“Folk Gagaku” and the Sonic World of Shinto Rituals

Research on the musics and dances that make up the performing art commonly known as “Japanese court music” (Gagaku) focuses predominantly on history and philology. Yet in its long existence, Gagaku has been an indispensable component of countless rituals, from those of the court to those happening in the countryside (Shumway 2001). The unitary and “combinatory” epistemology of premodern Japanese religious life (shinbutsu shūgō) meant that a split between the soundscape of Buddhist temples and that of Shinto shrines only came into being after the Meiji period. Before the late 19th century CE, ritual complexes (jisha) were the main sites of Gagaku performances as well as the institutional home of hereditary families of musicians (gakke) (see Grapard 1992; Rambelli 2022). However, with few exceptions, Gagaku is seldom analyzed by ritual studies specialists. This is surprising, considering the power of performances to sensitize practitioners (Grimes 2013, 217–23), socialize their states of consciousness (Rouget 1985; Michaels and Sax 2016), and produce a “ritualized body”, that is, “a body invested with a ‘sense’ of ritual” (Bell 2009, 98).

Today, “court music” is a ubiquitous element of the multifarious events that the term “Shinto rituals” has come to encompass (see Hardacre 2017, 477–80). This is true both at the “central” level of imperial celebrations—in rituals like the enthronement ceremonies (sokui girei) which feature both music and singing in the Gagaku genre known as kuniburi no utamai—and at the “local” level of smaller festival, in which Gagaku almost always plays a role. When live performances are not an option, shrines often broadcast Gagaku recordings as a diffuse “atmospheric” element of their daily life. However, “unlike Japanese Buddhist musical traditions, the sound culture in Shinto is more difficult to grasp” (Ōuchi 2021, 212). How can we make sense of the role of Gagaku within the overall sonic world of Shinto rituals?

As Ōuchi noticed, the “vagueness of the definition of Shinto” is itself an impediment (2021, 212). With much internal variation, it is difficult to draw an overall picture of the role of specific sounds, performing arts, or even utterances. This is in stark contrast with Buddhism, which has an extensive doctrinal repertoire and a long textual tradition regulating – and often warning against – the use of music (see e.g. Kataoka 1984; Mabbett 1993; Reehl 2021). Nevertheless, the lack of classification of acoustic events fulfilling specific ritual functions in Shinto has been partly remedied by the work of religious studies specialists who introduced (field) recordings into their research methods. The most notable example is Kikkawa (2013), who included in a CD anthology both ritual music and “ritual sounds used for specific ritual purposes, such as beginning the ritual, inviting deities, and opening the doors of the kami altar, and the recitation of norito and purification invocations” (Ōuchi 2021, 213). Here, however, the role of full-fledged music performances in the construction of an overall atmosphere is obfuscated by the predominant focus on spoken formulae.

To shed light on the complex relationship between sound and the ritual domain within Shinto, my paper presents the preliminary findings of an ethnographic project with small-scale, amateur Gagaku groups in Shiga prefecture, to the East of Kyoto. Completely unmapped by the official lists of Gagaku practitioners, these informal gatherings are often a very local affair (Takuwa 2015). In places like Kasuga shrine, in Une village north of lake Biwa, the small Une gagakukai group comprises just five senior male members, one serving as the shrine kannushi. Yet, in a survey conducted by Takuwa Satoshi and his colleagues at Kyoto City University of Arts, tens of groups were surveyed in the surroundings of Kyoto. In every case, a strong connection between Gagaku and Shinto rituals was observed.

The complex question of how we should categorize such small “communities of practice” (Wenger 1998) within the Gagaku world has been answered differently by different scholars. For example, Terauchi (2010) highlighted the emergence of “folk Gagaku groups” (minkan gagaku dantai) as a characteristically postwar phenomenon, driven by the gradual opening up of the once-secluded world of courtly rituals. On the other hand, traditional scholarship on “court music” tends to contrast the centralized and “orthodox” Gagaku tradition of the Imperial Household musicians in Tokyo with countless local “versions” of Bugaku dances, which, in a faraway past, may have been related to the mainstream tradition (Tōgi 1968; Takuwa 2007). Clearly, “folk Gagaku” differs significantly from the imperial tradition, which holds the most cultural capital. Consequently, there is a tension between musical and ritual practices that may even seem incompatible or unrelated. The question I explore is to what extent local rituals depart from the orthopraxis that dictates how Gagaku should be embedded in Shinto rituals, and how these differences correlate with variations in both “ritual structures and processes”, “elements and domains” (Grimes 2013, 283–93).

In my presentation, I advocate a “sonic turn” in religious studies (Hackett 2016). By emphasizing the significance of field recordings and other sonic materials, I address a widespread “disciplinary deafness” (Weiner 2009, 897) that still privileges texts over the sensuous dimensions of lived religion. Following Steven Feld, I suggest sketching an “acoustemology” of Shinto sound culture (Feld 2015) and framing it in the inherently comparative context of recent calls to embrace a study of “religious concepts and sensibilities [that] leak outside of the category of sacred music” considering the wider field of auditory experience (Lorea 2024, 20; see also Giolai 2025). Reaching a better understanding of the role of acoustic events in rituals “by taking seriously what we hear and by considering sounds as modalities of knowledge and makers of culture in their own right” (Lorea 2024, 20), I propose that we challenge traditional approaches of religious studies and performance studies specialists and promote instead an integrated understanding of how sounds make (Shinto) rituals, and how (Shinto) rituals make sound.