Music, Culture and Society: Alison Tokita
7 March 2008
The Piano and Cultural Modernity in East Asia
Alison Tokita
International Piano Competitions consistently show the dominance of young Asian pianists, reflecting the prominence of the piano in contemporary East Asian culture.
Max Weber wrote that: “It is the peculiar nature of the piano to be a middle-class instrument… It was a product of the industrial age.” The importance of the piano in 19th century Western culture was obvious to the Japanese, who early gave it an important place in the new education system and in public life. Companies such as the Yamaha Piano and Organ Company (founded 1897) obtained international recognition at world expositions, and commodification of instrument manufacture made the piano a feature of bourgeois family life (Herd 2006; see also Herd 1994). The domestic market grew further when the _bunka jūtaku _architecture with western style rooms became popular in the 1920s, and Hosokawa notes the centrality of the piano in his discussion of the enthusiasm for home music-making in 1910s to 1930s Japan (Hosokawa 2003). Further, efficient new methodologies for teaching piano and violin were developed in Japan to satisfy the demand for Western music by the new middle classes. Suzuki Shin’ichi’s music teaching method was later followed by the Yamaha group teaching piano and keyboard as a way of increasing sales.
Focusing on the piano, this paper will explore the reasons why Western music became such an important part of modern Asian culture; it will argue that the piano had already become a symbol of modernity in Japan in the pre-war period, and that the Japanese model was being taken up by East Asian countries in this colonial era.
Alison Tokita is Director of the Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University. Her research interests lie in the Japanese performing arts, especially music and sung story-telling (katarimono). Subsidiary interests are the influence of Japanese music on contemporary Australian composition; contemporary Japanese musical composition and composers; koto music; international marriage; Japanese popular culture.