A Response—Gagaku in Place and Practice: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Place of Japanese Imperial Court Music in Contemporary Culture

LeRon James Harrison's article "Gagaku in Place and Practice: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Place of Japanese Imperial Court Music in Contemporary Culture" (Harrison 2017, 4–27) aims to redress a perceived imbalance between the treatment of gagaku 雅楽 and other traditional forms of Japanese music performance in academic writings, reception by popular media, and descriptions by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs 文化庁 (Bunka chō).¹ Harrison wants to "provide [an] analysis that does not preconceive gagaku as other" (ibid., 6). And as a practitioner in a gagaku ensemble and a member of a gagaku community, he wishes to demonstrate that gagaku is not a marginalized activity.

According to Harrison, certain articles about gagaku, particularly two by Britten Dean and Terence Lancashire, treat gagaku as "remote," "esoteric," and removed from the main body of hōgaku 邦楽—a term that simply denotes Japanese music (Dean 1985, 147–62; Lancashire 2003, 21–39). Harrison states that academic perceptions of "remote" and "esoteric," as well as an absence of historical treatment, are the result of misinformed preconceptions of gagaku as being "other," leading to the positing of "claims that demonstrate the pre-conception" (2017, 6). To deepen his analysis, Harrison draws on the concept of "place" as postulated by Jeff Malpas (1999). From this, an additional term, "containment," can be used to describe the alienation of gagaku as "being contained and kept away from the everyday world" (Harrison 2017, 8; Malpas 1999). And Harrison believes that "temporal abstraction," where the historical dimension of gagaku is absent in the academic literature, is exemplified in Lancashire. In a similar vein, Harrison claims that Dean's spatial containment of gagaku outside hōgaku carries with it the inference that gagaku cannot be performed with musical forms of hōgaku. This inference "impedes the action of gagaku musicians performing with musical forms such as shamisen and shakuhachi by generating the belief that gagaku is not performed with hōgaku" (Harrison 2017, 11). According to Harrison, the Agency for Cultural Affairs is also complicit in an online description of gagaku under the heading "Other," and he makes subtle distinctions between usage of the words waga kuni 我が国 (our country) and Nihon (Japan) as further evidence for treating gagaku as an alterity by its incorporation in the latter appellation (ibid., 14).

Harrison's intent is evident from this description, and I refrain from a further explanation of the content of his article, elegant and sophisticated though his arguments may be. His examination of Lancashire's and Dean's articles as exemplifying the absenting of gagaku or its alienation through containment, however, raises concerns about Harrison's own interpretation of the status of gagaku in academic literature on Japanese music, as well as, to borrow his term, what can only be seen as an "eisegetical" approach to both articles (2017, 6). Leaving aside the overabundant literature on gagaku discussed as an essential part of Japanese music in the Japanese language,² there is other literature that discusses the subject: the English-language descriptions of gagaku in William Malm's Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (1959, 77–104) and its revamped version, Traditional Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (2000, 97–118); the inclusion of gagaku as one of eight major genres of Japanese music in Kishibe Shigeo's The Traditional Music of Japan (1984, 32–44); the almost dominant coverage in Eta Harich-Schneider's A History of Japanese Music, where treatment of and references to gagaku stretch from cover to cover (1972); the section on gagaku by Terauchi Naoki in volume 7 of the Garland Encyclopedia on World Music, East Asia: China, Japan, and Korea (2001, 619–28); and, more recently, two sections on gagaku and shōmyō by Steven Nelson in Alison McQueen Tokita and David W. Hughes, The Ashgate Research Companion to Japanese Music (2007, 35–75), all in which gagaku occupies significant spaces. If Harrison was able to locate the comparatively obscure articles by Dean and Lancashire, he would no doubt have been aware of the attention drawn to gagaku as...