Temporary Festival Trial Music Tonal Music (written by

Rinjisai Shigaku Chōgaku: Festival Music Rehearsals in Fujiwara no Teika's Hand

Two months before the extraordinary festivals of the Heian court, musicians and dancers assembled to practice. Their song and dance had to be ready for the gods and the emperor alike, and the steps, the tuning, and the order of the program were all set down in writing. One Kamakura-period record of these rehearsals survives in the hand of 藤原定家 (Fujiwara no Teika, 1162–1241), the poet and court official better known today as the compiler of the Hyakunin Isshu anthology.

The work is a single bound album, catalogued as one jō. Its title, Rinjisai Shigaku Chōgaku, names two stages of preparation for the rinjisai, the "extraordinary festivals" held at the Kamo Shrines in the capital and at Iwashimizu Hachimangū to the south. Chōgaku was the rehearsal of song and dance at the palace music bureau; shigaku was the trial performance staged shortly before the festival itself. A fifteenth-century commentary noted that the two words were often used interchangeably, both meaning to test the music before it was fully arranged.

The compiler of the original text and the year it was first written down are not recorded. What we have is Teika's copy, made in the thirteenth century. The Agency for Cultural Affairs lists it among works of calligraphy and classical texts, and more precisely as a music treatise on gagaku, the music of the imperial court.

Why It Is Designated an Important Cultural Property

The album was designated an Important Cultural Property on February 2, 1955. Its value rests on two foundations that rarely meet in a single object.

The first is the writer. Teika served the Kujō regental house as a household official and stood at the edge of countless court ceremonies, building up an exacting knowledge of yūsoku kojitsu, the study of precedent that governed how rituals were performed. His diary, the Meigetsuki, runs across more than fifty years and is itself a national treasure. A document in which Teika recorded the practical workings of festival music therefore carries weight on both counts: as a specimen of his writing and as a witness to how he understood the ceremonial world around him.

The second is the subject. Detailed records of how court festival music was rehearsed are uncommon, and an early transcription that preserves such detail is valuable to anyone studying the history of gagaku and the eastern song-dance called azuma-asobi. The album fixes in writing a practice that was, by its nature, passed on by ear and by body, from one generation of musicians to the next.

What Makes the Album Worth Knowing

Teika wrote in a manner so personal that later generations gave it a name: Teika-yō, "the Teika style." The brush swings between heavy and hair-thin strokes, the characters lean and crowd in ways that look almost untrained at first glance. Teika himself, with characteristic bluntness, described his own writing as looking like a demon's. Yet calligraphers came to prize exactly this roughness, and for centuries afterward poets, tea masters, and even shopkeepers imitated his hand.

The music behind the text is still alive. Azuma-asobi began as folk song and dance from the eastern provinces and entered court ritual in the late ninth century, first at the Kamo festival. Its two centerpieces are Suruga-mai and Motomego, danced by performers in courtly dress who wear a sprig of seasonal blossom in the cap and a sword at the hip. The accompanying musicians, called heijū, played the wagon (a six-stringed zither), the Koma flute, and the hichiriki double reed, keeping time with wooden clappers. Sei Shōnagon, writing in the same era, singled out these two dances as the loveliest of all.

Reading the album, one is looking over the shoulder of a thirteenth-century courtier as he set down the bones of a performance: who stood where, what was sung, in what order. It is a quiet object, easy to overlook beside a painting or a sword, yet it carries the texture of a vanished court calendar.

Seeing Teika's World Today

The album is privately owned and is not on regular public display, so a visit to view the original cannot be planned. Teika's writing can be encountered elsewhere, however. The Tokyo National Museum holds autograph portions of the Meigetsuki and other documents in his hand, shown in rotation, and the Kyoto National Museum also keeps a celebrated stretch of the diary. Both are good places to meet the famous "demon" script in person.

To experience the music the album describes, the living festivals are the surer route. At the Aoi Matsuri in mid-May, envoys reach the Shimogamo and Kamigamo shrines in Kyoto and offer azuma-asobi, the dancers here distinguished by scarlet robes and the musicians by purple. Iwashimizu Hachimangū in nearby Yawata preserves the other half of the old pairing of "northern" and "southern" festivals. The same dances appear at the Kasuga Wakamiya On-matsuri in Nara and at the great festivals of Nikkō Tōshōgū, so the song-dance Teika noted can still be heard across the year.