Course
Description
(including Goal and Objectives) |
Entertaining quality has always been important for performing arts both musical and dramatic in Japan. Designed as they were to be performed by professionals to a more or less paying audience, or (to a lesser degree) by loving dilettantes for their own pleasure, they had to be chic or else they would not sell. They did, else they would not have survived, and we would know nothing of them now. Music from Heian upwards, Puppet theater, Kyogen, Kabuki, Rakugo, Naniwabushi (Rokyoku), popular songs from Meiji to the postwar period: this course will offer a chance to listen, with explanations, to many major examples of what's been most popular in Japan through the ages. Fortunately, there have been recordings in Japan since more than a hundred years ago, so many major performers can still be heard. Along with general overviews of the various genres discussed in each session, we will mostly listen to original performances, so this one is for music lovers too.
Rather than handing in a written report, participants are expected to prepare a short English-speaking presentation on a course-related topic of their own choice along with an accompanying handout for one of the final sessions. |
