This article deals with a musical study of the accompanied vocal piece “Kurokami” as it exists in the two different Edo-period vocal music genres, jiuta and nagauta, and reaches the conclusion that the jiuta piece is the older or original version of the two. The basic reason for this result lies in the fact that the jiuta shamisen and vocal parts as well as the nagauta shamisen part are basically identical in melodic movement, and this movement has been demonstrated to be based on the accent of Edo-period Japanese in the Kansai area. The setting of the text in this way indicates that the piece was most likely composed in the Kansai area. Jiuta was the music of the Kansai and nagauta that of the Kanto (Edo) areas, and it would appear unlikely that the nagauta version of the piece was the original since, if that was the case, it should be expected that the nagauta shamisen and vocal part should agree in melodic movement and present a version based on the accent of Japanese in the Edo region.

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The aim of this paper is to clarify the concept of “gaku” in nagauta. Some nagauta pieces include a section labeled as “gaku”. The “gaku” sections are usually interpreted as representing or musically describing gagaku, court music, though it has been pointed out that the “gaku” sections do not imitate the musical style of gagaku. This paper considers 1) the types of music represented in the gaku, and 2) musical characteristics which create the gaku-likeness.
It is not only nagauta that uses the term “gaku”: other genres such as music in the no theater, offstage music (geza ongaku) in the kabuki theater, and Yamada school koto music also use this term. However, the meaning of the term “gaku” varies in each genre. In the case of music in the no theater, the gaku is a type of dance mostly performed by the main actor (shite) who plays the role of “China man”, and the accompanying hayashi ensemble plays a special rhythmic/melodic pattern which is also called gaku. The gaku section is recognizeable by this pattern and can be considered to be representing Chinese music. In the case of kabuki offstage music, a short shamisen piece named gaku is performed as a kind of background music during the opening scene of a palace or at the entrance of a nobleman on stage. Different from the case of no, the gaku in the kabuki theater has a strong connotation with the aristocracy and does not represent Chinese music. But, when the gaku pieces are played, the hayashi part accompanies the same gaku pattern as no music. Some Yamada school koto music also includes a gaku section, where the gagaku koto technique called shizugaki is often used. The gaku here represents or imitates Japanese court music gagaku.
The types of music represented in the gaku sections of nagauta have a wider range since they adopt the concepts of gaku from other genres and add nagauta's original meaning to them. In addition to Chinese music, background music for the opening scene at the palace and Japanese court music, some gaku sections represent exquisite music heard in “Western Paradise”, and some are used as background music for a Buddhist saint's appearance.
Then, what kind of musical characteristics make a section sound gaku-like? In order to extract the common musical features of the gaku sections of nagauta, twenty-four nagauta gaku sections and seven gaku pieces of kabuki offstage music, which have a close musical relationship with the gaku section of nagauta, have been analyzed. As a result of the musical analysis, the following eight features have been found: 1) slow tempo; 2) continuous pizzicatos (hajiki); 3) double stop technique; 4) special techniques such as kaeshi bachi, and urahajiki; 5) unnatural melodic movement; 6) coexistence of the plural melodies; 7) regular phrasing of four- or eight-bar; 8) the rhythmic/melodic pattern performed by the hayashi part named gaku. Of these eight points, 2), 3) and 4) create the “elegant” and “solemn” atmosphere by using special tone colors, while 5) and 6) produce the gaku-likeness by using melodic movements different from nagauta's usual melodic movements.
Creating gaku-likeness can be related to two ways of giving certain meanings to a melody which are widely employed in nagauta pieces: one is to quote a phrase from or to imitate the style of other musical genres, and this is considered to bring the musical atmosphere of the original genre into a nagauta piece; the

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This paper describes that 'Nagauta' samisen tones are analyzed and the several physical values are extracted using digital signal processing techniques, and that the synthesized tones based on these data are produced and studied with regard to the features of physical parameters contributing to the tone quality of samisen. Physical parameters of samisen tones are classified in the following, (1)attack noise, (2)spectrum, (3)overall amplitude envelope, (4)amplitude envelopes of each harmonic, and (5)time variance of pitch after attack transient, and they are analyzed on the several notes and the several playing styles. The results show that in the spectrum, amplitude levels of lower harmonics are very small, and in the amplitude envelope, they have very rapid raises and rather rapid exponential decays compared with other musical instrument tones. Using these data, the synthesized tones are made by means of additive synthesis and compared to the original tones of samisen. As a result, it is verified that the synthesized tones with the amplitude of each harmonic being time-variant have a rather good similarity to original samisen tones, and that the synthesized tones with attack noise in the attack transient part are distinguishably improved.

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Most shamisen pieces are formed by combinations of numerous melodic patterns, and thus to understand the structure of a piece one must recognize how a melody is blocked into patterns. However, past studies of shamisen melodic patterns have encountered certain difficulties: First, the conception of the length of patterns varies widely among shamisen players and researchers, and even experienced shamisen players have only a subconscious recognition of most of the patterns. Second, although the lengths of some patterns are fixed, most vary according to context, and thus are influenced by preceding and subsequent melodic material.
In traditional musicology, studies of shamisen melodic patterns have been based on written or oral accounts given by shamisen players, an approach used by MACHIDA Kasho in “A Study of Melodic Patterns in Japanese Vocal Styles Accompanied by Shamisen, ” which presents characteristic melodic patterns found in various vocal styles. MACHIDA's study is helpful for classifying and categorizing previously recognized and fixed melodic patterns, but these patterns are only a fraction of the potential material available in shamisen music. In addition, MACHIDA's list includes patterns that range in length from one to sixty bars, and this vast diversity hinders effective blocking. Consequently, MACHIDA's study cannot provide a thorough approach for blocking a melody into combinations of patterns.
If one could estimate the approximate length of patterns before blocking, the analysis process would become more efficient. Thus, an analytical method based on information theory would be effective for blocking a piece into patterns. A scanning process would reveal recurring patterns, and subsequently ciphers containing smaller amounts of information could replace the patterns. Blocking a piece with this process would compress the original melody and thus facilitate analysis. Our study adopts the “minimum principle” from Gestalt psychology and assumes that a description of a compressed melody is a rational means by which to describe the structure of the original. Using this assumption we have blocked and compressed the shamisen part of ten nagauta pieces with shamisen-bunka notation.
We have calculated the total amount of information for describing a melody as a sum of both the amounts for registering the melodic patterns and for describing the original melody by these registered patterns. Balancing these two aspects, we replaced the melodic patterns in the encoded shamisen melodies with ciphers, thus decreasing the total amount of information necessary to describe the patterns. We used two kinds of pattern processing, blocking melodies either by patterns with fixed lengths, or by patterns with lengths that changed according to the most suitable solution for compression. Compression rates reached 67.0 percent by the former process and 59.5 percent by the latter. The latter process also enabled us to extract 1, 482 patterns from 6, 464 bars, and we then described the ten nagauta pieces as combinations of these extracted patterns. In addition, we detected cycles of one, two, four, and eight bars in the encoded melodic sequences. Consequently, this study verifies KOIZUMI Fumio's hypothesis that phrase units in Japanese traditional music are stacked in multiples of two, at least within the nagauta-shamisen genre; however, one must remember that most melodic patterns with the above cycle lengths appear as roughly-matched rather than completely-matched patterns.
Many studies have used computers to simulate human perceptions and recognitions. Similarly, our method of blocking melodies by compression based on information theory provides an approximate model for human recognition of patterns in shamisen melody, yet at the same time avoids the problems of subjective interpretations

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