蓄音器の日本

Before radio, the gramophone carried the voices of Japan's theatres and concert rooms into homes across the country. These discs, all from the Nipponophone label between the mid-1910s and 1925, are kept and published by the National Diet Library in Tokyo, and stream here from its servers.

The set moves through the sung and narrative arts of the era. It opens with nō: the first Kanze Kiyuki chanting Hagoromo on an early disc. Then the Osaka puppet theatre: the third Takemoto Ōsumidayū in the Tsubosaka play of 1915, then Toyotake Roshō, the most celebrated woman gidayū chanter of her time, in 1923. Satsuma biwa follows with Nagata Kinshin's Shiroyama, Saigō Takamori's last stand, then the nagauta dance piece Tomoyakko, a Chikuzen biwa tale from the Russo-Japanese War, and a naniwabushi story of the forty-seven rōnin. Between them comes a young Miyagi Michio with the shakuhachi player Yoshida Seifū, a few years before 'Haru no Umi'. After the koto classic Rokudan, it closes with Echigo-jishi, the 1811 nagauta dance piece, complete on six sides.

These are acoustic recordings, made before microphones: expect surface noise, a narrow range, and long works split across several three-minute sides. They play in Safari, Chrome and Edge.