Noh, a Japanese Drama

Noh is a bit different than the other forms of music featured thus far. Unlike the others, it is also a form play, with music used to accent the actor's performance. The actual music is made up of chanters (known as a "hayashi" ensomble), drummers (a "shimi-daiko" drum, a kotsuzumi drum, and an otsuzumi drum), and a flautist (playing a shinobue). An example of this is an aptly named "Noh in Nagoya." Assumably named due to being a Noh performance in Nagoya (sadly, the play name was not listed).



The song is highly disjointed (almost disjunct), and is carried along by a highly sporadic beat. This ends up giving the song a very "random" feel to the overall beat of the song (though, it is by no means random). While all of the performers in the piece have cadences throughout the piece, there are very few times where they come to rest at the same time, with the only example of one being at the beginning with the main character of the play singing (though, it is rather hard to hear the singer as the video fails to really capture the singers voice). What is most interesting to me are the drums. Looking at what they're doing it seems that a majority of the time they are switching between drums, forming a kind of ornamentation loop. As one drum leaves another comes in as ornamentation, as that one leaves it gets ornamented by the next, etc. However, the complexity of the song comes from the fact that they don't actually follow that with the drums, as each drum keeps its own part of the rhythm for the chanters throughout the song (not just being some form of ornamentation of each other).