Enka - Musical Style

Musical Style

Modern enka's mainstream scale is called "Yonanuki Tan-Onkai" (ヨナ抜き短音階?) or "Minor Scale without Four and Seven (re and sol)," and is a modified version of "Yonanuki Chō-Onkai" (ヨナ抜き長音階?) or "Major Scale without Four and Seven (Fa and Ti)," which came from an older Japanese scale, the "Ryo Scale" (呂音階, Ryo Onkai?). One of the earliest Japanese songs that was said to have partly used it is Rentarō Taki's "Kōjō no Tsuki," which was called shōka (唱歌?) or "school song" in the Meiji period. The seventh- scale degree is not used in "Kōjō no Tsuki", a song of B minor.

The music, based on the pentatonic scale, has some resemblance to blues (which has been duly noted by Japanese-American enka singer Jero). Enka lyrics are usually written similarly around the themes of love and loss, loneliness, enduring hardships, and persevering in the face of difficulties, even suicide or death. Although enka is a genre of kayōkyoku, it is considered to be more expressive and emotional, though there is no clear consensus on the matter.

Archetypal enka singers employ a style of melisma—where a single syllable of text is sung while moving between several different notes in succession—known as kobushi. Kobushi occurs when the pitch of the singer's voice fluctuates irregularly within one scale degree: This compares with vibrato, which vibrates in a regular cycle. The kobushi technique is not limited to enka, as can be heard in the Italian song "Santa Lucia." In the late 1930s and early '40s, the music of composer Masao Koga began to resemble Buddhist shomyo-chanting possibly because his record label asked him to produce music. Although Koga became a composer whose work is considered seminal to the creation of the genre, present-day enka is different from Koga's primary music because the singing styles of many postwar singers were different from the kobushi of Koga's musical note. Modern enka singer Takeshi Kitayama himself admitted in 2006, "I was even confused because musical note was different from that of an old singer."

Enka suggests a traditional, idealized, or romanticized aspect of Japanese culture and attitudes. Enka singers, predominantly women, usually perform in a kimono or in evening dress. Male enka performers tend to wear formal dress, or in some performances, traditional Japanese attire. Nods to traditional Japanese music are common in enka. The melodies of enka are fundamentally Western harmonies, and electronic instruments are used, such as synthesizers and electric lead guitar with plenty of distortion, but its musical instruments also include traditional Japanese instruments such as the shakuhachi and the shamisen.