After the two and a half centuries of seclusion policies employed by the Tokugawa Shogunate, the newly established Meiji government (1868-1912) eagerly introduced Western culture, including music, to the Japanese people. Within a relatively short period, Japanese composers acquired sufficient knowledge and skill in the use of Western compositional techniques to permit themselves expression through Western-style music.
The early Japanese compositional activities fall into the following three periods: the first began around the turn of the twentieth-century and lasted until about 1917, focusing on the assimilation of Western technique; the second spanned from about 1918 to 1927 with the birth of Nationalism and Academism; and the third ran from about 1928 to 1950 with the establishment of three major schools of Western music -- German, French, and Nationalist.
Eta Harich-Schneider explains this certain affirmation to different schools, ryu or ha, by Japanese musicians, in her monograph, *A History of Japanese Music,* as:
"For a century, thousands of Japanese made their musical studies in the West, and for the rest of their lives preserved the musical style prevailing in the West at the time they studied. The method is accumulative, comparable to the agglutinative structure of their language. Because of this strange traditionalism (to which we owe the precious survivals from remote times) all trends of Western music of the past sixty or more years, long obsolete in the place of their origin, survive in Japan. Moreover, there is a trend among Japanese musicians to form distinctive groups representing the Western country where they have studied and the composing style fashionable at the time of their studies."1
The lecture will trace the historical development of Western-style piano music by Japanese composers from the Meiji era through World War II, focussing on such composers as Rentaro Taki, Kosaku Yamada, Kunihiko Hashimoto, Fumio Hayasaka, Yasuji Kiyose, Roh Ogura, Kazuo Yamada, Saburo Moroi, Hisatoda Otaka, Meiro Sugawara, Tomojiro Ikenouchi, and others.
1 Eta Harich-Schneider, *A History of Japanese Music* (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 548.
earned the BM and MM degrees in piano performance from the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University and a DMA from the University of Maryland at College Park. She is engaged frequently as a soloist, chamber-music performer, and as a lecturer, having appeared throughout the Eastern half of the US and in Japan. Watanabe's article, "Japanese Music, An East-West Synthesis," has been published in the American Music Teacher Magazine; in addition, two articles on Japanese contemporary piano music can be viewed on the World Wide Web Site. She has presented papers on topics of Japanese contemporary music at Symposiums: Music of Japan Today I & II; the College Music Society, Mid-Atlantic Chapter Annual Meeting; and the Society of Composers, Inc., National Conference.
Watanabe taught at Hollins College, Virginia (1982-1991), and is currently a Lecturer in Music at Roanoke College and Washington & Lee University in Virginia. She also serves as Music Director of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Roanoke, Virginia, where she directs the "Con Spirito" Concert Series, and is Artistic Director of the Eurydice Community Orchestra of Roanoke.