Paper short abstract:

<b></b>This paper will introduce and interrogate Ogyū Sorai's Treatise on Music Tones (Gakuritsukō 楽律考) showing why music had become a pressing issue for the leaders and intellectuals of the period and analyzing the rhetorical appeals and ideological presuppositions of Sorai's response.

Paper long abstract:

In the 1720s, Ogyū Sorai was tasked by Yoshimune to collate and critique the shogunal collection of music-related works. Central to the results of this enterprise - and, indeed, to a little-known "musical turn" in the intellectual trajectory of one of early modern Japan's most influential thinkers - was Sorai's musical treatise Gakuritsukō 楽律考.

Music mattered to Sorai and Yoshimune for two reasons. First, ritual music had a direct impact on the diplomatic status of the Tokugawa relative to other status figures inside and outside of Japan. This was exemplified by the Korean embassies, whose musicians claimed to be performing the music of the sages. Japan's best response came from gagaku court musicians. Both claims to musical orthodoxy - the Korean and the Japanese - were, however,　disadvantageous to the Tokugawa vis-à-vis both their continental counterparts and the imperial court in Kyoto.

Second, music summarized in a visceral way the issue of a changing popular culture. The principle examples here are the love-suicide dramas and their real life imitators - phenomena that symbolised the nefarious influence of "vulgar" music and led directly to government intervention in musical practice.

In Gakuritsukō, Sorai calculated the "correct" mathematical measurement of the tones, stating that, although these had been lost in China, they were preserved in ancient texts and instruments in Japan - and that specialist philological and organological analysis could unlock their secrets. There was, therefore, an opportunity for the shogunate to establish its own legitimacy over and above that of its peers if it were to use these tones to "restore" a properly Confucian ritual programme of musical performance.

Time is central to Sorai's musico-philosophical project in that music (*the* temporal art) is, according to Confucian orthodoxy, the most profound expression of societal harmony - or, as with love-suicides, a troubling symptom of degeneracy and disharmony. For the Sorai of the musical treatise, music was a temporalization, an actualisation, of otherwise shadowy fundamental beliefs. But it was not simply a one-way reflection: it was also an avenue through which a re-making of society could be attempted, via the correct regulation of musical tones.