Up to the advent of the samisen which brought about a complete change in the music in vogue among the people, the musical forms of the country had come to be the monopoly of the higher classes. The gagaku, or music of the Imperial Court, could not be heard on ordinary occasions, but was reserved for the highest functions. Transplanted from China in the early days of intercourse between the two countries, it was so far removed from affairs of everyday life as to belong to some celestial land. After a thousand years this ancient music is still heard at entertainments at Court, or in connection with Buddhist or Shinto ceremonies, and its slow and stately cadences produce a serenity in the minds of moderns that carries them back into an age when hurry was unknown. This music was too lofty, and beyond the grasp or enjoyment of the people, even if it had been accessible to them. Entertainment was afforded by the blind minstrels who played the biwa—an instrument not unlike a lute in shape. They sang and recited the melancholy adventures of the Heike, who were exterminated in their struggle with the Genji clan, in sad and tragic tones—sounding the very depths of negation. There was but little inspiration in this minstrelsy for the good people of the three towns hungering for romance. Likewise the Nō was reserved for the intellectuals, whose inner life had been sufficiently cultivated to appreciate its rarefied atmosphere of the unreal. Inseparable from the words and movements of the Nō were the rhythms of drum and flute, full of mystery, Buddhism, asceticism, its warriors and ghosts far removed from the world and its ways. Before the samisen’s supremacy, the minstrels who went about relating their stories scratched the ribs of their fans to form the beats necessary to their recitals, and priests who sang songs to popularise their scriptures beat their rhythms on the same metal gong as that employed by O-Kuni. So necessary was rhythm as an accompaniment to these ballads that the early minstrels shook a bundle of sticks, or waved a metal rod like a baton. With the greatly improved rhythms of the samisen at their command, minstrels sprang up in all directions, the new style of music being called Joruri, since the first ballad to be composed to the strains of the samisen concerned the love adventures of Joruri-hime, or Princess Joruri. Abundant materials were at hand, and the minstrels competed with each other in depicting the life of the time. The songs sung at festivals, by sailors, horsemen, farmers, vendors, were eagerly seized,—stories of battles and love, even religious propaganda formed the theme set to the ripple of the samisen.