The Representation of East Asian Music in Silent Film Accompaniment Scores

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

From the silent film era to the present day, film music has played a variety of roles. It intensifies the onscreen action, creates a psychological mood, establishes continuity throughout the film, or sets the mood of a specific period. Additionally, location setting is a crucial aspect of film music, and it often requires a musical style appropriate to the setting.For example, from the silent film era to the early talkie era, it was a major concern for Japanese filmmakers to design music appropriate to the “Japanese world” as it appeared on the screen. This problem was solved by using Japanese instruments and traditional Japanese music pieces—but how did they represent Japan or East Asia overseas, where Japanese instruments and music pieces were not readily available?In Japan, during the silent film period, accompaniment music was performed by live musicians, just as it was in the West. In the very early days of silent films, Japanese films contained traditional music, whereas foreign films had Western music, which created a dual structure: Japanese films were accompanied by music such as shamisen and taiko drums, which were used to accompany Kabuki plays, and foreign films were accompanied by Western music played by a small orchestra of violins, pianos, trumpets, and other instruments.1 Furthermore, in the 1910s, when Western culture had not yet become familiar to the general Japanese public, this dual structure divided the audience as well: the intellectuals watched Western films and the masses watched Japanese films. This structure changed in the late 1920s when Japanese films rapidly evolved by adopting film techniques from developed countries, and the intellectual class began to watch Japanese films; concurrently, the masses, now more familiar with Western culture, began to watch foreign films. This mixing of foreign and Japanese film audiences led to a form of Japanese-Western ensemble music, which was used mainly for accompaniment music during screenings of Japanese films.During the silent era, American accompaniment score anthologies, such as those of Erno Rapée, were imported to Japan, and the same method of selecting ready-made music to accompany films was used as in many Western countries. In Western films, classical masterpieces were mainly chosen and spliced together, such as Rossini's William Tell Overture and Offenbach's Heaven and Hell for the chase scene, and Mendelssohn's Spring Song for the spring scene. In contrast, in Japanese films, it was a common practice to play traditional Japanese music, such as Chikumagawa for the scene of a boat ride down the river, and a passage from Azuma Hakkei during scenes of swordplay. Thus, in both foreign and Japanese films, the accompaniment music was mainly quotations from existing music. Later, during the transitional period from silent films to talkies, the desire to create new music that was more organically connected to the content of the films increased. To this end, film companies began to employ a succession of composers with Western musical training, including Shiro Fukai, Noboru Ito, and Fumio Hayasaka. However, one of the major problems in film music of this period was the mismatch between the Japanese world of the screen and the music composed in the Western musical style.Keizo Horiuchi, one of the Japanese composers of film music at the time, stated in 1934: The most troubling thing about Japanese film music is the gap between the music actually heard in homes and on the streets and cinematic music. It is not so unnatural for music to appear in any scene in a Western film. Music in the home can also be performed in the style of film accompaniment with an orchestra. However, this is puzzling enough when I consider what kind of music would fit in a Japanese home or street scene.2Although Western culture had been rapidly adopted in the general public since the Meiji era (1868–1912), many people still felt Japanese scenes and Japanese emotions were mismatched with Western onscreen music. Therefore, during this period, filmmakers and film music composers experimented, for instance, having Western instruments imitate Japanese music, having Japanese instruments play pieces composed using Western compositional methods, or using Japanese-Western ensembles.How was Japanese music received in the US during this period? Figure 1 shows the number of songs with Japanese content written mostly in Tin Pan Alley between 1890 and 1930. These were not pieces written specifically for film; rather they were written for Broadway, as either show tunes or other stage cues. However, the fact that there are 375 songs written with Japanese themes during the silent film period indicates a growing interest in Japan in the US.In 1917 Gertrude Ross, a pianist, accompanist, and composer explained: My interest in the music of the Japanese was awakened when a little Japanese woman played for me on the samisen. The weirdness of this music founded on scales so entirely different from ours, impressed me with its unusual intervals and rhythms. The unresolved melodies, without our cadence, gives a sense of something so foreign to our occidental ears, that it is indeed an awakening.3While this growing interest in Japanese music was evident, the distinction between Japanese and Chinese was blurred in the musical representations of the period, which was encompassed as East Asian and Orientalism. In fact, the Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists compiled by Erno Rapée includes a piece entitled Chinese-Japanese, indicating that East Asian musical representations were shared.How did music express and characterize “Japaneseness” or “East Asia” in the US? To answer this question, I have selected music from accompaniment score anthologies published in the US during the silent era, along with the keywords or tags “Japanese,” “Chinese,” or “Oriental.” Table 1 shows a list of pieces included in this study.Prior to the analysis, let me briefly introduce the computational music analysis software Humdrum, which I used for this analysis. Humdrum, originally created by David Huron in the 1980s and steadily used for decades is a software system for assisting musical research.4 To analyze the music, the score information should be encoded in the “Humdrum format,” which is the notation style of the Humdrum world (see Figure 2). Once encoded, the music can be computationally analyzed using command line tools (see Figure 3) to, for example, find the most common melodic patterns in multiple pieces or visualize a key transition within a piece.To investigate how “East Asian,” “Japanese,” or “Chinese” musical symbols are represented in the anthologies, I encoded all the pieces listed in Table 1 in the Humdrum format. The encoded data is available on my GitHub account.5To begin with, to determine what scales were used in the melodies of these pieces, I extracted only the melody parts of all the pieces and analyzed the frequency of use of each note using Humdrum Tools. To facilitate comparative analysis, all data were transposed to the key of C major or A minor without any key signature.The Remic Folio of Moving Picture Music, published in 1914, contains three pieces: Chinese, Chinese Serenade, and Japanese. In Chinese Serenade, the use of the fourth and seventh degrees is extremely limited, indicating that this is a typical pentatonic scale (see Figure 4). In Japanese, the third and seventh degrees are not used at all, and the scale comprises five notes: C, D, F, G, and A. Thus, whereas Japanese and Chinese Serenade represent a sense of East Asia in the pentatonic scale, Chinese shows a different trend. This piece was an excerpt from the opera Alessandro Stradella, composed by German composer Friedrich von Frothow in 1847, and thus, may have differed from the other two pieces in tendency. As Figure 4 shows, there is no use of the fourth, and the melody comprises C, D, E, G, A, B.Sam Fox Moving Picture Music, volume 1, published in 1913, includes Oriental Veil Dance, CHINESE MUSIC, and ORIENTAL MUSIC. Of these, Oriental Veil Dance and CHINESE MUSIC begin in a minor key but change to a major key in the middle of the piece. Therefore, in this analysis, I divided the melody into two parts: one in minor key, another in major key (see Figure 5). The major keys show a tendency toward a pentatonic scale with less use of the fourth and seventh degrees, whereas the minor keys show a more complex composition of notes in the scale. This is probably due to the fact that the minor key section is not stable in one key and many accidentals appear.The second volume of Sam Fox Moving Picture Music, also published in 1913, contains three pieces: Japanese Love Song, Oriental Dance or Scene, and Oriental Music. Again, in the major section, the use of the fourth and seventh degrees is minimal, especially in the Japanese Love Song, which is composed in the typical C, D, E, G, A pentatonic scale. In the minor part, the leading note G♯ is avoided and the natural G is chosen more (see Figure 6).Motion Picture Moods for Pianist and Organist, published in 1924, includes four pieces: Chinese-Japanese, Suite of Three Oriental Sketches, Chinese lullaby, and Fuji-Ko. With the exception of Chinese lullaby—a song with lyrics—all of the pieces contain several notes outside of the scale; however, upon examining the notes used most frequently in these four pieces, we can infer that pentatonic choices were adopted, regardless of major or minor key (see Figure 7).Based on these results, I categorized the scales in which pentatonic-like sound selection was observed (see Figure 8). The most commonly used combination was found to be C, D, E, G, A. This is the same as the ryo scale—a scale used in traditional Japanese music to serve as a bridge between traditional Japanese music and Western music—and it is assumed that it was used frequently because of its compatibility with Western harmony.Incidentally, examining the frequency of use of each note in Azuma Hakkei in a collection of Japanese accompaniment score anthology published in 1929, whereas A, B, C, E is heavily used, the fifth most frequent notes are F and F♯ in roughly equal percentages (see Figure 9).Furthermore, focusing on the notes before F and F♯ is limited to following the adjacent E or G or repeating the same F♯, and that the melodic pattern traverses the two pentatonics of A, B, C, E, F and A, B, C, E, F♯, which is a difference from the use of pentatonics in the American accompaniment score anthologies (see Figure 10).Sheppard summarizes the following as the two most prominent musical signs for Japan: 1) Conspicuous use of grace note ornamentation;2) Variations of a particular rhythm—four sixteenth notes followed by two eighths, or four eighths followed by two quarter notes, most often with staccato articulation and involving some pitch repetition.6Accordingly, I performed a rhythm analysis from both of these perspectives.An examination of the number of times grace notes were used revealed that more than 70 percent of the pieces contained at least one grace note (see Table 2). Furthermore, in half of the pieces, grace notes were used at the beginning or in the intro section. This suggests that grace notes were treated as a prominent cue of East Asian representational devices.Additionally, I extracted the three most common metric patterns appearing in each score (see Figure 11). Consequently, as Sheppard indicated, there were patterns that included grace notes. Additionally, there were specific rhythmic patterns such as four sixteenth notes followed by two eighths, or four eighths followed by two quarter notes, or similar patterns.Furthermore, I analyzed the melodic interval patterns of all the pieces examined in this study. Figure 12 presents the results sorted by frequency and shows how frequently perfect unison (P1) is found, indicating how often the same note is repeated.Sheppard states, “In the majority of examples, staccato eights and sixteenths more generally comprise much of the rhythmic material, as though offering an imagined approximation of the plucked sounds emanating from the shamisen appearing on the covers.”7 As Sheppard indicates, the extensive use of grace notes, repetition of the same notes, and specific rhythms with eighth- and sixteenth-note ticks are thought to mimic the classical playing techniques of Japanese instruments such as the koto and shamisen.When Japanese composers, who had studied Western composition techniques, entered the field of film music composition, they struggled with how to create music for the “Japanese” setting. However, in the US, how did they deal with this localization problem? First, pentatonicism was seen in many of the pieces. In particular, scales based on C, D, E, G, A combinations, which are compatible with harmonic music in Western style, were favored for use.Second, imitations of typical East Asian instrumental techniques were represented in the rhythmic patterns. This is likely because it was difficult to incorporate traditional East Asian instruments such as the koto and shamisen, so sound patterns that evoked those instruments, such as grace notes, specific rhythmic patterns, and repetition of the same notes, were used as a sign of East Asian–style music. In this study, I focused on the analysis of melody and examined it in terms of scales, rhythms, and intervals. However, as future work, I would like to examine the methods of harmony and cadence, and pursue a more detailed analysis of musical representation in East Asia.This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP19K13028.