This article discusses the state of music theory in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Japan, where musicians were invested in finding ways to map theories of traditional Japanese music and those of European tonality onto each other. By focusing on two theorists from the late nineteenth century (Isawa Shūji and Uehara Rokushirō) and one from soon after World War II (Koizumi Fumio), I demonstrate the coexistence of many contradictory ways of analyzing much of the music that came out of this period and afterward. My analysis of their various types of mapping draws out the cultural implications and goals that lie behind their strategies, which reflect the different ways in which they were hoping to situate Japanese music in a wider global context, whether as part of nineteenth-century nation-building or postwar reemergence.

Through analysis of several pieces written between the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, I suggest that the most effective lens is one that freely borrows elements from various theorists and traditions to create analyses that are as hybridized as the pieces themselves. Examples are drawn from a wide variety of genres—children’s songs, wartime soldiers’ songs, enka (nostalgic popular music), and film music—to demonstrate the wide reach of these hybridized tonal systems. By extension, analogous models could also be applied to musical traditions elsewhere in the world that blend Western tonal and non-Western elements.

Keywords: Japan, tonality, modality, enka, min’yō, tetrachords, solfège, history of theory

Contributor Information:

Liam Hynes-Tawa is a lecturer in the Department of Music at Yale University.

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