Shinto Music and Songs (Harich-Schneider Field Recordings, 1954)

A body of field recordings of Shinto music and songs made in Japan in 1954 by Eta Harich-Schneider, a German harpsichordist, musicologist and Japanologist who had taught at the Court Music Department of the Imperial Household Agency from 1947 to 1949 and who made the recordings under a Guggenheim Fellowship. They survive as part of her wider collection of Japanese field recordings, held by the Library of Congress American Folklife Center as "Eta Harich-Schneider recordings of Japanese music" (AFC 1957/010), whose own research guide names Shinto music and songs alongside imperial court music, Buddhist temple music and medieval court songs as distinct components of the collection. Harich-Schneider later drew on this fieldwork for her scholarly history of Japanese music, and recordings of her Shinto and Buddhist material were separately released through the publisher Barenreiter.