Traditional Japanese music is the folk or traditional music of Japan. Japan's Ministry of Education classifies hōgaku (邦楽, lit. 'Japanese music') as a category separate from other traditional forms of music, such as gagaku (court music) or shōmyō (Buddhist chanting), but most ethnomusicologists view hōgaku, in a broad sense, as the form from which the others were derived. Outside of ethnomusicology, however, hōgaku usually refers to Japanese music from around the 17th to the mid-19th century. Within this framework, there are three types of traditional music in Japan: theatrical, court music, and instrumental.
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Traditional Japanese music in the context of Iemoto
Iemoto (家元, lit. 'family foundation') is a Japanese term used to refer to the founder or current Grand Master of a certain school of traditional Japanese art. It is used synonymously with the term sōke (宗家) when it refers to the family or house that the iemoto is head of and represents.
The word iemoto is also used to describe a system of familial generations in traditional Japanese arts such as tea ceremony (including sencha), ikebana, Noh, calligraphy, traditional Japanese dance, traditional Japanese music, the Japanese art of incense appreciation (kōdō), and Japanese martial arts. Shogi and Go once used the iemoto system as well. The iemoto system is characterized by a hierarchical structure and the supreme authority of the iemoto, who has inherited the secret traditions of the school from the previous iemoto.
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