Vocal Participation Research Articles

Report from Paris: Women's Writing and the Women's Movement

The internal politics of the MLF (Mouvement de liberation des femmes) often strike foreign feminists in Paris as fascinating and glamorous but Byzantine beyond belief. I became involved in some of its activities while teaching in the French university system during 1970-74, a period one might characterize as the first phase of the movement. When I returned to Paris last year, the long-smoldering disagreements within the MLF had finally erupted into an open crisis. Turning away from the activism of the MLFs beginnings (1970-71), many women were involved in an exhausting internecine struggle between two wings of the movement, others were off working on their own projects, and some had dropped out altogether. Many saw in the government's enactment of more liberal laws on contraception, abortion, and divorce an attempt to co-opt the MLF's most popular issues, and they pointed to the short life of Fran;oise Giroud's secretariat of La Conditionfeminine as confirmation of their suspicions. Serious commitment to change the lives of French women seemed to have fallen victim to the scramble for political positions in preparation for the March 1978 legislative elections or, in the view of the more radical, to have been a travesty from the start. Some women see in recent events a reaction to their increasingly vocal participation inFrench society, another face of social repression disguised as paternalistic benevolence. I began to wonder whether the ideological splits within the MLF did not reflect the political crises of the society in general. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the May 1968 revolt, which

A Japanese Procrustean Bed: A Study of the Development of Danmono

strong orientation toward literature, a tendency which to various degrees is reflected in all of its musical genres. Most frequently this concern results in the use of the voice, in which case literature, often taken from classical sources of the highest quality, is directly involved. Examples may be found in the dramatic music of the n6, kabuki, and puppet theatres, the epic recitations with biwa accompaniment, and the lyric compositions of the koto and shamisen repertoires. Even instrumental music is not entirely free from literary associations: certain pieces for shakuhachi are quite programmatic, while poetic titles frequently determine the mood of gagaku compositions. Yet, although it may be safely stated that an overwhelming majority of traditional Japanese music is more or less strongly allied to literature, purely musical tendencies are not entirely absent. In tegotomono, an important subdivision of the shamisen and koto repertoires developed primarily during the nineteenth century, relatively short vocal-instrumental sections are interrupted by purely instrumental interludes of such magnitude and self-sufficiency that the involvement of the voice seems to be hardly more than the fulfillment of conventional demands for vocal ( literary) participation in the composition. Very few compositions are completely independent of literary influence; among these the most important are a group of compositions for koto solo, danmono or shirabemono, which probably were composed sometime around the second half of the seventeenth century. From the entry Danmono in the authoritative Japanese music encyclopedia Ongaku jiten (Tokyo, 1959), III, 1816, the following definition may be extracted:

ON “INSTRUMENTAL STYLE” IN EARLY MELODY

Some thirty years ago the late Arnold Schering of Berlin set forth his theories claiming a predominance of over vocal participation in the music of the 12th to 16th centuries. In support of his contentions, he adduced specific features found in the music as criteria of its instrumental style. These criteria were subjected at the time to at least one detailed criticism; but although Schering's more extreme contentions have not been accepted by most scholars, the premises of his argument—and therefore the true significance of these criteria— have not been examined with sufficient care. This chapter emphasizes at the outset that just as Schering s criteria refer to the individual parts, so does the concern itself with in melody alone. It summarizes Schering's criteria of are certain melodic, textual, and rhythmic features. The various differences which Schering takes to be criteria of 'instrumental style are not common to all instruments.