¹ The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 12, ‘Japan’, for example, labels the period after 1868 as ‘period of international music’ (816), ‘Western influences’ (817) and ‘period of Westernization’ (884) (the first two citations are from parts written by Kishibe Shigeo, the last one by David W. Hughes). The section of the ‘Japan’ article in MGG devoted to the period 1868–1945 addresses only developments in Western music and mentions traditional music only as a matter of continuation. See ‘Japan’, in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, second edition, edited by Ludwig Finscher, Sachteil, vol. 4, (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1996): 1372–4, written by Wolfgang Burde.

² Many historians today prefer to call the political changes after 1868 the ‘Meiji revolution’ rather than the ‘Meiji Restoration’, because they believe that the revolutionary elements outweigh the Restorationist ones in importance; but the existence of a Restorationist ideology cannot be denied, and it has special significance for our case study.

³ That gagaku musicians were pioneers in the study of Western music can be read in almost all writings about late-nineteenth-century Japanese music history, and that the same names occur as composers of gagaku style and Western style songs is also frequently mentioned, but the relation between these two creative activities is seldom discussed. In her important study ‘Meijiki no kyūchū ni okeru sakkyoku katsudō: Hoiku shōka no keifu’ [Musical composition in the Imperial Court during the Meiji era], Journal of the Society for Research in Asiatic Music (Japan) 74 (2009): 25–46), Nakamura Mayuko has shown that the step from traditional to Western composition was not ‘typical’ for the gagaku musicians of that time: only a minority of composers later engaged in Western composition, while the majority continued to be involved with gagaku style compositions, although they were also forced to develop their ability in the performance of Western music.

⁴ Tone Takahashi, Tozan-Ryū: An Innovation of the Shakuhachi Tradition from Fuke-Shū to Secularism (PhD diss., The Florida State University, 1990; UMI 2112119), especially 120–132Google Scholar

Hughes, David W., Traditional folk song in modern Japan: sources, sentiment and society (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Jinko, Katsumura, ‘Some Innovations in Musical Instruments of Japan during the 1920's’, Yearbook for Traditional Music 18 (1986): 157–172CrossRefGoogle Scholar

⁵ Ibukiyama Mahoko, Hoiku shōka ni tsuite [On the ‘childcare songs’] (MA thesis, Ochanomizu University, 1976)Google Scholar

Mahoko, Ibukiyama, ‘Hoiku shōka ni tsuite’ [On the ‘childcare songs’], Journal of the Society for Research in Asiatic Music (Japan) 44 (1979): 1–26Google Scholar

Sahomi, Honda, ‘Meiji-ki shinsaku gagaku shōka (Hoiku shōka) no ongakuteki seikaku – Meiji shoki ni okeru wayō settchū shōka no gutai’ [The musical features of gagaku-shōka in the Meiji era (Hoiku-Shōka)], Chiba Daigaku Kyōikugaku Kenkyū kiyō II: Jinbun-Shakai-Kagaku-Hen [Bulletin of the Faculty of Education, Chiba University, II: Humanities and Social Sciences] 45 (1997): 93–103)Google Scholar

⁶ Gottschewski, Hermann, ‘Poetic Form and Musical Form Performed and Written – European and Asian Cultures Compared’, in Research on Art and Music in Japan. A Colloquy with Foreign Scholars Resident in Japan, ed. Patricia Fister and Hosokawa Shūhei (Kyoto: International Research Center for Japanese Studies, 2007): 187–208Google Scholar

⁷ Gottschewski, Hermann, ‘Hoiku shōka and the melody of the Japanese national anthem Kimi ga yo’, Journal of the Society for Research in Asiatic Music (Japan) 68 (2003)Google Scholar

⁸ Later, songs that shared a melody were eliminated, and every song text was given a melody originally composed for it. An exception is a melody that was originally composed by Tōgi Yoriharu (1834–1898) for the song ‘Sazareishi’. It was re-used for another poem, ‘Futami no ura’, by Fujiwara no Kanesuke (877–933), when ‘Sazareishi’ disappeared from the collection (see Gottschewski, ‘Hoiku shōka and Kimi ga yo’, note 8). In effect, then, ‘Futami no ura’ neither has an original melody, nor shares a melody with any other songs of the collection. Both songs can be heard on Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/27 and 6/26 (see below note 19).

⁹ For an example see note 9 in Tsukahara Yasuko's article in this issue.

¹⁰ Terauchi Naoko, Gagaku no ‘kindai’ to ‘gendai’. Keishō, fukyū, sōzō no kiseki [The ‘modern’ and the ‘contemporary’ in gagaku: Continuity, dissemination and creative renewal] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 2010)Google Scholar

¹¹ Yoshie, Soga, ‘Shōka yūgi no seiritsu katei ni kansuru kenkyū: Gagakuroku ni mirareru Hoiku Shōka no seiritsu katei kara’ [Study of the creation process of ‘singing dance’: The writing process of Hoiku-shoka (childcare songs) found in the Gagaku-roku (The Official Documents of Japanese Imperial Court Music)], Taiikugaku kenkyū [Research Journal of Physical Education] 53 (2008): 304Google Scholar

¹² In the second half of the Meiji era and later, a number of single gagaku songs were commissioned from inside the court, as Nakamura has pointed out (‘Meijiki no kyūchū ni okeru sakkyoku katsudō’, 35–41). They were mainly composed for private occasions at the court and for representative festivities such as the silver wedding of the Emperor (1894), the 1100-year-anniversary of the old capital of Kyōto (1895) and the wedding of the crown prince (1900). Since the songs are spread over a longer period and composed for special occasions, each of them would require a separate consideration.

¹³ I have adopted the translation ‘Childcare songs’ from Soga, ‘Creation Process of ‘Singing Dance’. The term shōka has two different meanings in Hoiku shōka. In the wider sense, it means ‘singing’ as opposed to playing instruments, or ‘singing instructions’ for education. In the narrower sense, it means accompanied ‘singing pieces’ as opposed to unaccompanied ‘play-songs’. Hoiku shōka includes both singing pieces and play-songs. In other contemporaneous sources, the word shōka is used with other meanings, for example ‘words of a song’ as opposed to the melody, or ‘singing instrumental melodies with mnemonics’. In traditional Japanese music the word is still used with the last mentioned meaning, but it is pronounced ‘shōga’ (written with the same Chinese characters), while since around 1900 the word ‘shōka’ has meant mainly Western style ‘school songs’. Since most sources give no explanation, it is difficult to know which of the various usages of the word were pronounced ‘shōka’ and which ‘shōga’ at the end of nineteenth century. There is good reason to believe that the ‘Hoiku shōga’ would be historically more correct, but the pronunciation ‘Hoiku shōka’ is most widespread today.

¹⁴ See also the article by Tsukahara Yasuko in this issue, page 226.

¹⁵ See also note 11, above.

¹⁶ Tsukahara Yasuko, Jūkyūseiki no Nihon ni okeru seiyō ongaku no juyō [The reception of western music in nineteenth century Japan] (Tokyo: Taga, 1993): 567Google Scholar

¹⁷ Gottschewski, Hermann, ‘Musikalische Schriftsysteme und die Bedeutung ihrer “Perspektive” für die Musikkultur: Ein Vergleich europäischer und japanischer Quellen’, in Schrift: Kulturtechnik zwischen Auge, Hand und Maschine, ed. Gernot Grube, Werner Kogge und Sibylle Krämer (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2005)Google Scholar

¹⁸ Nakamura, ‘Meijiki no kyūchū ni okeru sakkyoku katsudō’, 30–35Google Scholar

¹⁹ Noriko Manabe: Western Music in Japan: The Evolution of Styles in Children's Songs, Hip-Hop and Other Genres (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2009)Google Scholar

²⁰ Gottschewski, ‘Musikalische Schriftsysteme’, 260–261Google Scholar

²¹ Gottschewski, ‘Musikalische Schriftsysteme’, 271Google Scholar

Gottschewski, ‘Poetic Form and Musical Form Performed and Written’, 200Google Scholar

²² Gottschewski, ‘Musikalische Schriftsysteme’, 271Google Scholar

Gottschewski, ‘Poetic Form and Musical Form Performed and Written’, 200Google Scholar

²³ Gottschewski, ‘Musikalische Schriftsysteme’, 269–271Google Scholar

²⁴ See note 19.

²⁵ Masami, Kubo, ‘Hoiku shōka no gosenfuka ni kansuru mondaiten ni tsuite’ [On problems of transcription of Childcare Songs to western notation], Kansai gakuri kenyū [Kansai Studies of Music theory], 10 (1993): 79–88Google Scholar

²⁶ Nakayama Eiko, Meiji shōka no tanjō [The birth of the shōka of the Meiji era] (Tokyo: Bensei, 2010): 1–41Google Scholar

Fumiko, Fujita, ‘Hoiku shōka no kenkyū: Fröbel-shiki yōchien shōka yūgi inyū no keika o chūshin to shite’ [Research on Hoiku Shōka: With a focus on the introduction of kindergarten songs and plays for the Froebel method], in Kunitachi Ongaku Daigaku sōritsu 50shūnen kinen ronbunshū [Collection of essays in celebration of the 50th anniversary of Kunitachi College of Music] (Tachikawa: Kunitachi Ongaku Daigaku, 1978): 329–369Google Scholar

²⁷ See Tsukahara Yasuko's article in this issue, note 8.

²⁸ Linguists use the term ‘mora’ rather than ‘syllable’ for the smallest rhythmic unit of the Japanese language, but for the application of classical Japanese lyrics to songs the difference between the concept of ‘mora’ and ‘syllable’ is not very important. The ‘mora’ in classical Japanese consists of a short vowel preceded or not preceded by a single consonant. The half-vowel ‘n’, however, can also form a mora and is thus often treated like a syllable in songs. Except for the short postpositions, most Japanese words have between two and five syllables, and there is no stress accent. When five-syllable clauses and seven-syllable clauses are mentioned in this article, I include cases where the actual number of syllables is six or eight due to certain rules of syllable augmentation.

²⁹ Although literary scholars prefer to speak of one or more 5–7 pairs followed by a 5–7–7 clause, due to the semantic structure of the ancient poetry, the description given here better fits the musical structure of gagaku songs. It seems that when the court musicians of the nineteenth century read ancient poetry they were influenced in their reading by a rhythmic feeling acquired from the experience of more recent Japanese lyrics.

³⁰ In the two collections discussed here, the only songs that are neither tanka nor chōka are those discussed in note 44, below, and the song ‘I ro ha’ (Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/22). The text of the latter is the traditional Japanese syllable alphabet, which is also a poem, but in another metrical form.

³¹ A more comprehensive description of the metres of Hoiku shōka can be found in Gottschewski, ‘Hoiku shōka and Kimi ga yo’, (3)–(4).

³² ‘Yin’ – read ‘in’ in Japanese – refers to the dualism of yin and yang in Asian thought. I conjecture that this naming refers to the ‘darkness’ of the musical time that is not ‘highlighted’ by a beat in performance.

³³ Gottschewski, ‘Musikalische Schriftsysteme’, 266–277Google Scholar

³⁴ Tanabe Hisao, Nihon ongaku kōwa [Lectures on Japanese Music] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1919)Google Scholar

³⁵ Kikkawa Eishi, Nihon ongaku no seikaku [On the character of Japanese music] (Tōkyō: Wanya , 1948)Google Scholar

Petra Rudolph, as Vom Charakter der japanischen Musik, Studien zur traditionellen Musik Japans 2 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1984)Google Scholar

³⁶ This technique is also described in Kikkawa, Nihon ongaku no seikaku, 210–11 (176–7 in the German translation).

³⁷ The words of the song are a versification of a prose translation of the second stanza of an English winter song, ‘Now we are in Winter’, which is itself a translation of the German song ‘Der Winter ist kommen’. See Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 5/12.

³⁸ There is only one (much) later example in Hoiku shōka where a composer re-uses an accompaniment, in that case one from his own songs. Many songs in Kōtenkōkyūsho shōka share their accompaniments for a different reason, discussed below. A special case is a song cycle called ‘Muttsu no tama’ [ , Six Balls] or ‘Tama to iro’ [ , Balls and colours], for Froebelian kindergarten education, consisting of nine songs composed by nine different court musicians (Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/38–46). The nine songs share their key, scale, metre, length and wagon pattern. The song cycle was a late addition to the Hoiku shōka and was abandoned shortly afterwards; it is found in only a few manuscripts. See Gottschewski, ‘Hoiku shōka and Kimi ga yo’, note 8, sources (3) and (5).

³⁹ The dates that are given for Hoiku shōka generally refer to the handover to the commissioner or to another act by the court music department that made the songs an officially approved part of the collection. That means that the composition was certainly finished at that time, but it does not exclude the possibility of later revisions by the composer or another person of the department, either on demand of, or approved ex post facto by, the department.

⁴⁰ Since the number of times per beat and the number of beats per bar varies by metre, but the length of a time is about the same in all metres, the length of songs can best be compared if not bars or beats, but times are counted. A full performance of ‘Ō Shōkun’, as included in CD 6 of Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/31–35, takes almost 20 minutes.

⁴¹ Those poems that had been set to pre-existent melodies before the interruption in mid-1880, were among those that were most often used for newly composed songs in 1882.

⁴² In ‘Kami no megumi’ [ ,‘The blessings of the deity’], poem by Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801) by Hayashi Hirotsugu (1845–1917), the four-hyperbar pattern in quick four metre, which has a simple first half and a more complex second half, is shortened to its first half, which is now repeated twice as often. In ‘Omou dochi’ [ , ‘Friends’], poem by Taira no Kanemori (d. 990) by the same composer, a quick-four-metre song ten hyperbars in length, the five-hyperbar pattern is replaced by a two-hyperbar pattern, which is thus played not twice but five times. And in ‘Yukimeguri’ [ , ‘On the way’], poem by Fujiwara no Sanesuke (957–1046), composed by Tōgi Takekata, a three-hyperbar pattern in quick four metre was replaced by a one-bar pattern.

⁴³ The Restorationist tendency is also obvious in the selection of the texts.

⁴⁴ See also note 30. This scheme is also known as the form of bussokusekika [ ], an archaic form of Buddhist lyric. There seems to be no connection between this archaic form and its modern use, however. ‘Hana tachibana’ was the first song in Hoiku shōka to use this form. The other songs in this form are dated between April and June 1878, except ‘Kimi ga megumi’ [ , ‘The Emperor's blessings’], which is of unknown date. Most of the songs in this form are translated English songs or poems newly written at that time; but two (like ‘Shirogane’ below) are classical tankas with an arbitrarily added line. It is unknown why the compilers of the texts of Hoiku shōka felt so strong a need for that form that they added words to famous classical poems. Nakayama (Meiji shōka no tanjō, 33) also mentions this addition and suspects that the composers may have added the words for musical reasons. But given the diverse musical structures of the various examples in bussokusekika form this seems unlikely.

⁴⁵ The original English text, itself based on a German song, is as follows: ‘The May is trav'ling hither, / The May is at the door, / The garden and the meadow / Will bloom again all o'er.’ The ‘fifth month’ in the lunar calendar is somewhat later than May and falls in the so-called ‘plum rain’ season. The source used by the Japanese translator is Adolph Douai, The Kindergarten: A Manual for the Introduction of Froebel's System of Primary Education into Public Schools (New York: E. Steiger, 1871), or another edition of that book. The song is found in German and English on pages 42–3. The prose translation contained in the Japanese edition of this book, Seki Shinzō, trans., Yochienki, ed. by the Tōkyō Women's Normal School, 1877, volume 2, 62 (reprint in Meiji Hoiku Bunkenshū, 1977), was used for the free adaptation. Seki's prose translation omits the second stanza of the song.

⁴⁶ Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/9.

⁴⁷ See, for example, ‘Aki no hikage’ [ , ‘Autumn shadows’] (text of unknown origin), dated December 1877 and composed by Shiba Fujitsune. The text in chōka form has eleven clauses, and the song is twelve hyperbars long.

⁴⁸ The difference between G in the melody and F♯ in the accompaniment, in bar 30, creates a strong dissonant effect for European ears, but in gagaku the discrepancy between these two tones is rather perceived as a difference of intonation than as a musical interval.

⁴⁹ The original poem has ‘kugane’ instead of ‘kogane’. The poems in this article are given as written in the sources of Hoiku shōka.

⁵⁰ Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/10.

⁵¹ ‘Kiku no kazashi’ [ , ‘Chrysanthemum decoration’], also dated 9 April 1878, with a text of unknown origin, composed by Hayashi Hiromori, uses the wagon accompaniment of ‘Hahasoba’ [ , ‘Oak leaves’], translated from an English song, composed by Ue Sanetake (1825–1895). See Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/12.

⁵² Often in Hoiku shōka the first five-syllable clause, which is sung solo, is composed in the simple syllabic style, even if that style is not used in any other part of the song.

⁵³ The original poem has ‘furi’, but the sources of Hoiku shōka write ‘furu’.

⁵⁴ ‘Arare furu’ [‘hail is falling’] is a makurakotoba belonging to the name ‘Kashima’. So the use of the expression in this poem does not necessarily mean that it hailed at that time.

⁵⁵ Kindai shōka shūsei, CD 6/11.

⁵⁶ There are very few exceptions of this rule, and some of them are spurious.

⁵⁷ ‘Harmonic’ not in the Western sense, but only in the broadest sense, as shown in our analyses: whether the full and half cadences of the melody and the accompaniment coincide or not.