Japan for Music Lovers & Concert Travelers

About this book

Every country can be seen, and most travellers stop there. But Japan, more than any country on earth, repays being heard. It announces its trains with composed melodies and gives each platform its own tune; it keeps, in the basements of its great cities, rooms where a single record is played to a silent audience like a rite; it builds its instruments in one famous city and its concert manners in a hundred halls; its shrines still sound the music their festivals have played for a thousand summers; and its record shops, instrument streets and listening bars form a second map of the country, drawn entirely in sound. This book is a guide to that second map: 200 complete music days across Japan, each composed around the same four questions. Which ground does the day claim, and on what terms? What is heard there, in what order, and by what measure is the day judged? How is the day kept — logged, tokened, filed — so that it survives its own evening? And what do the ground, its keepers and its music ask of the guest who comes to listen?

Japan answers the listener's questions generously. It will give you a morning hunting shelves in an instrument street, an afternoon in a room where nobody speaks for an hour, an evening on a standing floor close enough to see the drummer's hands, a night in a hall where two thousand strangers hold one breath. It will give you the station melody you will hum for the rest of your life without deciding to, the shrine drum that reaches the river, the park stage under a volcano. This guide designs two hundred of those days: the hunting days of the record rows, the quiet rooms, the live floors, the seated evenings, the passing sounds of stations and streets, the sacred listening of shrine and temple, the open-air fields, and the craft of composing a music day anywhere at all.

A word on honesty, because method here is a form of it. Programmes change; rooms close and reopen; festivals belong to their seasons; a melody is reassigned. This guide asserts none of those changeable things: no shop, room, hall, melody, performance, price or hour is promised anywhere in it, and every entry closes by naming the official channel through which its day is to be confirmed. What the entries teach is the durable part — the shape of a well-composed listening day, the keeping discipline that turns a day of sound into a possession, and the manners that make a listener welcome in the most listening country in the world.

Eight parts: record rows & instrument streets · jazz kissa & listening rooms · live houses & club floors · concert halls & civic stages · station melodies, street pianos & public sound · shrines, temples & ceremony sound · open-air stages, parks & festival fields · and a closing craft part — 25 method days (the hunting day composed, the quiet room entered properly, the first & last note honoured, the deep-listening discipline, the day handed over) that teach you to compose a music day anywhere.