Rediscovering Traditional Japanese Music

Many traditions fade away and are lost forever. Others simply remain dormant, waiting to be rediscovered.

Take the field of traditional Japanese music. For more than a century it has been largely neglected in Japan, upstaged by Western traditions of music making. But through the efforts of a new generation of Japanese artists, including flutist Michiko Akao and composer Toshi Ichiyanagi, the traditional ways are returning.

“It was through my study of musicology that I first became interested in the yokobue, “ recalls Akao about her first encounters with the traditional Japanese flute which now occupies most of her time.

Akao will give a concert tonight at the County Museum of Art with a program of new works for the yokobue by Ichiyanangi (who will also accompany on piano), Shinichiro Ikebe, Teizo Matsumura and a work of her own. Akao has commissioned the works by Ichiyanagi and several others in an effort to make the yokobue an important solo instrument.

“It was a little more than 100 years ago that the Western tradition of music entered Japan and overshadowed the traditions of Noh , Kabuki and Gagaku ,” explains Ichiyanagi, a soft-spoken, small-framed man, who usually pauses a long time before answering a question.

“Japan has a long history of adapting the practices of Western culture and assimilating (them) into their own.”

“Most of the teachers at the university where I studied in Japan taught only the Western techniques,” remembers Akao. “There was only one teacher there who specialized in traditional Japanese music.”

“Actually it was through John Cage that Westerners first started gaining interest in Oriental traditions. It has only been within the last 16 years that Japanese composers as well as composers from other countries have become interested in the original Japanese way of music again.”

One of the little-known facts of Ichiyanagi’s life was that he was Yoko Ono’s first husband from 1957 to 1964. When he is asked about the marriage, Ichiyanagi at first appears reluctant to talk about it.

“Oh yes, we were very close, and we both lived and worked very close to everyone else,” he finally says, referring to the close-knit circle of New York artists in the Fluxus movement they belonged to at that time.

But those days of the avant-garde are by no means behind Ichiyanagi. He continues to compose in the avant-garde style of his past as well as his latest experiments with traditional Japanese music.

“It’s about half and half,” he acknowledges, when asked how much time he spends with one musical tradition compared to the other. The composer says he is now working on an international new music festival called “Interlink” planned for this fall in Japan.