Japanese mouth organ. It is descended from the Chinese Sheng, of which shō is the Japanized pronunciation, and is used in various genres of gagaku (court music). The Japanese version has 17 bamboo pipes (two of which have no reed), a lacquered wood bowl and a short mouthpiece.
Six mouth organs are preserved in the 8th-century Shōsōin imperial repository in Nara; three are shō and three are the larger u (i.e. Chinese yu). All had 17 pipes and long curving detachable mouthpieces. The u soon disappeared from Japanese music, although it was artificially revived briefly in the late 19th century.
Two of the 17 pipes of the modern shō are silent – with neither reed nor soundhole. This situation is thought to have come about by the 10th century, although a convincing reason for such a development has yet to be discovered. It seems likely that all 17 pipes sounded on the Shōsōin instruments. The long mouthpiece also disappeared over the centuries. (The Korean saenghwang underwent a somewhat different development.)
Although resembling the sheng, the shō is unique in its musical applications. In the vocal genres saibara and rōei it plays a single-note melody in support of the voice (occasionally adding a second note); in tōgaku, however, except during the introductory sections (chōshi and netori), its part consists entirely of tone clusters known as aitake. Each of the ten basic aitake chords is linked with a particular degree of the tōgaku scale, which is usually also the lowest note of the chord. The chords are chosen to correspond with the main melody note. Each chord contains five or six notes, all of which, as Garfias (1975) has pointed out, are within seven consecutive 5ths of the fundamental note. It is these ethereal tone clusters, slowly swelling and fading, then reforming in anticipation of the next main melodic shift, which give modern gagaku much of its distinctive flavour. (The sheng was reimported from China with minshingaku music and is played in the contemporary Chinese way in that context.)
The Shō has, like other court instruments, attracted the interest of modern composers, from Takemitsu to Tōgi Mideki (the son of a court musician, now a ‘pop’ star of sorts).
Another Japanese character, pronounced the same but written differently, refers to a separate instrument, a set of Panpipes derived from the Chinese paixiao (see China, §III) and the Korean so. An example survives from the 8th-century Shōsōin imperial repository, although it soon became largely obsolete in Japan.
S. Kishibe and L. Traynor: ‘On the Four Unknown Pipes of the Shō’, Tōyō gakuhō, xxxv/1 (1952), 50–72
W.P. Malm: Japanese Music and Musical Instruments (Rutland, VT, 1959/R)
K. Masumoto: Gagaku (Tokyo, 1968)
R. Garfias: Music of a Thousand Autumns (Berkeley, 1975)
Gagaku (I), 2 CDs, Nippon Columbia COCF-6194/5
Tōgi Hideki, CD, Toshiba TOCT-9340
DAVID W. HUGHES