Общество "Россия-Япония":
http://ru-jp.org/

Margarita ESIPOVA
Ph.D in Art, Scientific Editor of "Great Russian Encyclopedia"; Chef-Editor of The Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture

CONFESSIONAL SOURCES OF ANCIENT JAPANESE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

This paper described several Japanese instruments which by type belong to the most ancient musical instruments in world practice.

A musical instrument in any confessional tradition appears in several aspects: as an instrument generating sound for public worship, as a cult object treated in a ritualized manner (methods and special storage places, etc.), as a concrete symbol, and, finally, as a certain established visual image (instruments that are no longer used for music-making often continue to 'exist' in the visual arts, as is the case with the Japanese kugo harp, one of the objects dealt with in this paper).

Most musical instruments in ancient cultures are typically related to confessional tradition, which may not necessarily be a tradition of the culture to which a particular instrument is related. If one takes into account that at an early stage of the appearance in a culture of a religious doctrine, borrowings (in the field of music as well as in other fields) from other cultures were made frequently and with ease (this became almost impossible in the New Times), one may conclude that the surviving musical instruments of any country (or those that are still known) can help in tracing numerous and extensive cultural-historical ties and links. As an object of culture and a music-making tool, an instrument carries a tremendous amount of information-both musical (related to structure, temperament, pitch, modes, scales, and timber characteristics, etc.) and cultural in the general sense. By reading this information, a layer after a layer, we may make considerable advances in understanding any particular culture as well as culture as a whole.

It is commonly held that practically all historical Japanese musical instruments are of foreign, chiefly Chinese, origin. This is only partly true because in a more precise sense they are of continental origin. An analysis of the set of historical instruments used in ancient Japan and modifications they have sustained over the centuries points to a particular selectivity inherent in Japanese culture (notwithstanding a considerable layer of Chinese borrowings).

Thus, musical instruments which 'had' settled in Japan in the early historical epochs point to pre-Buddhist contacts with other cultures related to more ancient confessions. This assertion can be illustrated with the story of one Japanese instrument proper-a sistrum-rattle called suzu, also described as a 'bell-tree' and used even today by dancers in Shinto temples and at kagura dancing performances at the court. It should be stressed that the suzu is one of the most ancient national instruments (not a one that was imported from the continent). Organologic data indicate that the suzu belongs to a particular kind of most ancient instruments that were evidently spread widely in ancient cultures, but were subsequently lost. Closely analogous to suzu is an archaic instrument still preserved in Latvia (a Baltic state) under the name of trideksnis (a rattle shaped like a small tree). Such analogues take us back to our common Indo-European past, and are akin to such phenomena as swastika ornaments discovered in traditional embroidered patterns in Russia's Vologda Region, or the presence of Sanskrit roots in the 'purest' form in the Lithuanian (and, to some extent, Latvian) language. Supporting the common Indo-European source is the case of another Japanese Shinto instrument, a serpent clapper known as binzasara, also traceable to ancient Indian culture even though it is related to the Chinese p'ai pan.

Just as interesting is the Japanese Buddhist stick rattle shakujo:, a wooden or metallic pole with four metal loops on top with metal rings threaded on them. The 'vibrant pole' is of an attested ancient Indian origin (where it was called kakkhara); it evolved into the chief attribute of the Tibetan monks under the name of 'khar-gsil, and, according to iconographic data, was the attribute of Buddha's disciples, wise men and religious teachers. In the 20th century, the instrument was still found in South-East Asia, particularly in the island of Java, as an attribute of itinerant monks. The pole was introduced to Japan from China in the 7th century. Pointing to ancient collaboration of two confessional traditions are two varieties of the shakujo: coexisting in Japan-the small one (which the performer shakes by hand) and the big one, up to 180 cm (which is knocked on the floor). The first is Buddhist tradition brought to Japan during the first centuries of this era by way of Central Asia (Kucha); this is corroborated, in particular, by the fact that a similar pre-Islamic instrument, the sapai or safail, is known even today to Uigurs and Uzbeks (an analogous rattle-pole is depicted in 6th-century Buddhist murals in Pendjikent in Tajikistan, as an attribute of a goddess); this instrument was widely used and borrowed by the shaman and Muslim cultures of Asia (the Kazakh asatayak, 40 to 100 cm long, is an attribute of the shamans - bakshy; the Kirghiz shaldyrak, about 40 cm long, and the asa-musa, or "the pole of Musa", was widely used by dervishes; an analogous instrument was also known in Persia, according to records in the Arabic brotherhoods of dervishes).

The second tradition is Christian Nestorian (beginning in the 5th-6th centuries, the Nestorian doctrine was widely spread in Central and Eastern Asia); poles or analogous instruments with which people stomped on the floors or wooden podiums, were used during divine services conducted by monophysite Christians (this tradition has been preserved in the Ethiopian Church where a wooden pole of up to 1.5 meter long called the maqwamiya is still used; it is also attested in the Armenian Church). One should also note that an analogous pole is known among many Siberian peoples, including the Tungus and Paleo-Asians, as a typical shaman attribute used in lieu of a frame drum (this may be a rudiment of ancient 'high' cultures that existed in the region in the past). Meanwhile, the shakujo: is still used in Japan as an instrument of confessional designation; its image also appears in visual art as an obligatory attribute of Bodhisattwa Kshitigarbha (Jizo: in Japanese), who holds it in his right hand; also surviving is a folk custom for determining a direction (in case of need) by tossing up a walking stick, a custom that goes back to ancient Indo-Buddhist cultures (a similar custom was attested in Tibet where an appropriate site for a new monastery was determined by tossing a 'khar-gsil, or a flail gandi and studying their position on the ground after the fall).

It is highly likely that yet another Japanese instrument, simandre han ("board") - a rectangular wooden beating board which is (according to eye witnesses) hanged at the entrance to Zen monasteries, is related to Nestorianism. Although there is no direct analogy to this instrument in East Asian cultures today, it is absolutely clear that it had been imported from the continent. Interestingly, a wooden beating board of a different kind that has never found its way to Japan is perfectly analogous with a board still in use in Christian monasteries on St. Athonus Mountain (this is not a large board that is suspended but a small and portable one that is placed over a player's shoulder as a yoke or is held at shoulder level during play), which is well-known under its Sanskrit name, gandi, in all continental cultures of Buddhism of the Vajrayana/Lamaism creed (Tibet, Mongolia, Buryatia and Tuva ). On the one hand, this may indicate that a suspendable flail of the han type is an earlier form of the borrowed instrument while, on the other hand, it may imply that contacts between Buddhism and Christianity should be timed much earlier than is generally accepted (it is known that one of the first reference to the gandhi is found in a Chinese translation of "Ekottaragama sutra" dated by the end of the 4th century ).

Let us now turn to a Japanese shaman instrument known as a 'musical bow,' or azusayumi. This monochord is a small wooden resonator with a bow running through it and a string attached to the ends of the bow; sound is extracting by either running a piece of stick across the string or by plucking. The first reference to a certain zither-kind monochord in Japan said that in the year 799 in Mikawa (north-western part of Aichi prefecture), there arrived from India a musician "who sang sad songs and played a one-string zither" . A similar monochord (with a pumpkin resonator) is one of the most ancient instruments in South- and South-East Asia and, according to legends, is linked to the God Indra. Its ancient images are found in the bas-reliefs of 7th-8th-century temples in Vietnam and Cambodia, they were made at almost the same time in India (Mavlipuram, 7th c.), and are attested somewhat later in Sri Lanka and Indonesia (Borobudur, end of 8th-early 9th centuries); playing the instruments were winged deities by the name kinnaras. This was apparently a really wide-spread instrument: in the 9th-10th centuries it was already described by Arab scholars as an Indian instrument called kingira/kankara. Upon finding its way to South Asia, the instrument was modified until it was given the shape of a modern vina. In Persia, for example, it was especially popular in the 14th century, lasting till the 17th century. It has survived in its original shape in Cambodia (under the local name of ksae diev) in music accompanying the shaman ritual araks, and in Thailand (phin). It seems evident that the Japanese azusaumi is a descendant of this Indo-Chinese instrument.

Finally, let us examine yet another ancient string instrument-the harp. There are indirect indications that the arched harps were used by most ancient civilizations in the Indus Valley (mid-3rd-mid-2nd millennia BC) and had common characteristics with the Sumer and ancient Egyptian arched harps well known today. Proved attestations of the instrument are of a later date: there are many images of the arched harp in the 1st-2nd-century bas-reliefs in Indian temples, for example. Missionaries took the arched harps to South-East Asia, where, with the fading away of Buddhism in northern and north-eastern regions of the subcontinent, it gradually went out of use (finally by the 9th c.); despite this its images continued to appear up to the 13th century. The only exception to this development was Myanma (Burma), where the arched harp known as the saun gauk still represents classical art musical tradition. The instrument was brought to Japan from China under the name of k'ung hu and was later given a generic name kugo (two samples are currently preserved in the emperor's Shosoin Treasures in Nara. Chinese as well as ancient Japanese sources describe three kinds of the k'ung hu / kugo: a horizontal (fushikugo), a vertical angled harp (tatekugo) and a harp with a "phoenix head" (ho:o:kugo). There are reliable data that both arched and angle harps were popular in Japan, despite the fact that they belonged to completely different civilizational levels. The main instrument that established itself in China was the angle harp, which, according to Suichi, made its way to southern China from Persia via Central Asia in the 2nd century (this was the chang harp widely attested during the Sassanids epoch). From southern China, it traveled to the Korean state of Pyakche (Kudara in Japanese) and from there to Japan, where it was given the name of kudaragoto. It is noteworthy that, while in China, the harp received its name thanks to another instrument, namely, the ancient Burmese arched harp kon or konkok, hence the Chinese k'ung hu, i. e., a harp described by sources as an instrument "with the head of a phoenix." The harp's peak of popularity in China was in the 3rd-6th centuries (even though it was used in court orchestras up to the end of the Ming dynasty in the 17th c.); it was also known to be in use during certain religious ceremonies. In the 6th-7th centuries, images of arched (boat-shaped) harps would appear in murals decorating Buddhist shrines in eastern Turkestan, and in the 7th-8th centuries, in murals at Penjikent (despite the fact that angle harps were more characteristic of that region). Although harps of both kinds went out of use in Japan rather early the image of the arched (Buddhist) harp has survived in religious painting. The earliest images of the arched harp in mandala drawings are dated by the 9th century, one of the latest, by the Edo epoch. In the period between the 9th and 14th century, it frequently appears in raigo:zu (images of the Buddha Amida surrounded by the heavenly musicians) . Obviously related to the arched harp was a Heian-period courtly custom to play the kugo at childbirth to mitigate the pain. This custom had an amazing historical prototype: in ancient Egypt (where arched harps are attested since the 3rd millenium BC, and the angle harps, since the time of the New Kingdoms, 1589-1085 BC) harps were played in temples during what was known as the 'birth of gods' ceremonies (the giving of birth to Hora by Isida, in particular) as well as to facilitate human childbirth. It seems wonderful that invisible threads link together world civilizations and cultures which, seemingly, can be neither linked nor compared in time or in space.