An Anthology of Nagauta

Erscheinungsjahr 2009
ISBN: 978-1-929280-56-8
Verlag: University of Michigan Press

Buch, Englisch, 224 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies

From 1964 until 1994 The University of Michigan Japanese Music Study Group performed annual concerts. The concerts included Edo matsuri bayashi festival music and occasional koto compositions, but the major genre was nagauta, a lyrical music originally written to accompany kabuki and classical dances. Students learned to sing in Japanese or play either the three-stringed shamisen or one of three drums of the noh drama as used in kabuki. Noh and folk flutes were also taught.

During those thirty years, the students usually translated the nagauta texts that were used for the concerts. Now, William P. Malm, the retired director of the study group, has gathered those translations into a book, An Anthology of Nagauta. Two introductory chapters provide an overview of shamisen and nagauta music; the remainder of the book contains translations of 31 nagauta compositions dating from 1753 to 1967. The translations, with commentary, appear side-by-side with the romanized text; full Japanese texts appear at the end of the book, along with a glossary and bibliography. In addition, two compact discs have been made of seven representative pieces.

In preserving these translations and presenting them to the reader, the author has provided the Japanese specialist and those interested in Japanese music a comprehensive study of nagauta.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Über Autor(innen)

William P. Malm is professor emeritus of ethnomusicology and retired director of the Stearns Collection of Musical Instruments and the Japanese Music Study Groupat The University of Michigan. Among his publications are Nagauta: The Heart of Kabuki Music (1963); Music Cultures of the Pacific, the Near East, and Asia (1966); Six Hidden Views of Japanese Music (1986); Theater as Music: The Bunraku Play “Mt. Imo and Mt. Se: An Exemplary Tale of Womanly Virtue” (1990, with C. Andrew Gerstle and Kiyoshi Inobe), and Traditional Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (2001, a revised edition of his classic 1959 work Japanese Music and Musical Instruments). As a teacher at Michigan he received the Henry Russell, Alumni Merit, and Legislature awards, and in 1993 he was given the Koizumi Fumio Prize in Ethnomusicology.