Category: On Music

Back before The Six Week Gap, I had started a series of posts in this category exploring the work of Japanese composers. I think I only lost three of those posts, but those were all the posts in the Japanese Composers series, so I guess now we’re just going to start over. Yay! [bangs head on desk]

Japan is a fascinating culture in just about all respects, but musically as well. It has its own music traditions that date back thousands of years, but since Japan’s opening to the West in the middle of the 19th century, the influence of Western music can be keenly felt in the classical traditions that emerged there starting in the early 20th century. Many Japanese musicians studied in the west before returning home, and not even the great conflagration of World War II could stem the tide of those influences. (In fact, it may be that the realities of the postwar era hastened those influences, but that’s for a more learned person than me to assess.) For years I have found enormous fascination in the concert music of Eastern Asia, and in Japan specifically, so that’s what I’m going to explore in this series.

The work with which I am re-starting this series is a superb example of what I often find in Japanese classical music: deeply pictorial music that borders on outright impressionism, bathed in orchestral color that is at times overwhelming, but all in service to a formal architecture that conveys emotion in ways that stand entirely outside the traditional forms of Western music.

Takashi Yoshimatsu was born in Tokyo in 1953, and while he did not have any particular musical upbringing in his early years, music captivated him in his teens and he went on to both study music formally and to perform rock music in bands. It’s interesting to see how similar this particular bio is among Japanese composers, or at least the ones I was reading about when I launched this series. This sort of thing cements my long suspicion that rock and classical are not so far apart as we like to believe…but while a lot of Japanese composers of Yoshimatsu’s generation worked in modernist and even avant garde traditions, Yoshimatsu seems to have kept his voice in the lyrical and even neo-Romantic traditions.

This work, Ode to Birds and Rainbow, was written in response to the death of Yoshimatsu’s sister. He apparently did not intend it as a requiem, or something so somber; he called it “an ode to a soul at play amongst the birds and a rainbow in the sky”. This definitely accounts for the work’s strongly emotional content. I have found this piece deeply moving, and in fact, moreso with each play-through.

Share This Post

As I continue working through this site’s new look and functionality on the back end, I suppose it’s time to figure out how posting music looks and works here. I haven’t listened to this in quite a while, but it’s always a delight to come back to: the ballet “Dance of the Hours” from Amilcare Ponchielli’s opera La Gioconda. The opera is one that to this day I’ve never heard, but it’s still a mainstay on the international repertoire, even though full stagings are infrequent because the opera’s complexity and scale makes it expensive to do. Ponchielli is almost entirely known now for La Gioconda and especially for the “Dance of the Hours”; his music now aside from those works is little heard. But he was influential in his day, and without Ponchielli we don’t get the likes of Puccini or Mascagni. Those kinds of composers are important to recognize and to hear, once in a while.

The “Dance of the Hours” is pure light and magic, utterly effervescent the entire way through. It depicts the march of an entire day’s time, and it comes at the end of the third act of the opera. Having just read a synopsis of the opera, I find myself wondering how this gloriously magical ballet works in the midst of a scene where guests have arrived at the home of an Inquisitor for what eventually turns out to be a fairly dark evening.

Share This Post

Jessie Montgomery’s atmospheric and cyclical work “Rounds” is up this week. The piece, for piano and strings, takes inspiration from poet TS Eliot:

Rounds for solo piano and string orchestra is inspired by the imagery and themes from T.S. Eliot’s epic poem Four Quartets. Early in the first poem, Burnt Norton, we find these evocative lines :

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

(Text © T.S. Eliot. Reproduced by courtesy of Faber and Faber Ltd)

In addition to this inspiration, while working on the piece, I became fascinated by fractals (infinite patterns found in nature that are self-similar across different scales) and also delved into the work of contemporary biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber who writes about the interdependency of all beings. Weber explores how every living organism has a rhythm that interacts and impacts with all of the living things around it and results in a multitude of outcomes.

Like Eliot in Four Quartets, beginning to understand this interconnectedness requires that we slow down, listen, and observe both the effect and the opposite effect caused by every single action and moment. I’ve found this is an exercise that lends itself very naturally towards musical gestural possibilities that I explore in the work – action and reaction, dark and light, stagnant and swift. (via)

Montgomery’s website has three bios available, marked Long, Medium, and Short! Here is the short bio:

Jessie Montgomery is a GRAMMY® Award-winning composer, violinist, and educator whose work interweaves classical music with elements of vernacular music, improvisation, poetry, and social consciousness, making her an acute interpreter of 21st-century American sound and experience. Named Performance Today’s 2025 Classical Woman of the Year, her profound works have been described as “turbulent, wildly colorful, and exploding with life” (The Washington Post), and are performed regularly by leading orchestras, ensembles, and soloists around the world. In June 2024, Montgomery concluded a three-year appointment as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence.

A founding member of PUBLIQuartet and former member of the Catalyst Quartet, Montgomery is a frequent and highly engaged collaborator with performing musicians, composers, choreographers, playwrights, poets, and visual artists alike. At the heart of Montgomery’s work is a deep sense of community enrichment and a desire to create opportunities for young artists and underrepresented composers to broaden audience experiences in classical music spaces.

Montgomery has been recognized with many prestigious awards and fellowships, including the Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, the Sphinx Medal of Excellence and Sphinx Virtuosi Composer-in-Residence, the Leonard Bernstein Award from the ASCAP Foundation, and Musical America’s 2023 Composer of the Year.

I have found Rounds a fascinating work to hear as its sounds cycle back and forth. It’s a work that hovers around the edges of rhythm and melody in a particularly abstract and atmospheric way. I love works like this! At times it’s almost Ravelian in its impressionistic color, at other times it’s purely modern.

Share This Post