Chinese And Japanese Music Dramas

Chinese and Japanese Music-Dramas is the result of a conference on the relations between Chinese and Japanese music-drama held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, on October 1–4, 1971. In addition to the Association for Asian Studies, four U-M departments participated in the conference: the Center for Japanese Studies, the Center for Chinese Studies, the School of Music, and the Speech Department. One important inspiration for the creation of such an interdisciplinary conference was the fact that each participant had found, after years of individual research on music-drama in East Asia, consistent frustration caused by attempts to deal on their own with multiple cultural and technical problems. Another motivating force was an awareness among many members of the four disciplines involved that the topic is in fact one of the largest untouched fields of scholarly endeavor in both Asian and theatrical studies. The collection opens with J. I. Crump’s exploration of the Ming commentators who began to subject Yüan musical drama to the same critiques as other literature from the past. In the second chapter, Rulan Chao Pian looks to the structure of arias in Peking Opera for clues about what distinguishes this art form. William P. Malm turns to three key sources for the performance conventions of Japanese Noh drama to glean any Sino-Japanese music relationships that exist in technical terms and practices. In the fourth essay, Carl Sesar analyzes a Noh play that stages the tension between Chinese influence and Japanese originality. Roy E Teele concludes the volume with a formal study of Noh play structure to assess lineages of influence from Chinese dramatic forms. After each contribution, the editors print a transcript of the conference participants’ discussion of that paper, providing the reader with a detailed and nuanced view of how the contributors understood and responded to each other’s work.

The foremost authorities in the field of music from around the world have contributed twenty original essays for this volume, edited by Elizabeth May. Only European musics have been omitted, except insofar as they affect other musics discussed here. North American music is represented by the musics of the Native Americans and the Alaskan Eskimos. The essays are profusely illustrated with maps, drawings, diagrams, photographs, and music examples. There are extensive glossaries, bibliographies, and annotated film lists. The book is directed to readers seriously interested in acquainting themselves with musics beyond the confines of Western musicology. Contributors include Bruno Nettl, Kuo-huang Han and Lindy Li Mark, Kang-sook Lee, William P. Malm, David Morton, Bonnie C. Wade, Margaret J. Kartomi, Adrienne L. Kaeppler, Trevor A. Jones, Atta Annan Mensah, John Blacking, Alfred Kwashie Ladzekpo and Kobla Ladzekpo, Cynthia Tse Kimberlin, Jozef M. Pacholczyk, Ella Zonis, Abraham A. Schwadron, David P. McAllester, Lorraine D. Koranda, and Dale A. Olsen. Please note: this book was originally published with records. The edition available now does not include the records. We are hoping to make the original recordings available in some other way.

From ancient ritualistic practices to modern dance theatre, this study provides concise summaries of all major theatrical art forms in Japan. It situates each genre in its particular social and cultural contexts, describing in detail staging, costumes, repertory and noteworthy actors.

This volume explores not only the close ties that link the cultures and musics of East and Northeast Asia, but also the distinctive features that separate them.

The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music is a ten-volume reference work, organized geographically by continent to represent the musics of the world in nine volumes. The tenth volume houses reference tools and descriptive information about the encyclopedia’s structure, criteria for inclusion and other information specific to the field of ethnomusicology. An award-winning reference, its contributions are from top researchers around the world who were active in fieldwork and from key institutions with programs in ethnomusicology. GEWM has become a familiar acronym, and it remains highly revered for its scholarship, uncontested in being the sole encompassing reference work with a broad survey of world music. More than 9,000 pages, with musical illustrations, photographs and drawings, it is accompanied by 300+ audio examples.

An up-to-date cultural history of the Japanese theatre in all its forms including primitive rituals, court and popular dance-drama, puppet shows and westernized plays, is narrated here for the first time in English by a western authority in the field. The book underlines Zeami and Zenchiku's secret tradition of the nō, explaining Zen-inspired spiritual teachings for the actor's training on the way to enlightened performance. It also gives relevance to the transformation of an anti-establishment entertainment by prostitutes into spectacular kabuki stagecraft, and to the modernization process which created shingeki modern drama, and moved it into the context of world theatre. The final chapter summarizes the history of western discovery of the Japanese stage. The illustrations, the indexes, the glossary and the extensive bibliography — including all major literature in western languages until 1989 — also contribute to make this volume a must for all students of the Japanese theatre, and for anyone interested in a better understanding of Japanese culture as mirrored in its theatrical component.

Blending a flair for textual nuance with theoretical engagement, Theaters of Desire not only contributes to our understanding of the most influential form of early Chinese song-drama in local and international cultural contexts, but adds a Chinese perspective to the scholarship on print culture, authorship, and the regulatory discourses of desire. The book argues that, particularly between 1550 and 1680, Chinese elite editors rewrote and printed early plays and songs, so-called Yuan-dynasty zaju and sanqu , to imagine and embody new concepts of authorship, readership and desire, an interpretation that contrasts starkly with the national and racially-oriented reception of song-drama developed by European critics after 1735 and subsequently modified by Japanese and Chinese critics after 1897. By analyzing the critical and material facets of the early song and play tradition across different historical periods and cultural settings, Theaters of Desire presents a compelling case study of literary canon formation.

China Reinterpreted is the first comprehensive study on the representation of Chinese figures and motifs in Muromachi Japanese noh theater. Given that China had a strong influence on Japanese culture from the sixth to the early seventeenth centuries, research on Japanese reception of Chinese culture abounds.This book examines how noh theater integrated earlier reception of Chinese culture in various disciplines to produce its reinterpretation of China and Chinese culture on stage. Centering on a group of noh plays that features Chinese characters and motifs, China Reinterpreted explores not only the different means and methods of adaptation, but also the intricate (re)construction of diverse and complex images of China. This study situates the selected Chinese plays in the context of the dramaturgy and artistic conventions of noh, as well as the sociopolitical stances and artistic preferences of the audiences, and thus highlights the aesthetics, cultural, and sociopolitical agendas of noh theater of the time. By analyzing the various images of China (Japan’s cultural Other) staged in Muromachi noh theater, China Reinterpreted offers a case study of the representation of the Other in an intra-Asia context.