Zeami

Performance Notes

Motoyiko Zeami, Tom Hare

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9780231511414
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Drama
• Index: Literature

Zeami (1363-1443), Japan's most celebrated actor and playwright, composed more than thirty of the finest plays of no drama. He also wrote a variety of texts on theater and performance that have, until now, been only partially available in English.

Zeami: Performance Notes presents the full range of Zeami's critical thought on this subject, which focused on the aesthetic values of no and its antecedents, the techniques of playwriting, the place of allusion, the training of actors, the importance of patronage, and the relationship between performance and broader intellectual and critical concerns. Spanning over four decades, the texts reflect the essence of Zeami's instruction under his famous father, the actor Kannami, and the value of his long and challenging career in medieval Japanese theater.

Tom Hare, who has conducted extensive studies of no academically and on stage, begins with a comprehensive introduction that discusses Zeami's critical importance in Japanese culture. He then incorporates essays on the performance of no in medieval Japan and the remarkable story of the transmission and reproduction of Zeami's manuscripts over the past six centuries. His eloquent translation is fully annotated and includes Zeami's diverse and exquisite anthology of dramatic songs, Five Sorts of Singing, presented both in English and in the original Japanese.

APPENDIX 1

Music, Dance, and Performance in Sarugaku

Many of the texts in the Performance Notes concern questions of music and dance in general terms, but at least eight or nine of them are more specifically and technically related to these central features of sarugaku performance. For music, five texts are especially noteworthy: Oral Instructions on Singing, A Collection of Jewels in Effect, Technical Specifications for Setting a Melody, Articles on the Five Sorts of Singing, and Five Sorts of Singing.

We are both tantalized and frustrated by much of what appears in these texts. First, they attest to the presence of magnificent actors on the late-fourteenth-and fifteenth-century stage. Zeami’s passing remarks in the Performance Notes about Kiami and Inuō Dōami, not to mention his father, Kannami, offer hints about this (and those hints are elaborated in Conversations on Sarugaku, in which the great dengaku actor Zōami also comes in for high praise). But all we really know about Kiami, Dōami, and Zōami are comments like these. There are no extant plays in their hand, as far as we know.¹ And even if we did have plays by them, that still would give us only a vague idea of what they must have been able to do as actors. But then, that was the case for all actors anywhere until the development of recording technologies that could give us a more detailed picture of what the greats of the past did on stage.

It is not merely for the evocation of past masters that we turn to these texts. We also can see in them, remarkably clearly, how closely the contours of the typical nō play conform to Zeami’s prescriptions for sarugaku. We find here, as well, some of the most important evidence to consider when trying to evaluate for ourselves the importance of “tradition.” Tradition is everywhere trumpeted as a reason to value forms like nō, bunraku, kabuki, kathakali, or even the religious plays of Oberammergau, but all too often, the tradition in question is not really that old, not plausibly “authentic,” and maybe not very edifying. In the case of sarugaku and its descendant nō, we have enough good information to give us a strong basis for reconsidering questions about the integrity of tradition, and we also have the clear testimony, especially in Zeami’s own words, about the unparalleled importance of the here and now for performance.

If all the texts are technically daunting, given the removal of Zeami’s performance from what it is possible for us to know in the twenty-first century, they nonetheless deserve close attention because they show the paradox of form in Zeami’s thought, and despite their (often baffling) technical specificity, they do provide an unsurpassed view of what fifteenth-century performance of sarugaku must have been like. Many of nō’s most salient features are apparent in sarugaku, and Zeami clearly promotes the centrality of the shite, both artistically and aesthetically. His assertions about the shite’s primary role in performance are numerous and persuasive, especially from the perspective of modern nō performance. Perhaps the most typical feature of nō, which distinguishes it from many other kinds of theater in the world today, is its focus on a central subject. It is interesting to read between the lines in texts such as Learning the Profession, which mentions the failure to recognize the centrality of the shite as hurting the troupe’s success.

We also learn from Learning the Profession and the other five texts just mentioned that singing is the central musical feature of sarugaku, yet we discern particular places where instrumentalists play an important role as well. We find generally less information about dance. Although Figure Drawings of the Two Arts and the Three Modes discusses dance in detail, apart from its bewildering comments at the end of the text about varieties of stomping, it doesn’t specify what happens but instead opts for a more abstract and philosophical ground from which to discuss dance. Remarks like “Substance is intent, and force is to be cast aside” (in the passages on the Woman’s Mode) are typical.

Zeami’s detailed discussions of musical performance in the Notes make generous use of terminology from Sino-Japanese music theory. This was the theory underlying gagaku, the instrumental ensemble music played at the ancient Japanese court, which was first introduced into the country perhaps as early as the sixth (or even fifth)² century and increasing in importance as part of the vast importation of continental culture through the late ninth century. The musics that became gagaku have roots in many parts of Asia, including Central Asia and the coast of Annam as well as, of course, China and the Korean Peninsula. Gagaku continues to be performed even today, although it has been vastly altered in transmission.

Sarugaku is very different from gagaku, but most of the formal theory of music available to Zeami was what was used to discuss gagaku, so however great the discrepancy between gagaku theory and sarugaku practice might have been, we must deal with some of the terminology and conceptual assumptions of this theory in order to understand Zeami’s detailed comments about music.

The most common references relate broadly to pitches and pitch structures, which might loosely be called scales or modes. These scales or modes are created by combining a system of degrees (i.e., positions that individual notes hold vis-à-vis other notes within the same system, like do, re, mi, fa, etc.) with a system of fixed pitches. The Chinese systems that had been imported into Japan divided the octave into twelve named pitches and then identified certain groups of pitches with fixed relationships that could be transposed into different keys. Of the twenty-eight theoretical groupings they produced, thirteen were popularly used in China at the time. Six of these “modes” were used in the species of gagaku most closely associated with Chinese antecedents (Tōgaku [Tang music]).

In China, the modes were divided into two scale types: ryo (

, in Mandarin lü, third tone) and ritsu (

, in Mandarin lü, fourth tone). When the system was adapted to the Japanese practice in gagaku performance itself, it underwent numerous alterations. Accordingly, its application to other types of music in Japan has “rarely provided insight,”³ but the terminology nonetheless is found in Zeami’s discussion.

Zeami refers (though only rarely) to the degree names of the Chinese system,

, using Japanese pronunciation, kiu (mod. J. kyū), shyau (mod. J. shō), kaku, chi, and u, respectively. He refers more frequently to pitch or modal names, especially waushiki (

, mod. J. ōshiki) and banshiki

.

In modern gagaku performance, ōshiki corresponds generally to A and banshiki to B, but there is no absolute pitch in modern nō performance, so the significance of these pitch terms itself wavers. Modern nō actors are not concerned with absolute pitch in their singing and generally do not use these technical terms with reference to singing.⁴ In the repertory of the nō flute, however, the old pitch and mode names do retain some significance, particularly the distinction between ōshiki and banshiki. In this case, though, the terms do not refer to an absolute pitch but to the specific fingerings of the principal tones in a given piece.

Moreover, the construction of the modern nō flute actually makes impossible the identification of any absolute pitch with reference to ōshiki and banshiki, because flutes are not made to particular pitch specifications. Furthermore, one of its physical features (the so-called nodo [throat]) distorts the relation between a particular note in one octave and its counterparts in the octaves above, so that even if, say, ōshiki were A 440 in the lowest octave of a nō flute, it would not produce an exact octave when played in the register above that lowest octave.

It would be easy enough simply to relinquish notions of absolute pitch altogether when discussing sarugaku, if in the Performance Notes, Zeami did not make several references suggesting that in his time, pitch relations between singing and the flute were more exact than they are today. In A Mirror to the Flower and Oral Instructions on Singing, for instance, he seems to suggest that the shite should take his pitch from the pitch of the flute:

It is the ki that sustains the pitch. If you focus on the pitch of the flute first and use this occasion to match the ki with it, then close your eyes, draw in a breath, and only after that produce the voice, your voice will come forth from within the pitch from the start.⁵

It is not impossible that the word I’ve translated as “pitch” (teushi, mod. J. chōshi) should be understood in a more emotional way as, say, a general aesthetic or emotional tenor. But this is unlikely, given other places where it is difficult to interpret teushi as mea...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Editorial Board
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Transmitting the Flower Through Effects and Attitudes
• An Extract from Learning the Flower
• Oral Instructions on Singing
• A Mirror to the Flower
• A Course to Attain the Flower
• Figure Drawings of the Two Arts and the Three Modes
• The Three Courses
• Technical Specifications for Setting a Melody
• A Collection of Jewels in Effect
• An Effective Vision of Learning the Vocation of Fine Play in Performance
• Five Ranks
• Nine Ranks
• Six Models
• Pick Up a Jewel and Take the Flower in Hand
• Articles on the Five Sorts of Singing
• Five Sorts of Singing
• Learning the Profession
• Traces of a Dream on a Single Sheet
• The Flower in... Yet Doubling Back
• Two Letters to Master Konparu
• Appendix 1. Music, Dance, and Performance in Sarugaku
• Appendix 2. On the Manuscripts
• Appendix 3. Zeami’s Languages
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series List