Content area
Full Text
The Last Biwa Singer, A Blind Musician in History, Imagination and Performance. Hugh de Ferranti. Ithaca, NY: East Asian Program, Cornell University, 2009. Cornell East Asia Series 143. xii + 320 pp., figures, tables, maps, music examples, bibliography, discography, videography, index. ISBN 978-1- 933947-13-6 (Hardcover), $56.00.
Among many of the aims of ethnomusicology is the documentation of musics, including those that are currently disappearing. This excellent book by Australian composer, musicologist, and ethnomusicologist Hugh de Ferranti documents such a case, a Japanese musical tradition that is virtually unknown in the West and that is in many respects disappearing before our eyes. This tradition is the music of the itinerant blind biwa players called biwa hoshi, a common term for poor itinerant musicians in Japan, also called biwa hiki, vernacular term for blind biwa players found on the southwestern island of Kyushu. The biwa is the Japanese short-necked fretted lute. Before Japanese contacts with China prior to the Tang dynasty (618-907) and the advent of Buddhism, string instruments were venerated as having ritual power (de Ferranti 2000, 27), a belief that has been maintained up until the beginning of the twentieth century in some parts of Japan. The biwa hoshi tradition is distinctive because it was usual in Japan for blind children to become musicians and these musicians were culturally stigmatized because they were blind and beggars, to a large extent because of Buddhism.
The book can be divided in two parts, although de Ferranti does not arrange the chapters in this way. Following the introduction, the first part, which I consider includes chapters 1-4, puts these blind musicians into historical context, as well as introduces the career of Yamashika Yoshiyuki (1901-96), the biwa hiki de Ferranti features in the second part of the book. De Ferranti indicates that because these musicians were considered outcasts, their lives have not been documented; hence little historical information can be found about them. Yet the author is able to give the readers a thorough overview of these musicians. As indicated, the second part, which includes chapters 5 and 6, presents the life of Yamashika Yoshiyuki, with whom de Ferranti studied and worked between 1989 and 1992, and situates these musicians in the context of current modern life.
In...