I'm kind of curious as to why your parents were playing shinkyoku so much during your childhood that you remember it today.
As someone playing this music as a pretty serious hobby, it's extremely amusing to see the Tadaos anonymized away as Miyagi's students. It's like, "the program will feature music by Haydn and one of his students, including the latter's ninth and final symphony." (Maybe not quite that extreme...)
What is really interesting is that below the layer of shinkyoku you have Meiji shinkyoku, which are the same sort of thing -- self-aware attempts to update traditional koto music for changing times, just a century earlier. But this layer of music tends to get subsumed into the "traditional" category, because although it did draw on foreign influences (e.g. Chinese-derived popular "minshingaku"), it didn't do so as overtly or systematically. To the point where now to the untrained ear many of the pieces are indistinguishable in style from what came centuries before. I don't think the same can be said of Miyagi's shinkyoku. --Matt
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Date: 17 September 2013 03:47 am (UTC)As someone playing this music as a pretty serious hobby, it's extremely amusing to see the Tadaos anonymized away as Miyagi's students. It's like, "the program will feature music by Haydn and one of his students, including the latter's ninth and final symphony." (Maybe not quite that extreme...)
What is really interesting is that below the layer of shinkyoku you have Meiji shinkyoku, which are the same sort of thing -- self-aware attempts to update traditional koto music for changing times, just a century earlier. But this layer of music tends to get subsumed into the "traditional" category, because although it did draw on foreign influences (e.g. Chinese-derived popular "minshingaku"), it didn't do so as overtly or systematically. To the point where now to the untrained ear many of the pieces are indistinguishable in style from what came centuries before. I don't think the same can be said of Miyagi's shinkyoku. --Matt