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This chapter investigates flute performance as a space for exploring the relationship between tradition and innovation and traces the characteristics of the nohkan and its music. It examines the musical structure and nohkan melodic patterns of five traditional Noh plays. It also assesses the degree to which Issō School nohkan players maintain the continuity of their musical tradition in three contemporary Noh plays inspired by the twentieth-century Irish poet William Butler Yeats. The chapter reviews three contemporary works draw upon Yeats's At the Hawk's Well, which was influenced by Noh drama. The chapter argues that traditions of musical style and usage remain vastly influential in shaping contemporary Noh composition and performance practice, and that the freedom within fixed patterns can be understood through a firm foundation in Noh tradition.

This chapter reviews the strict separation that exists in Japan between professional and amateur Noh performers and how this boundary translates overseas through the collaborative works of Theatre Nohgaku and professional Noh performers. It demonstrates how the traditions of musical style and usage reign over contemporary Noh composition and performance practice. It also talks about Nohkan music in contemporary Noh dramas that does not deviate from traditional forms, content, and usage in any remarkable way. The chapter exhibits the Nohkan music performer's imagination and inspiration within the confines of prescribed patterns, which indicates that the Noh structure still affords a degree of artistic license and innovation. It reviews contemporary Noh plays, both in Japanese and in other languages, that cover varied subject matters.

Chapter Seven examines how Zeami and his artistic heir Konparu Zenchiku sought to harness the otherworldly charisma of the aged body in Noh. This chapter traces Zeami’s uses of the aged form in his attempts to transform Noh from a low-status performance tradition into an aristocratized art. Zeami (and later Zenchiku) argued that Noh had its origins in okina sarugaku or the Shikisanban—a set of three ceremonial dances featuring actors performing as old men, including the smiling Okina. They described the Shikisanban as an ancient ritual with the power to ensure peace and prosperity in the realm. In developing the genre of Waki Noh—plays in which gods appear (usually as elders) to bless the realm—Zeami once again promoted the aged body as a locus of sacred power. And, in many of his dramatic works, Zeami used the aged body to generate pathos. Relying on Buddhist logic, Zeami suggested in his theoretical works and libretti that audiences moved by the pathos of the aged body would also reap worldly and spiritual benefits.

Menu collections, one of the major categories of published culinary books in the Edo period, included complex meals that most of their readers could not create because of the menus' expense and complexity, and the existence of sumptuary laws which prohibited the use of key ingredients and elaborate methods of serving. This chapter explores menu collections that vary in their treatment of their subject, but share the fact that they are less like shopping lists and guides for actual meals and more like poems written to evoke other things: the dining habits of the elite, the change of seasons, or Noh drama. The menus demonstrate ways that those who wrote about food borrowed from and participated in larger cultural trends ranging from the elite tea ceremony to popular pastimes such as shrine pilgrimage and the puppet theater. Medieval rules for cooking and dining became the guidelines for a literary genre in the Edo period, allowing readers to conceive of entire banquets as abstract meditations on food.

The list of those figures who, to varying degrees, donned the Japanese Noh mask in modernist theater is long. Having borrowed several of the most obvious elements of Noh, particularly the use of masks, symbolic movement, and ritual dramatic structure, modernist figures tended to re-dress these elements in the fashion of their own cultural costume. Euro-American works and productions based on or inspired by Noh were created throughout the twentieth century to serve a variety of political, religious, and didactic functions. Two archetypal cases of this kind, in which Noh was tailored to fit Western purposes in works of modernist music theater, were the “Plays for Dancers” of W. B. Yeats and the Lehrstücke of Bertolt Brecht.

This chapter is a transnational study that draws into focus the globalized modernist dialogue between artistic traditions. This dialogue is invited through both Wong’s investigation of the little known paintings, drawings and collages, rather than poetry, of Rabindranath Tagore. Rather than connecting Tagore with the Western traditions in which he was sometimes immersed, Wong explores the influence of the Japanese mask on the construction of a regional Indian Modernism, with particular emphasis on the Bengal School. She also investigates the Tagore family’s collection of Japanese noh theatre masks on display in the Rabindranath family home and the incorporation of mask themes in Abanindranath Tagore’s paintings and plays, which would have been known to Rabindranath Tagore. As Wong explains, this dynamic led to comparisons between Tagore’s work and more westernized strains of modernism, including Surrealism and Symbolism, as the artist travelled through Europe gaining popularity. But Wong traces Rabindranath Tagore’s Bengali modernism as an artistic persona, one that, in light of imperialism and the orientalizing of the West, becomes a mask that strategically subverted, and at other times espoused Western and Eastern modernities.

This essay analyzes W. B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer, and specifically its negotiation of elements of Noh theater as well as its reliance on dramatic characteristics of tragedy for its fundamental structure. It first considers the various theatrical strategies employed by Yeats to represent the hero's absence before discussing how the Chinese-box structure of The Only Jealousy of Emer is employed in the service of the play's tragic dynamic, which turns theater into an ambiguous metaphor of absence. It then explains how the tragic logic that governs The Only Jealousy of Emer turns the dramatic project of Noh on its head, since it is based on the impossibility of the border between the visible and the invisible, between audience and stage. It suggests that the play enables Yeats to offer a kind of reinvention of tragedy distinct from naturalism and infused with “the dramatic syntax of the Noh tradition.”

This chapter, “Noh Kah: An Archaeological Site in Extreme Southeastern Quintana Roo,” describes the newly surveyed site Noh Cah as an example of the clustered dispersed settlement pattern known from throughout southeastern Quintana Roo. These mostly Early Classic sites do not have a single monumental core as is common in Petén. Rather they have multiple monumental cores arranged in clusters across a more dispersed landscape, possibly an advantageous arrangement for large scale cacao production. They are linked by line-of-site from pyramidal summits oriented on a predominately east–west axis that does not deviate beyond the angle of the summer and winter solstices. Epigraphic evidence from several of these sites links them to Early Classic Dzibanché and the powerful Kaanal dynasty that was located there.

This chapter examines the development and construction techniques of the nohkan and includes interviews with the nohkan makers. It explains nohkan, also known as fue (flute), as a transverse flute made from a type of bamboo known as Pleioblastus simonii. The chapter discusses how the nohkan is traditionally played in the Noh theater, Kabuki, and some shrine festivals, and is recently seen on concert stages as part of both traditional and non-traditional ensembles. It also describes the nohkan as a unique instrument in both construction and sound that uses a nodo, a thin bamboo tube that disrupts the instrument's natural acoustics. The chapter highlights the performance techniques of the nohkan, which include the creation of shakuhachi-like white noise. It looks at several theories that surround the history and construction of the nohkan in Japan.

This chapter discusses the three primary functions of the nohkan in a Noh play and focuses on comprehending the role of shōga and the importance and history of oral transmission. It offers an analysis of Issō Yukihiro singing the shōga of the ryo-chū-kan keishiki of the [Chū no Mai] using Western staff notation, followed by his performance of the ryo-chū-kan keishiki. It also talks about Issō Yukihiro as a professional nohgaku-shi and a nohkan performer, who has been actively promoting the nohkan by collaborating with musicians that play Western music and Japanese music. The chapter analyses how the nohkan failed to reach a level of popularity within or outside Japan due to the lack of comprehensive study on the nohkan and the challenges of oral transmission using shōga. It includes transcriptions of nohkan melodies in Western staff notation, which has become a universal method of notating music.

This chapter provides a preliminary explanation of the shōdan, which gives an accessible description of the mugen Noh structure and the three categories of shōdan. It surveys past research on nohkan entrances and melodic patterns through the shōdan structure and. It also highlights five selected traditional Noh plays from Zeami's mugen Noh repertoire: Takasago, Atsumori, Izutsu, Kinuta, and Tōru. The chapter analyzes the nohkan senritsu-kei and their use in these Noh plays, as well as the role of the performer in adding embellishments and other performing techniques to support the chant while enhancing the mood of the play. It explores the role of the performer in adding embellishments and other performing techniques to support the chant while enhancing the mood of the play.

This chapter presents transcriptions of Issō Yukihiro's “theoretical” nohkan entrance and compares it with a specific shōdan from a live performance of Atsumori with Yukihiro on the nohkan. It demonstrates an individual interpretation of a Noh play, taking into account the different schools of instruments, singing styles, and written texts of chant books used by the main actors and chorus. It also illustrates the structure of Noh plays among the traditional plays in terms of overall organization of the dan and the shōdan. The chapter examines the flexibility in the nohkan melodic patterns that allows variations and individual interpretation within the prescribed structure. It considers a particular performance by Yukihiro that apply William P. Malm's three functions of the nohkan.

This chapter assesses the degree of continuity of the nohkan that is illustrated in three contemporary Noh play adaptations of William Butler Yeats's At the Hawk's Well by nohkan performers of the Issō School. It looks at interviews conducted with nohkan performers and a composer. It also highlights the nohkan's traditional role in contemporary and English-language Noh that allows variations and embellishments by performers, which demonstrate musical continuity in the context of experimentation. The chapter discusses a number of shinsaku Noh that have been successful and performed more frequently. It describes the performance of Yokomichi Mario's Taka no Izumi and Takahime, including the English-language Noh production of At the Hawk's Well by Theatre Nohgaku.

This chapter illustrates how black programming produced elsewhere navigates the circuits of contemporary commercial television and global, digital distribution platforms. It looks at three examples of non-American black television and video programming: the animated Samoan/ Māori television series bro'Town (2004–2009); the booming Nigerian videofilm industry known as Nollywood; and the transnational pirating of the first Belizean television drama Noh Matta Wat (2005–2008). Together, these examples display several important trends in black television during an era of digitization, globalization, and marketization. First, there is an obvious increase in the variety of video and television programming featuring non-U.S. blacks circulating internationally. Secondly, these programs retain significant cultural specificity. Lastly, black television programming travels through disorganized, parallel markets, which make production funding highly precarious.

This chapter examines translation theory and practice in the context of the specific linguistic and cultural challenges that arise when translating Milton’s poetry into accessible Japanese. Milton has been known in Japan as being as important as Shakespeare, but his works have a limited readership while Shakespeare has had a strong presence. Elements that account for Milton’s reception are Milton scholarship in Japan, characteristics of the Japanese language, the archaic sound of Milton’s grand English style especially given Japanese translational choices, and a Christianity articulated too immediately and profoundly for a culture in which Christian training and history are almost absent. This chapter then provides a personal account and the theoretical underpinnings of Sano’s recent Japanese translation of Samson Agonistes and her participation in a well-received production in 2012 of poet Takahashi’s adaptation of Milton’s tragedy in the Noh style.

Song in Japanese Noh drama is generally described in terms of an eight-beat meter. In the hira-nori song rhythm, the meter is organized according to the standard Japanese poetic unit of 7+5 syllables. The meter of Noh is isochronous in theory and a song’s syllables can be laid out regularly in accordance with it. However in performance, singers and drummers never seem to obey the meter; rather they create layers of deviation from the meter. Spaces between beats articulated by drummers seem more elastic than one might imagine based on the notation. To examine such layers and elasticity, this chapter describes the singers’ training style. This teaches them how to deviate from the meter and specifies drummers’ modification types of the cycle of eight beats. “Taking komi” is the drummer’s technique for synchronizing with and detaching from the singers’ part. The history of patron-amateurs’ participation in performance is described as a background for the creation of the interaction style.