We all need some Star Trek music, don’t we?
Tuesday Tones
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.
Share This Post
Tuesday Tones
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.
Share This Post
Tone Poem Tuesday
Japan! Back to Japan!
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!
Share This Post
Tuesday Tones
Tuesday Tones
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.
Share This Post
Tuesday Tones
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.
Share This Post
Tuesday Tones
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.
Share This Post
Tuesday Tones
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.
Share This Post
Tuesday Tones
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.