Research on Early Notations for the History of Tωgaku and Points of Scholarly Contention in their Interpretation

Abstract

It is now almost forty years since Laurence Picken first suggested that present-day performances of tωgaku—the repertory of Japanese court music (gagaku) that was originally imported from Tang China to Japan during the seventh to the ninth centuries—bear little or no resemblance to Chinese music of the Tang period (618-907 CE), or indeed any subsequent period. This was the first time that any scholar had challenged the ideology that modern tωgaku perfectly preserves the inheritance from Tang China, an ideology that had been developed in the nineteenth century during the official standardization of gagaku. Picken based his views on preliminary study of tωgaku tablature notations—which he saw as containing important clues about the relationship of the modern inheritance to the original Chinese forms of the repertory—and on study of surviving Chinese notations (Picken 1967, 1969; see also Marett 1986 for a more detailed summary of this research).