This interesting and authoritative book includes essential facts about the various forms of Japanese music and musical instruments and their place in the overall history of Japan. Japanese Music and Musical Instruments has three main orientations: The history of Japanese music Construction of the instruments Analysis of the music itself. The book covers in a lucidly written text and a wealth of fascinating photographs and drawings the main forms of musical expression. Many readers will find the useful hints on purchasing instruments, records, and books especially valuable, and for those who wish to pursue the matter further there is a selected bibliography and a guide to Tokyo's somewhat hidden world of Japanese music. It will be found an invaluable aid to the understanding and appreciation of an important, but little-known, and fascinating aspect of Japanese culture.

The unique sounds of the biwa, shamisen, and other traditional instruments from Japan are heard more and more often in works for the concert hall and opera house. Composing for Japanese Instruments is a practical orchestration/instrumentation manual with contextual and relevant historical information for composers who wish to learn how to compose for traditional Japanese instruments. Widely regarded as the authoritative text on the subject in Japan and China, it contains hundreds of musical examples, diagrams, photographs, and fingering charts, and comes complete with two accompanying compact discs of musical examples. Its author, Minoru Miki, is a composer of international renown and is recognized in Japan as a pioneer in writing for Japanese traditional instruments. The book contains valuable appendices, one of works Miki himself has composed using Japanese traditional instruments, and one of works by other composers -- including Toru Takemitsu and Henry Cowell -- using Japanese traditional instruments. Marty Regan is Assistant Professor of Music at Texas A&M University; Philip Flavin is a Research Fellow in the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University, Australia.

Long seen as a source of ritual power, Japan's musical traditions continue to serve as a primary realm of aesthetic experience for the nation's people. Fully illustrated and including both historical and present-day images, Japanese Musical Instruments is a comprehensive survey of Japanese traditional instruments. Easy-to-use and concise, the book provides an overview of the nation's musical heritage while describing the historical meanings and uses of the full range of instruments.

Henry Johnson is an ethnomusicologist at the University of Otago, New Zealand, where he teaches and undertakes research in Ethnomusicology and Asian Studies.

"Malm's scholarship is impeccable... Of equal importance is the fact that he is an excellent performing musician who has studied extensively in Japan." -Choice

This insightful appreciation of musical instruments features more than one hundred extraordinary pieces from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection. Whether created to entertain a royal court, provide personal solace, or aid in rites and rituals, these instruments fully demonstrate music’s universal resonance and the ingenuity various cultures have deployed for musical expression. The results are astoundingly diverse: from Bronze Age cymbals and sistra to violins made by Stradivari, monumental slit drums from Oceania, and iconic twentieth-century American guitars. Stunning new photographs and a lively text reveal these objects to be works of both musical and visual art, as well as marvels of technology and masterpieces of design. Depictions of instruments and music making—paintings, statues, and pottery—further illuminate the narrative, providing a vivid counterpoint to these remarkable objects.

Music is a frequently neglected aspect of Japanese culture. It is in fact a highly problematic area, as the Japanese actively introduced Western music into their modern education system in the Meiji period (1868-1911), creating westernized melodies and instrumental instruction for Japanese children from kindergarten upwards. As a result, most Japanese now have a far greater familiarity with Western (or westernized) music than with traditional Japanese music. Traditional or classical Japanese music has become somewhat ghettoized, often known and practised only by small groups of people in social structures which have survived since the pre-modern era. Such marginalization of Japanese music is one of the less recognized costs of Japan's modernization. On the other hand, music in its westernized and modernized forms has an extremely important place in Japanese culture and society, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, for example, being so widely known and performed that it is arguably part of contemporary Japanese popular and mass culture. Japan has become a world leader in the mass production of Western musical instruments and in innovative methodologies of music education (Yamaha and Suzuki). More recently, the Japanese craze of karaoke as a musical entertainment and as musical hardware has made an impact on the leisure and popular culture of many countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas. This is the first book to cover in detail all genres including court music, Buddhist chant, theatre music, chamber ensemble music and folk music, as well as contemporary music and the connections between music and society in various periods. The book is a collaborative effort, involving both Japanese and English speaking authors, and was conceived by the editors to form a balanced approach that comprehensively treats the full range of Japanese musical culture.

When we think of composers, we usually envision an isolated artist separate from the orchestra—someone alone in a study, surround by staff paper—and in Europe and America this image generally has been accurate. For most of Japan’s musical history, however, no such role existed—composition and performance were deeply intertwined. Only when Japan began to embrace Western culture in the late nineteenth century did the role of the composer emerge. In Composing Japanese Musical Modernity, Bonnie Wade uses an investigation of this new musical role to offer new insights not just into Japanese music but Japanese modernity at large and global cosmopolitan culture. Wade examines the short history of the composer in Japanese society, looking at the creative and economic opportunities that have sprung up around them—or that they forged—during Japan’s astonishingly fast modernization. She shows that modernist Japanese composers have not bought into the high modernist concept of the autonomous artist, instead remaining connected to the people. Articulating Japanese modernism in this way, Wade tells a larger story of international musical life, of the spaces in which tradition and modernity are able to meet and, ultimately, where modernity itself has been made.

The study moves from tradition to modernity, explores a range of topics such as: song life in the traditional village; rural–urban tensions; local min’yo ‘preservation societies’; the effects of national and local min’yo contests; the ‘new folk song’ phenomenon; min’yo and tourism; folk song bars; recruitment of professionals; min’yo’s interaction with enka popular songs and with Western-derived foku songu; the impact of mass mediation; and min’yo’s role in maintaining or creating local identity. The book contains a plate section, musical examples, and a compact disc.