An Interview with Gagaku Expert Prof. Robert Garfias
Cultural News, November 2004
Anthropology Professor Robert Garfias at UC Irvine is a foremost expert of gagaku study in the U.S. (Photo by Fumie Iida)
By Fumie Iida
His infinite desire to study about music will never see its end.
Robert Garfias, professor of anthropology and a foremost expert of gagaku study in the United States, has mastered the study of music of all over the world, including the music of China, Korea, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippine, South America and Africa. In ethnomusicology, his field of research, he has been studying the relationship between humans and music.
He speaks as many as eight different languages, including fluent Japanese. He learned to speak those languages “just for my study.” Garfias appeared at the Reigakusha Gagaku Ensemble’s concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall on October 12, 2004, as a presenter.
In between performances, he introduced architect Frank Gehry, the designer of the hall, to the audience. Gehry, Garfias’ former gagaku student, said that it was his dream to have a gagaku concert in this hall in particular because the music influenced him on its design, as well as on his many other works.
“Many Japanese people tend to ask me why I am studying gagaku. I don’t see how people can stay so interested in such a simple thing,” Garfias says at his office in UC Irvine. “Gagaku has more than one thousand years of history. One thousand years. This is the reason. There is history to study and plenty of materials to study.”
Garfias, 72, started to study gagaku, Japanese traditional court music, in 1958 when he was a graduate student, majoring in ethnomusicology at UCLA. The idea of studying gagaku came from his professor Mantle Hood, a pioneer of ethnomusicology in the United States.
“Gagaku is so beautiful and so special. When biwa (lute), koto (Japanese harp), hichiriki (oboe) and sho (mouth organ) play together, they create great harmony,” Garfias says. Garfias says that in addition to the unique sound of gagaku, the unique form of the music attracts people of the west, especially western composers.
“Gagaku has a certain pattern of melody. Other Japanese music, such as nagauta, biwa, koto, kabuki and noh music, don’t have any pattern; they don’t repeat the same melody and just go one melody to another melody. Gagaku is like symphony. It’s more similar to music of the west,” he says.
Igor Stravinsky was one composer who was interested in gagaku. “He would tell me that he really wanted to study gagaku and compose music. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to accomplish his will,” Garfias says. On the contrary, Garfias says that a lot of Japanese people do not realize the value of their traditional arts. “Japanese people have some kind of inferiority complex about their own tradition. I really want them to appreciate and understand their own treasure,” he says.
Garfias stayed in Japan from 1958 to 1960 to study gagaku at the Imperial Household Agency’s gagaku department supported by a scholarship from the Ford Foreign Area Foundation. Garfias took lessons on every gagaku instrument, including sho, ryuteki, hichiriki and biwa. “To understand the music more, you need to play the music. I took seven to eight different lessons during the day and night while I was staying there,” he says.
After his study in Japan, he wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled “Music of a Thousand Autumns － The Togaku Style of Japanese Court Music.” This was the first doctoral dissertation about gagaku written in the United States. Garfias says that music reflects the social structure and the social notion of each country.
“In some societies, men start to sing and after they finish singing, women start to sing. In other societies, men and women sing together, or men and women are never allowed to sing together,” he says. Garfias says that instrumental music reflects a decadent society. “Gagaku flourished most in the Heian period, when noblemen were so absorbed in arts. It was the period of decadence in Japanese history.” Garfias says. “And so was Mozart in the west.”
By contrast, a society that emphasizes song with text is a very moral society. In the Muromachi period, noh was the most popular form of music. Noh taught people how to behave and how to remove their attachment through the text. “It’s like the sixties. People listened to jazz, instrumental music. Then, after the Beatles, everything was vocal. They told people how to behave and how to dress,” he says.
In his two classes at UC Irvine “Music as Expressive Culture” and “Global Popular Music,” he teaches the concept of music, culture and society. “Music as Expressive Culture” is very popular among students and the classroom is consistently filled to capacity in spite of it being offered early in the morning.
“Many students, most of them are Asian students, don’t know about their own countries’ music. I think they want to make sure of their identity by studying their music,” Garfias says. Garfias has his own web site, www.socsci.uci.edu/rgarfias that introduces his study about ethnomusicology, including gagaku. It also contains some music samples that he recorded during live performances.
“It’s really interesting to have my own web page and communicate with people from all over the world,” he says. Garfias says that he would like to study about Turkish music over the next few years. Of course, he has already learned the Turkish language.
“As I get older more and more, I have come to have a great deal of curiosity,” he says, “I think I am very happy that I have been able to continue studying what I like.”
Fumie Iida is a freelance writer. After graduating from Waseda University, she worked at an advertising agency in Tokyo for five years. She was a staff writer, photographer and assistant sports editor of the El Camino College newspaper Union. She came to the United States in 2002 to study American journalism and public relations.