Japanese Music

To one who never heard it it is impossible to give a definite idea of Japanese music, and to one who hears it for the first time it must either repel or strangelyattract, for its fantastic intervals and fractional tones demand a totally new eense of musical appreciation and cali into being a new set of musical sensations. It is as if a hitherto closed door between sense and spirit had been suddenly thrown open. One feels that if reincarnation be true, onemightthrough this door alone remember and reconstruct those vanished existences. Only in the tones of their own unguisu, a bird which has but three notes, have I heard anything so occult. Japanese music is like Japanese art, which, with its unperceived spirit, sense and symbolism, its strange method of brush handling, might seem merely grotesque at first, but which gradually reveáis to the initiated eye mysteries within mysteries of artistio form and perception, until presently one flnds oneself encompassed by a new art world, where technic is subordinated to feeling and whose flnest effects are obtained through the art of omission. As, for instance, in the greatest paintings of Fujiyama, the sacred mountain itself is discovered to be the bare, white, unpainted silk, as if color and line could be but the boundaries and outer confines of pure isolated idea. So in Japanese music, its methods are not ours, its climaxes come in crashes of silence, in sustained and soundless pause, the notes subordinated to a silent something, an inner sense, which, while restraining or even repressing sound, is the very ecstasy of musical sensation. In vain we attempted to analyze this subtle effect, to reduce it to the terms of our musical consciousness. It defied and eluded us as spirit must always defy and elude sense, and we perforce contented ourselves with following the strange, rounded, isolated notes, sustaining ourselves breathlessly on its wonderful causes and yielding to the irregular cadenced cbann of the singer, whose face, at first so unremarkable, 6eemed to grow of a shining effulgence as she thus interpreted to us an known world.-