I’m going to pause the exploration of Japanese composers for a bit, kind-of, because as I write this, the Autumnal Equinox is just under four hours away. The sun is scheduled to cross the equator at 8:05pm ET, and right now it’s–[checks watch]–[actually checks phone, I don’t currently wear a watch]–4:12pm. So, for the next bunch of weeks, I’ll be featuring autumnal music. I’ll likely be doing this up until Halloween.
But I don’t have to make the transition super sharp! I can feature Japanese autumnal music! Composer Toru Takemitsu wrote a lot of music inspired by autumn; apparently this season fueled his musical imagination quite a bit. So here is In an Autumn Garden, which Takemitsu wrote for gagaku orchestra. This is an orchestra comprised of Japanese instruments that was often used to perform the ceremonial music of court, as well as in Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. The work has the feel of religious chant to my ears.
I wanted to get back to Japanese music, but I didn’t get a lot of the pre-listening done this week that I like to do when I’m presenting music I’m not familiar with, so this week I’m going with something I’m very familiar with…but still Japanese! This is a cue from Kiki’s Delivery Service, music by the great Joe Hisaishi. It’s called “A Town With an Ocean View”. This is heard when young witch Kiki, on her first journey out into the real world, ends up in a city that’s much larger than anything she’s known before. She is amazed by its energy and bustle and beauty, and the music shows this so wonderfully.
I’ve noticed over the years that I gravitate toward stories that show cities as places of genuine magic….
Continuing our ongoing exploration of Japanese classical music, we have a work by composer Akira Nishimura.
Nishimura lived 1953-2023, dying of cancer just before he would have turned 70. He lived entirely, thus, in post-war Japan and saw his country’s rebuilding to an economic powerhouse (and then a protracted period of economic stagnation). Nishimura, like many of the other composers whose work I have been sampling, seems to have been mainly a Modernist in terms of his sound, specifically using a technique called Heterophony to great effect. This is when two or more voices perform simultaneously melodic lines that are very similar, but not identical. This results in a dense sound that presents at first like a wall of dissonant sound…but from which order can be gleaned through careful listening.
Here are notes on the work below, “Canticle of Light”, as written by the composer (from the YouTube description):
This piece is commissioned work by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, as their 50th Anniversary.
This piece was written with an image and an aim present to mind: The image: That a Light shines forth in the world as if an appearance were to emerge on the changing surface of a chaotic sea. From a beginning in silence, a multi-layered multi-textured structure of sound emerges. Oozing sound takes form and become Melody. Now taking on a certain shape, now another, it has the changing form of a Living Being. Then this chaos of sound converges into an Aura of the melody, indeed it surrounds and enfolds the melody. The Aura forms not only in vertical harmonic series but horizontally as well.
The aim: For the past several years, in my works I have sought to create an enveloping reality of sound, constructed by shaping musical texture from points and lines in a space of sound. However, at the point that I had completed my earlier work “Melos Aura” (1995) I founds that I had reached in the evolution of my works, a certain limit, or even a saturation point. Therefore for the present composition, I formed the intention to compose a piece which would use full orchestra, moving in both horizontal and vertical direction, to issue forth a melody, pouring it upward and out of the sweeping, massive sound of the orchestra.
This was accomplished because I was caught up in concrete desire to create a work in this particular way, yet I do not know whether this work can truly be said to be attached any longer to the concrete, physical domain from which it sprang. It has taken on a life of its own.
I find this work, “Canticle of Light” to be one created at a turning point. This piece represents a novel development my activity as a composer. (Akira Nishimura, 1998)
I have been finding a lot of this recent listening project to be an exercise in listening to abstract music that is mostly composed without the standard Western approach to melody. Mood without melody fascinates me, as much as painting without obvious representational subject does.
Staying with our exploration of the classical and concert music of Japan, we have something pretty interesting: a concerto for marimba and orchestra.
The marimba is likely the most fascinating of the percussion instruments, with its range and its earthy tone that is much less strident and cutting than its sister instrument, the glockenspiel. Our composer here, Takatomi Nobunaga, uses the marimba to great effect in a work that is both impressionistic and virtuosic in its demands on the soloist. And this work puts those demands on the marimbist (I’m assuming marimbist is a word, I’m going with it) almost immediately as the opening bars send the soloist on a wild display that puts the instrument’s range right up front and center. The remainder of the work is at times haunting, at other times enervating.
From what I’ve read. Takatomi Nobunaga is mostly known as a choral composer. I’m glad he composed this concerto, though.
When I do themed series in these weekly features, I usually try to avoid posting multiple works by the same composer. Why? Actually, I don’t know. It’s not like I’m working on any kind of limit here other than what I impose on myself, and I generally think limits are annoying enough without subjecting myself to them. So here we are, revisiting the music of Yasuji Kiyose (whom we heard just a couple weeks back).
In that earlier post, I featured a work for solo piano. Apparently Kiyose mostly worked in smaller forms for solo instruments or small ensembles, and this work appears to have had a similar genesis. As far as I can tell (real in-depth information about this piece is surprisingly hard to find), Kiyose arranged an earlier work of his for orchestra, resulting in Japanese Festival Dances. The result is colorful, energetic, and engaging. I enjoyed this work a great deal, and I hope you do as well!
Oops! Something has come up for tonight (a dog walk in the next town over), so I didn’t have time to get this week’s real post (which would have continued our exploration of Japanese composers) done. Here’s an operatic grand march instead, from Charles Gounod’s The Queen of Sheba.
Yasuji Koyose (1900-1981) was, among other things, a teacher of Toru Takemitsu, who could well be Japan’s greatest classical composer to date. His music incorporates Japanese tonalities and elements of Japanese folk song. This piece is not orchestral at all: here we take one of our infrequent detours into the world of the solo piano. Fairy Tale of the North is a moody work, solemn and meditative, that was apparently inspired by the composer’s impressions of the darkness of Japan’s north country, that he experienced in Morioka, a city in the north of Honshu. The piece has a familiar sound at first, but as it progresses it seems to get, well, stranger and stranger.
Atsutada Otaka (1944-2021) was a Japanese composer and teacher…and that is just about all of the biographical information I have been able to find about him. A longer (but not by much) biography can be found here.
The work in question today is a large-scale piece for organ and orchestra. I’m always surprised that organ-and-orchestra is not a combination encountered more often; the organ is, after all, the only single instrument that can stand toe-to-toe with the modern symphony orchestra in terms of the sheer sonic output it can generate. If your main impression of works for organ and orchestra is Saint-Saens’s Organ Symphony, then this piece, with its fiery dissonances, massive crashing chords, and slicing sonorities will come as something of a shock. It doesn’t get more purely modern than this.
Continuing our exploration of Japanese composers, we dig back now to one of the early voices of Japanese classical music. (By “early”, I mean, the period when Japan, relatively newly opened to the influences of the Western world, started producing music in what we recognize as “Classical music”. None of this is to suggest that Japan was a culture devoid of music until the West came along.) The composers of that early period tended, therefore, to reflect that new Western influence in their music, perhaps to the exclusion of anything that would make it particularly and uniquely Japanese. Such is the case with today’s work, which to my ears sounds like it could have sprung from the pen of any of the fine post-Romantic or early-Modern composers.
Kosaku Yomada lived 1886-1965, so in his lifetime he witnessed a transformation of Japanese culture, for good and bad, that must have been a constant source of astonishment. Yomada studied music both in Japan and in Europe and the United States; among his teachers were Max Bruch, so the Western stamp upon his music was indelible. He did not completely eschew Japanese influence in his music, however; he was one of the first musical voices in Japan to start the work of expressing Japanese thoughts in a Western musical language.
This piece, the Chromatic Symphony “Maria-Magdalena”, is derived from a ballet Yomada wrote based on a play by a Belgian playwright. In this work you can hear most readily the European influences on Yomada’s early work: Wagner, Strauss, and even Scriabin seem to be the main influences here. This is not criticism, by any means; the work is dramatic and effective in a way that makes it highly compelling. The development of classical music in Japan seems to have followed, at least in part, a similar track to American music: heavy European influence before the indigenous and new elements arose to have their own influence.
