Still listening to the Gagaku album......................
Here, for everyones' delectation, are the English liner notes:
Gagaku is the oldest of Japan's performing arts, with a history of more than one thousand years. At present it signifies in its widest sense the whole body of music and dance performed by the musicians of the Kunaichō Gakubu (Music Department of the Imperial Household Agency, Tōkyō ).
It is classified in terms of of its origins into three categories: 1. accompanied vocal music and dance of indigenous origin employed in Imperial and Shinto religious ceremony; 2. instrumental music and dance deriving from the Asian mainland, imported during the fifth through ninth centuries; and 3. saibara and rōei, accompanied vocal music originating at the Japanese court of the ninth to twelfth centuries.
The second category is subdivided into two classes according to the region of its origin: tōgaku, music of Chinese origin, is performed both as dance with accompaniment (bugaku) and as instrumental music without dance (kangen); komagaku, music of Korean origin, is performed only as a dance (bugaku).
Tōgaku dance is referred to as Dance of the Left (samai or sahō-no-mai), while komagaku is referred to as Dance of the Right (umai or uhō-no-mai).
The instrumental ensemble is made up of winds, strings, and percussion instruments; stringed instruments are, in principle, not used in bugaku. A single bugaku dance may contain a mumber of movements, and there are cases in which a piece common to both kangen and bugaku does not have the same musical structure in each repertoire. This is especially true in regard to rhythmic types and performance tempos.
