Progress of this acquisition was indexed by gauging children’s sensitivities to musical scale membership (differentiating scale-tones from non-scale-tones) and differences in tonal stability among scale tones (differentiating the tonic from another scale tone). We examined how Japanese children acquire tonal schemata in a bi-musical culture characterized by the simultaneous, and unbalanced, appearances of Western (dominant) music along with traditional Japanese (non-dominant) music. The acquisition process of tonal schemata has been delineated in Western mono-musical children, but cross-cultural variations have not been explored. Tonal schemata are shaped by culture-specific music exposure. This will lead to some tentative conclusions about the extent and nature of bi-musicality in Japan. Then some individual case studies will be presented of people whose bi-musicality has been central to their musical activity. The discussion will focus first on the societal level, that is, Japan as a bi-musical culture. The application of the concept of bi-musicality to music in modern Japan offers a new perspective on Japan’s musical modernity. In considering the relevance of bilingualism to the development of bi-musicality as an aspect of bi-culturality, I will argue that bilingualism as such is not so relevant to Japanese music, because early in Japan’s modern period Western music was effectively ‘translated’ into Japanese culture. It establishes a model of musical competence as a preliminary to considering bi-musical competence, and schematizes the differences between Japanese and Western musical cultures for this purpose.
It considers the usefulness and limitations of the comparison of language and music.
This paper explores bi-musicality in modern Japan, and compares it with bilinguality at societal and individual levels.