Conference Agenda

The first paper will clarify the characteristics of the KATADA Kiyozō collection and the importance of its digital Archiving the Kiyozō collection. The repertoire of kabuki, Japanese traditional theatre, can be broadly divided into two categories: theatrical plays and dance pieces. KATADA Kiyozō (1924-2000) was a kabuki musician who played narimono (percussions) both in plays and dance pieces. He left behind many materials for his own memory and practice, collecting over 1,000 items, including tsukechō (notes on musical direction), music scores, scripts with musical direction handwritten in the margins, cassette tapes containing recordings of performances and rehearsals and so on. The defining qualities of his collection are the relative recency of the materials' dates and the large number of detailed musical scores it contains. By compiling these into a database and analyzing them, it will be possible to reveal the actual state of kabuki in the latter half of the 20th century through music and sound. Although the multiple materials left behind by such musicians are extremely valuable for research, very few are currently available to the public. The aim of this project is to build a digital archive of this collection and to lay the groundwork for its wider use in academic research both in Japan and abroad. This paper will outline the distinctive features of our project, in which we collaborate with KATADA Kisayo — Kiyozō’s daughter and successor — to compile and analyze materials, and to document the first phase of archiving work and the challenges involved.

This presentation examines the archiving, accessibility, and current state of kabuki research with specific examples to situate the digital archiving of musical materials within the broader landscape of kabuki scholarship. Kabuki studies originally centered on performance history and dramatic literature. Consequently, published materials such as banzuke (playbills and programs) and reviews were catalogued and digitized early. Play scripts, which form the core of theatre studies, were also transcribed and published at an early stage. Beyond such text-based materials, ukiyo-e research has also flourished internationally due to extensive digital archiving and fewer translation barriers compared to specialized notations like cursive script (kuzushi-ji). Recently, scholarly interest has shifted toward how performances were staged, making the clarification of visual and auditory effects a pressing concern. However, this requires internal theater documents that were not intended for public circulation. Historically, sources like tsukechō (notes on musical direction) and scores were produced for practical use within the theater rather than public distribution; as a result, most musical documents remained private. Even today, they are typically held in private collections with almost no digital preservation. Furthermore, their specialized nature often requires specific expertise and collaboration with musicians to be fully understood. In light of these circumstances, this paper argues that public access to and use of the Kiyozō Collection will broaden the basis for the study of kabuki music and help address persistent scholarly imbalances within the field

How can performer-written materials help us study kabuki music? This paper addresses that question through materials in the KATADA Kiyozō Collection, which includes notebooks, memoranda, tsukechō (notes on musical direction), and related documents. Used, revised, and preserved privately by kabuki musicians, such materials have rarely been accessible to others. Even when available, their descriptions—often a mixture of pattern names, abbreviated wording, and symbols—are difficult to interpret without practical knowledge. For this reason, earlier studies on kabuki music have often remained divided by material type, separating research on music selection for particular scenes (Kageyama 1992; Tsuchida 2014) from studies of musical content (Malm 1967). The KATADA Kiyozō Collection offers an important basis for reconsidering this issue. It encompasses a wide range of material types and preserves records accumulated by an individual performer over several decades. Within this collection, works such as Suō-otoshi, Tomoyakko, Shiokumi, and Musume Dōjōji are documented in multiple records across different formats and, in some cases, at different times. In such a group of materials, even fragmentary descriptions may become legible when related sources within and beyond the collection are read together in relation to repertory, performance occasions, and performers’ own acts of documentation. Through these considerations, the paper clarifies the analytical value of performer-written materials for examining the practical transmission of kabuki music.

While this panel introduces the KATADA Kiyozō Collection and its significance for present-day kabuki music, this presentation focuses on the translation of the database’s usability and functionality for the collection and English metadata for item-level records from the collection to address a central issue: how to disseminate native archival materials beyond a limited circle of specialists. Drawing on my experience as a translator of archival sources—including historical materials in the Geidai Archives and the The Heritage of Kyūshū Style Jiuta CD series—I examine the challenges involved in translating highly personal and practice-based performance documents for an international audience. A key methodological issue concerns whether and how the collection’s materials, including performer annotations, memoranda, and tsukechō (directions for musical content), should be transcribed, and what forms may most effectively communicate their musical and performative meaning more deeply. This presentation also considers translation strategies that can convey both the literal meaning of the texts and the symbolic dimensions of kabuki music—its instruments, sonic structures, and performance practices—as interpreted by kabuki practitioners. By addressing the above concerns, and fostering open discussions with the audience, this presentation aims to develop approaches that maintain integrity while expanding accessibility. Translating is more than understanding word to word conversions. Translations become the influential base in how native materials will come to be understood more broadly, and how the translated music’s newer forms will come to be judged both inside and outside its historical and contemporary contexts.