A "MUKKO," OR MUSICAL INSTRUMENT.
SIDE VIEW OF THE "MUKKO."
The Ainu are remarkably quick at reproducing sounds which are direct imitations of noises, cries of animals, &c., and it is instinctive in them, as when children they are not taught or trained to do so. The education of Ainu children is indeed a thing far to seek in every way, and what they know is self-taught. Nature is their only school. The Ainu voice is pleasant, flexible, and very soft in quality. The men are mostly baritone and bass, the women alto; but when singing, a falsetto is preferred to the natural voice, especially by the women, and this always without an instrumental accompaniment. Musical instruments are more than rare among the Ainu; indeed, I saw only one, which is now in my own possession. It is a black-stained wooden instrument, fifty-one inches in length and three wide. The upper part is flat, the under is half a cylinder scooped out by a knife, while five keys are fixed in the short neck, in which a cavity is cut, leaving a space for the strings to be tied to each key. The top is circular, and flattened on each side. One very small hole is bored exactly in the middle of the instrument and another is at the lower end, where the point of a triangular piece of leather, seven inches long, is passed through and fastened by a knot tied in the leather on the opposite side. The five strings, which are of Ulmus campestris fibre, are fastened to this leather piece and then to each key. A peculiarity of this instrument is, that it has two prism-shaped bridges, and they are placed at each end of the harmonic case. The Ainu call it mukko, which word, however, means only a musical instrument; and as it is applied by them to all Japanese instruments of music, it shows that they do not distinguish very sharply one instrument from another. Though in my long journeying I found one of these mukkos, I was never able to discover any Ainu who could play on it, and the Ainu of Ishikari from whom I bought it told me that the man, the only one, who could play on it, was dead. This was unfortunate, as none of the others could tell me how he tuned it; and one old man, in attempting to solve the problem, broke three strings. Seeing that I was then quite unable to learn any of the tunes of the deceased Ainu Paganini I purchased the instrument, and found by cross-examining the natives that it was played by twanging the strings with the fingers, and not with a plectrum, as is the case with the Japanese shamesen. In the illustration I have faithfully drawn a front and a side view of this instrument, so as to give the reader an exact idea of its shape. The Ainu of Volcano Bay sometimes make bamboo jew's-harps for their children; but even those are very uncommon, so we might as well define Ainu music as entirely vocal. Ainu music is sentimental, and not displeasing, but it is monotonous, and continually repeats itself. It is difficult to establish a rule as to what order of intervals their music is founded on, as their progressions, modulations, and rhythmical effects are often so peculiar as to make it impossible to indicate them accurately by means of our musical notation; but the nearest approach to it is the diatonic minor scale. The Ainu are fond of chromatic intervals, and when their recital comes to an exciting point they make use of this method in a crescendo to give strength to the narrative, especially at the end of the tune, which invariably winds up in the tonic. The intervals which are of most frequent occurrence in the Ainu tunes are as follows:—
The tunes seldom contain modulations from one key into another, except in the case of genius-gifted improvisators, who sometimes indulge in such a luxury, especially when intoxicated; but the usual modulation is generally begun pianissimo and in irregular time, and is sometimes like a slow lamentation gradually and irregularly increasing in force, some notes marked violently and the next very faintly, thus giving a weird effect of light and shade. When a sentence comes to an end, there is a chromatic interval fortissimo, and the keynote generally concludes the tune. The melody repeats itself again in the next sentence, sometimes altering the pianissimo into fortissimo, and vice versâ, according to the force which the narrator wishes to give to certain words. The Ainu, as far as I could judge, have no fixed rhythmical method, and each man constructs his own. Their melodies are generally short and simple, and the same phrases and passages—in fact, usually the whole melody—occur again and again in their songs. No Ainu melody that I heard was constructed according to any rule of musical form. All were invariably of one part only, in which the name of the tune was often applied to a certain form of rude poetical composition. For instance, some of the folk-lore legends—which, unfortunately, are not purely Ainu—are chanted in a musical intonation, and are a kind of extempore composition, though the roots of the songs and the verse have probably been brought down from former generations. This is proved by the preservation in them of some obsolete words and forms of speech which are never used in current conversation, and which none of the younger folks can understand or explain. I believe, however, that none of these legends are very old. The Ainu, having no written language, it is but natural that their tradition and legends should have been greatly changed and corrupted, especially by intercourse with the more imaginative Japanese. It is to be noted, however, that the Ainu, though to a certain extent as imitative as monkeys, have also a large amount of personality and originality, due to their shy and unsocial habits. This originality is not surprising when we remember that they are taught nothing, and that each man provides for himself and his family, but has no markedly friendly feelings towards his neighbours; in other words, it is a state of degradation very similar to that of wild animals. Perfect indifference is shown by the people of one village towards those of another. They are neither friends nor foes. All have a right to live, but as for helping one another, that is out of the question.
Having no written documents, each man, in his easy-going manner, recites and sings as best pleases himself such verses or legends as he has heard from his father or from some other person, and the result is that, according to the reciter's greater or smaller poetical and musical tastes, the grandfather's composition, already altered by his father, is again altered by the son, which makes it a composition of his own. This transformation of a given theme is common even among civilised nations when people are set to repeat the same story verbally transmitted from one to the other—the version of the third person has but little in common with that of the first. If this we do with a spoken narrative, how much more with tunes learned by ear only, and characterised in the delivery by individual temperament and transient mood.
The Ainu do not teach these legends to their children, and if learned at all they are merely "picked up" by ear and, in a manner, at random; therefore, most Ainu profess ignorance as to their existence, and a man, when I asked him if he knew any, scornfully answered in these identical words, translated:—"The Ainu are taught nothing, and they know nothing."
The few legends, &c., that I heard were told me by Benry at Piratori, and by another old man, the chief of a village up the Saru River. The title of one was "Tushi-une-pan"—"Twice Below;" the story of Yoshitsune, a Japanese hero, and Samoro-kuru (a Japanese man-friend of Yoshitsune), who came to Yezo and had a great struggle with a huge fish, which was harpooned by them and disappeared twice under the water, capsizing the boat which contained the two fishermen. Yoshitsune's temper was roused, and he cut the nipesh[38] rope to which the harpoon was fastened. The fish went to die at the mouth of the Saru River, when plains of hemp sprouted out of its body.
Another legend, called "Kimta-na," is a rather different and more simple version of Tushi-une-pan's story which I have just related.