Harmony outside the Iron Cage: Tanaka Shōhei’s Strategic Deconstruction of the Music-Theoretical Edifice

Abstract

Tanaka Shōhei was a major figure in both Japanese and comparative musicology. Convinced by his tutor in Tokyo (Mendenhall) that Japanese music must embrace harmony in order to become “modern,” Tanaka was admonished by his advisor in Berlin (Helmholtz) that the Japanese must not adopt twelve-tone equal temperament because of its adverse effects on the ear—contradictory advice given that the latter was considered the simplest way of enabling the smooth functioning of the former. His solution involved a system of musical intonation whereby the octave was divided into fifty-three (as opposed to twelve) tones. In the context of his overall project, however, this theoretical innovation was only the first step. His goal was to reproduce a sort of harmonic “rationality” in Japanese music, while preserving its expressive melodic freedom: in Weberian terms, he wanted a different sort of modernity, one that escaped the confines of the iron cage.

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