Time, Timbre, and Form in Noh
Takanori Fujita
Research Centre for Japanese Traditional Music, Kyoto City University of Arts
François Rose
Department of Music, Stanford University
Wednesday, 26 April 2023
11:00–11:30 am
Abstract: Noh plays are composed of a sequence of sections (shōdan), each one characterized by its own temporal and timbral signatures.
The timbre or the sound of a section is the result of the combination between any of its three components — vocal, nohkan, and percussion parts — where each component is either synchronized or not with the beat. Thus, Noh’s spectrum of timbre includes six textures with a vocal part, and four that are strictly instrumental.
We analyzed the timbral and temporal characteristics of the sequenced sections of the plays and noticed some similarities. They have led us to the development of an "Index of Intermedia" that we have used to represent the form of the plays.
In this presentation, we identify the timbral and temporal characteristics of Noh’s ten textures, before introducing the Index of Intermedia and how we have used it to represent the form of a play. Then, the same principles are used for the analysis of the form of a single section (shōdan): Hagoromo’s Kuse.
About the presenters: Takanori Fujita is a Professor of the Institute for Japanese Traditional Music, Kyoto City University of Arts. As an ethnomusicologist, he has been involved in the music research on Noh drama in Japan and related local traditional performance of the medieval origin. Watching performances not exclusively but in relation to their social contexts, he aims to understand and explain the value and meaning of Japanese musical traditions handed down generation after generation. His doctoral thesis ("Noh Choruses and Choral Singers". 2000, in Japanese) describes the historical change of the choral part of Noh chanting and its effect on dramatic production and narrativity. His recent work includes Hagoromo with Full Notation, as well as the co-authored work, "Noh as intermedia".
Born in Montréal, François Rose is a composer with a passion for orchestration. His collaboration with the physicist Dr. James Hetrick led to the conception and development of LabOrch, a computerized orchestration tool. This was followed with a collaboration with Dr. Jarosław Kapuściński and the Tokyo-based gagaku Reigakusha ensemble, investigating the correlation between time and timbre in gagaku music. This research led to the Gagaku-project website, and paved the way for a collaboration with Dr. Jarosław Kapuściński, Dr. Fujita Takanori and the Kyoto-based Kongō Noh school, and the publication of the "Noh as intermedia" website. He joined the Department of Music at Stanford in 2017.
