| Тойм: | <p>This thesis examines the work of Yamada Kōsaku 山田耕筰 (1886-1965), a Japanese composer in the Western classical tradition. Scholarship to date has tended to ascribe to Yamada a substantial change in his identity, whereby his recognition of his Japanese nationality sometime before 1920 brought his music to its laudable maturity. I argue that this is a misinterpretation. Instead, any such shift was superficial, only rhetorical in nature, and overlaid a stable philosophical core. This philosophy can be defined as a modernist faith in totalizing unity.</p>
<p>A reassessment of Yamada’s biography demonstrates that there is no evidence of a substantial ‘Japanese turn’. Similarly, an examination of Yamada’s musical style, focusing on his influential ‘accent theory’ of song declamation, shows it to belong within an Austro-German discourse of song composition. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied there was some form of rhetorical shift. I describe this as a transition from a perspective of outward-looking cosmopolitanism to one of inward-looking nativism, and date it to a critical period around the early 1920s, on which this thesis focuses.</p>
<p>An analysis of Nursemaids’ Songs (AIYAN no uta AIYANの歌), a song cycle from 1922, reveals the ‘crisis of modernity’ that Yamada was facing. This was brought on by the failure of Yamada’s attempts to forge ‘unity through purity’, the method for engendering artistic and social harmony that was mandated by his theory of the ‘unified work of art’. However, Yamada’s close collaborator from 1922 onwards, the poet Kitahara Hakushū 北原白秋 (1885-1942), provided a solution to this ‘crisis of unity’ with his anti-intellectual ideology of the pure ‘heart of a child’ (dōshin 童心). The alignment that steadily developed between this ideology and the totalitarianism of the later Japanese Empire drove the transition in Yamada’s rhetoric towards an inward-looking nativism.</p>
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