Drumming in Okinawan Classical Music: A Catalogue of Gestures

Abstract

In the West, the categories of music and dance are generally thought of as related, but distinct performing arts. Those of us who devote our time to studying and performing music often forget that no sound is produced without physical movement and that in most (if not all) cases performers have learned to move in certain ways in order to produce a desired pattern of sounds. Yet when we attend a piano recital we may very well enjoy the performance without actually seeing the pianist's fingers in motion on the keyboard. The movements of western “classical” musicians are, for the most part, aimed at producing sounds, and it is these sounds that the audience is expected to apprehend and appreciate aesthetically. In Okinawan “classical” music (koten ongaku), however, the “musical aesthetic” relies on a combination of formalized patterns of movement and sound, particularly in the playing of the two drums, collectively called tēku. The movements of the Okinawan drummer are thus more than a means to correct sound production they have aesthetic significance in their own right. Some of these movements, in fact, produce no sound at all. Others, though highly contrastive visually, may produce sounds which are acoustically the same.Interplay of the visual and the aural is found in performance traditions around the globe. In East Asia alone there are numerous genres in which dancers sound drums – Japanese and Okinawan Ancestor Festival dances (bon-odori in Japan, eisā in Okinawa), the Korean “monk's drum” dances (puk-chum) and hourglass drum dances (sol-changgo), to name a few. In these dances, however, the “drummer” is more readily identifiable as a “dancer.” He or she moves through space; the striking of the drum is but one of the activities which the audience beholds and may not be the primary one. Usually these dances are accompanied by music performed by “non-dancing” musicians, whose ensemble may include drums other than those played by the dancing drummer.