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Mass Twang /Folk Twang: A Critical Approach to the Aesthetics of Tsugaru-Jamisen

Sun, April 3, 10:45am to 12:45pm, Washington State Convention Center, Floor: 3rd Floor, Room 305

Abstract

This paper takes up the historical narrative of Tsugaru folksong [min'you] and instrumental performance, offering a reading which highlights the exchanges and resistances which contribute to the complexity of its evolution. The historical trajectory of Tsugaru folksong ostensibly falls in line with the common narrative of the centralization and modernization of Japan: performers migrate from the countryside to the capital, performance practice is modified to conform to the limitations of new recording technologies and broadcast media formats, and the added appellation of "Tsugaru" implicitly acknowledges its role as one among many national musics. The music was appropriated during the postwar period "nostalgia boom" to serve the modern desire to connect with a non-urban past. Now shamisen is mobilized in ways complicit with capitalistic mass-economy aesthetics, a trend led by Kinoshita Shin'ichi, Agatsuma Hiromitsu, and the Yoshida Brothers' groundbreaking mass music hybridizations.
While there are strong tendencies to align with the currents of modernization and massification, the Tsugaru-jamisen field is actually characterized by an unevenness, full of eddies and divergences from a unidirectional flow toward mass aesthetics. Contemporary performance is characterized by a schizophrenic waffling between what I call "oral-economy" and "modern-economy" aesthetic epistemologies; unfortunately, extant studies of this music approach it almost entirely from a "modern-inflected" consciousness. Tsugaru folksong performance is not a purely dominant, popular, or counter-culture; rather, it is a heterogeneity which cannot be subsumed part and parcel under one monolithic label.

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