How to sing traditional Japanese

27 Jun 2005 Category: Japan, Music

When I joined my Japanese family’s ceremony to honor the dead on monday morning, I came across this beautiful, yet extremely inefficient way of writing traditional Japanese songs. As many people might know, Japanese is difficult to read, anyway… not only, because there are so many ancient Chinese characters, but more because the pronounciation of each one depends entirely on the other characters around it. Therefor, especially with old and rarely used words, it is essential to add another line of text using the easy- to- pronounce furigana. Now that was basic! What about singing, then? As we see in the colored picture (nr. 2), we have the main row with the ancient song (highlighted purple), to the right some furigana (orange) and on the left these very obscure looking Japanese song dashes (blue) as a substitute for notes. What they do, more or less is to give you a singing “direction” (whether you should lift or lower your voice). If that song-line-row is left blank, just keep chanting in the same rhythm without any melody. As soon as those funky dashes set in ….. I mainly guessed (like all the others did). The difficult thing about these instructions is, that they don’t only change the tone, but can change the rhythm, too, especially those bended ones. Want to hear an example?

Since all this is obviously very vague, someone came up with another system, like the one written under the main singing part in picture 3. This is not only the explanation of the actual meaning of the old song, but also tells you, how to sing a little more precisely. These extra lines are based on the western system for writing notes (I discovered that graphic in the back of the book, when the ceremony was over…).

It seems that for some songs, even this extra help wouldn’t really work, so they used notes right from the beginning. I must confess when my efficient German soul noticed that, I couldn’t help but smile a little. Just amazing! How complicated you can get!?? Thank God, the priest knew all the songs. Well actually, I think he’d better- considering how much he got paid for helping us sing along….

Written by Uleshka

Japanese notes
Japanese notes
Japanese notes
Japanese notes

semi-Japanese notes
semi-Japanese notes
western notes
western notes

the priest in his beautiful clothes
the priest in his beautiful clothes
priest accessories
priest accessories

pic with no caption

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