日本の歌を形音符で Japanese songs in shape notes

オレゴン州ポートランド市でアメリカ人がわからない言葉（日本語）で見たことも聞いたこともない日本の歌をパッと初見で歌う。少し粗削りだがその不思議な才能はどこから来ただろう。

Oregon Portlanders singing songs they’ve never seen or heard before, in a language they don’t know (Japanese). The recordings are quick and dirty, but where does that ability come from? (Scroll down below for English.)

七里ヶ浜の哀歌　Shichirigahama Lament

春の小川　Spring Stream

では、それを形音符（けいおんぷ）とでも呼びましょうか、shape note のことを。ネット上でいい日本語の訳を探しましたが「シェープ・ノート」か「シェイプ・ノート」とかたかなでしか出ません。英語を母国語として話すアメリカ人の私にはshape noteについて日本語で説明している時、「シェープ・ノート」、「シェープ・ノート」を何回も繰り返すのは変な感じをします。しかも普通の日本人はそれを聞いても意味が全くわかりません。シェープアップのために使うノートのこと？

それよりも日本人は自分の素敵な言葉があるのに、どうして発音しにくくあまりきれいに聞こえない「かたかな」で自らの言葉を台無しにするか理解できません。去年の夏日本で形音符のワークショップ（...まあ、いいや）を教える機械があって「図形音符」と訳してみましたが、それはまた英語に訳すとgraphic noteが出ます。その意味はちょっとわかりませんがshape noteとは全然違う意味みたいです。

では、私がここで言う形音符とは一体何なんでしょう。従来の音符はたった一つの形で表されます(楕円形)。しかし私達の形音符はドレミファソラシをそれぞれの七つのちがった形で表します。たとえばドは三角、レは半円形、ミはひし形など。この事によってひと目でドの位地や他の音が確認でき、全部円い音符の時よりもずっと簡単に歌を教えられ、そして慣れてくると初見でもすぐに大勢の人たちにアカペラの四部合唱で奇跡のように歌わせる事ができます。

アメリカは世界中に怪しげな文化をたくさん輸出しますが、形音符は立派なアメリカ製品の一つです。１９世紀の始めの頃考案されましたが、南北戦争の頃までには（1860年代）形音符はもう古臭いものという評判を受けその存在が減り、アメリカ南部のあるへき地の教会のみに残る事になりました。各地でピアノやオルガンを取り入れ始めたからです。しかしそれらを買う余裕がなかった南部の田舎がアカペラだけで音楽を奏でる方法を守ったのです。最近アメリカでは又形音符が見直され、ある程度復活していますが、その復活はほとんど南部以外で起きています。

話は１８年前にさかのぼります。私はもともとアメリカの北部（ミシガン州）の出身でしたが１８年前南部に移住しました。若い頃からハモるのが気に入っていた私は南部に着いてからすぐ形音符を使って歌っている教会の合唱会を探し、とある田舎の寂しい所にたどり着きました。

最初から形音符は素晴らしい発想だと思ってはいましたが、初見で歌うなんて自分にはできると思ってもみなかった私は、すぐできるようになって驚きました。そして形音符の伝統を守るべく、やがて私は他の人達にも教えるようになりました。
アラバマ州芸術協議会から民族芸術家として形音符を教える依頼をされるようにもなりました。

先週の週末、ポートランドで毎年行っている形音符合唱会に参加するためポートランドに行ってきました。初日の土曜日、終わったあとメンバーの一人の家に大勢の人が集まり新たに親睦会をしました。私はこんな事もあろうかとあらかじめいくつかの日本の昔の歌を形音符とローマ字に書きなおし、何部かコピーを用意しておいたんです。親睦会でその歌を二つ歌ってみてくれないかとお願いした所、１５人位の人が同意してくれました。音符のほうはわりと簡単だったので、録画する前に一回だけ皆で合わせました。歌詞のほうは皆意味はわからない人ばかりだったけど、ローマ字で書かれた日本語は発音しやすく、一回私の後について言ってもらう練習をしました。私はスマホにあるカメラを持ちながら同時に歌を先導して歌った為、画質は最悪でしたが、歌自体は知らない言葉で初めてにしてはまあまあ上出来じゃないかと。

小学校で形音符を教われば誰でも初見で歌うことができるようになるとずっと思ってきました。言葉は通じなくても人は同じ歌を歌う事ができます。そうすれば世界はもっと平和になるのではないかとも思います。日本人は小学校でドレミ（移動ド唱法）を学ぶのは珍しくないので、形音符は特に日本人には適切だと思います。その為私は機会さえあればいつでも日本人に形音符を教えていきたいと思います。

The term "shape note" is rather hard to translate into Japanese. They have perfectly good words for both "shape" and "note," but whenever I try to use them, Japanese just ignore that and say "shape note" with a Japanese accent ("shapu noto"). Last year I had the fortuitous opportunity to teach shape-note singing schools in Japan, but I refused to mouth "shapu noto," partly because they wouldn't know what it meant, partly because it would just make the other foreigners there snicker. Japanese sounds more euphonious to me than English does anyway. But the Japanese I made up didn't really work either. Apparently, it had already been taken to translate "graphic notes," whatever those are.

So what are shape notes? Conventional musical notes are expressed with just one shape: an oval. Shape notes use that shape, plus six others (e.g., a triangle, a rectangle) to represent all of the other notes of the scale, do, re, mi, fa, so, la and ti (or "si" as old-timers say). Shape notes are much easier to teach than regular round notes, so in no time, one can have a crowd of people singing four-part a cappella harmony. To me it's nothing less than a miracle.

The United States has exported a lot of questionable culture around the world, but shape notes are one marvelous American cultural product. Invented in the early nineteenth century, by the time of the Civil War, shape notes were already considered old-fashioned and outdated everywhere except in certain pockets of the rural South. The shapes came to be identified with poor rural churches that, either through poverty or dogma, couldn't get an organ or a piano. Recent years have witnessed a renaissance of sorts in shape-note singing, but mostly outside of the South.

I'm originally from Michigan, but moved to the South 18 years ago. Ever since I was young, I've always loved to harmonize, so after I got to this part of the country, I looked for the lonely rural settings (mostly churches) where shape-note singings occurred. From the very start, I thought what a brilliant idea shape notes were. Never before did I think I could learn to sight-read music, but I soon got so I was sight-reading anything written in shape notes. Before long, I found myself teaching shape notes to these very same churches that had preserved this tradition through all these years. I even got a grant from the Alabama Council on the Arts to teach this, a grant for "Alabama master folk artists," no less.

Last week I went to Portland, Oregon, for their annual shape-note singing, which this year for the first time used both the 4-shape Sacred Harp and the 7-shape Christian Harmony books. After the Saturday session, quite a few singers gathered for a social at the home of the gracious Thom Fahrbach. Beforehand I had transposed some old Japanese songs into shape notes and put the words in roman letters. Japanese is super-easy to pronounce, so even though no one else understood the words, they could still pronounce them. And because everyone could read shape notes, all I had to do was go through the notes once before I turned on the camera and started recording. I was just using the camera in my phone, and singing and leading at the same time, so the video is horrible, but the songs themselves don't sound too bad for people sight-reading songs in a language they didn't know.

I've always thought that if shape notes were taught in elementary school, everyone would be able to pick up a sheet of music and just start singing it. And if everyone could do that, I've got to think it would make the world just a little more peaceful place. In Japanese elementary schools it's not at all rare to learn to sing do-re-mi (the technical term is "movable do"). All they're missing is the shapes. Since they already have a feel for the notes, much better than your average American does, attaching shapes is easy-peasy. They don't know that they're just waiting for this, but I'm going to take every opportunity I can find to teach shape notes in Japan.

Shape-note singing in Japan, June 2012

Greetings, singers.

Mako and I are now back in Alabama, but Japan is still lingering on our minds the way a place does after a memorable visit, the way I suppose Alabama does for those of you who come here to sing. In the month of June, we led what were, as far as I can tell, the first shape-note singing schools in Japanese history (or if anyone ever sang shape notes before in Japan, there’s no Internet trail). I used songs from the Christian Harmony in seven shape, as well as some old Japanese songs and a couple Sacred Harp songs transposed into seven shapes, mainly because Japanese learn solfege in elementary school. I don't mean they just sing the Do-Re-Mi song from the Sound of Music as you may have done in school. They actually use do-re-mi to learn new songs. So at the singing schools, teaching shape notes was a relatively simple task of attaching shapes to something they already knew. With amazing speed, we could go from talking about what shape notes are and singing them off of my chart to launching into actual songs in four parts. The whole idea of shape notes had always struck me as so thoroughly sensible, and now it seemed that way to so many Japanese people that I wondered why nobody had ever done this before. Last year I mentioned to the Alabama State Council on the Arts people that I would be teaching shape notes in Japan and was so brazen as to ask if they might be able to offer any financial assistance. To my surprise they did, which helped a lot. So now a little bit of Alabama has been lovingly planted in Japan. I think the Japanese refer to this as “soft power.”  Y’all, there’s an entire nation there just waiting to be taught shape notes.

With said assistance, as well as a lot of generosity from people in Japan, I ended up doing a singing school in some form or another on four separate occasions, with Mako’s help in Hitachi, Birmingham’s sister city, and Tokyo, and by myself in Osaka and Hagi in Yamaguchi Prefecture. The first event was on June 1 in Hitachi on the campus of Ibaraki Christian University. Mako and I were leading a study group of 10 students from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the good folks at IC treated us like VIPs, inviting us to stay on their campus and teach our singing school just for the mere fact that we were from their sister city. Altogether somewhere around 60 people showed up: university students and faculty, townspeople, church folks, and our UAB students, who had to go all the way to Japan to learn this.

I wanted to start out with something familiar to Japanese people, and in their own language, so the first song we sang was a Japanese song called "Ryoshuu," which means the kind of longing you have when you go back to your hometown and it’s not the same, and you're left with the overwhelming sense that you really can’t go back. All that meaning packed into that one word. Someone took some home movies of part of the singing and that video eventually got to me. It’s a little shaky, and there’s a jump in the first one, and remember, they hadn't seen a shape note 30 minutes before this, but anyway, here it is:

Shape-Note Singing in Hitachi, Japan - Ryoshuu from Tim Cook on Vimeo.

Then we tried "Dundee"

Shape-Note Singing in Hitachi, Japan - Dundee from Tim Cook on Vimeo.

and "Angel Band"

Shape-Note Singing in Hitachi, Japan - Angel Band from Tim Cook on Vimeo.

in English, both from the Christian Harmony. Then we sang another Japanese song about picking tea, called "Chatsumi."

Shape-note singing in Hitachi, Japan - Chatsumi 茶摘み from Tim Cook on Vimeo.

We sang more, but that’s enough to give you an idea.

The next singing was on June 24 in a church in Tokyo (Tokyo Holy Trinity Church). By then the UAB students had already gone back to Alabama, but Mako and I stayed another 8 days. This workshop came about thanks to friends of a friend, the in-between friend being Hunter Hale, who lived in Japan a long time, but is originally from Dalton, GA. I met him at the National Sacred Harp Convention several years ago and last year mentioned to him that I would be teaching this shape-note workshop in Hitachi and asked if he knew if there might be any interest in Tokyo. Sort of a leading question. I was determined to do this in Tokyo too. It’s always a surprise to Americans, but there’s an avid bluegrass music community in Japan and the folks he paired me up with were Japanese bluegrass enthusiasts who were also interested in shape-singing as it's one of the roots of bluegrass. They created a bluegrass/shape-note event in a church in Tokyo to raise money for victims of last year’s earthquake and tsunami, but after a few numbers by the bluegrass band, most of that event was my workshop. We had wonderful publicity, including mention on NHK-FM, Japan's public radio station, which played shape-note songs that morning. Over a hundred people showed up, including family members and relatives on both Mako’s side and my side. A lot of things moved us, but having our own kinfolk show up was high up there. Same wonderful reaction there as in Hitachi: Why don't we already know this and when are we going to do it again?

Tim and Mako and kin in fellowship hall after Tokyo singing school

Hunter Hale’s friend, or rather friend’s daughter, Yui Inoue, was the one who made the contacts with Tokyo bluegrass folks. A very rare cultural hybrid, she comes from one of those Japanese bluegrass families and she studied Appalachian culture at East Tennessee State University where she graduated last year. Although she was the person who contacted the people in Tokyo, she herself lives in Osaka, which is over 300 miles down the road (or down the train track in Japan). Since I didn't have any weekend left, she asked if I could go to Osaka the next day, which was a Monday, and she offered to help pay for my train ticket. So I went to Osaka too. This time it was in a gallery space above a little restaurant on a weeknight, not your typical venue for a singing like this, which made me appreciate it all the more. How charming, I thought, for a restaurant to book a shape-note singing instructor for a gig like this. About 20 people came out for it. Same love fest as before.

It helped that Osaka was right on the way to Yamaguchi Prefecture, where I was hired 30 years ago to roam around the prefecture as an assistant English teacher in public schools. One of the reasons we stayed in Japan longer than the UAB students was so I could go there again. I stayed in the city of Hagi with a teacher friend whose late husband was an English teacher who had me visit his school several times. She herself was an art and music teacher, so I mentioned that I was doing all this singing instruction and would she be interested in scraping together a few of her friends to try it. Which is exactly what she did. So my last singing school was with seven Japanese ladies in my friend's house. She keeps a blog and wrote all about it there, which is all in Japanese, but the pictures alone tell most of the story.

The amount of time I had at each of these events was woefully inadequate, but enough to make people, including myself, want to do it again. The evening before the Tokyo singing, Yui introduced me to a warm and engaging music professor from the Tokyo College of Music. She couldn't attend the singing school because of a schedule conflict, but she wanted to meet me because she wants to have me do this again someday, like on her campus. That's like Juilliard or the New England Conservatory asking you to have a shape-note singing on their campus. I did all I could to keep my jaw from dropping. I think I've started something.