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.

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