The Japanese Tradition and Beyond:
Instrumentation in The Sound of a Voice

by Brian Bergstrom

In their production of The Sound of a Voice, David Henry Hwang and Philip Glass perform a melding of cultural influences and methods of dramatic storytelling that blurs the line between East and West, the ancient and the avant-garde, musical and ‘straight’ theater. This spirit of boundary-breaking exploration can also be seen in Philip Glass’s musical score, which is the first he has composed for non-Western instrumentation. Taking the Japanese roots of the piece as a springboard, Glass incorporates instruments from throughout Asia and thus shows how these rich musical traditions fed off of each other during their long histories of transformation and development.

Prominent among these are the shakuhachi and the pipa. The shakuhachi is a long flute of very ancient origin that plays a large part in the first section of The Sound of a Voice. Ultimately tracing its roots to China, the shakuhachi in Japan has been used since the 5th century in a traditional form of classical music called gagaku. The gagaku musical tradition fed into the development of the stylized and now more famous noh theatre, which also uses the musical accompaniment of a flute, along with drums and a chorus.

The pipa is also a Chinese instrument, although it has had considerable impact on the Japanese musical tradition as well. Introduced at around the 9th century into Japan, the pipa is a four-stringed lute-like instrument with a pear-shaped body and a relatively short neck. In Japanese, the characters used to write pipa are pronounced “biwa,” and after its introduction it became associated with blind performers who used to roam medieval Japan and were sometimes credited with mystical or prophetic properties. In China, the pipa is used occasionally in Beijing (or Peking) opera, and more extensively in the rarefied k’un chu operatic tradition. Compared to other stringed instruments used in traditional Chinese opera, the pipa is known for its more mellow, rounded tone.

Glass makes heavy use of drums in this piece, using a sixteen-piece percussion section in the first half and fourteen-piece one in the second. Among the percussion instruments he uses are the tar and the dumbeck, both from the Arab tradition. The tar is a circular drum that resembles a tambourine in shape, and similarly sometimes has metal discs jingling in its wooden frame. The dumbeck is a goblet-shaped drum used widely throughout the Middle East. Its presence here cites the somewhat similar taiko drum used in Japanese noh theatre, as does Glass’s use of woodblocks, which are used not only in noh but in the Chinese musical tradition as well. Rounding out Glass’s expansive percussion section are tom-toms, double-headed barrel drums that trace their roots back to India. These should not be confused with tam-tams, bronze gongs of varying diameters that are suspended within a large frame and struck by soft mallets.

The extensive use of percussion echoes the similar prominence of drums and rhythmic devices observable in the Japanese dramatic traditions The Sound of a Voice draws upon in its structure and themes. In kabuki drama, for example, woodblocks are used to accompany dances and punctuate the action on stage, while in noh, the taiko drums mentioned before make up the bulk of the music heard, their only accompaniment being the flute and the voices of the actors and chorus, as well as the players themselves shouting cues to one another in time with the beat. Rounding out the sonic picture are wind chimes, castanets, and finger cymbals, all of which, while now ubiquitous in the West, find their origins in Asia. Also used is a glockenspiel, a thoroughly Western instrument with a German name and set of metal bars aligned like a keyboard and struck with a hard mallet.

The unique instrumentation employed by Philip Glass in The Sound of a Voice echoes in its diversity the unique coming together of cultures that characterizes every other aspect of the production. Building on a sturdy foundation in Japanese mythology and stylized literary modernism, the production draws on the unique sounds and textures of other Asian, and even non-Asian, ingredients to create a whole that is all the more stunning in its deep emotional richness and complexity.

Brian Bergstrom is a PhD candidate in East Asian studies at the University of Chicago.