When I first heard the music which sort of fits the bill for what you might call “Japanese Classical Music” I could make no real musical sense out of it at all. I came to appreciate it, but my first impression was that it was noise punctuated by non-rhytmic drumbeats.
Similar story applies to Chinese opera.
What I’m wondering is, what was it like for, say, Japanese people when they first heard music from Europe? Did European music (classical or popular) strike non-European ears as being somehow non- or at least only problamtically musical? What records do we have of such encounters, if any?
-FrL-