Traditional Japanese Dance and Music
Learn From The Master: Traditional Japanese Dance and Music
You’ll be surprised how an innocent enough looking drum can have so much going on within it.
One Saturday afternoon, I headed to the Teatro Le Tea, a building of multiple performance spaces and practice studios, on the Lower East Side. I was told this was where a weekly group class on Japanese traditional music and dance (as in Kabuki) were being taught. When Chopsticks NY told me about an opportunity to learn to play hogaku (Japanese music) here in NYC, I jumped at the chance.
As I arrived, I was greeted by a very charming lady in a beautiful pink kimono who happened to be Ms. Mariko Watabe, the founder of Tomofuji Kai and the instructor of this weekly class. Ms. Watabe was originally trained as a traditional Japanese dancer. Although a dancer first, she is also a master of all aspects of Kabuki style performance art, including vocals, shamisen, narimono (percussion instruments like bells), small drums, and hand drums. Ms. Watabe started teaching her craft in the US in the mid ’70s, and is now considered the foremost expert in this genre in the United States giving lectures all across America.
As the class began, immediately, I was called upon to try the shimedaiko, which is a small drum. I was a little hesitant to blindly jump into it at first, given that I had no knowledge of this instrument, but I braced myself, then sat next to Ms. Watabe, and started imitating her.
The students lined up in a row in their beautiful, colorful yukata,
producing other worldly music is a sight to see.
The first thing that struck me as I observed Ms. Watabe singing beautifully as she played the drums, was how graceful her movements were, and how extremely difficult they were to mimic. The first instinctive thing to do when one arm goes down to hit the drum is for that arm to go back up, while the other arm comes down to hit the drum in an orderly fashion. With shimedaiko, however, this was not the case, and having to stop myself from what seemed a natural course of action was the most difficult part. At a glance, the moves seemed like an ornamented form of banging the drums, almost as if it was a part of a dance. But then I realized while the movements were visually pleasing, it was these crisp, precise movements that gave the drum sound a certain refined quality, and dynamic. I tried a stringed instrument called shamisen next. This did come more easily to me since the strings were tuned in fourths, a common interval in western music, making it easy to find pitches, which was somewhat of a relief.
The students range from six years old to 70 years old. The group is also culturally diverse.
The thing about Kabuki music is that its form and sounds are completely different from the Western notion of how music works. There are no chords, or rhythmic time, and no western style sheet music available to guide you. A form of sheet music does exist in hogaku, but they are written out in old Japanese, so to an untrained eye like mine, they might as well be written in Greek. As I carefully listened to the ensemble of sounds around me, it seemed as though every instrument was doing its own thing, and you were to somehow navigate through what seemed like a controlled randomness of sounds that came together and created the magnificent ethereal characteristics of hogaku.
All and all the experience was fascinating and very entertaining. Although many of the students have less than a year of experience, a sense of nostalgia passed over me while I observed and listened to their music. In addition, the vibrant colors of the many yukata and kimono, the beautiful pentatonic melodies, and the mystical rhythms of the drums were fresh and soothing, and I left the class feeling serene as if I had just received the best therapy.
Tomofuji Kai will be performing their music and dances at the Kiku Festival
in the Botanical Gardens in the Bronx this November.
The class is only $60 a month offering instruments for rental ($10), and is open to all levels of musicians.
———— Reported by Maya Robinson
