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.

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