Gagaku as a Guide: Can It Help Make Horror Music?

I think what makes horror frightening is not so much the big event itself as the time just before it. The sound of something falling, footsteps in the hallway, your own breathing. Your nerves cling to each one, and your whole body waits for what will happen next. And in that state, something goes bang.

Seen this way, the task of horror music splits in two. One is to make the listener's attention cling to each individual sound. The other is to make something happen once that attention is stretched taut.

Let me say first that gagaku is not music meant to frighten anyone. It is ritual music of the imperial court and of temples and shrines. Even so, I think the way gagaku builds its sound contains several parts that can be used, as they are, for the first task.

1Walls and choices

Wall 1When the supporting parts can't be “heard,” the listener can relax and let the music pass

This is not a claim that European music is bad. In an orchestra or in today's pop music, the bass and the chord instruments play behind the melody, yet most people are not conscious of them. The supporting parts keep the music stable from outside our awareness.

Choice 1Don't hide the supporting partsInterpretation

Gagaku has supporting parts too. The shō sounds several notes at once, and because its sound does not break whether the player breathes in or out, it wraps the whole ensemble in chords. The taiko, kakko and shōko mark the divisions of the beat.

But the way they sound never quite becomes “background.” The shō's chords keep lingering in the ear, holding sounds in which semitones clash, and slowly changing shape. The percussion strikes are widely spaced, and each one is heard clearly. The hichiriki, which carries the melody, also has a thick, sharp tone and makes heavy use of enbai (塩梅), a technique of sliding the pitch.

In gagaku, the supporting parts and the melody alike have tones you cannot let pass. I think this is the first part for making attention cling to each individual sound.

Tōru Takemitsu, too, seems to have been struck most by the shō among the gagaku instruments. He said that the “impression of sound rising up” that he took from hearing gagaku might have come from the sound of the shō (quoted in Miyakawa 2018: 4).

Two rows of brush strokes over 84 seconds: the organ's C, and from 18.7 seconds a C# a semitone above it in gold. — The organ in the example track holds C (lower line). From 18.7 s it adds C#, a semitone above (upper line, gold); the C# ends at 49.9 s, and in the last four entries, from 68 s, the organ plays C alone. Thicker strokes are played more strongly. Drawn from the track's MIDI.

Wall 2A steady beat lets the listener predict what comes next

A beat that ticks like a metronome tells the listener when the next sound will come. People do not brace themselves for a sound they can predict.

Choice 2Let the beat stretch and shrink with the players' breathingFactInterpretation

Gagaku has no conductor waving a baton to show the tempo. In kangen, the kakko player leads the tempo, and each wind section has a principal player (ondo) whom the others follow. It is not fully equal; there is an order of roles.

Still, what decides the beat is not a baton you can see but the breathing among the players. Gagaku's beat is not mechanically even, and there are many passages where a single beat sounds drawn out. For listeners who are not used to it, it should be hard to read when the next sound will come.

After hearing gagaku at the Imperial Household Agency in 1962, Takemitsu wrote:

“In gagaku, there is no notion of the beat in the Western sense.”
(Takemitsu 1971 [1961–1962]: 38, quoted in Miyakawa 2018: 13)

In the same text, Takemitsu describes gagaku's rhythm as usually static like a pattern, and now and then released sharply like an arrow. Within static time, a sharp strike is released now and then. This can also be read as a description of the time just before something happens in horror.

Two rows of dots: the track's first four sounds, 5.66, 2.42 and 1.92 seconds apart, above four dots evenly 3.00 seconds apart. — When will the next sound come? The first four sounds of the example track start 5.66, 2.42 and 1.92 s apart (top). Below, the same four sounds re-timed to a steady beat, 3.00 s apart: an edit made only for this comparison. From the track's MIDI.

Wall 3When the instruments sound from one place, the sound arrives as a single mass

When many instruments play in one place, what reaches the listener is the mixed sound of the whole. Like black ink dropped onto water, the individual outlines spread and dissolve.

Choice 3Divide the players across spaceFactInterpretation

Here I want to name Tōru Takemitsu as a composer who pushed the direction of gagaku further. Takemitsu wrote a large work for gagaku instruments, Shūteiga Ichigu (In an Autumn Garden). He placed groups of instruments at the front and the back of the stage, and when he completed it as a set of six pieces in 1979, he added two more groups on the left and right (Miyakawa 2018: 19, note 2).

This arrangement did not appear out of nowhere. In his 1966 string work The Dorian Horizon, Takemitsu had already divided seventeen string players into two groups, “harmonic pitch” and “echo.” This was carried over into Shūteiga (1973), and in Shūteiga Ichigu the groups on the left and right were added (Miyakawa 2018: 2, 19).

When sound does not come from one place, the listener ends up following “where did that sound just come from?” The source of the sound itself becomes information. I think this is the same mechanism as a horror film playing noises from speakers beside or behind the audience. When a sound comes from a place you cannot see, you brace yourself.

Two circles seen from above. The first, before 1979: groups at the back and front. The second, 1979: the same, plus groups on the left and right in gold. — Where the groups of players sit in Shūteiga Ichigu. Takemitsu placed groups at the front and the back of the stage; completing the work as a set of six pieces in 1979, he added groups on the left and right (Miyakawa 2018: 19, note 2). A schematic: it does not show how many players, or which instruments, each group has.

Wall 4How do you make the listener wait for “the next”?

Choice 4Leave ma (間)Interpretation

Gagaku's percussion strikes are widely spaced, and gaps open between the sounds. Takemitsu, too, made the relationship between sound and silence a lifelong theme; one of his books is titled Oto, chinmoku to hakariaeru hodo ni (音、沈黙と測りあえるほどに, literally “Sound, enough to measure up against silence”).

If something happens after a silence, it is something that is not silence. I think placing silence inside music prepares the listener to “receive 100% of what comes next.” It is the same as the time in a hallway where nothing happens.

One long brush stroke across the whole track, broken by gaps of silence; the longest gap, 5.67 seconds, is marked in gold, and a shaded band marks the unbroken climax. — Sound and silence across the whole example track. The stroke thickens when more notes sound at once; gaps are silences in the score (reverb may still ring into them). Before the climax, the silences of a second or more last from 1.25 to 5.67 s; the longest runs from 34.33 to 40.00 s. The only unbroken stretch is the climax, 56.0 to 70.7 s. From the track's MIDI.

2Objections and comparisons

ObjectionListening to gagaku doesn't make you scared

To be honest, most people hearing gagaku for the first time will probably feel “sleepy” or “solemn” rather than “scared.” The parts above can make attention cling, but gagaku itself does not make an event happen at the end of that taut attention.

Miyakawa also points out that because gagaku has no relationship like that of the tonic and dominant chords in Western music, you do not feel a direction in which unstable chords resolve to stable ones, and there is little dramatic development (Miyakawa 2018: 6).

What to make happen at the end of that taut attention is something you have to design yourself, not borrow from gagaku.

ObjectionHorror music actually relies on supporting parts

In horror films, a low sustained sound (a drone) often holds up the tension. In other words, it is not frightening because the supporting parts are missing. This is where gagaku's shō comes in. It is a chord that does not disappear, yet its sound cannot be let pass. It could stand in for a horror drone.

Precedents from horror music

Tōru Takemitsu, Kwaidan (1964, directed by Masaki Kobayashi): Takemitsu himself scored this horror film, combining the sounds of traditional Japanese instruments with processed sounds. It is the precedent closest to this article's question.
Kubrick, The Shining: It uses music by Ligeti and Penderecki. Its sound of many notes packed together and played at once (tone clusters) should be interesting to compare with the shō's chords.

Comparison with Bach

Gagaku does have written parts for each instrument, but much of it is learned through shōga (唱歌) and oral transmission, and it does not take the form of a full score with every part laid out on one page. The way the voices are built is completely different from Bach, who combines many independent melodies. I don't reject this simplicity of construction, because Japanese art is often tied to simplicity, and that too can be enjoyed.

3Experiment and making

I made one 84-second track in Studio One. To make the listener's attention cling to each individual sound, this is what I aimed for.

Narrow the material. The track uses six note names, and the only sounds are organ, glockenspiel, cello and percussion. There is no drum kit. With fewer elements, attention does not scatter. Takemitsu saw in gagaku a multilayeredness born where there is “nothing more left to throw away,” and called it a “minimal structure” (Takemitsu 2000 [1981]: 214, quoted in Miyakawa 2018: 6). Narrowing the note names to six was aimed in this direction.

A one-octave keyboard with six keys in gold: C, C sharp, F sharp, G, A sharp and B. — The six note names used in the whole example track: C, C#, F#, G, A# and B (percussion aside). From the track's MIDI.

Muddy the supporting part. The organ holds a C, and the motif above it, C#–F#–A#–B, clashes with the C on all four notes. Partway through, the organ itself adds C#, forming a semitone cluster. Like the shō, I was aiming for a sustained sound that does not vanish yet cannot be let pass.

I only learned this after making the track, but Takemitsu, too, has the shō sound C and C# at the same time in Shūteiga Ichigu. Miyakawa analyzes this as a sound in which two modes ring at once (Miyakawa 2018: 16). It was the same combination of notes as my adding C# to the organ's C.

Let the organ foreshadow. The organ is not accompaniment; its role is to announce in advance what may happen. After it has shown the scene, the organ disappears. Things happen in the time after it has gone. The organ is absent from both the fragment sections and the climax.

Percussion, one hit at a time. Only seven times in 84 seconds. This is to make a single hit in silence into an event. The claves return three times, and each time they return they grow stronger. Takemitsu wrote about the role of percussion in gagaku as follows:

“By driving a wedge into what is sustained, it makes that sustained body busy — more multilayered.”
(Takemitsu 2000 [1981]: 216, quoted in Miyakawa 2018: 13)

Placing percussion hits one at a time inside the organ's sustained sound borrows exactly this relationship.

Hand the same motif to other instruments. The opening four notes are passed to the glockenspiel, then to the cello in tremolo, crescendo and staccato. When the listener notices “I've heard this before,” the ear should turn toward the difference in timbre.

Make ma the skeleton. For about the first minute, the track alternates between fragments and silence. The silences range from 1.3 to 5.7 seconds and are deliberately uneven. This is so that the listener cannot read when the next thing will come.

Open and close the space. The opening and the sections where the motif returns sound from a single point in the center. In the fragment sections and the climax, I scattered the sounds to the left, the right and the back with panning and reverb. If the listener first hears the space closed to a point, they can notice the sounds moving around when it opens. Only the climax has a long reverb, so that the room keeps ringing after the sound stops.

Make everyone push against each other. Rather than splitting the instruments into lead and accompaniment, I connected them all as a single mesh. The organ shows the scene, the percussion breaks it with a single hit, and the cello takes it over. When one moves, the others push back.

The track ends by unfolding all at once in a climax of about 15 seconds, the only unbroken stretch. After that, it closes with the same motif as the opening, at the softest dynamic, from a single point in the center. It closes by returning to where it began. Shūteiga Ichigu, too, has been described as forming an arc as a whole, with its last piece nearly repeating its first (Miyakawa 2018: 17).

A map of the whole track in six lanes: organ, glockenspiel, three cello parts and percussion. A shaded band marks the unbroken climax; the organ and glockenspiel return at the end. — A map of the whole example track, drawn from its MIDI. Lines are held notes; points are short notes and hits; bigger means played more strongly, and the organ's C# is in gold. The shaded band is the only unbroken stretch, 56.0 to 70.7 s. The opening motif returns four times, at 68, 72, 76 and 80 s; the first return overlaps the end of the band.

4Overall

Gagaku is not music for fear. Even so, its parts — supporting voices you cannot let pass, a beat that stretches and shrinks with breathing, sound divided across space, and ma — closely resemble the time just before something happens in horror, in that they heighten attention to a single sound.

In this track, I added to them the organ's foreshadowing and the mesh of all the players pushing against one another. Show the scene, disappear, make things happen one at a time in silence, and finally push through with everyone. The design uses gagaku's parts to make attention cling, and then carries that attention to the climax.

Gagaku performers reportedly describe other contemporary composers' gagaku works as “using the sounds and techniques of gagaku instruments, but not having become gagaku,” and set Shūteiga Ichigu apart from them (Miyakawa 2018: 1). This track is the reverse: it does not use a single gagaku instrument. The instruments are not gagaku, but the ideas are borrowed from gagaku. I think the attempt to make horror music with gagaku as a guide has taken at least one form.

5General notes

Gagaku 雅楽: Ensemble music handed down at the Japanese imperial court and at temples and shrines. It includes music that came from the continent and the Korean Peninsula in ancient times, as well as songs and dances native to Japan. One of its representative pieces is Etenraku.
Kangen 管絃: A form of gagaku played by wind, string and percussion instruments, without dance.
Shō 笙: A wind instrument made of bundled bamboo pipes that sounds chords. Its shape is likened to a phoenix resting with folded wings.
Aitake 合竹: The traditional chords of the shō; there are eleven kinds. They are made by combining notes stacked in perfect fifths.
Hichiriki 篳篥: A small vertical pipe that carries the main melody. It is known for enbai, a technique of sliding the pitch.
Ryūteki 龍笛: A transverse flute with a wide range, likened to a dragon.
Heaven, earth and sky 天・地・空: An explanation often given in introductory books: the shō is likened to light shining from heaven, the hichiriki to the human voice on earth, and the ryūteki to a dragon dancing between heaven and earth.
Kakko 鞨鼓), taiko (太鼓), shōko (鉦鼓: The percussion instruments of gagaku. The kakko leads the tempo of the ensemble.
Ondo 音頭: The principal player of each wind section.
Shōga 唱歌: A way of learning a melody by singing it.
Ma 間: An idea that treats the silence or gap between sounds as part of the expression.
Mode 旋法: A kind of scale. Gagaku uses six modes, such as hyōjō (平調).
Tone cluster: A sound made by playing many adjacent notes at once.
Pan / reverb: Panning decides where a sound sits between left and right; reverb adds reverberation to create depth and a sense of the size of a room.
Tōru Takemitsu 武満徹: A 20th-century Japanese composer. His works include the gagaku piece Shūteiga Ichigu, the string work The Dorian Horizon, and the score for the film Kwaidan.

References

Miyakawa, Wataru (宮川渉). 2018. “Gagaku elements in the works of TAKEMITSU Tōru: Commonalities between Landscape, The Dorian Horizon, and In an Autumn Garden” (武満徹作品における雅楽の要素―《ランドスケープ》《地平線のドーリア》《秋庭歌一具》の共通性―). Ongaku Hyōgengaku 16: 1–20. In Japanese. https://doi.org/10.34353/jmes.16.0_1

Tōru Takemitsu's words are quoted from the paper above. For the original sources, see the paper's list of citations and references. This article was first written in Japanese; the quotations are translated from the Japanese.