Kyoto Nohgaku Kai

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Kyoto Nohgaku Kai is a company of musicians and singers from Kyoto that performs the music of Japanese Noh theatre. The album Japanese Noh Music includes excerpts from Hagoromo, one of the best-known Noh plays, about a heavenly woman who wants her feather robe back, and the instrumental pieces Jo-no-mai and Deha.

Music and breakthrough

Noh is the oldest major theatre form in Japan that is still regularly performed. It arose in the fourteenth century, when the actor Kan'ami and his son Zeami combined older forms of dance, song and popular entertainment into a new, refined theatre. With the support of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, Noh became the country's most important performing art. After that it hardly changed: actors and musicians learned to imitate every movement and every sound exactly, so that over the centuries the tempo became ever slower and more solemn.

Influence

The music is made by a small ensemble, the hayashi, with four instruments: a transverse flute, the nohkan, two hourglass-shaped drums played on the shoulder and on the hip, and a drum struck with sticks. To this is added a chorus of six to eight singers. A piece follows the principle of jo-ha-kyū: it begins slowly, gradually speeds up and ends in a climax. To Western ears Noh often sounds strange, but it shows how music, text and movement form a single whole in an age-old tradition.

Listening

• 
  Hagoromo · Kyoto Nohgaku Kai
• 
  Jo-no-mai · Kyoto Nohgaku Kai
• 
  Deha · Kyoto Nohgaku Kai

Discography

Studio albums

• ?Japanese Noh Music

See also

• Noh