Shomyo

Shomyo is the ritual chant of Japanese Buddhist temples, a unison melodic recitation of sutras and liturgical texts sung by monks in a slow, unmetered flow shaped by the contours of the words. Unaccompanied male voices move through long, ornamented phrases, sometimes dividing into overlapping parts that create a dense, shimmering sonority. Transmitted orally for more than a millennium within the Tendai and Shingon schools, shomyo preserves melodic formulas of great antiquity while remaining a living practice, heard at ceremonies such as the Dai Hannya rite and, in modern times, on recordings by *Junko Ueda* and *Midori Takada*.