Mash-ups
wait...you don't like Red Vines, or Candy Corn?
Confession: I love mash-ups. Beyond the fact that I am a living, breathing genre mash-up, I enjoy listening to them, and I have been known to spend many, many hours mashing traditional Irish tunes with pop songs, often to the consternation of my more puritanical colleagues.
A mash-up is when you take two or more elements from multiple sources to create a new work. In the case of songs, you might take the vocal track from one song and play it over the instrumental tracks from another. Often, hilarity ensues, but sometimes the results can have their own peculiar beauty.
Sublime.
Years ago, fiddle-player extraordinaire Dale Russ noticed a similarity between a very beautiful 17th-century Irish tune, Lord Ullin’s Daughter (also known as Eibhli Gheal Chiúin or “Fair Gentle Eily”) and a Japanese folk song called Hamabe no Uta (“Song of the Shore”) written by Narita Tamezo in 1916. These two tunes, separated by half a planet and several centuries, still manage to share some surprising melodic similarities.
Does that mean Narita, inspired by hearing Lord Ullin’s Daughter somehow, rushed to his piano and out poured Hamabe no Uta ? No. It’s just a happy coincidence. Correlation does not equal causation.
Because while two pieces of music may share similarities, it does not indicate one directly influenced the other—even when they’re more or less contemporaries of one another. Take, for example, this excellent mash-up of Bootylicious by Destiny’s Child and Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana.
Where am I going with all this, and what could this possibly have to do with shakuhachi? Much to my chagrin, I was tagged in a post where the Eurocentrists are again tying themselves in knots to claim Rokudan no Shirabe (a popular piece of 17th century koto music) is based on the Gregorian chants sung by Christian missionaries. It’s not just coincidence the two have structural similarities; in this version of history, Rokudan was actually based on the Latin Credo.
I’ve heard this before but in a casual conversation and I didn’t think much of it at the time.
Rokudan is widely attributed to a koto player from the 17th century named Yatsuhashi Kengyo (kengyo is a title reserved for the blind masters of koto), but the author instead claims it was either composed anonymously or that the composer’s name was simply lost to the mists of time. Rather convenient, I’d say.
Whatever his name may have been, it seems likely that Rokudan came into being as a consequence of this master of the koto executing a fantasy-like paraphrase of the melody of the Latin Credo chant and attempting to create a set of variations, in the manner of the Spanish diferencias.
The more I read these faux-academic papers, the more I see a pattern of speculation, conjecture, and straight-up wishful thinking, and always propounded without a shred of evidence. Despite being no more than a blip in the Japanese historical timeline—not to mention the paucity of converts from the efforts of the church to save the heathenish masses—tremendous effort is put into proving that Christianity is responsible for much of the great art and music of Japan. These notions are then cited and regurgitated by academics who either don’t verify their sources, or don’t care.
If you find yourself wanting to ask me for proof that Rokudan wasn’t based on Gregorian chants, I would ask why the idea that a piece of music didn’t come from White people makes you so uncomfortable.
I would add the question itself is exhausting. For one, it’s impossible to prove a negative. For another, asking me to defend my culture, my heritage rather than just accepting the possibility that a society developed without White influence is deeply troubling. Smells Like Teen Spirit came out in 1991, Bootylicious came out in 2001; I can no more easily prove that Destiny’s Child wrote Bootylicious without the influence of Smells Like Teen Spirit, but it’s no less absurd.
One of the central pillars of traditional music is the importance of knowing your place in the history of that tradition. To play traditional music is to be a part of, not separate from, every traditional musician that came before us. To demand that Japan did not in fact create its own music based on her native traditions and instead assert that it only came about from the influence of Christian missionaries is antithetical to the entire study of traditional music. You are choosing to ignore cultural history in favor of elevating your self, your ego, and superimposing that over a history and culture that was doing just fine without you, thanks very much.
To be honest, I find it far more interesting—and choose to believe—that two similar pieces of music that otherwise share no commonality can spontaneously occur at the same time. If not, everyone who ever wrote a four-chord pop song has a lot to answer for.
More anon,
Hanz