 That made this event possible. The UArts Initiative, Office of the Provost, the Women's Gender Sexuality Studies Program, the Center for the Study of Asia, and the CAS Department of English. And this series was made possible by Professor Perry Preston, and he's Arts Initiative Director, Ty Furman. So please give him a round of applause. And if you don't know the schedule yet, there are some cards that you can pick up on your way out. Please do pick them up if you don't have it already. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to theater nogaku, who will be at BU for the next week, and we will have David Crandall, who will be guiding the lecture demonstration conversation for the next hour. Welcome. Thank you, buddy. I guess I should start out with a question and ask you how many of you have seen me, though, and know what I'm talking about when we were talking about no. A few. Have you seen it live in Japan, or seen videos of it? Not so long yet, actually. Transylvania. Ah. All right. That's exotic. The festival is a festival. I see. Every year. So a Japanese crew came to. Next. Well, I would like to talk today about the music of no, which is what my understanding of what this event is about. But before we do that, maybe just talk about what no is. It's a theater form that got its current form about 650 years ago in Japan, and it was the aristocratic class, the warrior class that patronized it. It involves very elaborate costumes, which we are not in. We are in just formal Japanese wear, but in a true full no performance, you will have located silk costumes that are extremely gorgeous. It also involves a mask. The main character often wears a mask, and the movement is geared so that the mask can stay very still. But the other elements in the no that we're gonna talk about today are the instruments, how the music is put together a little bit, and then we'll demonstrate some of that by performing. This is the group theater no, we've just arrived. In fact, we're not all here yet. Last night, everybody converged in Boston, from Tokyo, and from Vancouver, and from the UK, and Michigan, all points everywhere. And we're just here to do this for you. So we're very excited and very happy that we've been invited to do this. So let me start by introducing some of the instruments of the no. Now I'm going to start with the flute. There are four instruments that are used to accompany no when it's performed on stage. And not all of the plays use all four instruments. There are three drums and one flute, and Laura would come up and demonstrate the flute. The flute, in a Western sense, is a very pure instrument, and you've got the note that's very clear, but in a Japanese flute, in this flute in particular, it has a special sleeve on the inside that messes up the harmonics series so that it plays out of tune, plays out of tune non-purposed. And that is one of the reasons to do that is to bring out the eeriness of what is often the main character in no, which happens to be usually a ghost, somebody who's coming from the other world to talk about the experience that they had in life and expiating their sins. So let's just hear a little sample of this flute sound cycle. But it does serve a great purpose in bringing the characters in and out of the stage. It also is used to accompany dance, so it would take the main melody and the dance that the other drums are playing with. So it has various, and then ornamental purposes where the chorus is singing and the flute will just kind of float on top to give it a little flavor. The next instrument I'd like to introduce is the Kozizumi. This is a shoulder drum. It's an hourglass drum, two-headed. The chords are not very tight, and the reason for that, you'll see when she demonstrates. You hear that there are different tones in this drum. The chords are not very tight, and when she hits it, she can tighten it or loosen it to get different sounds. It's got a kind of a wet sound in this drum, although this drum is a synthetic drum that's made out of plastic, so it's not sensitive to humidity, but a real drum is made with leather. It has a high, is it cowhide or is it horse hide? Horse hide. And it's very sensitive to humidity, and if it's not a humid day, it won't sound very good. And so the drummer will make sure that it's wet by breathing on it in passages where he doesn't have to play. He'll actually take his finger and put his spit on it or put a wet piece of paper and place it on there so that it has this nice, round sound. In contrast to that, I think you can state because we have the okawa, the oats is in here. This is also an hourglass drum and it's kind of the opposite of this. The shoulder drum likes it wet. The hourglass drum here, the okawa, likes it dry. And in fact, so dry that you actually heat up the heads before you assemble the drum so you can get it as tight as possible. Can you move it like this way? Everyone needs to move this way because we're out of the camera, I guess. Is that good? You can't see things. You want to see things? Ha ha ha ha. Oh, oh, oh! Our skill and talent is found in two purposes. One is to, because you have a large ensemble performing though, you have the actors who are dancing and singing. You've got a chorus of eight people sitting at the side where singing. You've got three or four instrumentalists who are playing and there's no conductor. There's nobody to tell people where they are in the play. So one of the things that helps them do that are these drum calls. They tell you what beat you're on and they tell you what the tempo is so everybody can stay together. It doesn't mean that the drums are always leading the band though. It's a give and take and the chorus is going to be singing and pulling things out. The drummers will hear that, take that and then they'll say, well I'm gonna hold this yo a little bit longer there and then back and forth so that everybody gets a chance to lead. But there's no conductor and one of the ways that they stay together is those drum calls. The other thing that those drum calls do once you get used to the sound is that they are very expressive emotionally and you can really make a difference between a lyrical, quiet piece and a martial piece, for example, by the way that the drum calls are done. And then you, James, could you? Both of you demonstrate this. Well, let's just do James. Let's just think about Simida Gala, Simida Gala, a very lyrical, quiet thing first. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, they infuse the words that are being. Finally we have, thank you very much. Oh, let's hear these together because these two drums actually interlock and you have a basic unit of eight beats and generally the ol' kawa, the large drum, his sphere of influence is kind of the first half of that eight beats and the sphere of influence of the kotaizumi is the second half of those eight beats. But they have interlocking patterns. Name what you wanna do. The way that they can do this is there are set patterns with names and so we say, well, we're gonna do the nagajin and then we'll go into a tizuka and then we'll do this and that. That's all that they need to know how to play this. So the tempo by their drum calls so that they can slow down or speed up and that gives signals to the chorus and to each other how fast they wanna go, what kind of mood they wanna go. So the last drum is the taiko. Now the taiko is not used in every play. About half the plays have a taiko and the other half do not. Rick will demonstrate. Again, there are named patterns and they come in standardized, often standardized sequence. So you can just say, Rick, would you please play a cycle and he'll know what to do. I think that's what we're doing for us. Would you play a cycle? Would you please? Musical. There are two basic ways to organize music and no one is called matched and the other one is called. We're going to demonstrate a matched section now and that's when the drums are very carefully calibrated to the different syllables in the text and they listen to what is being sung and they hit on specific beats in the text. But there's a whole another section of note that's actually much more interesting fun to play which is called unmatched and in unmatched you have the drums and the flute going along their own path and then you've got the singing going along its own path. They start at the same place and they keep tapped. You have to listen very carefully to where the other people are in their path and time it so that you finish what you have to do and they finish what they have to do at a specific point at which point then you go into matched again or something else. So it's not improvised but it's free and you're not specifically tuning one beat per measure. It's very flexible and that's a very interesting way to make music. Lots of people liken it to jazz and I don't think it's quite the same as jazz because what they're playing is set but the exact timing of what they play is not set and so you get kind of a race going and it's lots of fun to do that. All right, so let's demonstrate then this. We're gonna show you a matched section from a play called Hagoromo which is The Feathered Mantle and I'm going, if you could please come up, that'll be fun and I'm going to read to you what the text says. This is a story about an angel who comes down to earth and leaves her robe on a pine branch and a fisherman comes and picks up the robe and takes it away and he's not gonna give it back to the angel and finally she convinces him to give it back and teaches him because she can't get back home unless she's got the robe and so she'll die if she doesn't get the robe back. He finally understands this and gives the robe back so that compassion has been taught to humankind and the last section of it, she dances for him. He demands actually that she dance before he gives the robe back and at the very end of the play she dances and then she rolls up into the sky and disappears and I'd like to read the text there. The graceful eastern dances countless in number the graceful eastern dances countless in number she dances for mortal kind the moon palace maiden shining in the midnight sky holy orb of light land bent within carnate truth fulfilling all vows bestowing in full measure her bounty upon the land the seven sacred treasures shining among myriad jewels fall like rain upon the land a divine gift of plenty as wonders unfold time passes away fleeting as a feathered robe that in the sea wind furls and flutters furls and flutters above the pine strand of meal through the clouds of Ukishima soaring past Ashitaka and Fuji's lofty peak growing faint her figure fades into the blue of heaven mingling amid the mists of spring she vanishes away of presenting vocals and now one is called Kotoba soar one is seen are soar oars oar that robe you have is an irony what are you doing with it? is what that meant but you notice that there's no attempt to make it sound like an ethereal angel a mere sip of the girl who's asking this fisherman to give back the robe it's presented in the actor's own voice everybody's going to do it a little bit different but they all have that same arc where you're going da da da da da da so let me demonstrate something else and you can hear it haio ni soar oar oar oar oar saito oar no kata oar ni sumai suru musashi oar benkei ni te soar oar this is how a warrior would talk it's the same pattern it's the same, you're doing the same thing but one is very quiet and kind of controlled and low the next one sounds more masculine more energetic and if you really get excited and you're in a battle scene or something kyou no shuran no kataki watasou nani no tono kami noritsune toiya aramono mono shiya tenami o shirinu so you can get very excited in the role as well there's a wide range that you can do with kotoba that's the first mode of vocalization in no way then there's something in contrast to kotoba which is called lutei lutei is singing chanting is how we usually translate it and within lutei there are two different kinds there's one called yoagin which is melodic singing and there's one called tsuyogin or gogin which is dynamic singing what you heard then sing here it was a kind of melodic singing and you can hear the intervals the intervals are very simple in note mostly forced in fist da da da da da da da da da da not losing force in fist but usually it's force in fist da da da da da da da da and you can hear the intervals so if you give that And I should mention also that my school of know is different from everybody else here. So they will sound different when they sing than I sound. But you can recognize it as being know. You can recognize it as being know-chanted. There's a lot of vibrato involved in it. So that would be the yawaki. That is the melodic singing style. Now, one that's more interesting for a westerner, because we're not used to it, is the dynamic singing style. And in that, you have less emphasis on the actual intervals of pitch and more emphasis on, let's see if I can do that. Well, I'll just sing something. Now, if you were to try to break that down into intervals, it's not melodic. It's not pretty. But there's a tremendous amount of energy. I think you'll agree in that kind of vocal production. And it's very effective for warrior scenes. I should also mention that dynamic singing doesn't have to be loud. You can do it softly. It still has that dynamism, but it's not necessarily loud. So those are the three. Speech, melodic, and dynamic. Are there any questions at this point? Yes. What about the calling of the instrumentalists? Well, it's not kind of this chant. And the calling doesn't have any meaning. Those are just syllables that they're using. But there's a great, huge variety. It's very much an individual thing, what those calls are. They all say yo and ho. But how they break their voices and what they do depends on schools. And then within the schools, the individual will sound very different from one person to another. You have to find your own voice in that. But the principles of the voice production with the tight diaphragm and the tight throat, that's the same. You're using the same principles to produce the sound as you do with the chant. Does the chorus have multiple singing styles or is there one style for the chorus? No play will go from style to style. If you're talking about melodic sometimes and dynamic other times. Yes. And a single play will have, even sometimes within a single sentence you can change from melodic to dynamic. So that's very variable. The chorus does not do a speech though. That's reserved for the characters, for the actors. Yes. So the actor, why is there no expression on the face? Well, remember I said that there's masks. So we're not wearing masks now, but the main actor in no place usually wear a mask. Not always, no. The only absolute you can say about no is that there are no absolutes. There's always going to be an exception in some places. But in general the main actors wear masks. And you can see, I mean how I produce my voice, you don't open your mouth. You keep your mouth closed. You can make a lot of noise and not open your mouth. And that's so that the mask doesn't move. We'll be demonstrating this to some extent on Saturday. And then if you come to the performances, you'll see we've got a beautiful new mask that's made for this play Zadie Desi Aki's. And Sumida River also has a beautiful mask. And everything is geared towards bringing out the life through that mask. Okay? I'd like to show you now we're going to demonstrate what you can do. Think of this as a palette. This is a palette. You've got these kinds of singing styles. You've got these drums. You've got the flute. Well, what can you make of it? That's new. And that's kind of the thing that theater no longer is interested in. We make new pieces. We do it in English. And we use these performance techniques to try to tell a story. And Cary Preston wrote Zadie Desi copies. It's just a beautiful, beautiful work. I wrote the music to it so that we could perform it as an old play. And we're going to be doing that. And I'd like to show you what the traditional, can we turn out the lights? Is that going to mess us up? No. We get it. I'd like to show you what a traditional text looks like. This is the Feathered Mantle. And this is the text. We just performed this. But look at this. The red and the blue. The red is the Kotsuzumi and the blue is the Okawa. So these are the two drums. And you see all that they do is they put in the names of the patterns next to the text. And from that, the professionals can know where those patterns fit into the text. That's all they need to know. So when you learn a piece, you get the text and you write in the names of the patterns by the side of the text. That's what that is. Now, when you're studying as an amateur or if you're studying starting out as a professional, that's really hard to do because you don't know where the beats are going to hit what syllables from this. You just can't tell. So if we can look at the next one. What often happens is that they will write it out. They'll write it out this way. Oops. So, ah, let's see. This is actually a dance. Can we go down here? Good. This black here, that's the text. This again is the same play. This is the Feathered Broil. This black in the middle is the text. The blue is the Okawa. The red is the shoulder drum. And the green is the taiko, the stick drum. And you write it all out so you can tell where the hints come. These symbols here are the vocals. Those are the drum calls. So everything is written out like this and then you can tell what goes with what. And we make these ourselves because all we have are the names of the patterns. And so if you really want to match it up, you write it out yourself. So that you can tell where it's supposed to go. Now, how do you get from this to writing a new play in English? How do you note it? And if we can go to the next one. As I said before, no in its pure form is basically three. You've got low, medium, and high tones. And they're set in fourths. Actually from here to above this line is a fifth. But these are fourths. So you can set it horizontally like this so that it matches so you can put the English in. And then this is just traditional Japanese chant that has been transcribed. But if you want to go a step further and you want to do something outside of the mill. Well, the easiest way to do it is just to add two more lines. Which I have done in the top there. Then you have a five line staff. Then you can determine any melody you want. Now in this particular case, I wrote it in the treble clef. There's no key though. The actor will sing that line in whatever level he wants. And all he has to keep are the relative intervals. But it's not in a key. So that expands the palette. Then all of a sudden you can write any melody you want. You don't have to keep yourself restricted to what the traditional note does. And if we go to the last page, two more down. Then you can write the drums in up here. You saw those going up and down. Now they're going across this way. And you can match the drums to the words in that way. It provides a very flexible sort of medium. That you can really write anything you want in that way. That's a lot of fun to do. So I would like to close this presentation with presenting this little segment of Zaddy Dates and Appies with my colleagues here. I left the desert feeling blank as the sand. The taste of power cancelled by the chill of death. They told me to go. I went. They tried not to think. But hoped I could tell my wife. I had not kissed. The audience, yes. I mean there would be women who would observe performances in the traditional. Today, since World War II, there are now professional women. And they're making progress. They're not really equal yet. They're not given equal treatment. It's unfortunate, but it's true. But there are some very talented actors who are female today. And they enrich the art a great deal. Yes, traditionally what type of vocation system they have used would have just been something where they broke down what type of pattern they wanted and then everyone was taught orally what it was Yes, well as I showed you there that you have the text of the play and then people would write in the names of the patterns and they would learn that orally. Absolutely. And in fact it's an oral art anyway. The text was not text dependent. And if you look back at the old texts of the plays themselves there's very little notation telling you how to do it. It's just the words. So it is definitely orally transmitted. Today you've got recordings. You've got printed song books. You've got printed drum pattern books and things. That's not how it was originally done. And they like to keep things secret and in their families and stuff like that so they would write their own little thing and pass it on to their sons but they wouldn't show it to anybody else. So they could be special. Could you say something about the major schools often? There are five major main acting schools. There's Hoshō which isn't the first. There's Kansei. Kansei is the largest by far and Kansei is actually divided into smaller sub schools. Then there's Hoshō and then there's Kongō and Konparu and Kita. And I am Hoshō and these folks are Kita. So there's a stylistic difference between what we do. But as the main actors, for example in the play we were talking about with the feathered mantle, the main actor is the angel. The secondary actor is the fisherman and there are also schools of actors who specialize in the secondary roles. So they will have different stylistic approaches to that role but they will only do that. You won't get a secondary actor who does the main role. So what are the main acting schools? Actually now most of the schools are based in Tokyo but there are some that are in Kyoto as well and Osaka. And then we didn't even talk about Kyougan which is a whole different, that's a comedic art form that is a sister art form to know. There are different schools, actually there are only two schools now but there used to be more. Flute, the instruments are also the same way. There are different schools of each of the instruments. When you use these new English texts for your productions, do you find that English tends to fit well pre-naturally with the style or is it a challenge to get the language to fit within our style? It's a huge challenge. It's very difficult. Mostly I think, well the rhythms themselves are typically 7-5, you got that is a Japanese feel to the sentence. That's not natural in English and so that in itself is a strength. But then you also have Japanese words they all end in vowels. The only thing that doesn't end in a vowel you have an um sound. So the chant is not set up to end words with consonants and English has a lot of words and so it gets very challenging to make the text understood and to get the stress placed for the right syllable. It's a puzzle that you have to work out. And as a composer working on this I find that rather than try to use traditional patterns and then stick the English into that I do it the other way around. If I have to I'll write new drum patterns or do unusual things with the music so that the text remains as natural as possible. Can you talk about the origins of No and you mentioned that it was mostly performed for aristocratic people. Yes. So does it mean that the general public didn't get to view it and was it secular or religious origin? Oh those are also big questions. They all require very long answers. The short answer about being aristocratic it didn't start out that way. It started out it was an amalgam popular performance arts that came from the continent from China and Korea also were indigenous masked things it was pretty bawdy and they had popular songs they had dances it was something that people would come to it would attract people to come to temples in China. The secular and religious thing there are different kinds of pieces that have different things but they're all infused pretty much with a basic understanding of Buddhism often in equal measure even in the same piece but sometimes a play will be focused on for example how a temple or shrine got started something like that. So there are religious things but there are also completely secular things as well. Yes. I was interested in the drums and I think in particular the taiko drum and wondering about the gestures and the relation between the gestures, the physical gestures and the sounds that are made. Yes. All of the drums are choreographed as I think you noticed and the taiko is very beautifully choreographed. Again that will vary from school to school they're all choreographed but the exact choreography is a little bit different. Well everything you know is choreographed like that and so does the sound change if you don't do the choreography? That's hard to say I don't know actually I've never seen anybody not do the choreography so I can't really say but it's more of an aesthetic it's an aesthetic of formal attention. When you're on stage you are alert and every move that you make is conscious. Well it becomes second nature but you train in order for that to become second nature careful about how you move in every respect. Yes. Is there any amount of spontaneity in the performance if everything seems to be choreographed and located? Well one way that you get spontaneity is that you remember you have very many schools that are being involved here and so each performance is in a sense unique because you don't have repertory companies where the same actors are working with the same people all the time and you don't have long runs you have a situation where somebody will say let's put on a show let's put on a program and then they put out the word to the people they want to perform with and they say we're performing on the 20th and they say yes and then they come on the 19th they go through some of the stuff that they need to do and then they perform it on the 20th and then they dispersive it and so each combination is potentially unique it's like snowflakes that you don't have the same people in the same roles and the way that you perform that piece is going to be different depending on what the school is bringing to it and you're always listening to what other people on the stage are doing and you're reacting to what they do and so each performance is going to be unique so that's where you get your spontaneity that's one place where you get your spontaneity Yes? I have a question is there any connection of that whatsoever between no and buto? I don't know too much about buto but I do know that no was one of the inspiring sources of buto that comes from a lot of different sources no is one of them but the interest in earth the interest in downward movement and being connected, being a farmer being heavy, that's no that's buto that's in common I was wondering you mentioned a little bit earlier that these traditions would be passed on orally and kept very secretively among families and what you're doing with the English text is a pretty radical break from what your training was I'm imagining so I'm just curious to know like did you have to break from your teachers or do they approve of this you get a lot of different responses depending on who your teachers are my teacher is very understanding and also we're foreigners and so in a way we don't fit into that category yet I think that is slowly breaking down in the same way that it's breaking down for women when I got my training originally that was in the when was that early 80s throughout the 80s I was studying very hard it was an apprentice at one point so I did that traditional thing there was nobody else that was doing that and they didn't know what to do with it they were very kind and they were very considerate and taught me a lot but they didn't have, I wasn't in the hierarchy they didn't know where to put them and I think that's still true today there's a slow kind of melting between amateur and professional now where very good amateurs I don't think just now that's been the case for a long time very good amateurs can kind of bleed over into the professional world and back and forth like that and people in this troupe there are people who are doing that they're bleeding over we perform on an equal basis in the stage but we're not no actors so it's kind of a we don't know where we are but as far as what we do with English well they're not far they don't really know what we're doing I mean we're doing howl around today so this is going out anybody can see it on mine but usually you know we're out of their mind and out of their vision so we can do just that thank you I want to ask you about the meaning of the dance I see everybody has a fun talk ten at a certain point you place it out so I would like to know more about it well it's up a piece of the same of the choreography with the drum I think the emphasis on formality people used fans they were useful items I know I'm a lover I have a collection of songs but it became very formalized and even though they don't serve function for example in the chorus they do indicate when the chorus is ready to play or ready to sing and they do have a certain nice feel to it when you take up the fan you say okay we're ready to go in the dances the fan can take on lots of different meanings depending on what the text is or what the meaning is it can be a drinking cup or you can take it into a sword we do it this way even though it's this way so there are different ways that you can use a fan that are prop oriented but they will always can't say always almost always they have a fan in their hand even if they're not using it they'll have something in their right hand and it's just a convention that is followed today and that's what I've got thank you yes are there stock characters in note that span the genre the way they say they do in Commitment and if so are they also characterized by typical gestures there are not stock characters in that way but there are the characters are determined if it's a main actor and if you're talking about what's determined by the mask and there are hundreds of varieties of masks you could use the same mask in more than one place so it does have that kind of crossover but they're not stock characters in that you can expect to have the same personality so the situation they're not composed of stock often the characters are historical in many cases so they're actually based on some person's story so they're various I'm curious about the tuning of the flute that you described as out of tune is it considered as, is it heard as out of tune by the known musicians and what's the aesthetic principle behind what we hear as out of tune and how does it affect your writing, your composing yes well those are good questions I say it's out of tune just because I'm comparing it with a western flute I don't think that issue comes up at all among traditional players it's just their flute sound but there is this flute that looks exactly like the no-con that doesn't have the sleeve inside and if you play that it has the regular harmonic series and it sounds like a bamboo flute they put that sleeve in there on purpose so that it would get a kind of a I don't want to call it dirty sound but it's not a pure sound and I do think that that is part of the aesthetic of note to bring out the fact that it's an other world thing that's my interpretation of it so when you notate it when I notate it well if I can I use traditional but when I write something that doesn't have a traditional base and then I write in the fingers so you can do it just with the fingers and it's approximate very approximate because each flute is tuned a little bit differently you can't have a chorus of flutes it would sound they would just be terrible it's just microtonally different and there's no way to tune them and they don't want to tune them so I write it in western and then approximate it with the fingers yes this might sound a little strange but I notice that you all have the same socks for like a big toe is that a functional purpose for that or is that just a stylistic thing traditionally Japanese take their shoes off when they go into the house and they often wear clogs or some kind of slippers that have the toe separated so these are very functional you go when you get out of I'm wearing these these are very dirty because this floor is dirty but generally you use these kind of socks in a clean environment to stay quiet and when you get out of that clean environment you put on something that you can just slip on microton or something looks like our time is up thank you very much