In my previous post, I showed how the first movement of Rokudan no shirabe fits into Koizumi’s tetrachord/nuclear tone theory.

While doing research at Osaka university of arts, I made a diagram and chart showing the similarities between the first movements of all the different danmono.

(rokudan means six steps/movements….dan means step, mono means thing, in this case music)

I was thinking about Rokudan again recently, and made the flash file in my last post showing how the song functions in the nuclear tone theory, but as I listened to the 2nd, 3rd and following movements, I realized, there are parallels.
I wrote each movement out by hand in western notation.  I found this very interesting because a lot of phrases line up with each other.  I started thinking that perhaps Yatsuhashi Kengyo, the composer of the piece, had used some sort of system or premeditated method to write each movement.

I went to the library and found a book called “The 13 riddles of Yatsuhashi Kengyou” by Mayumi Tsuriya.  In this book she proposes that each individual movement is actually borrowed from an older form of shamisen solo music called “Sugagaki”.  She listed 5 different sugagaki as being the roots of movements 1 through 5.

I have only compared one Sugagaki to the first movement by doing an audio comparison.  I played both pieces on the koto side by side and mixed them L and R in stereo.  The result was pretty accurate and lined up overall.

I will seek out the manuscript of the other 4 sugagaki and see if I can match the five up to prove that the only original part of Rokudan is the last movement.