ABSTRACT
“Melodious singing voice” might seem too obvious an asset for vocalists in many musical genres. Yet it is considered a liability for gidayû music in Japan today. The audio component of the four-century-old, all-male puppet theatre, known as bunraku today, gidayû consists of string music played by an instrumentalist and the entire lines of all characters on stage narrated solo by a single chanter who also sings descriptive recitation. Its artistry is defined by a particular combination of two kinds of dichotomized and hierarchical pairs (narrating/singing and masculinization/feminization), according to which gidayû is “theatrical male-vocal-music centering the act of narrating as that which is not singing.” Contemporary female chanter Takemoto Koshikô (b.1953) excels in gidayû as such, yet also resists the low status of “melodious singing voice.” By acknowledging “melodious singing voice” as a crucial part of gidayû music, and suggesting that it gives female chanters a certain advantage, Koshikô's ideas can theoretically disturb the relationship among the two polarized conceptual pairs, not to mention the aforementioned definition of gidayû music per se. Moreover, that the remark was made by a maestro who belongs to the mainstream artistic tradition, who is excellent at “male vocal-music centering the act of narrating as that which is not singing,” adds weight to her argument.
