Kelvin H. F. Lee
The idea of being modern is often intertwined with the tenet of progress, whether understood through a Hegelian conception of history or a Darwinist view of sociocultural evolution. In a similar vein, traditional accounts of early musical modernism frequently associate modernity with the ‘emancipation of dissonance’, conceiving the departure from tonality as a historical or cultural necessity for progress. As Jason Yust (2024) points out, such a teleological narrative has its roots in François-Joseph Fétis’s Histoire Générale de la musique (1869), where tonality was presented as the conceptual framework for mapping diverse musical traditions of the world through an evolutionary lens. Within this historical paradigm, the development of music was naturally deemed to have peaked in the nineteenth century with European tonal music, and the logical next step would be to move beyond the tonal system. The notion of modernity, therefore, has customarily been linked to the use of dodecaphony or other non-tonal pitch-organising principles in the early twentieth century, as exemplified by Arnold Schoenberg’s Suite für Klavier, op. 25 (1921–23) and Olivier Messiaen’s La Nativité du Seigneur (1935). Listeners accustomed to their modernist sounds might then find the tonal idiom in the following piano work—Sonatine (1940) by Otaka Hisatada 尾高尚忠 (1911–51)—anachronistic by comparison:<1>
Example 1 Otaka, Sonatine (1940). Recording by Yuguchi Miwa 湯口美和. The score is available on imslp.org.
Born in 1911, Otaka received his music education in both Vienna and his hometown Tokyo. Prior to completing high school, he travelled to Vienna in 1931 for the first time to study piano and music theory. This initial stay however was cut short, and Otaka returned to Japan in 1932, where he began studying composition under Klaus Pringsheim—the German conductor and composer who had recently been appointed to the newly established Department of Composition at the Tokyo School of Music. Otaka made a second trip to Vienna in 1934 to further his studies in composition with Joseph Marx and conducting with Felix Weingartner. He was then active in Europe as a conductor after graduating in 1938, before eventually moving back to Japan in 1940 and assuming the position as conductor of the Japan Symphony Orchestra in 1942. Situating Sonatine in this context, the evocation of the tonal idiom might well be attributed to Otaka’s traditional training with the Austro-German pedagogues. <2> Yet Otaka’s adherence to tonality was by no means an exception—the majority of Japanese composers who were active during the 1930s indeed wrote in reference to tonality, even if not strictly aligning with the traditional morphology of the idiom. <3> This perhaps suggests that musical modernity in early twentieth-century Japan took on a different meaning, one that remained connected to the engagement with the tonal language.
The assimilation of tonality into Japanese musical culture began simultaneously with the vast import of Western knowledge and technology motivated by the Meiji Restoration of 1868. With the aim of nurturing talents who would shape the national music (kokugaku 國樂) of the future, Western music theory was first institutionalised as part of the curriculum for students enrolled at the Ongaku Torishirabegakari 音樂取調掛 (often known as Music Investigation Committee in English, 1879–87), which later became the Tokyo Academy of Music in 1887. <4> Although the study of harmony was established as one of the core subjects (see Figure 1), its purpose was not for students to merely embrace the Western tonal idiom. <5> As head of the Ongaku Torishirabegakari Isawa Shūji 伊澤修二argued, to develop a ‘new and suitable music’ for Japan was to ‘work out a compromise (setchū 折衷)’ between oriental and occidental music, and achieving this would require a good knowledge of Western musical idioms including the tonal language. <6> The question of how to conciliate the two traditions had subsequently become as a central issue in the Japanese exploration of tonality, with which a ‘new and suitable’ musical language of the nation was to be cultivated.
Figure 1 Isawa, Ongaku torishirabe seiseki shinpō sho ⾳樂取調成績申報書 (‘Report of the Result of the Investigations Concerning Music’) (1884), curriculum with the courses on harmony highlighted.
The desire to conceive a modern national music resulted in a constant search for the middle ground between Japanese and Western musical systems. Composers had strived to find ways to integrate Japanese scales and harmonies with Western tonality whilst retaining their distinct sonorities. As David Pacun (2012) notes, the challenge often lies in the fact that Japanese scales typically lack scale degree and
(construed in relation to the heptatonic Western major/minor scales) intrinsic to the key-defining tonic and dominant harmonies. Among the two most widely recognised Japanese scales, miyakobushi 都節 and rits 律 (shown in Example 2), the miyakobushi scale also contains a lowered scale degree
, which would induce an altered fifth when building a dominant chord. <7>
Example 2 Miyakobushi Scale and Ritsu Scale
In face of these issues, a common solution was to decouple the starting note of Japanese scales from the notion of the tonic and to seek instead for a Western counterpart with identical pitch content. The ensuing pitch collection would in turn allow for a tonal orientation to be derived from these scales. This approach is illustrated by Yamada Kōsaku 山田耕筰’s renowned arrangement of Taki Rentarō 滝廉太郎’s Kōjō no Tsuki 荒城の月 (‘The Moon over the Ruined Castle’), where the melodic line arising from the miyakobushi scale on A is harmonised as D minor with a deemphasised leading tone, generating a malleable pitch collection that can be related to both scales:
Example 3 Taki, Kōjō no Tsuki (1901; arrangement by Yamada, ca. 1917). Recording by John Ken Nuzzo (tenor) and Kohyama Noriko 甲山紀子 (piano). The score is available on imslp.org.
The focus on shared scalar properties thus provided an avenue for naturalising the tonal idiom, which laid the foundation for the development of a modern Japanese musical language during the pre-war era. Given this historical backdrop, Otaka’s appeal to tonality might not be seen as an anachronism, but rather as part of an ongoing negotiation with musical modernity in Japan. Corroborating the broader trends, his Sonatine operates within a framework where scalar relationships mediate between Japanese and Western traditions. In place of functional harmony, Otaka elected a tonal mechanism in which the sense of centricity emerges through scalar interaction rather than harmonic progression. Here the familiar signifiers of the Western tonal idiom are also constantly displaced, creating altogether an environment that deprioritises the Western teleological approach to harmony as a necessary basis of tonality.
Example 4 Otaka, Sonatine, opening antecedent (bars 1–8)
This scalar thinking is evident from the very beginning of Sonatine. Example 4 presents the opening hybrid antecedent. The basic idea (bars 1–2) arises from the pitch collection [A, B, C, D, E, G], which lends itself to both D ritsu and G major scales. While D ritsu was first implied through the scalarised melodic line that spotlights the characteristic trichords (D, E, G), the appearance of F# in bar 3 seems to direct the music towards G major, leading to a reinterpretation of the basic idea harmonically as expressing an A-minor seventh chord, or the ii7 of G major. This turn towards G major however is immediately negated by the F♮ in the bass, which displaces the G in the pitch collection and renders the F# recontextualised as a neighbour tone nestled between the Es. With the renewed pitch content [A, B, C, D, E, F], the subsequent contrasting idea (bars 3–4) serves to support both E miyakobushi and A minor scales in a similar manner. Once again, E miyakobushi is initially outlined by the scalar melodic configuration. But instead of gesturing A minor, the continuation (bars 5–8) then brings back the F# and reaffirms its status as a neighbour tone before reintroducing the G—rather than the supposed leading tone G# in A minor—to the pitch collection, which effectively makes up the complete C major scale. After an octave transposition, the C orientation is called into question by a ‘passing chord’ [C, D, E♭, F, A♭, B♭], thereby refuting the presumed leading tone B♮. Its reiteration nevertheless gives rise to a return of the opening pitch collection, now can be heard in terms of C, which marks the start of the consequent.
Overall, the pitch-class content (excluding the neighbour and passing tones) of the antecedent points to an orientation towards C major. Yet Otaka constantly mobilises hexatonic pitch collections and non-scalar tones to produce a scalar complex native to both Japanese and Western musical systems, resulting in a nest of scalar perception extending from the C major collection. As Table 1 summarises, this amounts to a scalar reimagination of tonality that still revolves around the idea of a centre, understood in the current context as the focal pitch class of a pivotal collection which connects different scalar conceptions through common tones.
| D ritsu 律 | [C] | D | E | G | A | [B] | ||
| G major? | C | D | E | (F#) | G | A | B | |
| C major | C | D | E | F | G | A | B | |
| A minor? | C | D | E | F | A | B | ||
| E miyakobushi 都節 | [C] | [D] | E | F | A | B |
_ = starting note of the scale
[ ] = mutable fifth step
( ) = passing tone
Table 1 Otaka, Sonatine, opening antecedent, scalar complex
Otaka’s Sonatine demonstrates how Japanese composers of the early twentieth century addressed the issue of modernity on their own terms by domesticating—but not merely imitating—Western tonality. The scalar logic of the work, which constantly shifts between Japanese and Western musical thinking, reveals a reconfiguration of tonal centricity that extends beyond the functional harmonic practices of Western art music. This engagement with the tonal language hence does not reflect an outmoded attitude to pitch organisation, but rather a transcultural negotiation of a modern Japanese musical identity.
Otaka’s remodelling of the tonal system also attests to a case where tonality can operate beyond its historical European context. When assessing its ideological underpinning and utility, Yust (2024) argues that the expression ‘tonality’ binds music-theoretical concepts such as centricity, key, scale and functional harmony with its ethnic-historical frame propagated by Fétis, who treated the tonal system as the point of reference for musical progress and evaluated non-European musical cultures against its criteria. <8> As this mirrors the language of white-supremacist pseudoscientific discourse in nineteenth-century Europe and disparages non-European musical cultures as primitive, the continued usage of the term, Yust warns, would risk perpetuating such a Eurocentric framing and its accompanying teleological evolutionary perspective on music in the rest of the world.
Yust’s critique of ‘tonality’ is not dissimilar to the issues posed in the ‘Global Musical Modernisms’ special issue in Twentieth-Century Music (2023), in which the notion of modernity is constantly put under scrutiny as a static Western construct and thus a colonial condition that needs to be disrupted. While moving away from tonality as a pure technical descriptor of a unified harmonic structure might seem theoretically advantageous and ethically responsible, what the term denotes nonetheless goes beyond its practical remit—in the present case, it still holds historical currency as a representation of Western modernity, an artifact of cultural exchange, and an umbrella term for a codified set of Western harmonic practices that Japan adopted, adapted and transformed into its own. If we are to consider music of the past as a historical product that can be benefited from situated listening, the concept of tonality will likely remain relevant. But as a site of transculturation, it requires a much broader definition and framing, one that accounts for the complex sonic history of modernity Japan navigated after the Meiji Restoration.
The research undertaken for this essay was funded by Research Foundation Flanders (project no. 12ZO222N).
Notes
<1> The order of Japanese names throughout the essay will follow the East Asian practice, with the surname listed first, followed by the given name.
<2> The Austro-German training seems to have left a lasting impact on Otaka. He later edited and translated the Praktischer Leitfaden der Harmonielehre (1906) by Richard Stöhr, with whom he initially studied in Vienna, into Japanese. See Stöhr (1958).
<3> There were only a handful of exceptions, including notably Itō Noboru 伊藤昇 (1903–93), who had already begun exploring the use of quarter tones in 1930.
<4> Ongaku Torishirabegakari was founded as a unit under the Ministry of Education. Despite the name, it was conceived as a music training centre from the beginning. See Eppstein (1985).
<5> Students were required to study harmony as an independent subject from the second year onwards, after they had learnt the basics of Western music theory including musical terms, notation and melodic construction. Crucial concepts in Western tonality such as harmonic progression, cadences, and modulation were also introduced in the third and fourth years, with composition included as the final topic of the course. The study of harmony was complementary to piano and vocal training, both of which were compulsory throughout the programme. Other subjects in the curriculum include self-cultivation (修身, the teaching of moral principles, an important aspect in Confucianism), koto 筝, organ, kokyū 胡弓, music theory, specialised instrument (orchestral instruments, koto and kokyū), music history (in both Japan and Europe) and music pedagogy. See Isawa (1884, 162–82).
<6> Ibid., 3–5. Translations incorporated here are based on the original Japanese text. For the English translation of the relevant passage, see Eppstein (1985, 21–22).
<7> Here I follow Koizumi Fumio 小泉文夫’s categorisation of the scales and adopt Uehara Rokushirō 上原六四郎’s formulation, i.e. with the mutable fifth step, as their basic forms. For details of Koizumi and Uehara’s theories, see Hynes-Tawa (2021).
<8> See Christensen (2019, 183–208) for the white-supremacist ideology underlying Fétis’s writings.
Bibliography
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Biography
Kelvin H. F. Lee’s research focuses on music in Europe and East Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Integrating music-theoretical and contextual approaches, his work explores the ways in which musical forms and tonal systems intersect with broader philosophical thoughts and cultural dialogues in the period. His writings have appeared in journals and edited volumes such as Music Analysis, Musurgia and Revue belge de Musicologie, among others. Kelvin received his PhD from Durham University. He previously held postdoctoral fellowships from Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and Research Foundation Flanders, and was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Leeds.