Getting back to my exploration of Japanese music, here is a film score by one of Japan’s most noted and prolific composers, Toru Takemitsu. In his sixty-five years, Takemitsu produced hundreds of musical works, as well as nearly a hundred filmscores and he somehow also found time to write extensively about music. He was one of those creative people who seems to do nothing but spout creative work.
I’ve always found his music to be somewhat cool and distant, but also captivating in an almost hypnotic way. This particular score, for a 1977 film called Ballad of Orin, is a very good example of this. Minimalistic motifs recur throughout, with scoring that is intimate and itself minimalistic. I know absolutely nothing about the film itself, and I also don’t know if this video presents all of the music Takemitsu wrote for the film. Nevertheless, I found this a compelling listen, albeit–as mentioned–cool and distant. This is music for a day of cool rain, I think.
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.
Well, if you remember back to before the Great Functionality Disaster that ate six weeks of content of mine, I was in the midst of a series of works composed by Japanese composers. And I’m going to get back to that, but for now, here’s an old favorite of mine. Why am I choosing this one? Because of a certain sonic effect in the third movement! Yes, it’s relevant to something I’ll be posting in the near future. Here is The Pines of Rome by Ottorino Respighi. (This is a very fine performance, by the way, but what appears to be a student orchestra. I’m as big a fan of great orchestral recordings as anyone, but there’s often something wonderfully sincere about the music-making that the young people do, even if the technical work isn’t always quite as clean.)
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.
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.
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.
Here’s something fascinating: an entire album comprising a ballet written by a prominent rapper!
RZA is the leader of Wu-Tang Clan, a hip-hop collective that has been around for over thirty years now. That is, I admit openly, the extent of my knowledge of RZA. Hip-hop has never been a musical genre to which I have paid much attention, though not out of dislike in any way. I’ve found, pretty consistently, that when I am exposed to hip-hop in any extended way, I find myself intrigued by it and respecting it. So why haven’t I explored it? Well…time, mainly. I just never find the time for it.
The album featured below is not hip-hop, though. It’s a straight-up classical record: a ballet told through eleven tracks, which tells a story of six youths, each named for a diatonic scale, who “transpose” into their “higher selves”. It’s dramatic, interesting listening that feels like good film music at first blush.
RZA wrote the ballet after he apparently found some old lyrics of his, which he had written in his teenage years, and found the old ideas lodging in his mind as old ideas tend to do. I can relate to this! It’s like the old ideas show up and say, “You weren’t ready for me then, but I’m back.” I found this ballet lyrical and emotionally varied, and dramatic in the best “film music” way.
I hope the embed works, as it’s a playlist. If it doesn’t work (i.e., only the first track plays), go here to get the whole thing. I really enjoyed this work!
An incredibly hectic week is going on! The Wife had carpal tunnel surgery the other day, so I have to pick up the slack and actually do stuff around the house. Do you believe this crap? The horror!!!
Also, at work I’m in the long-delayed, long-planned process of moving my work area from one part of The Store to another. This will be lovely when I’m done, but right now I’m in the “All my crap is where it’s going so now I have to move around piles of my crap while I try to organize it and put it where it goes” stage of moving, which is not a fun part of the moving process to be in. But we’ll get there.
Meanwhile…as is my oft-used practice when I’m too busy to write about music, I drop in an overture by Franz von Suppe. Enjoy!
I hope that worked, I’m always a bit nervous about embedding video playlists.
Anyway: Carlos Simon is a composer who originally hails from Atlanta, GA. He completed doctoral work at the University of Michigan and has since enjoyed a varied career of composition and performance; according to his bio he is currently on the faculty at Georgetown University, and he served recently as Composer-in-Residence at what was the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. I don’t know what Dr. Simon’s current status is regarding that, since the Kennedy Center has been one of many Grounds Zero for our current President being a complete and utter calamity, but that post was a great honorific at one time. Dr. Simon has had a number of his works recorded, and he has been performed by quite a few of the finest music ensembles in America.
The work featured above, Tales: A Folklore Symphony, is “a four-movement piece for orchestra that explores African American folklore as well as Afrofuturist stories.” Dr. Simon’s website has an entire page devoted to this work, so I recommend going there for more! He even provides a perusal copy of the score which you can explore virtually as you listen. It’s a fascinating, inventive, energetic, and emotional work that plays out fascinatingly over its four movements.
It’s St. Patrick’s Day, which means I’m going to take a quick break from American Black composers. (Sadly, a brief attempt to locate Irish Black composers did not turn up much of anything at all. I did not dig super-deeply, though.) We’re going to dig back to the music of one Charles Villiers Stanford, an Anglo-Irish composer whose music has been overshadowed since his lifetime (1852-1924) by the likes of Edward Elgar and the British masters who followed. Stanford’s music is lyrical and Romantic, and it’s always pleasing. Not necessarily pleasant, as he brings a lot of good Romantic fire to his work, but pleasing. I’ve never heard a work of Stanford’s that left me thinking anything other than, “I’m glad I heard that.” This work is a good example. Stanford wrote six tone poems that he called “Irish Rhapsodies”, and this is the fourth of those. It is subtitled “The Fisherman of Lough Neagh”, and what a wonderful work it is–brooding and melodic and, in the end, just wonderfully triumphant.
As I was listening to this work, I read that George Bernard Shaw criticized Stanford’s music as lacking passion. I’m not sure what Shaw was listening to when he said that, because it sure as hell wasn’t this.
Jonathan Bailey Holland is a composer originally from Flint, MI who is currently the Dean of the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University. According to his bio, he has had music performed by ensembles all over the world, and he has taught at a number of universities as well as at many music festivals and arts schools. And like many of the other composers in this ongoing mini-series of mine, I never heard of him until now. I have thus far only heard the work presented below, so I can’t discuss Dr. Holland’s general approach, but this work is minimalistic and haunting in its evocative use of a very small ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, percussion) and its use of moody dissonances throughout. The work is chillingly meditative, befitting its title: The Clarity of Cold Air. This work does seem to me to fit the mood of the streetscape photo I posted the other day….
