Kikkawa Eishi 吉川英史's Nihon ongaku no seikaku 日本音楽の性格 ("The character of Japanese music") is an interesting book. For a book published in 1979, it spends a puzzling amount of time defending Japanese music against European classical tradition-centricism — that battle had already been won by then, surely — and is oddly vigorous, even anti-Western, in its working out of a Japanese musical aesthetic. This all makes more sense, though, when you read the afterword and learn that it was first published in an early form in 1948 — and had originally been scheduled for publication in 1943. Context is everything when it comes to sweeping cultural arguments.

Anyway, here's Kikkawa quoting Kanetsune Kiyosuke 兼常清佐 on Noh:

... It takes quite some time before the heavenly maiden dances her dance and Hagoromo comes to an end. Most people have begun to find it tedious by then. Indeed this tedium is something that, it seems, few people today can avoid feeling when watching Noh.

This is the complaint, and indeed the pace of Noh is leisurely in the extreme. For example, when the heavenly maiden I mentioned earlier makes her appearance, it can take three whole minutes to walk across the little bridge and reach the stage. When I timed a performance I attended the other day, I found that it took two minutes and twenty-eight seconds. When the dance began, I found that it took the actor ten seconds to move a fan from front to back, five or six seconds to make a ninety-degree turn, and fourteen seconds to go from one on-stage pillar to another. Think, dear reader, on how precious this two minutes and twenty-eight seconds would be in other contexts. In a moving picture, that much time could see a significant advancement of events. In rugby, the ball's location within the ground will have changed any number of times. [...] To we who are accustomed to movies, to rugby, to riding trains, Noh cannot be but unbearably boring. What is more, it can be of little emotional interest to us even if we endure this boredom.

"This is not a record of a Noh performance seen by Marco Polo or Columbus," notes Kikkawa. "Nor is it the yammering of an oaf..." He then talks about folk (minzoku) and culture and the maintenance thereof before arriving at his thundering conclusion:

I will add just one comment. If it is true that watching rugby and riding trains renders one unable to find Noh anything but tedious, then there are surely many people today who would cheerfully stop attending rugby matches, and walk instead of catching the train.

Eerily, I have recently expanded my daily walking routine one train journey's worth. Can it be coincidence that I also find myself growing more able to appreciate and parse traditional Japanese music?