天神祭の音楽

抄録

This is a report on a continuing study begun five years ago by members of a study group associated with the Seminar of Ethnomusicology, Music Research Institute of the Osaka College of Music (Inobe Kiyoshi, Hiroi Eiko, Miyagawa Noriko, Hirayama Keiko and myself) on the music of Osaka's Tenjin festival (Tenjin-matsuri). It is a summer festival held annually on 24th-25th July, with a preparatory ceremony on the 24th and central celebrations on the 25th, and is associated with the Shinto shrine Tenman-gu (Osaka-shi Kita-ku) and celebrated on the Yodo River, which runs through Osaka. At the time of the festival, the bridges that span the river, Tenjin-bashi, Tenma-bashi, and Kawasaki-bashi, throng with people there to see the parade of boats and fireworks of the festival. Said to originate from the tenth-century, the festival reached its full form by the Genroku yearperiod (late 17th-century), and has been Osaka's main festival for a long period of time.
Research on the festivals of Japan has in the past tended to concentrate on those on the fringes of its culture, and only lately have those of the cities been taken up by research groups from the viewpoint of urban anthropology. The Osaka Tenjin festival is no exception; despite its fame, it has not attracted much attention. Such is particularly true of its music and performing arts, which have not yet been dealt with by ethonologists and researchers on folkmusic.
The festival is supported in both material and spiritual terms by religious associations and other groups numbering in all about fifty. They also bring life to the sound world of the festival, which is truly multi-faceted: moyoshi-daiko, drums played by six youths on a platform supported on the shoulders of more than one-hundred men, and symbol of the festival; danjiri-bayashi, festival music that sounds all day long; sounds of flute, drum and bamboo of the shishi-mai (lion-dance) and yotsudake-odori (four-bamboo dance) of the children; drum and gong sounds of the dondoko-bune, a boat with thirty rowers that travels up-and-down the river; the stately strains of the gagaku and kagura associated with Shinto ceremonies. There are many more musics contributing to the sound world of the festival. These musics do not take place in a linear fashion, but are super-imposed on one another, covering a large area of space at the same time. This may be typical of urban festivals. The players of the music, too, range from amateur members of the religious associations, who transmit the moyoshi-daiko tradition, to professionals and semiprofessionals who are paid to participate in danjiri-bayashi as well as gagaku and kagura.
Central to the music of the festival are the moyoshi-daiko and danjiri-bayashi, the interrelationship of which is of great interest. Our research group has already published a paper on the former, its history, performance structures and techniques, and musical characteristics (“Moyoshi-daiko no baai —tenjin-matsuri no ongaku Part 1—” [‘Moyoshi-daiko — music of the Tenjin festival, Part 1’], Ongaku Kenkyu [‘Music Research’], Bulletin of the Music Research Institute of the Osaka College of Music, Vol. 4, 1986). It is played on instruments belonging to the shrine and hence gains a type of sacredness, and the six youths who play it are required first of all to concentrate on playing together, in a way in which the act of beating the drum and each single sound produced is given weight. The music of the danjiri-bayashi, however, is of a light and rhythmic feeling, and is played energetically.
Lastly, it should be noted that although we have dealt up until recently with a strictly synchronic study of the festival, we have now begun a search for the roots of the music and performing arts of the festival. In