The word gagaku indicates a vast repertoire of music and dances brought to Japan through the Silk Roads from the 6th century CE. Japanese conservative intellectuals and international organizations... Show moreThe word gagaku indicates a vast repertoire of music and dances brought to Japan through the Silk Roads from the 6th century CE. Japanese conservative intellectuals and international organizations like UNESCO often portray gagaku as timeless and immutable, equating it with the music performed by the Japanese Imperial Household. But gagaku is much more than “Japanese court music”. This thesis offers an alternative perspective on gagaku, presenting it as a “multiple object”, a dynamic genre with porous boundaries. The examination of the activities of professional musicians in Tokyo and of amateur practitioners in Kansai at the end of the 19th century forms the basis for two ethnographic sketches of gagaku in contemporary Japan: a portrait of Nanto gakuso, an amateur group based in Nara; and a discussion of the dispute concerning the threat to the materials used in the making of a gagaku instrument by the construction of a highway between Kyoto and Osaka. Theoretically ambitious and based on over two years of apprenticeship, this thesis skillfully combines historical, musicological, and anthropological approaches to music. Advocating a new ontological paradigm for the study of gagaku, it proposes to shift the question from what music is to what music can do. Show less
In our culture, vocal harmonics fuction as independent musical elements since only a few decades. Thresholds of the audible explores the changing relationship between singers, listeners and... Show moreIn our culture, vocal harmonics fuction as independent musical elements since only a few decades. Thresholds of the audible explores the changing relationship between singers, listeners and harmonics. As a research method a series of compositions (Nulpunten/’Zeropoints’) has been developed, which attempt to make a fresh approach to overtone singing and to the sonic source material of the human body. They spark off further investigations of reality and illusion of our auditory world. Using his experiences with Tibetan monks and Sardinian brotherhoods and the ‘transverbal’ oeuvre of Michael Vetter, Mark van Tongeren develops his notion ‘multiphony of the body’. The last word, according to him, must be given to readers/listeners, who are challenged to shift their thresholds of the audible with the cd It starts here and the performance Incognito ergo sum. Show less
