Mikagura (Imperial Court Shinto Music)

Mikagura is the form of court kagura performed in the Kashiko-dokoro, the inner sanctuary of the Tokyo Imperial Palace, by musicians of the Imperial Household Agency's Music Department. It uses a small ensemble of wagon (six-stringed zither), kagurabue (kagura flute), hichiriki (double-reed pipe) and shakubyoshi (wooden clappers), with two solo singers — a moto-utai (lead) and a sue-utai (response) — exchanging the lines of ancient sung poems. Tempo is extraordinarily slow and dynamics are level; the music is meant to be heard against silence and is rarely performed before public audiences.

The mikagura repertoire was assembled at the Heian imperial court in the 10th and 11th centuries to accompany annual Shinto rites such as the December Mikagura-no-Gi at the Kashiko-dokoro. Transmission has been continuous through hereditary court musician families now organized under the Music Department of the Imperial Household Agency. The score 'Kashiko-dokoro Mikagura-fu' codifies the canonical sequence, and the music has been preserved essentially unchanged across the Edo, Meiji and modern eras.

Attention is best spent on the spaces between events — the pause after the wagon plays a chord, the breath before the singer enters, the way the hichiriki shapes a single sustained tone over several seconds. The interaction between the two singers (moto and sue) is antiphonal and unhurried. Compared with folk kagura the absence of percussion is total.

Official recordings by the Music Department of the Imperial Household Agency, particularly of 'Niwabi' and 'Achime no Saho', are the only readily available document of the tradition. Listen in a quiet room rather than on headphones in transit; the music's pacing depends on a silent acoustic frame.

The Music Department traces its institutional ancestry to court musicians active in the 8th and 9th centuries, making it arguably the world's oldest continuously functioning musical body. Musicians traditionally train from childhood within a small number of hereditary families and are forbidden from altering the transmitted repertoire.