Catalog of Shōdan:
Oshirabe
Oshirabe is a short musical piece heard before a play. The musicians perform it in the anteroom, separated from the audience by the lowered curtain. It announces that the performance is about to begin and establishes the expressive character of the play. The Oshirabe offers a transition from everyday life to the art of theater.
Oshirabe means ‘to tune,’ and it refers to the musicians adjusting their instruments, so it is not considered an actual module (shōdan) of a play. The tuning is important because each percussionist reassembles his instrument right before a performance, and no sound-making is permitted behind the stage. It is the musicians' first opportunity to hear and adjust their instruments. The tuning does not involve attempts to match one another's pitch. Instead, the musicians tune to the play’s kurai, or its overall atmosphere.
The performers sit in a prescribed order, facing the curtain: from left to right sit the nohkan, kotsuzumi, ōtsuzumi, and taiko, if one is used in the play. The musicians introduce the sound of the instruments one at a time. The nohkan player opens and closes the Oshirabe with the pattern: ho ho ho fu fu, interposed by the three patterns: ho hya riu, ho hiu hiu, and ro ra riu. The staggered entrance of the percussion instruments follows the seating order, so the kotsuzumi enters shortly after the nohkan, followed by the others.
The three-part nohkan’s melody, with its first and third parts in the low range, middle one in its higher register, and the prescribed sequenced entrance of the percussion instruments, is common to all Oshirabe. But differences in its performance help set different moods. One obvious difference between Kokaji and Hashitomi’s Oshirabe is the timbre, since Kokaji's instrumentation includes a taiko, whereas Hashitomi's does not. Subtle differences can also help set distinct moods. For instance, the performance of Hashitomi’s Oshirabe in our recordings is longer than Kokaji’s by more than twenty seconds, suggesting that the musicians felt that longer durations were appropriate to set the mood for a play about a young woman or a flower, compared with shorter durations for a play featuring a dynamic deity. Because all Oshirabe consist of the same musical material, the audience can pick up on its unique, expressive inflection. After finishing and before entering the stage, the musicians bow to each other, reinforcing their unity as a group.