August 29, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY Page 3

Music: Vivian Zoakos

How Beethoven Helped Build Japan

This column has asserted that anytime, anywhere in the world where republicans attempted to bring industrialism to a developing country, they regarded the music of Bach and Beethoven as indispensable. We recently discussed music in Mexico; the case of modern Japan, this century's most impressive economic miracle, proves the argument again. The 1868 Meiji Revolution, which transformed Japan from a feudal zerogrowth Confucian society into a modern nation, was accomplished with the aid of Abraham Lincoln Republicans from the U.S.A. The Meiji conspiracy was based on the ideas of Kepler, Spinoza, Alexander Hamilton and his successor, economist Henry Carey. The American allies of Meiji Japan did not neglect the importance of music. In 1875, seven years after the Meiji Revolution an official of the newly set up Education Ministry, Shuji Izawa, was dispatched to the United States to learn how to set up a public school system. Shuji met Luther Whiting Mason, director of the Boston Music School and a teacher at Harvard University. Mason told Shuji that part of the education program must include the music of the German classical masters. Three years later the Meiji government brought Mason to Japan to found and direct the Tokyo Music School. The school's purpose was to educate performers as well as teachers for the public schools, where music education focusing on singing was to be made compulsory. The leaders of the Tokyo Music School pointed out that when they said "music," they meant Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert. Since Japan had previously been using the barbaric pentatonic scale, the process of propagating Western music widely took years. At first, performed music consisted primarily of Schubert songs and Beethoven or Haydn piano sonatas, with occasional performances of movements from Bach concerti or Haydn's and Beethoven's early symphonies. Choruses began singing at first in unison and only later in full four-part singing.

Johannes Brahms may have played an important role in aiding Japan's musical development. In 1884 the government sent Shohei Tanaka to Germany to study under the celebrated physicist Hermann Helmholtz. Tanaka was also to study music with two of Brahms's closest collaborators, the violinist Joseph Joachim and the conductor Hans Von Bulow. Meiji-era Japan saw battles back and forth between two business factions, the humanist, Lincoln-allied Mitsubishi faction and the pro-British Mitsui faction. On more than one occasion, when the Mitsui faction came to power, they disbanded the Tokyo Music School, and when the Mitsubishi faction returned to power they reestablished the school. To combat the authority of the humanists, the Mitsui faction and its British mentors insisted there was another Western musical traditionthe music of military bands and Wagner. When the British gained an important role in the guidance of the Japanese Navy, they set up military bands under the direction of J.W. Fenton. Fenton trained the bands in such western music as "Annie Laurie" and "Old Lang Syne." For "serious" music the band performed sections of Wagner operas. The fate of music followed the course of the overall political developments in Japan. Prior to the 1902 Anglo-Japanese military alliance, concerts consisted primarily of Bach, Haydn, Beethoven, and Schubert. After 1902, antihumanist musicians such as Wagner, Debussy, Saint-Saens and Liszt came to be performed alongside the humanists. Despite the efforts of the British-Mitsui faction, the Mitsubishi humanists and their American allies succeeded in irrevocably establishing a love for the world's greatest music in Japan. Today, every December as part of the New Year's festivities, there are scores of festivals featuring Beethoven's Ninth Symphony across Japan. This column was contributed by Richard Katz, a specialist in the Meiji period in Japan.