琵琶

How to listen

Whatever the type, the biwa is a plucked instrument with a wide plectrum, usually of boxwood, and much of its character comes from how that plectrum is used. It can sound a single string, sweep across several in a spread chord, or strike the body for a percussive accent. A Japanese encyclopedia names this varied use of the plectrum as the mark of Japanese biwa music, and as something that later shaped the shamisen.

In court music the biwa is not a melody instrument. In gagaku the gakubiwa marks the beat and the turning points of each phrase with broken chords, alongside the koto, while the winds carry the tune.

In the narrative styles the instrument works differently. The singer chants the story and the biwa answers between lines. On the Satsuma biwa the frets stand high off the neck, so a player can press a string to bend its pitch upward, and the instrument has a buzzing resonance called sawari.

The family

The court instrument, the gakubiwa, is large and heavy, with four strings and four frets. It is played with a small plectrum and does not accompany singing.

A second line came through Kyūshū. Blind monks there, the mōsō, chanted sutras to a slimmer biwa in rites for the gods of the hearth and for good harvests. It survives today only in a few places.

The heike biwa accompanied heikyoku, the chanting of the Tale of the Heike, the war epic of the fall of the Taira clan. Blind biwa priests, the biwa hōshi, performed it. Tradition credits its beginning to a blind monk named Shōbutsu at the end of the twelfth century, and it took shape by the middle of the Kamakura period. Scholars still debate whether it grew from the court instrument or from the blind monks' line. Heikyoku is the oldest living Japanese narrative art.

The Satsuma biwa began in the sixteenth century in the south of Kyūshū. By tradition the lord Shimazu Tadayoshi borrowed the blind monks' instrument to set moral songs for his samurai. After the Meiji Restoration it spread across Japan. The Chikuzen biwa, from northern Kyūshū, was established in the Meiji era by Tachibana Kyokuō, a blind monk, drawing on Satsuma biwa and shamisen music.

The biwa today

Interest in the biwa fell as Western music took hold in Japan, and by the late 1940s it was close to abandoned. It has since been revived by players and composers. The Satsuma biwa player Tsuruta Kinshi (1911–1995) developed her own instrument and style. With the composer Tōru Takemitsu she created works such as November Steps and Eclipse, which won the biwa an international audience.

Questions

What is a biwa?

The biwa is a Japanese short-necked lute with a pear-shaped body, usually with four strings and a few tall frets, played with a wooden plectrum. It descends from the Chinese pipa and reached Japan around the Nara period.

What is the difference between the biwa and the pipa?

They share an ancestor and a pear-shaped body. The Japanese biwa kept a few tall frets and is played with a plectrum. The Chinese pipa developed many frets and, in its northern solo style, a fingernail technique.

What is heikyoku?

Heikyoku is the chanting of the Tale of the Heike to the accompaniment of the biwa, performed by blind biwa priests from the Kamakura period on. It is the oldest narrative art still passed down in Japan.