Kabuki

by Zoë Kincaid

Up to the advent of the samisen which brought about a complete change in the music in vogue among the people, the musical forms of the country had come to be the monopoly of the higher classes. The gagaku, or music of the Imperial Court, could not be heard on ordinary occasions, but was reserved for the highest functions. Transplanted from China in the early days of intercourse between the two countries, it was so far removed from affairs of everyday life as to belong to some celestial land. After a thousand years this ancient music is still heard at entertainments at Court, or in connection with Buddhist or Shinto ceremonies, and its slow and stately cadences produce a serenity in the minds of moderns that carries them back into an age when hurry was unknown.

This music was too lofty, and beyond the grasp or enjoyment of the people, even if it had been accessible to them. Entertainment was afforded by the blind minstrels who played the biwa—an instrument not unlike a lute in shape. They sang and recited the melancholy adventures of the Heike, who were exterminated in their struggle with the Genji clan, in sad and tragic tones—sounding the very depths of negation. There was but little inspiration in this minstrelsy for the good people of the three towns hungering for romance.

Likewise the Nō was reserved for the intellectuals, whose inner life had been sufficiently cultivated to appreciate its rarefied atmosphere of the unreal. Inseparable from the words and movements of the Nō were the rhythms of drum and flute, full of mystery, Buddhism, asceticism, its warriors and ghosts far removed from the world and its ways.

Before the samisen’s supremacy, the minstrels who went about relating their stories scratched the ribs of their fans to form the beats necessary to their recitals, and priests who sang songs to popularise their scriptures beat their rhythms on the same metal gong as that employed by O-Kuni. So necessary was rhythm as an accompaniment to these ballads that the early minstrels shook a bundle of sticks, or waved a metal rod like a baton.

With the greatly improved rhythms of the samisen at their command, minstrels sprang up in all directions, the new style of music being called Joruri, since the first ballad to be composed to the strains of the samisen concerned the love adventures of Joruri-hime, or Princess Joruri. Abundant materials were at hand, and the minstrels competed with each other in depicting the life of the time. The songs sung at festivals, by sailors, horsemen, farmers, vendors, were eagerly seized,—stories of battles and love, even religious propaganda formed the theme set to the ripple of the samisen.

This great activity culminated in the Joruri of Takemoto Gidayu who, gathering up all the existing materials, concentrated them in his little doll-theatre, the Takemoto-za of Osaka. Here Chikamatsu Monzaemon collaborated with him, by writing the plays for the marionettes that moved to the voice of minstrel and samisen accompaniment. Gidayu Joruri, or the balladry of Takemoto Gidayu, in turn had an overwhelming influence upon Kabuki.

It was Kineya Kisaburo who first introduced the samisen into the orchestra of Yedo Kabuki. Kisaburo was the grandson of Kineya Kangoro, a younger brother of Saruwaka Kansaburo, the founder of Yedo Kabuki. Kangoro was an expert in the O-Kuni Kabuki, and when young was attached to the Saruwaka-za as an actor. He had two actor sons, Kisaburo and Rokuzaemon. Later on Kisaburo gave up acting, and took up the samisen as his specialty. The name Kineya, or rice pounder, came from the crest chosen by Nakamura Kangoro. Thus it came about that this family of Kabuki musicians and singers were firmly established and have continued until the present day.

The Kineya genealogy is extremely complicated, but the headship of the house has been handed down from father to son. When there was a failure in blood relation, the best pupil succeeded. The present Kineya Rokuzaemon is the fourteenth in descent, a young man in the twenties. He is at the head of the Kineya musicians attached to the Imperial Theatre of Tokyo, possesses a good voice, and has appeared since he was a lad, growing up, as it were, in the service of the stage.

At the time of the fifth Kineya, the theatre music in which the family specialised became known as Nagauta (long poem or song). Before this, the Kineya singers had entertained with short pieces, but their art developed into something more important, for they furnished the accompaniment of drum, flute, and samisen, also the singing to which the actors danced in the music-posture dramas, or shosagoto, the most characteristic productions of Kabuki.

This style of theatre music originating in Yedo, it has always been distinguished as Yedo Nagauta. The music is reminiscent of the Nō, from which it has taken much of its technique. The large number of Nō dramas that have been popularised in order to suit Kabuki requirements have received special treatment at the hands of different members of the Kineya family, who possess some two hundred compositions.