Nineteenth-century gagaku (Japanese traditional court music) songs, composed mainly between 1877 and 1884, are almost forgotten today; but they deserve special attention for their function in the development of modern composition in Japan. More than 100 compositions by 28 composers, belonging to two collections, can be counted as gagaku songs in the narrowest sense. Most of them are accompanied by an individually composed ostinato pattern played on the wagon, a six-stringed zither. The songs are strongly shaped by Restoration thought, one of the characteristic aspects of the early modernization period in Japan, although the genre originated in response to the need for music for a modern Western method of education.
An analysis of the two collections, of intertextually related pieces and of different versions of single songs shows that the collective process of genre development and the individual process of song composition were closely intertwined. The aim of my analysis was to uncover the problems faced by composers when they composed a single song. Particular solutions were often required to fulfil all the demands of the strict stylistic framework of the genre, while meeting the conditions of a specific poem. While similarity to an already existing song was not avoided when a new song was composed, the effort to create a difference can also be observed clearly in some cases. My analysis gives special attention to heterophonic techniques that characterize the relation between voice and accompaniment. Their use is constitutive for the musical form, and their analysis sheds light on the aesthetic significance of each song. An analytical approach to the gagaku song repertoire provides us with a fascinating insight into how musical creativity was performed under the circumstances of a quickly changing cultural environment in the early modernization period of Japan.