Uzagaku

• Japanese: 御座楽 (uzagaku)

Uzagaku (lit. "seated music") was the chief form of court music in the Ryûkyû Kingdom used for formal court ceremonies including seasonal observances such as celebrations of New Year's and Mid-Autumn Festival; enthronement and investiture ceremonies; and the like.

Like the kingdom's formal processional music tradition, known as rujigaku (lit. "street music"), uzagaku was based heavily upon Ming and Qing musical traditions. However, where rujigaku closely emulated the comparable formal, courtly, ritual processions of the Ming and Qing courts, and where Korean aak, Japanese gagaku, and Vietnamese nha nhac court music traditions similarly borrowed from the ancient, highly ritualized yǎyuè music of Tang and Song dynasty court ceremonies (based in turn on traditions said to stretch back to the Zhou dynasty), uzagaku instead took Ming and Qing folk, popular, theatrical, banquet, and entertainment music and elevated them in Ryûkyû into formal ritual music of the royal court.

Employing an array of Chinese musical instruments such as pipa, erhu, and Chinese types of flutes, dulcimers, zithers, drums, gongs, and chimes; Chinese language lyrics; and Ming and Qing dynasty melodies, it is not to be confused with the Ryukyuan uta sanshin tradition, which features Ryukyuan language lyrics; and distinctively Ryukyuan tuning, scales, and melodies. The uzagaku tradition died out following the 1879 abolition and annexation of the Ryûkyû Kingdom, leading to the uta sanshin tradition becoming the core of what is today considered "classical Okinawan music" or "Ryukyuan classical music" (古典音楽, koten ongaku). However, while uta sanshin songs were certainly performed within the royal court and related contexts, they were most likely performed only for banquets, entertainments, and other somewhat less ritualized contexts; historical records strongly suggest that at court ceremonies conducted as part of official ritual court business, such as formal audiences granted by the king to his officials, it was uzagaku and not uta sanshin music that was performed as part of the ceremonies themselves.

History

Whereas ceremonial audiences and most other formal political ceremonies conducted by the Tokugawa shogunate involved no music at all, the Confucian classics state that music and ritual are inseparable, and accordingly music played an essential part in formal court ceremonies in every Chinese dynasty. As in Beijing and Seoul, formal court ceremonies at Shuri such as those involving the king's obeisances to Heaven on New Year's, the scholar-officials' obeisances to the king, and/or the welcoming of Chinese or Japanese envoys, involved uzagaku music being played almost throughout the ceremony, halting whenever a figure was to speak or conduct another important action, and then starting up again afterwards. After the end of such ceremonies, banquets and entertainments were often held, depending on the occasion, in one of the palace's secondary halls, accompanied by uta sanshin music, dances in the tradition today known simply as "Ryukyuan dance" (Ryûkyû buyô), and performances of kumi udui or other theatre forms.

Uzagaku was also performed by Ryukyuan officials on embassies to Kagoshima and to Edo, chiefly at Kagoshima castle, Shimazu clan mansions in various cities, and Edo castle, but also occasionally at other castles (such as Nagoya castle) or at the Edo mansions of other daimyo. Due to fires in Kagoshima and elsewhere, the 1945 Battle of Okinawa, and other circumstances and developments, no sets of uzagaku instruments in Ryukyuan or Kagoshima collections are known to have survived down to the present day. However, a set of musical instruments gifted to the Owari Tokugawa clan lords of Nagoya in 1796 remains today in the Tokugawa Art Museum, and another set gifted by a Ryukyuan Edo embassy at some point to the lords of Tsuwano han similarly survived and has since been donated to the Okinawa Prefectural Museum by the inheritors of the Tsuwano collections.

Uzagaku was primarily an oral tradition, passed on from masters to students through direct in-person instruction without the use of any written notation. The only written records of uzagaku music - that is, the melodies and not just the lyrics - come from a 1913 interview of Kokuba Kôken, at that time one of the last surviving court musicians from the time of the kingdom, conducted by scholar Yamauchi Seihin.