Yesterday, I braved the oxymoronic late March NYC chill (you would have to live here to understand that point fully) to go to a concert at Columbia University. The music on offer was not the usual fare: it was the 10th anniversary performance of a group that specializes in ancient Japanese music. The first half of the concert featured ancient music and the second half featured both modern pieces written for ancient instruments, and a modern piece inspired by ancient music (specifically, an abreviated version of John Cage's "Ryoanji"). The first half of the concert was definitely the less popular half, as evidenced by the restless audience. In the most annoying of New York fashion, people straggled in during the introductory talk; then left in the midst of the first, second or third pieces - not even waiting for the musicians to finish playing. Add in the simultaneous lighting of smartphone screens between every piece and the effect was positively maddening, especially among people who should know better.
To be sure, gagaku and hogaku - the two featured forms of Japanese ancient music - are acquired tastes. My appreciation of ancient Japanese music stems from going to a Shinto festival years ago. The festival featured almost 100 musicians playing the small, hand-held mouth organ, called a shoh, which produces a dreamy and unusual sound, sometimes rich, sometimes just a thin tone, and the hijiriki flute. The two instruments together sometimes create a disharmonized but somewhat hypnotic effect. The resulting performance was exactly what one might want for a Shinto ritual, but maybe not suitable for a cold spring afternoon on the Upper West Side.
So there I was, while everyone else was squirming, being carried back to Nara one very cold weekend in December when I enjoyed 3-1/2 days of just that type of music, only with a much larger and louder presence. I vividly remembered the ritual in the dark, when a group of chanting priests, accompanied by a large number of singers and musicians, carried a small, wooden box carrying the essence of the Shinto god from his home to a temporary shrine, there to be feted and fussed over before being lovingly returned to his usual abode, several days later. I felt both nostalgic and a little as though I was about to be drawn into a trance.
But the Columbia audience, in this case, though rude, was correct. Even my companion remarked that the second half of the concert was better than the first, and I had to agree. The context for the ancient music was all wrong. This small, but dedicated group of students, augmented by some Japanese professional musicians, did a competent, even surprisingly good, job, but the music was falling largely on uncomprehending ears. (People who don't live in NYC may wonder how something like a group formed for the appreciation of ancient Japanese music might even get off the ground, but this used to be a fairly common occurrence. I once met Isaac Asimov at a regular meeting of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. He was conducting the sing-along - from "Patience." I mean really - who knew?)
Context is important. When I teach budo, I try to throw in what I know of the era in which a given practice evolved. Most important to me is what people wore, and how they moved generally. We can know some of this from illustrations on scrolls; but Japan is a unique place. Just as gagaku and hogaku have been passed down through centuries, movement styles have been passed down via noh, kabuki and dance. I try to get people past chambara movies and anime, and into some more realistic historical sense of how people moved and behaved. Since I study Japanese dance, I am able to convey some of this sensibility, even if in a truncated fashion. I even brought my dance teacher in one time to teach suriashi footwork.
Do I succeed? Not always. And an argument can be made in regard to what a "realistic historical sense" is. After all, kabuki lives for exaggeration at least some of the time (but I'll bet you didn't know that there are some surprisingly realistic kabuki dramas out there) and noh has evolved over time to be more stately than it once was. And the dance both echoes and bounces off of these genres, along with others. But it's the best we have; and honestly, it's much better than nothing.
And I mean that. Some years ago, I was at a seminar for tanjo - a 19th century genre consisting of partner kata which pits a defender wielding a walking stick against an attacker with a sword. The kata are fairly vigorous for both attacker and defender. About halfway through the session, someone remarked that they just could not see how someone who used a cane could handle a swordsman in the way the kata required. He was completely oblivious to the fact that 19th century gentlemen (AND ladies), both in the West and in Japan, carried walking sticks as a proper accessory. Without knowing that, the kata meant nothing to this particular student. He could dismiss them out of hand, based on his ahistorical assumption about what people wore and how they moved. In his mind, there was no difference, historically or culturally, between the people of 150 years ago, and himself.
Modern budo is adaptive, and that's fine. It was created to fit in with the shifting contemporary world. But traditional budo is a different thing altogether. And one thing I know about context - if the teacher doesn't furnish it in some way, the students will come up with a way to fill in the knowledge gap on their own. We may think, as teachers, that we are teaching organized systems of attack and defense, but really that is only the start of what we are doing; or, at least, it should only be the start. The wonderful thing about our practice is the many layers of context that can be peeled back, and the richness that lies beneath.
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