Here's an interesting couple of sentences from early in Imai Hitoshi 今井仁's Fuke shū shakuhachi-kyoku no onritsu (普化宗尺八曲の音律, "Temperament of fukeshu shakuhachi music"):

西洋音楽における一つの音は量子化された素材にすぎない。この素材の配列により音楽が構成される。翻って一つの音で森羅万象を表現しようとする、禅宗の一派である、普化宗尺八曲の微細な音程変化を五線譜で表現することは難しい。

A single note in Western music is quantized raw material, nothing more. Music is composed by arranging this material. Conversely, in the shakuhachi music of the Fuke shū, a school of Zen Buddhism, the player seeks to express the entire world in each note. Representing the subtleties of these altered intervals on the five-line staff is difficult.

To an extent this is a sort of cultural triumphalism: there is obviously more to Western music than what's on the staff as well, or else the development of synthesizers with precise timing and pitch would have been the End of Musical History. But it is true that the kind of music most people think of when they think "Western art music" (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven) is about structure and pattern to a much greater degree than most Japanese art music (and especially shakuhachi music). One obvious difference is harmony: obviously a huge deal in the West, in most Japanese traditional music it's either absent or very simple.

But there's more to it than that. Part of the reason that, say, Japanese koto compositions all tend to sound the same to the untrained ear is that in terms of structure they are all very similar. In particular the all-important opening section tends to be a series of isolated statements: "nuclear note, nuclear note, unstable passing tone, nuclear note..." Strictly speaking, this is a melody, but it's not supposed to be interpreted as one. More like, as I said, a series of isolated statements, most very short, many single notes. If you're listening for the standard post-1600 European pattern of "line that implies interesting harmony! (pause) second, similar line that implies slightly tenser version of harmony! (pause) line that resolves part of the way! (pause) line that finishes resolving!" &mdash well, you're gonna be bored. (And yes, I noticed that my explanation there summons up harmony again. It's all interrelated.)

Incidentally, Imai concludes that in the music of the Fuke shū, performers keep the pitches of nuclear notes relatively stable (although they may vary between performers), but other notes, less so. This he also interprets as evidence for Koizumi Fumio 小泉文夫's argument that the gagaku scale (律音階) and the "miyako-bushi" scale of urban Edo-period art music (都節) are in some sense varied expressions of the same phenomenon (not having read Koizumi properly, I'm not in a position to comment). He also proposes that Fuke shū music be represented in a continuous graph-like form making explicit the variations in pitch, rather than the discrete (and inherently diatonocentric) five-line staff. (I'm not sure why that's necessary, though, since he makes a convincing case that nuclear tones are fixed — even if the five-line staff is a round peg for the square hole of shakuhachi music, we can surely invent something similar that allows for acceptable simplification for ease of analysis.)

In completely unrelated news, at the end of May the Diet library opened a publicly accessible archive of "historic recordings" (歴史的音源) whose copyright periods are all complete. Here's their intro page. So far most (all?) of the recordings seem to be old '45s rather than, you know, tape reels from field anthropologists or anything (I think that 音源 might be a term of art in this regard), but who's complaining?

Here's a Miyagi Michio 宮城道雄 setting of a Shimamura Tōson 島崎藤村 poem called "Enishi" (ゑにし, "Affinity") a.k.a. "Aki ni kakurete" (秋に隠れて, "By the autumn hid")1. Miyagi himself is on Koto, Yoshida Seifū 吉田晴風 is playing the shakuhachi, and the vocals are by Satō Chiyoko 佐藤千夜子.

わが手に植ゑし白菊の
おのづからなる時くれば
一もと花の暮陰に
秋に隠れて窓にさくなり

I planted white chrysanthemums by hand,
But let them bring their own selves up to bloom;
A single blossom, by the autumn hid,
Stands at my window in this evening gloom.

This is a fine example of Miyagi's modernizing/Westernizing tendencies, by the way, and not at all of the "note by note" thing I was talking about up there. Even the singing is straight-up Euro-Art. Probably the most "Japanese" part of this, apart from the instrumentation, is the occasional diversion into miyako-bushi-esque scales, e.g. around "暮陰に".