POPULAR SONG OF THE MEIJI ERA, SUMMARY     
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　2012/01/14   KODAMA Takeshi

In this study I first identified the most popular songs, or rather I should say standard numbers in the Meiji period, through their occurrence frequency in the songbooks from Kindai Digital Library of the National Diet Library.　I also noticed that annual numbers and properties of the songbooks in the KDL obviously imply noticeable events and movements in this field.　Then I verified the reliability of the various kinds of notations in the songbooks of the time, recorded them as Western staff and sound, and clarified the prominent characteristics of zokuyo, gunka/shoka and heitaibushi:　My principal conclusions through the above study are as follows:
　　Zokuyo occupied the overwhelming majority in the world of popular song and gunka led by far the field of the new Western-style song throughout the Meiji era.
　　Gunka first emerged as a collection of war themed lyrics without melody with numerous reprints that made a nationwide publication boom in Meiji 19-20.　Soldiers had no chance but to sing them spontaneously to various tunes called heitaibushi.　Although most of the important gunka with new Western melody had already appeared in songbooks by the year of Sino-Japanese War, the ‘gunka without melody’ made the second publication boom Meiji 25-27. This new genre of songs peculiar to this transitional period continued to be sung until Showa era.  
　　Popularization of mingshingaku brought the 4-7-nuki major scale in the earliest years of Meiji 10s, that is, earlier than the popularization of gunka and shoka.　The kon-chie (gongche) notation played a great role in the dissemination of not only mingshingaku but also zokuyou, gunka and shoka.
　　Since middle years of Meiji 20s most songbooks began to be entitled with names of various instruments and to carry all three genres of songs with staff, numeral or kon-chie (gongche) notations. Nihon Zokkyoku-shuu, written by Army Band leaders and published by an instrument store in Meiji 25 took initiative in this movement.　Songs of zokuyo in the songbooks hereafter followed the selection by Nagai and Kobatake, and greatly differ from those of Meiji 10s except the two most frequent songs in the KDL, dodoitsu and otsu-e.　　
　　The biggest publication boom of shoka occurred in Meiji 33-35 just after the explosive hit of Tetsudou-shoka, the first shoka that really became a popular song in the time, published by the same instrument store as that of Nihon Zokkyoku-shu.        
　　The important characteristics of zokuyo are use of colloquial language, various syllabic structures, also frequent comical or ironical expressions, offbeat starting and syncopation, and sophisticated melodies with frequent sharps and flats.　Prominent points in the melodic structures of zokuyo are:
The ‘four basic scales’ and the ‘four fundamental tetra-chords’ advocated by Koizumi Fumio based on children songs hardly fit the above songs.　In some inakabushi melodies the difference between ritsu-TC and minyo-TC does not make sense.　Some zokuyo melodies have pairs of variations, insen and yosen as Uehara Rokushiro pointed out.　Among all genres of Meiji popular song, melodies of dodoitsu has the closest relation to the high-low-intonation of spoken Tokyo region dialect.
　　Contrary, gunka and shoka use literary language, strict repetition of 7-5-cho, pyonko-beat, and 4-7-nuki melody.　The noticeable is a few exceptions:　InYukinoshingun (Meiji 28) soldiers express evident distrust of the Army authority in colloquial, with frequent syncopation.         

　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Thesis 　　　　　　　　　　　 Top-page