Former Tokyo Music School Concert Hall

The Hall Built to Be Listened To

The Former Tokyo Music School Sōgakudō (旧東京音楽学校奏楽堂, also written Kyu Tokyo Ongaku Gakko Sogakudo) is a wooden school building of 1890 standing in Ueno Park, Taito City, Tokyo, and it was designated an Important Cultural Property on 13 January 1988. It was put up as the premises of the Tokyo Music School, the institution that became the Faculty of Music at Tokyo University of the Arts, and the name Sōgakudō originally belonged only to the auditorium on the second floor. Over time the word came to stand for the whole building.

The design came from two Ministry of Education technical officials, Yamaguchi Hanroku and Kuru Masamichi. Kuru also drew the Imperial Library in Ueno, now the International Library of Children's Literature, so the two buildings share a certain governmental confidence in their proportions. The structure is timber-framed, two storeys, with an entrance porch and a pantile roof, and covers a footprint of 785.4 square metres. A central block flanked by two wings gives it a symmetry that reads clearly from the approach.

Japan had concert rooms before 1890. What it did not have was a hall built from the outset for Western music, with acoustics treated as a design problem rather than an afterthought. That is the claim on which this building rests.

Straw in the Walls

The designation text from the Agency for Cultural Affairs is unusually specific about technique. It records that straw and sawdust were packed into the wall cavities and beneath the floor for sound insulation and acoustic effect, and calls the result the first full-scale hall for music in the country. The ceiling of the auditorium was cut into a vault, a barrel shape running down the centre, and the corners were rounded instead of squared so that sound would not collect in them. The acoustic scheme is said to have been the work of Uehara Rokushirō, though the attribution rests on tradition rather than a signed document.

The building nearly disappeared. By the 1960s, eight decades of use had told on it, and in 1972 an agreement was reached to dismantle the hall and move it to the Meiji Mura open-air museum in Inuyama, Aichi Prefecture. The Architectural Institute of Japan, musicians and local residents pushed back, and the agreement was withdrawn. Taito City took ownership from the university in 1983, moved the building roughly 300 metres to its present position in Ueno Park, and opened it to the public in 1987. The Important Cultural Property designation followed the next year.

Conservation here follows a principle sometimes called dōtai hozon, preservation through continued use. The building is not a display case. Concerts are held in it, which means it wears, and the wear is accepted as the cost of keeping the hall alive. Between April 2013 and 2018 it closed for seismic reinforcement and repair, reopening on 2 November 2018 with the seating replaced, soundproof windows added and the organ overhauled.

What to Look For, and What to Listen For

The organ at the back of the stage is the oldest concert pipe organ in Japan still in use. Tokugawa Yorisada, sixteenth head of the Kishū Tokugawa house and a serious student of music, ordered it from Abbott and Smith of England and installed it in 1920 in Nankidō, the music hall he had built with his own funds. He gave it to the Tokyo Music School in 1928. It has 1,379 pipes and a pneumatic action, a mechanism now rare anywhere.

Look at the window glass while you are on the stairs. Old panes were reused wherever possible during the move, and some carry the faint waves and trapped bubbles of nineteenth-century manufacture. Outside the entrance stands a bronze of Taki Rentarō, who studied here. Yamada Kōsaku sang in this hall, and Miura Tamaki made her debut on this stage in the first opera performance given by Japanese singers.

One practical warning. Tokyo University of the Arts has its own concert hall on the Ueno campus, completed in 1998 and also called Sōgakudō. The two buildings stand a few hundred metres apart and the names are almost identical, so check which one your ticket names before setting out.

The building opens on Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays, plus any other day the hall is not booked, from 9:30 to 16:30 with last entry at 16:00. It closes on Mondays, over the New Year period and for stocktaking. Admission is 300 yen for adults and 100 yen for school pupils, with preschool children free. Sunday afternoon concerts alternate between the pipe organ and the harpsichord, and other performances run through the year. From JR Ueno Station the walk takes about ten minutes; the hall sits at the northwestern corner of the park, further from the station than the museums.