Yogaku: Japanese Music in the Twentieth Century 9780810843257, 2002003145, 9781461674559

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Yogaku Japanese Music in the Twentieth Century

Luciana Galliano

Translated by Martin Mayes

The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Lanham, Maryland, and London 2002

SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A Member of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group 4720 Boston Way Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.scarecrowpress.com 4 Pleydell Gardens, Folkestone Kent CT20 2DN, England Copyright © 1998 by Cafoscarina Copyright © 2002 by Luciana Galliano This book is a revised and expanded edition of Yogaku: Percorsi della musica giapponese nel Novecento, first published in Italian in 1998 by Liberia Editrice

Cafoscarina

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Cataloging in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Galliano, Luciana, 1953Yogaku: Japanese music in the twentieth century I Luciana Galliano.

p.cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 978-0-8108-4325-7 1. Music-Japan-20th century-History and criticism. I. Title. ML240.5 .G35 2002 780' .952'0904-dc21 2002003145

§™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America.

The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection. The water has no mind to receive their image. -From Zenrin Kushii, translated by Alan Watts

Contents

Foreword to the Italian Edition Luciano Berio

ix

Foreword to the English Edition Yuasa Joji

xi

Acknowledgments

xiii

Note on the Transliteration of Japanese Terms and Names

XV

Part I

Introduction Traditional Japanese Cultural Values and Japan's Transition into the Twentieth Century 0.1 The Historical and Cultural Background: Considerations on the Theory and Aesthetics of Traditional Japanese Music

5

0.2 The Concept of Time in Japanese Music

12

0.3 The Stratification and Conservation of Traditional Forms of Music

16

1 The Introduction of Western Music

2

3

27

1.1 The Role of Western Music in the Program of Modernization: Modernization through Westernization?

32

1.2 Travels and Musical Exchange: The First Foreign Musicians in Japan and the First Japanese Abroad

39

1.3 The Traditional and the New in Japanese Music

51

The Evolution of a Western-Style Musical Language in the First Half of the Twentieth Century v

65

vi

Contents

2.1 The Influence of French and German Music on Japanese Composers

73

2.2 The Avant-Garde and Shinko

78

3 A New Musical World 3.1 Music Schools and the First Symphony Orchestras

93

3.2 Music Journals

95

3.3 The Birth of Opera

99

3.4 Japanese Society and the Influence of Broadcasting and Recording

4

91

Nationalism and Music

104 113

4.1 Political Movements and the Proletarian Music League

117

4.2 Propaganda and Censorship

119

Part II 5 The Cultural and Social Situation in the Postwar Period

127

5.1 Similarities and Differences with Europe

130

5.2 Continuity and Change on the Postwar Music Scene

132

6 The Postwar Avant-Garde

149

6.1 Jikk:enkObo

150

6.2 Electronic Music

166

6.3 The Twentieth-Century Music Laboratory

173

6.4 Composer's Associations

182

7 The 1960s

209

7.1 The Impact of Cage. Happening and Performance. The New Direction Group and Its Activities

221

7.2 The Boom in Traditional Music

238

8 The Closing Decades of the Twentieth Century

259

8.1 The Leading Composers: Matsudaira, Yuasa, Takemitsu, Ishii, and Ichiyanagi

259

8.2 An Overview of the Musical Situation in Japan in the Closing Decade of the Twentieth Century

284

Contents

vii

8.3 Hogaku

285

8.4 Other Composers

287

8.5 The Next Generation

298

Appendix A: List of Japanese Names

319

Appendix B: List of Aesthetic and Musical Terms

325

Bibliography

327

Index

335

About the Author

357

Foreword to the Italian Edition

In this book Luciana Galliano has made an important contribution to creating an awareness in Italy of Japanese music today. The topic of Japanese musical creativity is a complex one. This is because in Japan the concept of "today" in music cannot be defined chronologically, typologically, or historically in the same way it can be defined in Western music. It is also because Japanese musicians have a more intimate and private relationship with history: the musician is not in conflict with it, does not want to possess it, and does not talk very much about it either. The value criteria that govern Japanese music do not contain external references; they do not try to represent or to not represent other art forms, historical developments, or the conflicts that occur between the individual and society. In all of this, nothing is simple or basic. Quite the contrary. In the context of this foreword, however, I do not wish (nor am I able) to enter into explanations as to how and why in Japanese art and society the meaning is very often not made explicit but left to be quietly inferred or thought about, or even to remain implicit. I would like to recall an event that struck me forcefully, although it was a long time ago. It is the description given in The Empire of Signs by Roland Barthes of Zengakuren (the student protest movement of the 1960s). In Tokyo the students who had organized violent demonstrations carried a limited number of posters that gave no reasons explaining their highly dramatic "choreography." The signs simply announced the fact that they were students who were protesting. I would just like to suggest that it is a tendency of Western culture to confuse the structure of the signifier with the structure of the signified and that it is this that very often renders Japanese music impenetrable to the Western listener. Neither music nor visual art in Japan is meant to function as a representational model, allegory, or imitation of an idea or physical object; the large-scale, dramatic changes in moods, with fluctuating oceans of meaning and the creation of relationships with the surrounding physical world and with the world of ideas, are also alien to it. Nor does Japanese music torment itself with the Western dilemma of aesthetic categories. Nor with that of silence. In European music, silence can have metric, syntactic, and rhetorical functions. The concept of silence has been ix

X

Foreword to the Italian Edition

ideologized; it has often become a symbol of rebellion, of absence, or of deliberate impotence. But in Japanese music, silence has no dialectical relationship with sound. More often it suggests the silent presence of sound. Silence becomes an intrinsic ontological dimension of what the composer or performer of the past enacted and of what today's composer thinks, writes, and scrupulously annotates. This book introduces us to the world of contemporary Japanese music and it guides us toward a better understanding of that world.

Luciano Berio, composer

Foreword to the English Edition

As things stand today, there is only one book that deals with the whole world of contemporary Japanese music, and that is the book Yogaku, originally written in Italian by Luciana Galliano. It is the ftrst book published in any Western language that succeeds in showing how the Japanese absorbed Western musical styles to produce an entirely new musical repertoire. In addition, although the author's primary focus is on Western music in Japan, her history of music in twentiethcentury Japan pays careful attention to the counterpart of Western music, the traditional musics of Japan. In so doing, Galliano offers her readers an excellent panorama of the entire Japanese musical scene. The treatment is particularly valuable, for the author relates indigenous Japanese viewpoints to Western viewpoints; she takes account of significant research carried out by Japanese as well as Western scholars and, unlike most American specialists in Japanese music, she takes account of significant research published in German, French, and Italian (three languages in which many of the best contributions to Japanese musicology have been published). Finally, she succeeds in combining stylistic analysis with aesthetic reflections and places musical developments within the broader sociocultural context. Her excellent analyses of postwar musical works constitute the ftrst attempt to place these works in the context of twentieth-century musical developments worldwide. The publication of this book in English means that for the ftrst time the world will know what Japanese composers are thinking now and what they have been doing over the past half century. I don't know other musicologists who understand contemporary Japanese music like Luciana Galliano. Her acute insights hit the target and cover the scene from composers like Matsudaira Yoritsune, the great pioneer who died just one month ago at the age of ninety-four, to the younger generation of composers now in their thirties, who embody the music of the future.

xi

xii

Foreword to the English Edition

Finally, this book will help people all over the world understand how contemporary music was created in Japan, an Eastern country far removed from their own reality, and this makes me very happy.

Yuasa Joji, composer Tokyo, December 2001

Acknowledgments

The present book discusses over a century of musical activity in Japan, in particular the music that was inspired by Western music, otherwise know as yogaku, and its development from the end of the nineteenth century through to the closing decade of the twentieth century. The word yogaku (Western music) is made up of two characters: yo, which means "ocean" (that is, "over the ocean," meaning Western or foreign) and gaku, which means "music." The ideogram for gaku has a double meaning; when written with different letters, it assumes the meaning of joyfulness or happiness. All other genres of Japanese music are dealt with in this book only when there is some connection with yogaku. The analysis and aesthetical assessment of artistic products that come out of transcultural processes is fairly complex. What guidelines are to be used for the analysis of a hybrid piece of music? What criteria should be held in mind when assessing such work? This topic has not been dealt with extensively in articles and books and it may well be that the problem is insoluble. It is my belief that the only possible approach is a musicological one that tries to consider each work as an aesthetically autonomous artifact whose internal logic can be described in relation and ascribed to its cultural context, but also in part independently. In the writing of this book, every effort has been made to approach Japanese music in the twentieth century with an open mind, while constantly bearing in mind as much as possible each musician's motivations and analyzing each piece of music on its own merits. I am extremely grateful to the following Japanese institutions for the support they gave me during the four years of research in the preparation of this book: the Ministry for Education (MonbushO), the Japan Foundation (without whose help the original Italian edition of this book would not have been published), and the Suntory Music Foundation (whose generous support covered the costs of translating Yogaku into English). A warm thanks is also due to all the people who were so kind as to help me at various stages of my research, in particular many of those composers, musicologists, and performers mentioned in the text, and I ask them xiii

xiv

Acknowledgments

to pardon me if I don't mention them all personally by name here. Special thanks go to the late Matsudaira Yoritsune for his constant willingness to answer questions; to Yuasa Joji for his patience and insightful replies to all my queries; to Akiyama Kuniharu for sharing his vivid memories of the postwar activities (his premature death was a sad loss to Japanese music); and, with all my affection and respect, to Narazaki YOko, and Tokumaru Yoshihiko. I would also like to thank Prof. Gian Carlo Calza and Prof. Francesco Gatti. It has been my pleasure to work with them at the Department of East Asian Studies at Venice University Ca' Foscari; they have given me much precious support and help during the fmal phases of the preparation of this book. I would also like to mention the warm and friendly reception given me by all the wonderful librarians I met, and by everyone on the Tokyo music scene, to which I was introduced by Prof. Funayama Takashi and Takemae Fumiko. I thank them for this, for without their help, the path would have been much harder. I do not feel that I have in any way exhausted this topic of the Japanese music that has sprung from Western music, musical ideas, and culture. Unfortunately, in order to keep the book within reasonable limits, I have had to mention only briefly or even omit certain important composers. I take full responsibility for anything missing or erroneously dealt with in Yogaku.

Note on the Transliteration of Japanese Terms and Names

The Japanese names and other words that appear in the text have been transliterated into roman letters using the Hepburn method. In the Hepburn system, the consonant sounds are spelled as in English and the vowel sounds are spelled as they are in Italian. It is one of the most common systems used today and it is easy for a Westerner to read. It is also the most commonly used system in existing Japanese-English dictionaries. Japanese family names are given following the traditional Japanese name order with the patronymic family name (i.e., the surname) followed by the given name (what in Western culture is known as the "first name"). The book does not deal with the vast area of Japanese music in the twentieth century in a strictly chronological sequence, but according to specific areas of activity. Thus, the works of many composers are not spread out through the text chronologically but are assembled in the section that coincides with the period when the composer in question became an established figure. However, for the most important composers, examination of their work is not concentrated in any particular section; instead, each period of their output is examined in detail in the section relevant to the aspect of their work in question. The titles of all works by Japanese composers are given in a romanized version of their original Japanese title, except sometimes when the Japanese title is merely a transliteration of a European word; for example, "Pasutoraru" is given as "Pastoral." Only when the Japanese transliteration has a special significance is a romanized version of the Japanese transliteration maintained. If a composer chose to give a work a European title, then no Japanese equivalent is given. The International Society for Contemporary Music is always referred to by its internationally accepted acronym: ISCM. Likewise, following current practice, Nihon Hosii Kyakai, the name of the national Japanese radio, is always given as NHK. Again, following the internationally accepted practice, Japan's capital city is given, without macrons, as "Tokyo." The true transliteration, "Tokyo," is only used when it appears in the transliteration of a Japanese title. Unless otherwise XV

xvi

Note on the Transliteration of Japanese Terms and Names

indicated, all translations from other languages have been made by the author or the translator. Research on much of the material used in the preparation of this book was carried out in Japan using sources written in Japanese. Therefore, it has not always been possible to find the original non-Japanese sources for some of the quotations taken from these Japanese texts. The author and the translator accept full responsibility for any discrepancies between the translation of the Japanese quotation used and the original version of the text being quoted in the Japanese source.

PART I

Introduction

Traditional Japanese Cultural Values and Japan's Transition into the Twentieth Century

Yogaku is the transliteration of the Japanese word for Western music and an expression that has been current in Japan for many centuries. It was in the sixteenth century that Christian missionaries gave Japan its ftrst contact with European music, when new converts were taught sacred choral music and music for organ and harpsichord.' But the Tokugawa military regime, which had come to power at the beginning of the seventeenth century, recognized that the individualistic quality of Catholicism was a potentially subversive element, so Christianity was banned and all further interest in Western music was cut short.2 The regime then imposed restrictions to impede any changes in the structure of Japanese society and, as part of this policy, cut off all contact with other nations. Now, more than a century has passed since Japan reopened her borders and Western music has become an integral part of Japanese culture, a culture of a highly developed society equipped with mature intellectual and critical tools. And even though Western music comes from a society that is profoundly alien to traditional Japanese values, the Japanese have assimilated Western culture with the same surprising speed and thoroughness they displayed in mastering Western technology and economic practices. A superficial visit might suggest that the music scene in Japan today is dominated by Western music and culture, with a pronounced American influence evident in many areas of light music and a strong European influence evident in the myriad performances of classical music. But on closer examination it becomes clear that the panorama of music making in Japan is highly diverse, very lively, and prolific, even by Western standards. A Western-inspired style of contemporary music is flourishing and developing an original style of its own. There are various publishing companies and specialized magazines and there is a high standard of musicology. The quality of Japanese musical education is testified by the number of Japanese musicians, interpreters, and composers who have gained international recognition during the last decades. There are many orchestras and festivals as well as institutions that promote concerts. Mter the Second World War there was a renewal of interest in traditional Japanese music and many people began to study traditional instruments such as the koto, shamisen, 3

4

Introduction

and shakuhachi, 3 as well as the various singing styles associated with traditional theatrical genres. Interest in music in Japan is widespread, with activities taking place at all levels. There is a lot of enthusiasm for practical music making and there are many amateur symphony orchestras, chamber music groups, choirs, and soloists. The standard of amateur music making is generally very high and this has inspired many contemporary Japanese composers to write music specifically for this market. These same composers have also written scores for more commercial productions, such as television programs, film soundtracks, and advertising, and this broad range of activity has contributed to the development of the public image of Japanese contemporary composers as highly skilled, all-round musicians. At the reopening of the borders, Japan had a highly evolved culture but was devoid of technological know-how. That the country has managed to modernize so efficiently that it is now able to compete with the West on its own terms, and has even managed to surpass it in many areas, is due to the social compactness and integration Japan developed during its long period of isolation. When the Japanese turned to the West, they studied it with care, diligence, and humility. Yet at the same time they managed to maintain their outlook and way of life, as well as that profound civilized humanity that had so struck those Westerners who visited Japan before it began the process of modernization.4 This explains why, despite being a relatively poor country in the middle of the nineteenth century, Japan managed to escape exploitation by the West and to carve out its own route into the twentieth century. Japan rigorously maintained her closed border policy long after this policy had become anachronistic. Actions such as the Western colonization of China and the ensuing opium war were exploited as pretext for the policy's continuance. Japan's first direct contact with the West was through the diplomatic mission led by lwakura that left Japan in November 1871 for a three-year trip to the United States and Europe to renegotiate the treaty Japan had signed with the Western powers in 1858.5 The effect of this trip was Japan's realization that it would have to find a way to fend off the savage exploitation that the West was perpetrating in Africa and in some areas of Asia. It was also clear that, in striving to make profits, Japan would inevitably come into conflict with other nations. To survive, Japan would have to nurture a competitive passion for power and to create a technological production capability. But a study of what had happened in the West highlighted the importance of firmly grounding all technological and industrial progress in Japan's cultural heritage and traditions. This first direct contact with the West opened up a dramatic debate among the members of the ruling oligarchy about Japan's limited awareness of her own history and about which decisions were needed as the basis for taking Japan out of the past and into the modern era.6 In their evaluation of the reports drawn up by lwakura, and from what had been learned through other contacts with the West, the ruling oligarchy concluded that the difference between East and West lay in the differences in the relationship between the individual and

Traditional Japanese Cultural Values into the Twentieth Century

5

society, with the West favoring an outward-going, individual competitiveness and the East favoring acquiescence and collaboration. Right from the start it was realized that the desired progress implied risks, including the risk of bringing change to Japan's habits and moral values? However, it was also understood that there was no alternative to competing with the West on its own terms, although Japanese society would view with suspicion and condemn Western society's overriding obsession with physical possessions. From various documents of the period it is clear that Japan's view of Western culture and mores was that they were based on the idea that human nature is intrinsically bad and has to be held in check and that the Western sense of religious morality was derived from a church that had often been guilty of scandalous acts of violence. In contrast, Japan's own view of the East and of itself was of a culture whose social structure was governed by ethical principles that cultivated those virtues that are innate to human nature. The questions that had led to lwakura's mission and that surfaced constantly in the intellectual and political debates of the period were: "Can Japan adopt Western technology and industrialization independently of the West's sociopolitical structure?" and "What effect will this have on Japanese culture and society?" The answers tended to fall in line with the slogan wakon yosai (Japanese morality and Western technology), but this response did not last long and indeed it could not have done.8 The decision to modernize initiated a process that developed independently and brought with it many problems that were painfully difficult to resolve. Moreover, the implementation of modernizing strategies caused violent debates between the ruling forces. The group known as Enlightener9 pressed ahead resolutely with its farsighted program of modernization aimed at making Japan competitive with the West as quickly as possible. In the social and cultural growth involved in the adoption of a Western-inspired model of society, music played a fundamental role.

0.1. THE HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL BACKGROUND: CONSIDERATIONS ON THE THEORY AND AESTHETICS OF TRADITIONAL JAPANESE MUSIC The Tang Dynasty (618-907) marked one of the richest periods of Chinese culture and it was during this period that many aspects of Chinese culture and knowledge were first introduced to Japan, leading to the creation of Japan's earliest forms of art music. In Chinese culture, music has never been a self-contained entity, but has always been an integral part of social events, such as public rituals and entertainment. In these events music played many roles; it did not just set the mood and pace, it also defined the event's social quality and place in the structure of society. Experiments, theories, and speculation about music and sound were central to a variety of the interests evidenced in early historical and philosophical texts. 10 Music was

6

Introduction

felt to embody a Weltanschauung, and to be essential to the cultivation of moral values. In early Chinese thought, all facets of human knowledge were articulated cross-referentially and with respect to cosmology. Music is held to be part of this cosmology and to be an important tool in education and in developing awareness, and as such it is accorded great importance in the hierarchy of knowledge. When Japan adopted Chinese culture, music became an important aspect of life at the imperial court.U This extensive cultural importation was subsequently followed by a lengthy period of seclusion during which the external influences were assimilated and elaborated and the Japanese developed their own theory and aesthetics of music. Classical Japanese music and most of the other art forms that were to become specifically Japanese established themselves in the period when Buddhism developed and flourished (in the late Heian and Kamakura periods of the eleventh and twelfth centuries). However, there are profound differences between the way Chinese music was assimilated and the way Western music was assimilated more than a thousand years laterP Assimilating cultural models from other countries is often a form of culture in itself. It is important to remember, however, that Japan, in the process of assimilating and reworking imported culture, has always managed to preserve clear-cut distinctions between styles and genres without feeling the need to make dramatic and definitive choices between old and new, between homegrown and imported traditions, or indeed between any of the contrasting elements inherited through such cultural importation. A clear awareness of the differences between cultural traditions was always maintained. The characteristics of each style of music were direct expressions of the social class within which the music had developed, and these characteristics were maintained even after the social class had lost its significance and no longer played a prominent social role. For example, the aristocratic genres imported from China are still called "Chinese music" (togaku), though most of this music was probably composed by Japanese court musicians after this style had been assimilated by the Japanese. Traditional Japanese music did not develop in a unified fashion the way European music did, because the divisions between Japan's social classes were so rigid that each class developed its own mores, cultural values, Weltanschauung, and music. The music of each class had its own style and syntax and its own period of glory. Each time a new genre would supersede an older genre it would not make the older genre obsolete, so both genres would continue side by side. The American anthropologist Ruth Benedict has stated that in many areas of life (not just in art) the Japanese think in apparently simultaneously opposing directionsP Music was never considered to be a purely abstract art form. It could be used as a setting for words or it could be an integral part of a theatrical performance, yet at the same time it could be capable of expressing profound spiritual and intellectual qualities. This can be seen for example in the many philosophical considerations of the transcendental aspects of Buddhist thought as epitomised, for example, in the music for shakuhachi or in the music for no theater. Furthermore, music was not the exclu-

Traditional Japanese Cultural Values into the Twentieth Century

7

sive property of professional musicians, despite its being an intensely refined art form that required a high degree of skill and great attention to the smallest details. The description given so far has dealt primarily with the social aspects of music. The details relating to the structure of the musical language need also to be examined. Traditional Japanese music is either homophonic or heterophonic: that is, the way different melodic lines are overlain is a totally different concept from that which governs Western polyphony. Japanese aesthetics and musical sensitivity have their roots in ancient Chinese mysticism, which assigned a cosmological significance to each sound. Unlike Western music, which places great importance on technical precision in performance practice, Japanese music stresses sound quality and prizes the richness and complexity of each instrument's sound spectrum; it pays great attention to microtonal shadings and appreciates subtle differentiations of sound colors and unpitched sounds, such as those made by percussion instruments. The world of sound is perceived as being a continuum in which the musical quality of noise is as important as the quality of conventional "musical" sounds. 14 For example, the Japanese regard all sounds of nature and not merely bird song as being musically enjoyable. In discussions of the Japanese perception of sound and music all textbooks on Japanese musical aesthetics quote the famous print by Hiroshige that depicts a trip in the countryside "to listen to the insects." The Genji Monogatari, an incomparable masterpiece completed shortly after 1000 by the court lady Murasaki Shikibu, is full of appreciation of the sounds that occur in nature and it treats all sound, from whatever source, as being rich with profound meaning. 15 For several decades now, the Japanese radio has broadcast a daily program called Soundscapes dedicated to recordings of environmental sounds such as the Nagano Mountains, the railway station in Ueno, autumn insects, or the beach at Izumo. The presence of extraneous sounds, such as the sound of the plectrum hitting the body of the shamisen or the shouts of the percussionists in no theater, is essential. The shamisen has a string that does not touch the upper bridge so that it is left to vibrate in sympathy with whatever sounds are played, producing a constant, metallic buzzing sound. This effect is known as sawari. 16 In vocal music, the voice too has a high noise content, is always guttural, and indeed could be described as being extremely unnatural. It is, perhaps, no theatre that most perfectly embodies this Japanese vocal aesthetic in which the singer keeps the pharynx constricted and provides an outstanding example of "dirty" singing in a style that is diametrically opposed to the cleanness of intonation required of Western singers. During a performance, the pitch will always slightly rise dramatically. Noise is also used in a highly formalized manner to imitate "nature" and the expressive energy and artistic potential of noise are totally accepted and incorporated into every performance. This synergetic integration of noise into the musical continuum helps the music achieve surprising expressive depths, even though the material used is sparse and economical.

8

Introduction

The main goal of Japanese music is neither sensorial seduction nor the inducement of a sense of physical well-being, a point that was clearly underlined by Motoori Noringa (1730-1801), perhaps the most important writer on the theories of Japanese art. He wrote, "contact with physical objects and the emotion this evokes is mono no aware." 11 It is something which is very much an introspective description of the aesthetic experience. As Anezaki Masaharu writes, 'The Japanese artist always aims to saturate his mind with impressions of the motions, the forms, and the colors of nature, and then to reproduce those mental images vividly." 18 Mono no aware defmes the feelings that are aroused by the awareness that phenomena exist and by the experience of direct personal contact with them. It is not a means of indulging the senses. Mono no aware occurs when a person's aesthetic sensitivity performs in the sensorial sphere at an intellectual level. Perhaps it is the absence of clear-cut barriers between subject and object, between Self and Reality that typify European philosophy, that makes this possible. In Japanese philosophy, human beings and nature breath together. In Japanese music, all environmental sounds are expected to be intrusive and ever present. They form a necessary, natural backdrop and it is never felt necessary to eliminate them. Paradoxically, nature is both potent and peripheral, and its role in art is highly codified. In this nonduality between musical sound and noise, there is no distinction between sound and silence. Just as it is impossible to fix the precise moment when day becomes night, there is no definable point where sound becomes silence or vice versa. Silence in Japanese music is represented by the concept ma. 19 Characteristics of traditional Japanese music are its particular and prevalent use of the voice, like in no, and a performance practice conditioned by the social situation of tliie performance, and not the exclusive domain of professionals. Music thus defmed, although not conceived of for sensorial pleasure, nevertheless is intended primarily as entertainment. Similar to nature and human life it lacks, or claims to lack, a predictable organization and goals. It is homophonic and lacks complex formal structures in order to bring it closer to nature, which houses the divine. A typical example of these qualities can be found in kamiasobi, the ShintO music performed to delight the gods. Sunaga Katsumi talked about the joshoteki kyoshinsei or "hidden core of the emotions." 20 This idea is related to a Japanese Buddhist sense of life and expresses a fundamental concept of Japanese art and music, that in order to heighten tension and express qualities that are universal yet that touch deep emotional levels, all expression of sentiments should be restrained. It is this, together with the care and attention paid to fme details, such as a particular type of phrasing or a minimal variation in meter or tunilil.g, that explains why both the melodic and rhythmic material are relatively simple and unelaborated, and the expressive quality of Japanese music is so powerful. All Japanese art forms spring from a concept of beauty that focuses on simplicity of gesture to enable artistic expression to manifest itself most purely. This is why Japanese musicians are not interested in< adding complexity to the homo-

Traditional Japanese Cultural Values into the Twentieth Century

9

phonic textures of their music. Japanese art aspires to single, instantaneous gestures. In this way, perfect works of art are created that have no need of revision or correction. A painter who wishes to create an ink drawing will only draw on a blank piece of paper after an extended period of contemplation. During this period he prepares himself to make the perfect drawing by filling his mind with the feeling of the movements, shapes, and colors needed to express his artistic concept. Every painter is taught the artist's proverb: "Never take up a brush until you are ready to sacrifice not only your fame but even life for the sake of the forthcorning work."21 The same is also true for music: single sounds are allowed to vibrate, expand, and reverberate, after being primed by a rigorous meditation on its deepest meaning. The musician does not try to use his music to "communicate" a message, nor does he try to logically structure and organize a musical discourse to transmit an aesthetic concept. The music created is an external utterance that represents the culmination of the musician's aesthetic experience and emotions. Music (and art in general) is the expression of an instantaneous, illuminating, and higher level of understanding that is achieved not through intense investigation and thought but through the joyous liberation of experience. Thus, everything that has been felt builds up a dynamic power that explodes on contact with the external world (mono no aware) and the action that gives birth to music must be direct and performed without any second thoughts. Music is an expression of subjectivity, but the person who has been through this experience of self-awareness (which Tendai Buddhism calls ji-shO-taiken) has gone beyond the ephemeral sense of ware (in its meaning of each single transient human individual) to emphasise the transcendental and more general concept of ware as human awareness. This is yet one more important contradiction inherent in Japanese art: an excess of emotional expression that transcends the individual. It is the instant in which the gesture is performed that is essential. Indeed one Japanese scholar has suggested that the ambiguous nature of Japanese subjectivity is centered in the space between the individual and the people and the objects the person is interacting with; this is the concept of ma that plays such an important role in music and in the other temporal arts.22 Although each artist does have an established personal artistic identity, this is secondary to the artistic identity that is passed on from teacher to student and often the worth of an artist's output is measured by his loyalty to this tradition. Historically, the musical repertoire was a jealously guarded secret. This was not just for artistic purposes, but was also economically motivated. There was a system of guilds known as yurushi-seido. All musicians had to belong to a guild and when a student had reached a certain level his master conceded him a license, which would allow the student to teach within the ryu (school). But the artistic loyalty to the school is not, as it would be in the West, a conscious and analytical adherence to given precepts, but a profound internalization of the spirit and techniques that belong to the school's traditions. It is this criterion ofloyalty that guides how every artist will continue their teacher's work; most traditional Japanese music was

10

Introduction

conceived in this spirit of a "re-creation." The fact that Japanese history recognizes outstanding creative talents such as Zeami (1363-1443) and Basho (1644-94) does not stand in contradiction to this, for their poetic writings are very clearly conscious of being faithful to a concept that has not yet been fully expressed and to the idea that their art form, coming from an authoritative tradition, has not yet been fully realized. There is never any hint of the concept of changing course or of revolution-contrary to, for example, Monteverdi (1567-1643), who explicitly explored and innovated. When Western music was frrst introduced to Japan, it was studied in the Japanese way: by imitation, by assimilating it "obediently," and by total identification with the precepts of the original. In all arts in the Far East the balance between tradition and innovation is different from that in the West. Tradition and innovation are constants in art in all cultures and each culture has its own conventions as to how much known material needs to be used to render the work understandable and how much novelty each artist can personally contribute.23 Traditional Japanese music has never recognized the role of the composer as being separate from that of the performer, for the player's task is to recreate the music each time it is performed. The scope for creative self-expression is highly formalized; the degree of personal innovation through improvisation is limited; adherence to the traditional stereotyped formulae is imperative. Within the rigid formalism of Japanese music, expressive depths are plumbed by working creatively on the smallest details; the traditional overall shape and structure are maintained so that each tiniest change acquires great importance. And it is not just the music that is so rigidly codified, but it is also the context the performance takes place in and the formalities of how the music is presented and how it is listened to. These aesthetic principles required a correspondingly rigorous education. It was believed that neither an understanding of the aesthetic concepts nor an identification with the art form being studied could be communicated verbally. It was only after undergoing a technical training similar to that of the spiritual training of a religious apprenticeship that the student could begin to understand. This is a concept that is similar to the Buddhist idea of enlightenment: in order to arrive at any form of understanding or knowledge the student had to blindly follow and imitate his master.24 It is obvious that many aspects of musical training had less to do with learning a technique and studying the relevant theory than with following a spiritual path, and that this discipline was closely related to the Buddhist education principles of Zen and Shingon. Mastery can only be arrived at through an uncompromising discipline that does not separate intellectual understanding and the development of physical ability from spiritual growth. "Technique" and "spirit" can in no way be separated. The master does not try to correct errors or faulty technique or poor musicianship in a pupil, but concentrates on honing the desire for perfection and through that the creation of a basis for excellence.25 Spiritual enlightenment is considered as much a part of the learning process as the motoric (karada de oboeru) and nonrational aspects. In Buddhism persever-

Traditional Japanese Cultural Values into the Twentieth Century

11

ance in repeating an invocation to Buddha will unfailingly lead to salvation, which cannot be reached unaided. Aesthetic results in music are similarly achieved by constant repetition. And repetition is also a fundamental component of musical compositions. In Western music repetition is held to be a sign of a poor sense of structure, of weak creativity and a lack of rigour in developing musical materials. But in Eastern cultures repetition is extremely important. For example, there is a text dating from 1254 that cites Goshoraku, a work for gagaku orchestra as an example of the power of repetition: "in Goshoraku, when kyii (the last movement) is played for the hundredth time, then even the grasses and the plants begin to dance."26 Certain key words connected with the Japanese concepts of the aesthetic experience need to be explained. One such is sabi. The sabi derives from the same root of the verb sabiru, which means to decay, lose freshness. Sabi is used to indicate the special beauty that things assume when they bear the signs of the passage of time, the appreciation of the metaphysical tension between relative and absolute, between the transitory and the eternal, between the individual and the universal; it is the beauty that emerges when things decay and degrade. Sabi also shares the same root with sabishii, which means solitary and wistful. Thus, sabi only not implies an idea of simplicity and of the past, but also carries that sense of loneliness that the Japanese feel to be part of all human nature and inherent in the transient nature of human life. Shibumi expresses another concept of beauty. It literally means the mouth-drying quality of the lemon, or the touch of a rough surface, and it is used to imply "the sumptuousness of everything that is unpretentious." It is closely linked with wabi, which signifies the total absence of excess, the solemn and austere beauty of extreme restraint. These are concepts of an abstract, spartan kind of beauty that Westerners do not easily associate with the idea of aesthetic pleasure. They originate in the moral and religious teachings of Chinese Confucianism and in the Chinese interpretation of Indian Buddhism. In the earliest Confucian teachings there is a strict connection between beauty and goodness. For Confucius, art is a more potent means than knowledge for cultivating the human spirit and music is supreme among the arts. It is held that art can teach harmony and all Japanese characters found in the oldest treatises that mean "beautiful" are always read yoshi (good). This idea of beauty is much closer to the ancient Greek term to kalon than to the Latin word pulchrum, because the Greek word also includes the idea of goodness in the soul as well as external physical grace. It would appear that in Japanese philosophy these two concepts have been partly assimilated and amalgamated with the pathos of the denial of the physical world, a Buddhist concept that is a condition for the human soul to be able to arrive at an uncontaminated Beauty beyond the deceptive veil of external appearance. It is well known that theories about ethics in music had been formulated in ancient Western civilizations and there are many points of contact between, for

12

Introduction

example, Plato's ideas on the profound moral effects of music and the Confucian ideas prevalent in Japan. In both, music holds an important social position in politics and in education. However, the ancient Sino-Japanese music theories differ significantly from those of Western civilization. For the Greeks, for example, sound was an object that belonged to the physical world and that human beings physically took hold of (in an almost literal sense) through imitation. Throughout European history the idea of sound as an imitation of nature prevailed until around 1700. Japanese music, by contrast, followed the ideas inherited from ancient Chinese theories that music is first and foremost expression.27 In Japanese treatises on poetics, the main focus is never on imitation, which tends to be highly formalized. The emphasis is always on emotion, on representing the artist's emotional experiences and on how much of this the artist is able to put into his work through its formal aspects. Kokoro, heart, indicates a state of mind and the control of the mind over all aspects of one's interior thought processes. This coincides with the language of that part of the mind that can be defined as enlightened self-awareness. The internal form of the expression is not changed in any way through the process of exteriorization since the perception of the exterior is formed in the same area as that which semantically articulates thought. The last point that needs to be underlined is the unusual consonance between cleanliness and the strongly moral aspect of beauty (understood as the spiritual growth toward a state of well-being). In contemporary Japanese the concepts of both cleanliness and beauty are expressed by one word: kirei. Going back to Kojiki, the oldest Japanese historical/mythological text, we fmd that beauty is always linked to symbols and elements of purity and light that are directly derived from the categories of water and light (raised to the level of aesthetics), both of which are associated with the color white. Imarnichi Tomonobu, a leading scholar of Japanese aesthetics, has studied the etymologies of the names of the divinities and of the adjectives that are used in the ancient texts to designate all facets of the concept of beauty; he theorizes that "usually each word represents an aesthetic vision of the world that takes its inspiration from the plant kingdom."28

0.2. THE CONCEPT OF TIME IN JAPANESE MUSIC In all forms of Japanese music every parameter is subject to continuous flux. This is a characteristic inherited from Chinese music. For example, intonation is not based on a fixed temperament and it is common practice to perform simultaneously on instruments whose tunings differ slightly. The parameter of pulse is equally flexible. It is never constant and this elasticity often causes different time layers to coexist within the performance of a piece of music. The Japanese think of time as being circular and made up of single instants all of which exist simultaneously, and of reality as being of a transitory and impermanent nature. This concept of time is based on the rhythm of breathing, a rhythm that cannot be measured

Traditional Japanese Cultural Values into the Twentieth Century

13

with constant precision. In the West, the concept of time is very possibly based on walking and the heartbeat, both of which can be measured chronometrically. In the West, the concept of time has developed along two parallel and complementary paths with the result that the Western concept of time is a desperate attempt to mediate between two conflicting ideas in which time is conceived as being both circular and sequential.29 The teleological concept of time gives a historical significance to things and provides an interpretation of events.30 In music this led to the development of, for example, fugal music. At the same time it is held that time is essentially made up of identical units that form cycles (such as the changes of the seasons and of birth and death) that repeat without much sense of development. In music this is expressed in the rondo form and in the mechanically repetitive nature of Western meter. The structure of exposition and recapitulation in sonata form is an example of the concept of contemporaneousness, whereby the power of the relationships between the different moments causes them to become part of one single moment in time. It was Buddhism that most strongly influenced the development of the concept of time in Japan. Despite the diversification caused by the splitting of Buddhism into different schools, the basic Buddhist ideas about the nature of existence, which interpret the plurality of phenomena and of nature as being absolutely transitory and impermanent, are common to all. The transitory and volatile aspect of consciousness that is called "mind" nourishes itself on chance happenings that are haphazardly organized according to each individual's own random perceptions, and time is perceived with the same degree of false objectivity as that with which each individual forms their own perception of themselves. For the Buddhist this concept of time is a meaningless concept. Like the concept of self, it is a product of the mind in the same way that the past or future are, for the past is something that has ceased to exist and the future has yet to happen. The only concrete "reality" (and this in itself is a complex aspect of Buddhist thought) is that of the "present moment," which arises and disappears like vapor or an image reflected on water. This concept of time as a more-or-less continuous succession of equipollent moments, with no beginning or end, pervades not only Japanese music but all Japanese art forms. Arriving at an understanding of the Japanese concept of time is the only way for Westerners to grasp musical and temporal aspects of Japanese music, such as the kind of exposition of material that is so typical of Japanese music or the continuous repetitions that hardly vary. It is all utterly different from European ideas about structure. In all Japanese art forms, from theater to the visual arts, from ink drawings to the structures of minor art forms, the aesthetic concept is never about placing evolution and movement at the center of attention; it is about the emergence of a sort of suspended stillness, of a self-contained instant that is perfect and complete, and it is the artist's creativity that elevates that instant from its transient form. 31 The Japanese artist is concerned with "testifying" (as opposed to "creating") fragmented flashes of isolated moments, rather than with the monumental works Western

14

Introduction

art is typically concerned with ("The infinite can be seen in every passing moment"), or with brief juxtapositions of events presented quasi-accidentally. The artist does not attempt to impose or overlay a personal interpretation but aims at reducing everything to its most quintessential fundamental. The idea of trying to create an all-encompassing work is totally alien to the Japanese artistic sensibility, and it is because of this that the most interesting Japanese composers are those who have studied Hayasak:a's concept of a structure without beginning or end, which he developed at the beginning of the 1940s.32 In traditional and contemporary Japanese music the duration of a piece of music is a segment of time that has temporarily been placed in parentheses, but these parentheses are not an artificially created framework for time, nor is it this time a segment that has been abstracted or separated from the "natural" passage of time, for it is a moment that has been highlighted and to which the observer should direct his or her attention. The Zen teachings of Suzuki Daisetsu deeply influenced the composer Yuasa JOji, who arrived at a conception of time that in certain respects was similar to that experienced by Henri Bergson. In Yuasa's mature works, duration is "a cross section through unbroken time, made up of single instants that do not occur in succession but in Zen's paradoxical sense of time that includes all other moments of time, all identical to each other."33 The corollary of this fragmented conception of time as a series of single instants is its relationship with the idea of space as a conceptually unbroken extension of time. Fundamental to this is a very precise definition of the perception of space and time in Japanese aesthetics that is called rna. The character used forma is kan, which depicts a door with the sun inside it (though kan used to be interpreted in classical poetry as the moon observed through a window by two lovers). 34 Ma might be translated as "a between," that is, between treated as a noun and not as a preposition. It is the time between events, the space between objects, the relationship between people, or that moment in a person's mind between thoughts. It is the white space in a pen-and-ink drawing, the pause between notes, or the moment in a shite dance in the last section of a no play when all movement is frozen. In daily language rna is also used to talk about chronological time, about physical space, and about the "space" between an emotional feeling and the object of that emotion. These three meanings of rna are also used in the technical language of the martial arts to describe how best to tackle an adversary. However, because rna often defines an apparent hiatus in the flow of action, it might seem to indicate a break or interruption, but this is not the case. Ma is that element of implicit potential in all concepts of separation (spatial, temporal, emotional, or whatever) whereby the space between becomes a "journey between." And so space as defined by ma becomes not a moment of division but a moment of union that lends character to what would otherwise remain nondescript and colorless. In other words ma describes neither space nor time, but the tension in the silence and in the space surrounding sounds and objects.35 Indeed,

Traditional Japanese Cultural Values into the Twentieth Century

15

one of the greatest compliments for a performance of a piece of music is to say that it is "full of ma." What is meant by this compliment is that the individual sounds of the music did not occur in an empty vacuum and that the silences in the music were full of a sense of "betweenness," or ma, forma reflects aesthetic sensitivity. For the Japanese movement in time exists in space and that is why, when the philosopher Watsuji Testuro read Heidegger, he was not able to understand Heidegger's concept of the temporal structure of human existence being separate from the spatial structure of being. For Watsuji, temporality could not be genuine if abstracted from spatiality.36 And here we find another basic tenet of Japanese music (and indeed of Oriental music in general): thought is not something that can be conceived of separate from the body; similarly, music cannot be conceived separately from space. The superimposition of time and space probably has its roots in Dao. Dao came to Japan along with other elements of classical Chinese philosophy in one of the most crucial eras in Japan's history, between the fifth and seventh centuries. In Zhuang Zi there is reference to "abstract time" that is always complementary to and in dialectic tension with "present time." In Daoist writings on the concept of void, spatial metaphors are mostly used and as a result the few temporal metaphors that occur acquire even more potency. 37 Temporal emptiness is not accorded the same weight as spatial emptiness because temporal emptiness transforms spatial emptiness from a state of emptiness into a moment of emptiness. In a certain sense, spatial emptiness does not exist because it is always relative to fullness and to the dynamics of time. Given this philosophic context, silence or ma has a structural role in both traditional and contemporary Japanese music. In its cyclic structure, the instantaneousness of time and the absence of a regular pulse in Japanese music is basically irrational. This irrationality lies at the root of a different concept of evolution in which there is not a dramatic musical development but the juxtaposition of separate moments, and this nonteleological process is the basic structural concept that contemporary Japanese composers have pursued. Postwar Japanese composers have often expressed their desire to research and develop the concept of irrational time in their music, in contrast to the often illogical rational time of Western music. This irrationality is highly organic because it reflects the totally unpredictable way material coalesces in nature, following the rules of chaos.38 These composers place emphasis not on a complex musical structure, but on a structure that is transparent and natural (and full of a multiplicity of interpretations), which has an ability to surprise the listener and to give the flow of time a feeling of magic, for the experience of time through music heightens the natural experience of time. Time as experienced in art and time as experienced in daily life are not totally disjunct and it is this sensibility toward time that is an essential factor of Japanese aesthetics.

16

Introduction

0.3. THE STRATIFICATION AND CONSERVATION OF TRADITIONAL FORMS OF MUSIC During the Tokugawa period (1503-1867) Japanese society was stratified into different social classes that were rigidly controlled and exchange between them was severely curtailed.39 Each class also had its own activities, interests, and pastimes, including its own precisely defined style of music, and each class had its own historic period when its business and art forms flourished. It was during this period that the aesthetic and stylistic principles of the music associated with that class would become codified, after which the music would remain virtually unchanged apart from a gradual diminution of the repertoire. These styles included gagaku, the court style of music, unknown among the other classes except for the kagura pieces performed at the Shinto temples; no theater and its music, cultivated principally by the military aristocracy, which in 1192 took power from the emperor and from the families attached to the imperial court; the music of the biwa (a sort of lute) and of the shakuhachi (a bamboo flute), played by certain orders of monks during their religious rites; shOmyo, another form of religious music characterized by the style of singing used to recite religious texts; kabuki, an innovative and offbeat form of drama with dubious overtones of sexual ambiguity whose development was encouraged by a rich class of merchants who emerged during the long and peaceful Tokugawa period; certain genres of koto music also developed during this period; bunraku theater and the genres of vocal music accompanied by the shamisen, which also belonged to the middle classes; and what was known as zogukaku, which was performed on string instruments and was associated with the "red-light district."40 Of course all new styles of music grew out of preexisting styles, but each new style would follow its own individual path of development and would eventually crystallize into a separate and independent style of music, each with its own rules and theory, including even its own nomenclature, a difference that goes beyond the differences found between genres of European music. Then, in the middle of the nineteenth century, this stratification was further complicated by the arrival of Western music, which was given a mixed reception, but which right from the beginning began to cast a shadow over traditional Japanese forms of music, as it was quickly adopted by the new ruling classes and by the enlightened, forward-looking intellectuals of the upper classes of both the military and the families associated with the government. In 1871, the year in which the lwakura mission was sent to the United States, Canada, and Europe to study Western economy and culture, the government abolished state recognition of all the art guilds, including that of the blind t6d6 musicians, which was the largest and most powerful guild. The government also abolished the legislation that protected the guilds through a series of privileges and monopolies. This, of course, created a lot of difficulties for the guilds. Over the centuries they had developed a finely tuned system of awarding ranks for artistic progress, a system that depended on officially recognized titles and permitted the

Traditional Japanese Cultural Values into the Twentieth Century

17

artist to move on to the next rung in the teaching system. In an attempt to mitigate the hardships, a professional association was established in 1875 in Osaka. Originally called Jiutagya nakama, it was renamed TOdo ongakukai thirty years later, when it attempted to authorize once again the awarding of the traditional ranks; but these no longer had any validity. From this moment on a musician's survival depended on his or her ability in dealing with the free market. A good example of such ability can be seen in Miyagi Michio.41 Nevertheless, not all families were ready to give up traditional music in order to study piano, violin, and Western singing, so traditional music continued to be supported in private as they had always been. At the same time, this approach to the performance and theory of music in which the different genres were separated from each other and split between the different classes in society meant that, in the aftermath of the social upheaval created by the opening of Japan's borders in the Meiji period, traditional forms of music lost their social status and function. These changes affected primarily those forms that were currently fashionable and those that, like no, were protected and heavily supported by the government until the collapse of the feudal system. Other forms, however, benefited in various ways from the changes that occurred in the realm of culture after the Meiji Restoration; court music, because of its association with the emperor, regained its importance and kabuki theater was fmally freed from tbe restrictions and censorship to which it had been subjected under the Tokugawa regime, which had been concerned with keeping a strong moral control over tbe population.42 With the abolition of the Fuke monastic order,43 instruments such as the shakuhachi became much more accessible and new secular styles of playing began to flourish. While many musicians did manage to adapt with some degree of flexibility to the new situation, a much more important event was the move toward a massmarket culture, a move that brought with it Wes~rn habits and living styles and caused traditional art forms and music in particular to become ignored. Fortunately the new research methods offered by Western musicology and the willingness of the masters of traditional music to cooperate meant that traditional music began to be studied seriously before it was too late. Initially some university music departments also offered traditional music studies and the leading music magazines carried articles that discussed the situation facing traditional music and musicians. Traditional music did, however, become forgotten as society underwent the changes brought about by mass marketing and the growth of popular culture governed by the sales of recordings and the promotion of concerts by leading performers from Europe and the Uni~d States of America, with Western music becoming the latest status symbol. Luckily, though, this trend did not totally wipe out traditional music. The race toward modernization in the 1870s caused all areas of traditional knowledge to fall into discredit, but in the 1880s this trend was reversed and traditional culture was reassessed and many spoke out in criticism of the widespread

18

Introduction

adoption of those forms of Western knowledge not strictly limited to science and technology.44 But the process of modernization could not be halted. After the long constructive period of peace in the Tokugawa era, Japanese society had acquired highly refmed tools of thought and of social cooperation that were put to full use in the appropriation of a Western approach to learning in all aspects of society, from economic, political, and juridical structures to education and daily life, from dress styles to life styles. The gap between Japanese philosophy and artistic concepts and Western analytical approaches can also be observed in the developments that occurred in musicology. For example, in the first Western studies of Japanese music carried out by European and American scholars such as Leopold Muller and Francis Piggott, many aspects were wrongly interpreted: a phrase with four beats would be transcribed as being in 4/4; or the tetrachordal basis of the pentatonic scale was not correctly understood. Errors such as these persisted for a long time before they were noticed and corrected. Another nebulous issue is the dubious nature of the documentation that is generally available listing the genealogy of compositions. The decision as to which composers should be considered important figures of twentieth-century Japanese music would all too often seem to be based on historical factors and criteria that are rather suspect. Some composers who were widely recognized while they were alive have now become almost completely forgotten and no serious research or documentation and recording of their scores has been carried out. Their works have been given scarce consideration and the Japanese music scene has rarely held them to be worthy of inclusion in its official documentation of the journey toward the adoption of a Western musical language. Recently this situation (which is very complex) has begun to show signs of changing and the work of some important but forgotten composers is beginning to be reevaluated. But this trend is insignificant if one considers the scope of the activities of some of these composers. The accepted textbooks are still based on the unconscious acceptance of a certain way of reading the history of yogaku. It still has to be realized that there is not only one version of historical facts. Of course it is easy to see why composers such as Taki Rentaro (1879-1903) are remembered and mentioned in textbooks. Because he was the ftrst Japanese musician to tackle the vast new world of unknown sounds, and because this exploration of a new musical world was cut short by illness45 (the Japanese believe that brief lives are spiritually beautiful), it is easy to take a romantic view of his life. In contrast to this romantic figure, composers such as Nobutoki Kiyoshi (1887-1965), who wrote mainly choral works, clearly lack such appeal. Yet it is difficult to explain why able craftsmen and interesting personalities such as Sugawara Meiro,46 Hashimoto Kunihiko,47 Hasegawa Yoshio,48 or even Hirao Kishio49 have been almost completely forgotten. The little that is known about these composers makes it impossible to understand whether their qualities as able craftsmen and interesting personalities were prevalent throughout their entire output or whether they were transient traits. What does emerge clearly from a look at the number of their

Traditional Japanese Cultural Values into the 1Wentieth Century

19

commissions and performances, at the important teaching posts they occupied and the number of talented students they had, is that during their lives they were important figures on the contemporary scene, an importance that evaporated rapidly after their deaths. One possible explanation for this is that those earlier composers who are currently considered to be important are those who established themselves with works that clearly demonstrate their attempts to master and imitate the style and syntax of Western classical music, especially in its more exacting and demanding aspects, and who avoided any attempt at creating an original, individual style capable of mediating between the two cultures. From very early on there was an intense debate about how Japanese and Western musical ideas could best be amalgamated, but none of those involved in this debate realized that there were already indications of how this could be done in the works of the less academic composers. In the careers of nearly all officially recognized composers, there was at one point or another a marked resurgence of academic formulae used to create nineteenth-century Western harmonic structures, together with an increased percentage of "Japanese-ness" through the use of certain kinds of melodies and certain kinds of percussion instruments that are typically Japanese. This might explain why composers who explored other avenues, such as Koda Nobu (1870-1946), have now been totally forgotten. KOda Nobu was one of the frrst three female students to graduate from the Ueno Conservatory and she in turn taught Taki. She was a skillful composer, but her works do not conform to the officially recognized styles (at least as far as can be judged from what limited material that has survived).50 Not even composers such as Hashimoto or Sugawara seem to have followed the mainstream trends of their colleagues, who at that time favored the music of nineteenthcentury Europe. Their desire was for contemporary spirit in their music and so their model was more that of twentieth-century European music. An indirect confirmation of this hypothesis can be found in the words of Akiyama Kuniharu: "On the one hand Sugawara Meiro has written works that were clearly influenced by the compositions of contemporary foreign composers of that period, such as the French Group 'Les Six' and others. While Yamada adopted a conventional European style with the intention of preparing the way for creating his own expressive idiom, Sugawara was, right from the start, a modern composer working in a contemporary idiom."51 Matsudaira Yoritsune gives another confmnation with this statement about the situation in the mid-1920s: "For those musicians and music teachers,journalists and music critics who were behind the times, the new music was considered to be of secondary importance." It is as if, in its exploration of the new world of music from the West, the Japanese music scene wanted first and foremost to establish a basis using the European tradition as a guarantee of lineage, craftsmanship, and excellence and were reluctant and generally unprepared to participate straightaway in the strong currents of contemporary European music. And this is why the official history of twentieth-century Japanese music has not been able to accept Sugawara's brilliant modern neoclassical style or Hashimoto's complex style of writing and his search for a new harmonic syntax

20

Introduction

or Hasegawa's originality or that of other, similar composers. For while all that they composed inventively and openly took risks (though their music was occasionally incongruous), it is true that their music did not achieve what it set out to achieve-equality with anything produced in Europe. At the same time, it is also true that the goal of a truly original "national" style was closer to being reached than was generally realized. However, the fact remains that the path contemporary music has taken has been the path that the large bulk of the Japanese music world wanted it to take, very much as happens and as has happened elsewhere.

NOTES 1. The missionaries knew very well that church music, being such beautiful music, could be a useful element in encouraging people to convert to the Christian faith; see C. R. Boxer, The Christian Century in Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951). Music also figured prominently in a journey undertaken by four young Japanese noblemen who accompanied Father Valignano; see J. F. Moran, The Japanese and the Jesuits: Alessandro Valignano in 16th Century Japan (London: Routledge, 1993), chap. 2, "The Ambassadors," pp. 6-19. Also Adriana Boscaro, "The First Japanese Ambassadors to Europe," KBS Bulletin 103 (August-September 1970), pp. 1-20. 2. Christian rites continued to be performed clandestinely in some areas and on the Kyosho Islands. This remarkable tradition, called Kakure Kirishitan (hidden Christianity) only came to light when the ban on Christianity was lifted. See Chiba Yoko, "Nihonjin no kisobu ni okeru shokyo to ongaku" (Religion and music in Japanese doctrines), Ongakugaku: Journal of the Musicology Society of Japan 25, no. 3 (1979). 3. The koto is a large thirteen-stringed zither with a long, rectangular body made of a hardwood. It is used in many different genres and the different tunings, interpretative styles, and structural forms used for each genre make it sound like a different instrument in each style. Contemporary composers have shown much interest in it, perhaps because it offers many opportunities for different tunings and intonation and is capable of many changes in sound production. The shamisen is a three-stringed lute with a small, square sound box covered with cat skin.lt is often used in popular music and in the music for classical theater. The shakuhachi is a bamboo flute that came from China sometime between the seventh and ninth centuries. It flourished particularly in the thirteenth century. It is perhaps because of the shakuhachi's spiritual and intellectual associations that it has become one of the instruments most favored by contemporary composers. 4. There is a sizable literature on Japan's process of modernization. See Eleanor Westney, Imitation and Innovation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). On the fascination of Europeans for Japan, cf. Lafcadio Hearn, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894; reprint, Tokyo: Tuttle, 1976). 5. For further details on Iwakura's mission, see The Iwakura Mission in America and Europe: A New Assessment, ed. Ian Nash (Richmond, England: Japan Library, 1998); also see Eugene Soviak, "On the Nature of Western Progress: The Journal of the Iwakura Embassy," in Tradition and Modernization in Japanese Culture, ed. Donald E. Shively (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 7-34.

Traditional Japanese Cultural Values into the Twentieth Century

21

6. "Since the Western theory of progress is being transmitted and planted in Japan, things are being carried out carelessly and without forethought. The old is abandoned and there is competition for what is new.... What should be preserved of the old is destroyed, and in the end there is no trace of it. Ah! How indeed can this be spoken of as daily advancement? How can it be called progress?" (Diary of the travels of the special plenipotentiary delegate to America and Europe), vol. 3, 55; quoted in Soviak, "On the Nature of Western Progress," p. 26. 7. "Western philosophy: (1) places great emphasis on the discussion of awareness yet almost completely ignores personal behaviour; (2) has no technique for cultivating peace of mind ... ; (3) Western philosophers are excessively keen on being experts of philosophers from the past in a way which leads to dissent and a disproportionate attention to inconsequential details. This contrasts with the approach taken by Confucian scholars who defer to the writings of the ancient sages. Both lose the middle way." These comments are from Nishimura Shigeki, Nihon dotokuron (A study of Japanese ethic) (1886), related by Donald H. Shively, "A Confucian View," in Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Modernization," ed. Marius B. Jansen, 2d ed. (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1982), p. 235. 8. This slogan had been coined by Sakuma ShOzan (1811-64), a Neo-Confucian philosopher and rangakusha (scholar of Dutch, i.e., Western, culture), who had been one of the first to confront the problems posed by Japan's emergence from its long period of isolation. The slogan was a variation on an older slogan, wakon kansai (Japanese spirit and Chinese knowledge), to which all the Neo-Confucian schools of the late Tokugawa period adhered. 9. This is the standard translation of the Japanese name, Meirokusha, given to the leaders of this group, to be found throughout the vast collection of American historical and scientific writings on the subject of Japan's modernization. See chap. 2.2, n. 46, p. 89. 10. See Kenneth J. De Woskin, A Song for One or Two: Music and the Concept ofArt in Early China, Michigan Papers in Chinese Studies, 42 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies, 1982), p. 4. 11. In Japan the idea of music as a tool for gaining greater awareness and knowledge weakened, though music did remain a sophisticated and highly valued art form in the life of the imperial court. For an overview on the importation of Chinese culture, see Kitayama Shigeo, Nihon no rekishi N: Heian kyo (A history of Japan IV: When Heian was the capital) (Tokyo: Chuo Koron, 1965) and Penelope A. Herbert, Japanese Embassies and Students in T' ang China, Occasional Paper no. 4 (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Center for East Asian Studies, 1987). For music, see Robert Garflas, Music of a Thousand Autumns: The Togaku Style of Japanese Court Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975) p. 7ff. 12. The most obvious is that in the earlier period just a couple of thousand people at court were involved and the prestige and superiority of Chinese music were almost unanimously accepted. See Tanba Akira, La Thiorie et l 'esthetique musicale japonaise (Paris: Publications Orientalistes de France, 1988). 13. Ruth Benedict is the author of one of the standard texts on Japanese culture, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946; 42nd reprint, Tokyo: Tuttle, 1987). This book was the result of a research project commissioned by the American government at the end of the Second World War as part of its plan to develop tactics for dealing with Japan's apparently incomprehensible social structures. The very title indicates what Benedict has to say: "When a serious observer is writing about peoples other than the Japanese and says

22

Introduction

they are unprecedentedly polite, he is not likely to add, 'But also insolent and overbearing.' When he says people of some nation are incomparably rigid in their behavior, he does not add, 'But also they adapt themselves readily to extreme innovations."' Benedict goes on to add: "The Japanese are, to the highest degree, both aggressive and unaggressive, both militaristic and aesthetic, both insolent and polite, rigid and adaptable, submissive andresentful of being pushed around, loyal and treacherous, brave and timid, conservative and hospitable to new ways" (pp. 1-2). 14. For a discussion on culturally based distinctions between sound and noise, see Raymond Murray Schafer, The Tuning of the World (New York: Knopf, 1977). 15. See Nakagawa Masarni, Genji monogatari to ongaku (Osaka: Izumi Shoin, 1991); also see Frederic Lieberman, "Music in the Tale of Genji," Asian Music 2 (1971), pp. 39-42. For further discussion of the appreciation of noise and the meaning of silence in traditional Japanese classical music, see my article "Estetica del rumore: i suoni naturali nella musica," in La Naturafra Oriente e Occidente, Papers of the lOth Congress of the Associazione ltaliana Studi di Estetica (Milan: Luni Editrice, 1996). 16. These vibrations create the harmonic series that gives this instrument its characteristic sound. It is significant that the aesthetic value of sawari was not commented on until this century. See Kikkawa Eishi, Vom Charakter der japanischen Musik (Kassel, Germany: Biirenreiter, 1984), pp. 180-81; translated by Petra Rudolph from the Japanese text Nihan ongaku no seikaku (Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha, 1979). 17. Motoori Norinaga examines mono no aware in essays on ShinkokinshU and Genji Monogatari, in Motoori Norinaga Zenshil (Complete works), ed. Ono Sususmu and Okubo Tadashi, 19 vols. (Tokyo: Chikuma ShobO, 1968-1993). 18. Anezaki Masaharu, Art, Life and Nature in Japan (1933; reprint, Tokyo: Tuttle, 1984), p. 21. See also two essays by H. Tellenbach, B. Kimura, and D. E. Shaner in Nature in Asian Tradition of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (New York: State University of New York Press, 1989), pp. 153-82. 19. See part 1, introduction, 2nd paragraph, p. 14. 20. See also part 1, chap. 3.2., p. 98. 21. Anezaki,Art, Life and Nature, p. 23. 22. Imarnichi Tomonobu, Toyi) no bigaku (Tokyo: TBS Britannica, 1980). 23. See Vladimir Jankelevitch, L'irreversible et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1955); also Kondo Hideki, "L'etude de Jankelevitch sur !'improvisation," Ongakugaku: Journal of the Musicological Society of Japan 42, no. 1 (1996), pp. 24-35. 24. Training to become a musician continued to be of an austere ascetic nature until not so very long ago-up until just before the Second World War. An example of the harsh nature of this training were the exercises that had to be practiced outdoors before dawn on the thirty coldest days of the year. There were strict codes about dress and about how the studies were to be practiced. The aim of this was certainly in part to perfect the raucous and opaque timbre that the Japanese appreciate so highly, but it was also to encourage the development of the sense of total dedication necessary for attaining a spiritual goal. lmai Keisho, one of the most famous koto players, recalls in his book published in 1935 Matsu No Fukiyose (Tokyo: Okakura Shobo) how, during a practice session in the cold, he got severe pneumonia with a high temperature, and how he overcame the illness in spite of the fact that he disobeyed the doctor's orders and didn't interrupt his practicing. Sueko Kitai, in her autobiography, "Geigai Mandan" in Sankyoku 40, July, pp. 29-31, published in 1925, tells how once when she was particularly tired she changed her posture on her cush-

Traditional Japanese Cultural Values into the Twentieth Century

23

ion and that this prompted her teacher to say, "It seems to me that today you are not in the correct state of mind. You had better go home to practice." 25. Zeami (1363-1443, who developed the nii dance drama genre) tells how his father Kan'ami, after exclaiming "Wrong!" many times, once locked him in a room with his brother, but without giving any clue as to what needed to be practiced. See also Kyakuraika (by Zeami), translated by Mark J. Nearman in Monumenta Nipponica 35 (Summer 1980), pp. 153-97. 26. Quoted in Kikkawa, Nihon ongaku no seikaku, p. 85. It is clear too that religious institutions had important roles in music and this explains the direct link between music education and Buddhism. 27. Yueji, the book of music that forms chapter 27 of Liji, states, "All sounds come from states within the heart;" Walter Kaufmann, Musical References in the Chinese Classics, Detroit Monographs in Musicology, no. 5 (Detroit: Information Coordinators, 1976), pp. 32ff. There are many doubts as to the exact date of this text, but it is agreed that it represents the results of a work of compilation that was finished in the first century B.c. and that some parts of the text date back to the Zhou period (1027-771 B.c.), and this has led to the hypothesis that the text we have is what is left of Yuejing, an even older text on music. 28. Imamichi, Toyo no bigaku, pp. 228-35. 29. See Norbert Elias's important study, Uber die Zeit, Arbeiten zur Wissenssoziologie, no. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), and also Helga Nowotny's detailed research, Eigenzeit: Entstehung und Strukturierung eines Zeitgefohls (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989). The theme of the latter is an interesting elaboration of the idea that the development of society in its organization of work structures has led to the exact measurement of time being internalized. 30. This has its origins in Hebrew thought. See Stephen J. Gould, Time's Arrow, Time's Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987). 31. "[M]aking one's own mind the universal 'vessel,' and further establishing one's own mind- 'vessel' perfectly at ease in the limitlessly comprehensive and immaculately transparent Way of Nothingness-thus we should aspire that we may ultimately attain to the supreme artistic state." Zeami (1363-1443), quoted in lzutsu Toshihiko and lzutsu Toyo, "Observation on the Disciplinary Way of Noh," in The Theory ofBeauty in the Classical Aesthetics of Japan (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1981), p. 114. 32. See part 1, chap. 2.2, p. 81 and part 2, chap. 52, pp. 133ff. 33. "Jikansei to watashi" (The nature of time and myself), Polyphon 4 (1989), pp. 74-82. 34. See Gunter Nitschke, "Ma: Place, Space, Void," Kyoto JournalS (Autumn 1988), pp. 33-39. 35. See Minami Hiroshi, ed., Ma no kenkyo (Tokyo: KOdansha, 1982); also see my "Ma, il pieno e il vuoto," in La polifonia estetica: Specificita e raccordi, Papers from the Second International Congress of the Associazione Italiana per gli Studi di Estetica, ed. M. Venturi Ferriolo (Milan: Guerini Studio, 1996), pp. 307-314. 36. This idea was treated by Watsuji Testuro (1889-1960) in his Fudo: ningengakutekina kosatsu (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1935), translated into English by Geoffrey Bownas as Climate and Culture: A Philosophical Study (Tokyo: Hokuseido for UNESCO, 1971); to get an idea of the range ofWatsuji's discussion see also Sourcebook for Modem

24

Introduction

Japanese Philosophy, trans. and ed. by David A. Dilworth, Valdo H. Viglielmo, and Augustin J. Zavala (London: Greenwood Press, 1998), pp. 221-87. 37. Zhuang Zi in The Complete Works of Chuang Tzu, trans. by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1968); see also Giangiorgio Pasqualotto, Estetica del vuoto: Arte e meditazione nelle culture d'Oriente (Venice: Marsilio, 1992). 38. According to the laws of entropy and complexity; see Rene Thorn, "Halte au hasard, silence au bruit," Debat 3 (July-August 1980), and the reply by Ilya Prigogine and Edgar Morin, "Reponses a Rene Thorn," Debat 6 (November, 1980). 39. Shi-no-ko-shO was the name for this division of Japanese society into warrior, farmer, craftsman, and trader classes. Musicians could belong to any of them according to whether they worked at the imperial court, for the shOgun and feudal classes, at the Shinto and Buddhist temples, in recognized schools, or for aristocratic families, or were simply travelling minstrels and storytellers. Many artists belonged to the upper classes, but others belonged to the merchant classes or even lower. However, artistic excellence could free artists from whatever class they belonged to. For a discussion of the class structure during the Restoration epoch, see P. Dore, "The legacy of Tokugawa Education," in Changing Japanese Attitudes, ed. Jansen, pp. 99-131. 40. For an analysis and history of these styles of music, see Kishibe Shigeo, Yokomichi Mario, Kikkawa Eishi, and Hoshi Akira, Nihon ongaku: Rekishi to riron, (Tokyo: Kokuritsu gekijo, 1973); see also E. Harich-Schneider's classic text on this subject, A History of Japanese Music (London: Oxford University Press, 1973). 41. Miyagi Michio was awarded the highest rank by the lkuta school even though he was never adopted and accepted as a member of the family by his teacher. Previously, no musician could ever have become famous if he remained a free agent. But it was precisely this lack of allegiance to his teacher's family that helped Miyagi to work freely on traditional music and become famous in the Meiji period. See also part 1, chap. 1.3. 42. It was especially thanks to the efforts of the impresario Morita Kan'ya and to Morita's friendship with the writer Kawatake Mokuami (1816-93) that kabuki entered a new fertile period in which it became popular with all classes and came to the forefront in the development of new ideas, with the creation of new styles such as sangiri or katsureki, which offered new plots reflecting modem ideas. See Toita Koji, "The Kabuki, the Shinpa, the Shingeki," in Japanese Music and Drama in the Meiji Era, ed. Toyotaka Komiya (Tokyo: Obunsha, 1956), pp. 177-325. 43. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw the formation of itinerant groups of monks who were dependent on alms and played music on the shakuhachi as a form of meditation. The name Fuke was the Japanese version of the Chinese name for P'u K'o, who died around 850 and was alleged to be the founder of this school of thought. Suizen (breathing, sound) was the technique used for controlling breathing and thereby mental activity. The individual sound is called issokuon (single breath/sound) and the beginning and end of each sound is enriched by tiny ornaments. These minute details in the sound are very important in the Japanese conception of music; in the music for the shakuhachi they are used to create a complex structure that is, however, not considered to be music but a spiritual exercise in sound. Traditionally, the music for the shakuhachi was never performed in public. 44. In the late 1880s various societies were established to promote moral issues. One of the leading figures in this was the neo-Confucian intellectual Nishimura Shigeki. In the mid-1880s his society became the Society for the Promotion of the Way, which attracted

Traditional Japanese Cultural Values into the Twentieth Century

25

many intellectuals who were becoming newly interested in traditional values and culture. By 1900 it boasted ten thousand members, a high number for that period for a private society. See Marins B. Jansen, "Changing Japanese Attitudes toward Modernization," in Changing Japanese Attitudes, ed. Jansen, pp. 43-89. 45. Taki died from a disease he caught in Germany, where he had gone to study. See chap 1.2, p. 40. 46. Sugawara Meiro (1897-1988), composer. He was very active as a conductor and undertook numerous tours in Russia and France, where he met "Les Six," and his contact with the music of Debussy and Ravel stimulated him to bring these new musical languages back to Japan. Esteem for Sugawara was such that he was commissioned to write an important work to celebrate the visit of the Roman Catholic Pope to Japan in 1981. Yet nowadays it is almost impossible to find any score or recording of his works. 47. Hashimoto Kunihiko (1904-49), composer. Like Saburo Moroi, Hashimoto studied in Berlin, from 1934 to 1937, though he was a less academic composer than Moroi. As professor of composition at the Ueno Conservatory, he taught a large number of the postwar generation of composers. Because it was almost impossible to fmd his scores, I was not able to obtain a clear idea of the scale of the harmonic innovations that characterized his compositions. From the few works I have heard it would seem that he developed a mature and relatively modem style. 48. Hasegawa Yoshio (1907-81), a technically very competent composer who won the Premio Italia in 1951 and was very influenced by socialist ideas. He published two important texts, Daiwaseigaku kyotei (Manual of harmony, 1951) and SakkyokuhOgaku kyotei (Manual of composition, 1949-53). A typical feature of his writing is the concatenation of several motifs, which are overlapped to create a heterophonic halo over nontonal ostinato pedals. His writing is transparent and suggestive and because of this it recalls certain qualities of that simplicity that is so fundamental to Japanese aesthetics. 49. Hirao Kishio (1907-53) has not been so drastically forgotten. See chap. 6.4, p. 183. 50. In this context it is, of course, important to bear in mind the role women occupied in Japanese society. However, during the conference held as part of the 1996 12th Tokyo Summer Festival of the Arts (The Harmony of the Spheres: The Woman Ascending), it emerged that the situation of women composers in Japan is now better than that of their counterparts in the West. The conference was "History of Women Composers: From the Meiji Era to World War II", 9 July, see catalogue, pp. 28-29. 51. Akiyama, program notes for a concert entitled "Kindai Nihon no kangengakukyoku 1912-1941" (Modem Japanese compositions for orchestra, 1912-41), given at the Sogakudo Auditorium in Ueno in Autumn 1988. Here Akiyama takes issue with Fukai Shiro over Fukai's praise for his teacher Sugawara as a composer of instrumental works and his criticism of Yamada and Nobutoki because they were mainly composers of vocal music. In addition, Akiyama is doubtful whether Nobutoki is worthy of consideration, but asserts the importance of Yamada's role in the creation of "the foundations" for modem Japanese music.

Chapter One

The Introduction of Western Music

Japan bowed to the international pressures to open the country as if it were a capitulation. Initially one of the leadership's primary aims was the acquisition of the military and technical know-how of the "barbarians" (as Westerners were called, using the Chinese expression). In hindsight it can be seen that their intention in doing so was to enable Japan to resume her policy of isolation, but from a stronger position. Even before the forced reopening, the more enlightened of the lords and nobles had already begun to reorganize their enterprises along Western lines and for this they took as their role model the Dutch troops stationed at Nagasaki. Since military music was acknowledged to be an important component of the martial arts, the armed forces employed wind bands that, like their Dutch equivalents, were ensembles of woodwind instruments and percussion. In 1839 Takashima Shirodayii (1798-1866, a scholar of Dutch military techniques whose official name was Shiihan) initiated a reform of the armed forces that included the institution of military bands. When the Japanese navy was reorganized along Dutch lines in 1855, it was urged that a fife and drum band should be set up. 1 From 1860 onward many foreign delegations were established in Yokohama, Tokyo's port, and the arrival of the first Prussian ambassador, Count Eulenburg, in a triumphal procession with a military escort and accompanied by a brass band, caused a great sensation. In 1866 the daimyo of Fukui asked the French ambassador for an instructor to teach military music to his soldiers. In 1867 Tokugawa Yoshinobu, Japan's last shOgun, sent thirty-two men from his army to study military music and one of these subsequently became the instructor of the imperial orchestra.2 The year of the Meiji restoration was 1868, when the emperor regained control from the Tokugawa, and 1869 is the date usually given officially for the start of the importation of Western music, for it was in 1869 that the leader of the Shimazu clan from the Satsuma region (which had played an important role in leading the revolt against the Tokugawa regime) sent a

27

28

Chapter One

group of about thirty men to Yokohama to study military music with John William Fenton,3 the instructor of the British band. In 1871, with the Japanese army reorganized, the newly formed Ministry for War4 appointed Fenton as the army's music instructor. In 1874 a circular was issued by the Ministry for the Imperial Household (the Department of Music of the Imperial Household was the only organization of music for the state) that read: "We require that all court musicians, teachers, and students begin straight away to study Western music." So in 1876 Fenton began to teach the gakunin (the court musicians). There are many eyewitness accounts of the anxiety that beset the court musicians, for it was a task fraught with insurmountable difficulties due to the enormous conceptual and practical differences between Eastern and Western music. The newly formed Military Band played for the emperor in 1872 at the ceremony for the inauguration of Japan's ftrst railway. In 1876, in honour of the emperor's birthday, the Imperial Court Orchestra, directed by Togi Suenaga, gave its ftrst mixed concert of Japanese and Western music. It is now impossible to identify the pieces performed at this event, as the names of the composers were not included in the program, but it seems that the Western music performed was mainly English military music. In 1881 there was a historic concert given before the emperor in which the orchestra performed various national anthems and other popular works from Britain, Holland, and the United States. The following year, for the Empire Celebration Day, the orchestra gave a public concert in Asakusa, one of Tokyo's central districts, to an audience of seven hundred people. It is not difficult to imagine that this music of drums, ftfes, and trumpets, fully consonant with the Meiji government's new dictum fukoku kyiihei (enrich the country, strengthen the army)5 should have easily and quickly overcome the audience's initial confusion, stirred up their enthusiasm, and won them over. The military bands spawned numerous wind bands that were formed in schools, businesses, and factories and that remained active until the late 1970s. Those who had wished that the acquisition of military and scientific knowhow should be followed by a return to a policy of isolation soon saw their dreams blown away, as progress began to happen at a dizzying rate. Though the program of modernization had been carefully planned, the speed with which it happened caught everyone unawares. There were also prominent changes in the role of music in society that included public concerts of Westem music given by the military bands. From 1883 onward elegant, high-society receptions accompanied by Western music were held in Rokumeikan, a famous ballroom. Instructors from English, French, and German bands became responsible for teaching music and both they and their Japanese students composed new music that captured the modernist spirit of the Meiji period. The most famous example of this is the national anthem, Kimi ga yo (fig. 1.1), which was one of the earliest attempts to combine Japanese and Western musical cultures. Fenton

29

The Introduction of Western Music

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worked with gagaku musicians on several versions of a possible national anthem, but none of these were successful and the task was handed over to his successor, Franz Eckert. Eckert had been summoned to lead the Band of the Navy in 1879 and in 1888 he went to work for the Music Department of the Imperial Household. Kimi ga yo is attributed to a court musician called Hayashi Hiromori (1831-96). 6 It was performed in public for the first time in 1880 and subsequently adopted as the national anthem. Hayashi originally wrote it using traditional gagaku notation and Eckert "corrected" it by adding Western harmonization, thus underlining its adaptability both to ichikotsu (a gagaku mode) and to the Dorian church mode. Japan's victory ending the war with China (1894-95) reinforced Japan's military pride and, as a result of this, the musical repertoire continued to be dominated by Western-style marches and patriotic music. All of this had a significant influence on popular music, of which a typical style was rappa-bushi (literally "trumpet song"), and its effect was also felt on school music, as Western music influenced the formation of the music curriculum.7 In the middle of the nineteenth century literacy rates were about 50 percent for men and 15 percent for women (a high proportion compared with the European standards of that time). In the Meiji period the education system was radically changed and Western guidelines were adopted after an imperial decree in 1872 established universal education. In October 1879 a circular from the Ministry of Education ratified the creation of Ongaku Denshiisho, Centre for Musical Education, which was almost immediately renamed the Ongaku Torishirabe Gakari (Music Investigation Committee, the name by which it is commonly known). 8 Ongaku Torishirabe Gakari was headed by Izawa Shuji (1851-1917) and it had three

30

Chapter One

fundamental objectives: the creation of a new corpus of music using both Westem and Eastern elements; the training of musicians in preparation for the new developments to come; and the introduction of music into the national school curriculum. The adoption of Western ideas in the field of education was guided by Confucian criteria,9 which hold that education encourages mental harmony. As a result, given the program of the modernization of society, the music used could only have been Western. Very quickly Ongaku Torishirabe Gakari was able to organize lessons in singing, in a few instruments (koto, kokyu, 10 piano, organ, and violin), and in music theory. Another important task was the creation of a repertoire of songs suitable for teaching music in schools, since music was now an obligatory subject in primary schools though, as the commissioner Izawa Shiiji 11 had already complained in several reports, the plan for music education in schools was not being actuated, due to the lack of suitable teaching materials. It was quickly realized that there was a pressing need for the creation of new didactic materials for schools, for none of the Japanese genres of music had anything suitable to offer. This was partly because of the social stratification of music, partly because everything to do with traditional music took place privately, and partly because the whole traditional system of training musicians was so far removed from any of the ideas being discussed for the new education system. One of the tasks assigned to the Ongaku Torishirabe Gakari was the preparation of materials and, to help with this, Luther Withing Mason, the music education inspector for Boston, who had met Izawa on his visit to the United States, was brought over from America. Mason arrived in Tokyo in early March 1880 and stayed for two years. Mason and Izawa worked together and in 1881 produced the first book of school songs. 12 Of the songs in this collection, 90 percent used Western melodies to which a Japanese text had been added. In the second collection this imbalance was slightly redressed, as only 80 percent of the songs were Western in origin and the music of the remaining 20 percent used Japanese scales and melodies. As tastes and ideas changed13 the work of Izawa was heavily criticized and the emphasis shifted in favor of a return to traditional Japanese music. However, this primary phase laid down the groundwork for the introduction of Western music into Japanese culture in general. Children learned to read Western notation, to sing in a choir, to enjoy harmonized tunes, and to perceive modulation (fig. 1.2). Ongaku Torishirabe Gakari decided that, in order for it to be able to understand European music better, it needed to get a better understanding of the subtleties of the Western tonal system. Contact was made with the English musicologist Alexander J. Ellis,14 who was interested in studying the Japanese tonal system. Kozu Senzaburo (1852-1927), who had been in the United States with Izawa, had immediately on his return from the States started preparing and publishing translations of basic music theory textbooks. He was also interested in the history of

The Introduction of Western Music

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Chapter Five

In 1954, when Matsudaira was awarded the Suvini Zerboni prize, he came to Europe for five months. He returned to Europe in 1957 for a performance of Figures Sonores at the ISCM Festival in Zurich (Pierre Boulez subsequently included Figures Sonores in the 1958 Domaine Musicale concert season). In 1959 Matsudaira came to Rome for a performance of Samai for orchestra. He had close friendships with many European composers of his generation, such as Goffredo Petrassi and Olivier Messiaen. He attended many ISCM festivals as well as other festivals of contemporary music, such as Donaueschingen, Darmstadt, and Wien Modem. His musical language is well structured through his use of timbre and sense of geometry, while the impact his music has on listeners is a direct result of his powerful intelligence and the rich emotional complexity of his writing.

NOTES 1. John Dower, "Peace and Democracy in Two Systems," in Postwar Japan as History, ed. Andrew Gordon, pp. 3-33 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 7. 2. See William G. Beasley, The Modem History of Japan (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963), chap. 15, p. 289. However, a few years later, a large number of those who had been removed from their positions were rehabilitated, though only a few were able to reclaim their original positions, since these were now occupied by others. See Hans H. Baerwald, The Purge of Japanese Leaders under the Occupation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959). 3. See Marilyn Ivy, "Formation of Mass Culture," in Postwar Japan as History, p.244. 4. When the Korean War broke out, the United States wanted to use Japan as its Asian outpost. The United States occupied Japan, obliged it to align with the West in the ensuing Cold War, and tried to instigate an American-based rearmament, but Yoshida's 1952 government strongly resisted this. Recently several governments have sought to negotiate amendments to the clause that denies Japan a sovereign right to war, but lively popular protests have forced such projects to be abandoned. 5. This was a system of keeping fmancial, industrial, and commercial capital in family hands. 6. The ambivalence in Japanese thought toward victory and defeat has been well discussed by Ivan Morris in The Nobility of Failure: Tragic Heroes in the History of Japan (Tokyo: Tuttle, 1975). 7. For further discussion of how Japanese artists dealt with the dilemma between tradition and innovation, see Alexandra Munroe, "Re-defming Tradition in Post-war Japan" (paper presented at the Third Venice Conference on Japanese Art, "In search of elegance: Traditional Aesthetics in 20th Century Japanese Art," May 1996). 8. The differences between the free circulation of culture and civilization and the particular methods employed by Japan to adopt Western models are discussed in the papers presented at the "International Round Table on the Relationship between Japanese and Western Art," held in Tokyo-Kyoto in 1968 for the Meiji centenary, published with the same title in Tokyo in 1969 by UNESCO in collaboration with the Japanese National Com-

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145

mittee. Elisseef's paper is on p. 90. His paper, "Quelque reflections sur 1es experiences cu1turelles de Meiji et sur 1es exchanges cu1turels," is on pp. 54-55. 9. See part 1, chap. 3.2, pp. 98ff. and part 1, chap. 4.2, p. 119ff.. 10. Yamane's three articles were published on 23, 24, and 25 December 1945 in the daily newspaper Tokyo shinbun: "Shikaku naki chiikaisha" (Inappropriate mediators), "Kyutai izenno gakudan" (A new musical world as stale as ever), "Ongakufukk:o he no michi" (The road toward a musical renaissance). 11. This was also published in the Tokyo shinbun on 23 December 1945. 12. In June 1946 the Ongaku sekai published a series of articles entitled "Gak:udan no genjo wo tsuku" (Insights into the contemporary state of music), which included contributions by Yoshimoto Akimitsu, Arisak:a Yoshihiko, Maruyama Tetsuo (from the NHK), and Miyauchi Yoshio. 13. Joseph Rosenstock, "Shinnihon no Ongaku" (New music in Japan), Shin Nippon, no. 1 (1946),pp. 18-19. 14. For example, in June 1946 a list of twenty-five writers who had been guilty of being accomplices to the military regime and its ultranationalistic policies was published by the magazine Shin Nihon Bungaku (New Japanese literature), the official publication of the New Society for Japanese Literature. 15. Nakanishi Rei, "Suntory-hall no kurashiku kak:umei" (The classical revolution in Suntory Hall), Polyphon 1 (1987), pp. 159ff.; quoted in Okada Akeo "Europii.ische klassik in Japan-eine diistere diagnose," in Musik in Japan, ed. Silvain Guignard, Judicium Verlag Miinchen (1996), p.179-97. 16. In an interview with Fran~oise Bernard Mache, Les mals entendus (Paris: Richard Masse), Revue Musicale (1978), pp. 314-15. 17. In Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (New York: Abram, 1969), Allan Kaprow makes an interesting comparison between the postwar avant-garde movements in America,Europe,andJapan. 18. For example, films such as Kurosawa Akira's Tora no owo fumu otokotachi (They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail), films with music by Sugawara (who had collaborated with the nationalist regime), and all performances of kabuki (such as Chashingura, which were heavily permeated with Japanese morality), were banned. 19. The Toyama Library is a large music library that was set up with materials provided by the musicologist Toyama Kazuyuki. It includes an extensive collection of documents, texts, and scores of contemporary music. 20. Quoted in Akiyama Kuniharu, "Nihonteki narumono no kyoko," a series of six articles that appeared in Ongaku Geijutsu nos. 5-7, 10-12 (1978); discussion of Hayasak:a is to be found in the third article, pp. 56-63. 21. Hayasak:a Fumio in Ongaku Geijutsu no. 9 (1954). 22. Hayasak:a Fumio, Nihonteki ongakuron (Essay on Japanese music) (Tokyo: ShinchO Ongaku Shuppansha, 1942); see part I, chap. 4, p. 116. 23. It was not until he was twenty-five that Hayasak:a left Hokkaido for Tokyo to work with the TohO Film Company; see part I, chap. 2.2, p. 79ff. 24. From the text written by Hayasak:a for the work's first performance. This text was published in June 1955 in Shinfonf, the bulletin of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra (which had commissioned the work and which gave its first performance, conducted by Ueda Masahi). 25. The ryilteki is a bamboo flute and the hichiriki a small oboe.

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26. See part 1, chap. 2.2, pp. 83 and 85. 27. The rhythm and tempo of gagaku are regulated by two drums: the taiko (a large suspended drum), which marks the beginning of each rhythmic phrase, and the kakko (a barrel drum), which plays the internal patterns of each rhythmic unit. The kakko player is also the group's leader. Other rhythmic units are marked by strokes on the shoko gong. A 3/4 meter is exceedingly rare and there is no ternary rhythm in gagaku. 28. Matsudaira Yoritsune, "Gagaku to gendai ongaku" (Contemporary music and gagaku), in Nihon no kotengeiniJ 10, no. 2 (1969-71), pp. 319-30. In this interesting article, Matsudaira also explains how he extracted a twelve-tone row from a piece of .court music. 29. Netori (literally "taking the note") is a brief introduction. Its function is to anticipate both pitchwise and moodwise the modal scale of the piece that follows and to allow the instruments to check their tuning. There are six basic kinds of netori corresponding to the six modal scales. The instruments enter in the following order: shO, hichiriki, flute and percussion, and (fmally) the string instruments. During the netori, only the leader of each instrumental group plays. A netori is in a slow tempo and it is rhythmically free; rhythmic synchronicity between the wind instruments and the string instruments is avoided. For a detailed examination of the three saibara pieces, see Elizabeth Markham, Saibara. Japanese Court Songs of the Heian Period, 2 vol. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 259-333 and 387-395 of the first volume and pp. 55-59,109-111, and 266-268 of the second volume. 30. From Shiba Sukehiro's transcription into Western notation, Gosenfu ni yoru gagaku sofu (Gagaku scores in Western notation), 4 vol. (Tokyo: Kawai Gakufu, 1968-72), I, p. 300ff. 31. Tanka is a form of classical Japanese poetry. It is composed of five verses, each of which is composed of a 5-7-5-7-7 sequence of syllables. It is a very old style of poetry and it appeared in the very first collection of Japanese poetry, the Man'yosha (from the eighth century). 32. See part 1, chap. 2.2, p. 89, note 47. 33. Stockhausen developed his concept of "group composition" as he moved away from the tempered twelve-note scale and evolved a parametric organization based on numbers other than twelve. In group composition, he used serial organization to control every level of the formal process (not just the "four parameters" traditionally treated serially). In group composition the series does not just permute independent objects but it also governs their relative proportions. 34. From "Sozai wo norikoeru" (Transcending one's materials), a conversation between Matsudaira Yoritsune and Yuasa Joji published in Ongaku Geijutsu, no.6 (1969), pp. 30-35. 35. See part 1, introduction, 0.2, pp. 14-15. 36. Seigaiha and Rindai are large-scale gagaku compositions. Although they belong to the bugaku style, they are usually performed with the larger ensemble typical of the kangen style. Murasaki Shikibu gives a description of them in Genji Monogatari. Matsudaira used Seigaiha (Blue waves on the sea) several times. 37. Chakyoku is a medium-length composition with a tendency for phrases to begin on beat five of an eight-beat measure.

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38. Sound emission of the shO is continuous and B and A are always present in every aitake. The fingering (teutsuri) for passing from one chord to another is complex. Certain chord cycles are considered to be related to the mode, while others are not. 39. A comparison of the basic melodic outline to be found in ancient texts and the highly embellished melodies of more modern documents gives a good idea of the space that used to be given to improvisation. The widespread use of improvisation is also mentioned in descriptions of musical events in literary sources of the Heian period.

Chapter Six

The Postwar Avant-Garde

Japan shared with all the other defeated nations the urgent need to begin not only a physical reconstruction but also a reconstruction of its social values and social organization. In its transition from a feudal economy to a capitalist economy, it had managed to catch up and keep pace with the more technologically advanced nations. So the postwar reconstruction of its cultural life and its economic and political affairs, with the ensuing rapid return to prosperity, were on a par with that of countries such as Germany. 1 The music scene also reestablished itself relatively quickly but, at ftrst, contacts with the rest of the world were few. The vacuum that Japanese artists had to face was perhaps even more devastating than that their contemporaries in Europe had to deal with. As discussed earlier, Japanese society was a highly integrated society, so the collapse of the aura surrounding the emperor, plus the seven years of Japan's ftrst occupation by a foreign power, caused a profound psychological disorientation, an unease that was strikingly portrayed in contemporary literature and ftlm. Given this cultural isolation, the American occupation offered young people, who felt culturally starved, an avenue for making outside contacts and obtaining information. In over a third of all cinemas the only ftlms shown were American; there was an explosion of English-Japanese dictionaries appearing in bookshops; and by their mere presence in all big cities American Gls offered a means of cultural communication. The Civil Information and Education Branch of the American occupation forces had its headquarters in the Shibuya area of Tokyo, in the same building as the Morinaga sweet factory. This organization had a well-stocked library, where it was possible to read a large number of American magazines (including musical publications, such as Musical America and Music Quarterly) and newspapers, as well as listen to recordings and study musical scores. Many young Japanese musicians came here to study and to ftnd out what was going on in the rest of the world. In addition to new artistic developments, the ideas that had evolved prior to the war (such as atonality and dodecaphony) were assimilated. Of these, dodecaphony had by now become a well-consolidated and academically established technique, so 149

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it provoked relatively little discussion or debate. However, its introduction into Japanese music had not been through historical evolution, so there were no inhibitions surrounding its adoption and the complexities of its theoretical aspects were all but ignored. More than discussions about compositional techniques and styles, what fired collective debates and self-examination among young postwar Japanese composers were questions about individual inspiration and the search for new creative and aesthetic ideas. The liberation from the shackles of isolation and therejection of the nationalist dogma of the prewar era were the driving forces behind the evolution of a new, fragile cultural awareness and the recoupment both practically and ideologically of musical concepts from outside Japan.

6.1 JIKKENKOBO The older generation of composers emerged feeling betrayed after having been forced into participating in a shameful war. For those Japanese composers born around 1930, the war had been the period of their adolescence and, after the obsessive insistence on Japanese-ness of nationalist wartime propaganda, they were left with a heartfelt revulsion for everything associated with Japan and Japanese culture. Their primary desire was to shake off all the trappings of their own culture and, in particular, all those aspects of Japanese culture that had been exploited by the nationalist regime. The new social and cultural climate that arrived with the American occupation stimulated and inspired them. As Takemitsu Tom commented: "When I decided to become a composer, I wanted to compose Western music. At that period, quite definitely because of the war, everything Japanese was to me hatefu1.'>2 Immediately after the war, all the contradictions created by the prewar process of modernization erupted. The traditional hierarchy of Japanese society was based on a reverence for the emperor that was now being dramatically challenged. Traditional Japanese culture, the roots of which reached far back in time, long before the overwhelming influx of Western ideas and technology, was being rejected because it was soaked in the blood of war. And importantly, Japan's defeat raised many questions about the importation of Western culture and practices. Before the war the Japanese had prided themselves on being one of the world's leading nations, but the confrontation with a new reality in the aftermath of destruction, with all its squalor and poverty, deflated these feelings of grandeur. All of this was creating an unbearable contrast between, on the one hand, the outgoing lifestyles of city dwellers who were adapting themselves to Western technological advances and, on the other, the more intimate and traditional lifestyles of those who lived on and worked the land. It was becoming necessary to find an answer to these contradictions, or to at least fmd a way of living with them, and it was this need that became the stimulus for one of the most artistically creative periods in Japan's history, a period that anticipated parallel developments in the European avant-garde art. An excellent example of this is the group of artists of the Gutai Group, who were the first to develop ideas such as ac-

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tion painting, the informal movement, and happenings? and the group of musicians who were members of Jikkenk:obO (Experimental Laboratory), officially founded in 1951.4 In the early 1950s the members of Jikkenk:obO had begun to manipulate sound and to design multimedia projects that experimented with everything from musique concrete to installations. The founding members of Jikkenk:obO (all of whom were in their twenties) were the critic Akiyama Kuniharu (1929-96) and the composers Yuasa Joji (1929- ), Takemitsu TOru (1930-96), Fukushima Kazuo (1930- ), and Suzuki Hiroyoshi (1939- ), together with important figures from other artistic disciplines such as the painter Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, the photographer6tsuji Kiyoshi, the lighting designer Imai Naotsugu, and the performer Sonoda Takahiro. Other composers, such as Sato Ken'ijiro (1927- ),joined the group later, while Fukushima was a memberfor a brief period only.5 Jikkenk:obO's practice of holding sessions for the discussion and comparison of ideas had been initiated in the late 1940s. Its public activities included concerts to present compositions by members of the group, but works by contemporary foreign composers were also included. These concerts were carefully staged. The idea was to stimulate a new visual perception of the performance space by placing objects and mobiles around the performance area and by creating light displays and projecting photographs. This synthesis of audiovisual elements and the constant cross-fertilization of genres were among the main features that characterized Jikkenk:obO. Right from its inception, the surrealist poet Takiguchi Shiizo had a strong influence on the group. Takemitsu met Takiguchi in 1950 and it is most likely Takiguchi's influence that inspired the surreal imagery that pervades Takemitsu's work and is evident in the titles he gave his compositions. The composers who belonged to Jikkenk:obO would get together to study scores by Messiaen, which they had happened to obtain from Hayasaka, and to discuss everything that Akiyama found in American magazines, especially references to John Cage.6 They also paid regular visits to the Civil Information and Education Branch to listen to recordings of music by Aaron Copland, Walter Piston, and Roger Sessions. They remained unaware, however, of everything that was happening in Europe, such as the Darmstadt Ferienkurse or the new research into electroacoustic music. All the members of the group wanted to open up new paths and would stay up all night to discuss a new concept "until nobody any longer knew whose idea it had originally been," as Yuasa once told me. They were looking for a way to reconcile the conceptual differences between Japanese music and a "new" Western-style music. They had been able to procure scores by Bart6k, Jolivet, Messiaen, Schonberg, and Webem. Their studies of French music through the scores of Debussy, Ravel, and Messiaen were guided by Claude Rostand's book on twentieth-century French music? They were very interested in Messiaen's music, with its modal structure (which he had begun to employ in Preludes, 1929) and its strange combination of implacable movement and extreme sensuousness.8 But it was Jolivet's music that attracted them most. As Rostand wrote, Jolivet "systematically stresses the orientalization of Western music that Debussy had begun more or less instinctively.'>9 All members of JikkenkobO were also in instinctive agreement on the importance of the

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cosmic and irrational elements in Jolivet's music, with its atonality and rhythmic asymmetry and sense of a universal faith that was free from the mysterious and terrifying magic of Messiaen's Christ, a concept totally alien to the Japanese. The poetic conception of structure in Japanese music is the extreme opposite of the abstract structures that evolved in Europe from the classical period onward, and the composers of the Jikkenkooo circle, in their studies of works such as SchOnberg's string quartets, had difficulty dealing with its inordinately rational style and with the new linguistic syntaxes, such as twelve-tone music, that remained frrmly embedded in classical European forms. 10 However, these same Japanese composers also had a very limited knowledge of traditional Japanese music. What little, sporadic contact there was with this scene came mainly through personal connections, while traditional music was not to be featured greatly in public until the 1960s. One of the few composers who had a healthy knowledge of this area was Yuasa, who had had personal experience of Japanese classical music through studying utai singing and participating in no performances with his father. This had given him a basic, simple awareness of the conceptual differences between European and Japanese music, especially with regard to the conception of time. With this knowledge and awareness he was able to compare the concept of time and the use of silence in no music with Webem's use of silence.U They saw that in Japanese music time was felt to be circular, open, and nonteleological, while in Western music it was formalized within logical and abstract structures. They debated ideas on expression, art, and beauty and read writings that ranged from Jean-Paul Sartre to Suzuki Daisetzu, from Mallarme to Camus, as well as much of the American literature that had flooded the Japanese market and Yuasa was particularly keen on Faulkner, Hemingway, and Herbert Read. In their collective research for new linguistic tools, the contributions made by each member included not only their own artistic personality but also their own personal cultural interests and knowledge (knowledge of no from Yuasa, of zen from Suzuki and Fukushima, and of humanitarian Christianity from Tak:emitsu as well as Akiyama's intellectual curiosity and openness). This enabled the members of Jikkenkooo to gain strength from each other and their unified energy provided the basis for each individual composer's personal creative output; indeed Yuasa and Tak:emitsu in particular are considered to have made some of the most significant and original contributions to twentieth-century music. From 1951 to 1957 Jikkenkobo presented one major concert every year. The first was a performance of the ballet Ikiru yorokobi (The joy of life), commissioned as part of an important exhibition of works by Pablo Picasso. 12 The orchestral score was composed in tandem by Suzuki and Tak:emitsu. It included a text written and recited by Akiyama, who also designed the lighting and the set. The following year they organized the first performance in Japan of two works by Messiaen: Preludes for piano and Quatuor pour lafin du temps (1940).'3 In the same concert, Futatsu no pasutorliru (Two pastorals), Yuasa's first work for piano, was also performed. The event of the following year consisted of three works. The first was Shikenhiika W. S. shi no me no bOken (The visual adventures

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of W. S., the experimental pilot), with music by Suzuki, a sound poem by Akiyama on a prerecorded tape, and automatic projections of slides by Yamaguchi Katsuhiro. The other two were musique concrete compositions by Yuasa: Resupyugu (L'Espiegle, Small demon) and Mishiranu Sekai no Monogatari (Story of an unknown world). The latter piece had been composed with help from Suzuki, and its performance was accompanied by the projection of images by Kitadai Shiizo. The tapes for both works had been produced in Sony's electronic music studio (at that time called Tsiishin Kogyo). Since powerful and sophisticated sound systems had yet to be invented, they dealt with the problem of multiple spatial diffusion by placing the loudspeakers under the chairs. Akiyama controlled the sound projection by manipulating the levers for the lights, which also switched the loudspeakers on and off to move the sound around the space. In the following year, 1954, Jikkenkobo gave the first Japanese performance of Pierrot Lunaire (1921). The 1955 concert was a chamber music concert with Yuasa's Nanatsu no gakki no tame no purojekushion (Projection for seven players, 1955-56) and Takemitsu's Shitsunai kyosokyoku (Chamber concerto) for winds. In 1956 the concert was dedicated to electronic music, with Myujikku konkureto no tame no xyz (XYZ for musique concrete, 1953) and Denshi ongaku (Electronic music, 1955) by Mayuzumi Toshiro; Rittaih0s6no tame no myujikku konkureto (Stereophonic musique concrete, 1955), by Shibata Minao; and Maikurofon no tame no ongaku (Music for microphone, 1952), by Akutagawa Yasushi. The problem that the lack of performers would give no visual focus to the concert was resolved with a very simple expedient: many ropes were hung all over the performance space to bring it alive by creating a sense of fluid movement. In their last concert in 1957 JikkenkobO presented two works that were to become recognized as major masterpieces of twentieth-century music and that were composed by two of the group's linchpins: Yuasa's Naishokkakuteki Uchu (Cosmos Haptic) for piano and Takemitsu's Requiem for strings. By then end of the 1950s the Tokyo music scene had become rich and incredibly varied. There was such an abundance of musical activity of all sorts that it was alrilost inevitable that a well-known but loosely knit group such as JikkenkobO should fold and that its members should look for other outlets for their musical projects. JikkenkobO's artistic concept was outlined very clearly in Yuasa's preface to Projections, his first major work: "The lives of human beings are by necessity projected toward the future. Therefore, when music is thought of as 'the moment when self-questioning occurs' it can be fired only by a spirit of exploration." He defines consciousness as "the desire and determination to live life." According to Yuasa, the projection of music is that which follows from the projection of existence (i.e., man's will as expressed through life). It is clear that, in focussing on the notion of the projection of the future as the basis of human action, Yuasa has learned much from Sartre's writings 14 and it is obvious how deeply he had thought about Sartre's ideas in working out his own Weltanschauung. According

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to Sartre's humanism, human beings exist through their pursuit of transcendental objectives and the core of each person's life lies in reaching these objectives and mastering them. Yet for Yuasa, despite this focus on the importance of human intention, human beings are not placed at the center of things, but their existence reflects a far greater mirror and resonator- the cosmos that Suzuki defines as the Cosmic Unconsciouness. 15 Duality, or rather the zen concept of an acceptance of the nonduality of opposing ideas, was to become one ofYuasa's fundamental poetic tenets. For not only Yuasa and his fellow members of Jikk:enk:obO, but for all postwar Japanese composers the extremes of an excess of rationality 16 and an excess of subjective individualism did not reflect their personal poetics, for such extremes had never been part of the aesthetic concepts of Japanese artP Also in the preface to Projections Yuasa gives his first definition of time: "Consciousness lays out the ground plan for the project that provides the conditions 'without which there can be no awareness of existence.' As it then becomes itself time [my italics] consciousness is the first becoming of existence." Yuasa accepts the need to give consciousness a Heideggerian sense of the relevance of time (taken from Sarte's essay on Faulkner). 18 For Yuasa time can only be conceived of as subjective consciousness, and the objective immeasurability of time is an aspect that tallies perfectly with the oriental concept of time. For Yuasa and all the other composers of Jikk:enk:obo, this difficult comparison between the oriental concept of time and the Western organization of musical time led to an elaborate concept of time as circular and revelational and of time and space as an irrational flow in which the intervention of music functions as a cut. Reflections on time were to become an increasingly important aspect ofYuasa's work. Cosmos Haptic contains a good example of these ideas at work: seventy bars in 4/4 and 5/5, where Yuasa works extremely simple material to achieve a rich, expressive effect. It is an excellent illustration of the realization of the ideas expounded by Hayasaka in his teachings. In Cosmic Haptic Yuasa abandoned the serial writing that he had used so skillfully in Projections, for "he wanted to discover a more personally relevant starting point." Yuasa had come across the word "haptic" in Herbert Read's Icon and /dea. 19 This use of"haptic" comes from Austrian historian Alois Riegl's use of the word to indicate art forms whose structures were the result of internal sensations rather than of external observations. Yuasa writes: "This piece inhabits the space where human beings and the cosmos intersect. It is an attempt to express a primordial, vitalistic religious belief." In this quote, which comes from Yuasa's liner notes for the piece, Yuasa also explains how the composition is based on an oriental conception of time and discusses the modes used. His use of modality as an explicit avoidance of a diatonic or chromatic harmony is a device used to suffuse the music with a special, fluctuating atmosphere. The modes used are based on Messiaen's Modes of Limited Transposition, especially numbers II, IV and VII. But apart from this, other aspects of Yuasa's music share little in common with Messiaen, especially Messiaen's statement that "The starting point is melody" or Messiaen's concept that timbre is not a linguistic component. For a lengthy period (which started with Cosmos Haptic)

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Yuasa's concern was no longer primarily with the role of pitches in the musical structure, but with time. He concentrated on the interaction between a few musical cells, expanding and contracting them spatially (an effect achieved by altering timbre and pitch) and in time (by changes in durations). The structure is conceived from moment to moment. In the liner notes Yuasa also talked of a "linear string," by which he meant the use of a personal and multiform musical logic that incorporated both European and non-European concepts to develop his musical ideas. Yuasa also described the structure of the piece as being divided into five parts. According to my analysis, the five parts can be divided thus: section a (bars 1-16); section b (bars 17-31); section c (bars 32-42); section d (bars 43-53); and section e (bars 54-end, including a brief reprise starting at bar 63).20 The first and most impressive cell (fig. 6.1) starts with a major second that expands by a diverging tritone leap to become a major ninth (which can of course also be considered as an expanded version of the major second). This figure can also be read as two unrelated notes (unrelated because of the dissonance) that become two superimposed diverging lines that follow two separate itineraries. In the first exposition at the opening of the piece the durations of cell I are variable, sometimes very long, sometimes changing rapidly, sometimes syncopated or with attacks falling on the weak beats. This creates the feeling of a very loose tempo, completely free of any pulse. Cell I is repeated several times; in bar 4 it moves upward, with the notes closely spaced, and in bar 6 it is doubled, with further alterations to the durations that do not, however, affect its profile. This is a striking example of how Yuasa realizes his conception of contraction and expansion in time and space. At bar 6, cell I is embellished with a falling figure of four thirtysecond notes. The intervals of this figure are an augmented octave, a perfect fifth, and a diminished octave. This new pattern we shall call cell II. Even though it is extremely short and reappears only five times, it is always immediately recognizable. It always occurs at strategic moments and the intervals are always expanded and contracted in the same manner. So, even though the augmented and diminished octaves may invert position and the central fifth may not always be perfect, it is one of the key elements of the composition (fig. 6.2). This is perceived as spatial expansion and contraction.

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Figure 6.2. Yuasa, Cosmos Haptic, cell II. © 1973 Ongaku No Tomo Sha Corp.

•• Cell I returns at a distance of an interval of an augmented fourth that can be clearly heard because the two tritones are played an octave apart (in bar 7 and again in bar 8, where it is played iff). The last exposition of cell I in this first section comes in bar 11. This is where the tension reaches its highest point. It is preceded in bars 8-9 by cell Ill, which is a repeated octave. This also returns at irregular intervals, but every time it appears it brings a sense of pregnant stillness that is in sharp contrast with the dynamic tension of cells I and II (fig 6.3). When cell III appears as a slow, repeated ninth, it is still clearly recognizable as cell III, but this time it brings a powerful new feeling of expansion.

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Underneath cell ill there is a descending figure that is cell N. This reappears with cell ill, always at the same pitch, though the durations may alter slightly. The intervals of cell ill expand symmetrically by a major third to become a major tenth, which in turn becomes the opening of an ostinato figure that is repeated in the bass for the whole of the third section. A new episode (section b) starts with a brief ascending phrase on the last quarter beat of bar 16 and this new material continues, interacting with material from section a, right through to the end of the second section (bar 31). This ascending phrase can be analyzed as deriving from cell ll, but now moving upward with the octave contracted to a minor second. The tempo marking for section b at bar 17 is Poco Piu [sic]; and while it is more flowing and ornamented the material is similar, with syncopated repetitions and the use of intervals of a fourth or a second (fig. 6.4). In bars 20-21 this figure is repeated in unison in both hands in various registers of the piano in a crescendo that grows to jJf. The ornamentation, whose function is much more than just purely descriptive, changes. Indeed for Yuasa, "these 'grace notes' carry a great deal of the musical information. My semiotic approach to composition is what guides the writing of such passages."21 A clarification that must be made here is that, when Yuasa uses the word "semiotic," he is not referring to a significance of the sign but to a way of interpreting reality that therefore implies an overturning of the system's symbolic values. The figure in section b is repeated in a crescendo through to jjf; this is then followed by a reprise of Tempo I (Molto Lento) from section a-this reprise opens with the aforementioned expansion of cell ill to a ninth played sf!, a gesture that heightens the sensation of a spatial change. The immediate drop of the dynamic level down top and the static repetition of the dyad create (as happened in section

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Yuasa, Cosmos Haptic, the opening of section b. ©1973 Ongaku No Torno

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a) an impelling spatial tension. The figure that opened section b returns Meno Mosso, now expanded and transposed into the second of Messiaen's modes. It is reassembled with some variation (which does not however affect its recognizability) during the succession of cells that follow. Section c, marked Calmato con Espressione, begins at bar 32 with the figure in the bass that was described above as deriving from cell IV. To this is immediately added a rising phrase that can be interpreted as the scission of the intervals of cell I into two independent lines. These two lines interweave and finally converge on B~. This figure, taken as a whole, constitutes the ostinato bass of section c (fig. 6.5), over which evolve free variations based on the figure that opens section b. In bar 36 the ascending scale that starts from the second degree of the second of Messiaen's modes is none other than an expansion of the opening phrase of section b. In bar 38 a modulation to the first transposition of this mode marks a climax of the section, though it could also be interpreted as a modulation from an aura of E minor to one ofF" minor. After the opening figure of section b has been repeated once more in unison (as it was at bars 20-21), section c closes at bar 42 with a fermata on E. The "Piu Mosso [sic] animato con energia," which opens section d, is a pivotal moment of the whole piece. It opens with a sequence of staccato notes that are an elaboration of figures from section b. The material would appear to evolve independently in the parts given to each hand and this process is resolved only in bar 50. The final section,feroce, which is marked Tempo Primo, begins at bar 54. Here figures reappear. The opening dyads of cell I return (but, as in bar 3 of fig. 6.1, sometimes one note of the ninth is omitted) though the rhythmic profile accrued in section b makes them rhythmically richer and interaction with some of the cells of section b (bar 57) has added density to the material. Bar 61,JJJ, is the apex after which cell ill reappears, followed by cell II and then cell I (in the complex form it had assumed in bar 11) (fig. 6.6). The high tension reached in bar 61 is maintained through the following bars. The two tritones are superimposed on one another in an expanded form Gust as in bar 7, but this time a half step higher) and are repeated in such close succession that (unlike bar 8) they do not have the time to resonate. When cell ill returns for the fmal time, it is in a completely new variauaato co•

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Cosmos Haptic, the opening of section c. ©1973 Ongaku No Torno

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Figure 6.6.

159

•

Yuasa, Cosmos Haptic, reprise. ©1973 Ongaku No Tomo Sha Corp.

ant. It is no longer vibrantly static and contemplative, as its inner tension has been expanded to make it now the center of focus. The rigor of the writing and the sober expressiveness that conveys an emotional intensity are aspects of Cosmos Haptic that were to become a constant feature of Yuasa's later output. Other technical details that he continued to use include devices such as repetition or highlighting to make the listener aware of even the smallest events, so that subsequent modification, such as contraction or expansion, stasis or movement, are clearly perceived. Another element that assumed great importance was the circular quality in the way elements returned, a return that did not represent any development but a structural device more akin to a collage type of editing. Projections was a title that Yuasa used for a series of different works. One of the most interesting of these is Projection Topologic for piano, 1959.22 The composition is strongly influenced by an approach that is also found in the works of Iannis Xenakis. Yuasa uses the geometrical theory of isomorphism (i.e., topology) to shape and continuously transform his material, though Yuasa applies this not to space but to time. Projection Topologic is perhaps Yuasa's most structurally abstract piece. Figure 6.7 shows how in the ftrst two chords all twelve notes are used in the opening ftgure and its topologic projection. There is a series, but serial procedures

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Yuasa, Projection Topologic, opening bars.© 1973 Ongaku No Tomo Sha

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are not applied to the work's structure: Yuasa uses serial technique to organize the temporal parameters and in the third projection the durations of notes and silences are completely serialized. In the third movement Yuasa makes use for the third time of a device that he obviously has begun to like a lot-a mirror structure that pivots on the central bar. The music assigned to each hand is also inverted. Another noteworthy element in Yuasa's original application of serial technique is the procedure used to give an irrational twist to the meter in a way that certainly puts the performer's rhythmic skills to a severe test. In the piano part, different time signatures are given to each hand and, instead of dividing each bar rhythmically in any conventional manner, the bar lines are marked by dotted lines. Yuasa continued to use this technique in subsequent compositions in his attempt to find a musical language with which he could sculpt time to give it a textural and mobile structure and to create a nonlinear experience of musical time. Yuasa, Takernitsu, and the less prolific Fukushima had a limited knowledge of traditional Japanese music, yet they were very conscious of how deeply rooted in Japanese culture in general their thinking was; an interesting feature of their work is their attempt to use their Japanese approach to art to find new and different musical categories, procedures, and structures. Right from the earliest works, Yuasa displayed a deeply thoughtful approach to music. While Takernitsu, however, participated with keen interest in his friend's reflections, he soon began to develop ideas of his own. He was more intuitive in his approach and throughout his career his refined and sensitive tactile use of sound remained uppermost: "I wish to free sound from the trite rules of music .... I want to give sounds the freedom to breath." 23 Takernitsu Toru spent the first seven years of his childhood in China, where through his father's interests he was exposed to different kinds of music, including jazz (and especially the blues), but also birdsong (a very Chinese interest), on which his father was an expert and once the winner in a national competition for his ability to imitate it. As well as this musical inheritance from his father, he was also able to hear music at the social club of the American occupation forces in Yokohama, where he worked as a waiter and where he was given access to the club's piano before hours. Then, when he was eighteen, after a few composition lessons with Kiyose Yasuji, Takemitsu decided to study on his own: "I became aware that composing is giving meaning to that stream of sounds that penetrates the world we live in." 24 Takernitsu 's awareness of the "tactile" aspect of sound, which had first been stimulated by his contact with French impressionist music, continued to develop and his use of tone color became increasingly personal. Because Takernitsu focused on the spatial aspect of music, at times his scores seem to lack a formal structure; but this spatial aspect springs directly from traditional Japanese musical aesthetics. While meditation on the uniquely Japanese approach to time has always been part ofTakemitsu's music, it was space that predominantly occupied Takemitsu's thinking and this is reflected in many of his titles, with their references to elements of nature, such as

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trees, water, or the seasons. The evocative metaphor that Takemitsu often used when talking about his musical aesthetics was kaiyushiki (a Japanese style of garden design). In the Japanese garden no detail may dominate over any other and the garden is not conceived to be surveyed from outside, but to be experienced by the act of walking through it. It is this process of moving through the garden, blending the notion of space with that of time, that is essential for experiencing and understanding the garden. Most ofTakemitsu's work, even his earliest pieces, are marked by a sense of calm, a sense of solemn motion that is not external but internal; it is a music that conveys a sense of infinite time with an extremely slow pulse. In some works (in particular those of the 1970s), a Proustian concept of Time Regained creates a sense of movement in the music that is I contemplative and introspective. His use of color became quite virtuosic and the mannerisms of certain works from the 1970s are self-referential while the textures recall the sounds of early Ligeti or the harmonic sensuality of French impressionism. This derived from his study of scores by Debussy as well as Faure, Jolivet, and Messiaen, though he elaborated his own original creative theories and the expressive content is entirely original: "I must not ignore my doubts about the falseness of this so-called 'expression."'25 Takemitsu's first works were for piano. Lento in due movimenti was the first piece that attracted attention. After the work's first performance in 1950 Yoshida Hidekazu, the well-known critic, described Takemitsu's appearance as that of a young man, thin but with a large head. This comment became famous and stuck with Takemitsu for the rest of his life. Lento is a brief and intense work. The frrst movement is based on a pentatonic scale and the second bears the influences of Messiaen. However, the overall style recalls the pianistic style of the French impressionists and the discrete and restrained writing conveys a mood of quiet gentleness and intense solitude. This was followed by Saegiranai kyusoku (Uninterrupted rest, 1950-59). There were already many new touches evident here, such as the use of dissonance and silence, that set this work apart from the simpler style of Lento. The title comes from a poem by Takemitsu's friend Takiguchi.26 There are three movements, written in 1950, 1952, and 1959 respectively. Unifying details include subtleties of timbre, with harmonics and with resonances within the piano; the formal use of internal cross-references and thematic references to earlier material create an almost dream-like atmosphere. In the second movement a "cruel resonance" erupts. This is the "cruel resonance" referred to in the movement's tempo marking: "Shizuka ni zankokuna hibiki de" (Quiet in a cruel resonance). The third movement is an homage to Alban Berg and is the only movement of this piece in which bar lines are used. In the first decade of his career Takemitsu worked with the world of sound in general. In the following decade he honed down his approach, paying more attention to the relationship between human beings and nature. It was during this same period that Yuasa focused on the relationship between human beings and the cosmos.

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Requiem for Strings in 1957 ftrst brought Takemitsu's music to a larger public and in 1958 he won the Prix Italia, a prize for a broadcasted piece of music, with Tableau noir. The title Requiem is meant to indicate not a funereal atmosphere but a meditative state similar to a zen meditation. The work was written just after the death of Hayasaka Fumio, Takemitsu's friend and musical and spiritual mentor, and it is dedicated to his memory. Requiem is a one-movement work articulated in three sections (lento-moderatolento) that are very asymmetrical in terms of length. All the musical material is derived from a single theme and the changes from one section to the next are vague and smothered by the "thematic tides" that characterize the piece. For example, the opening motif of the Moderato appears out of such a wave and causes the tempo to accelerate from minim= 60 to minim= 85-90 (ftg. 6.8). Although bar lines and tempo are clearly marked, the frequent tempo changes, the use of irregular meters, and the overall structure of the piece create the sensation of an erratic beat. This is typical of Takemitsu's style of that time, when he was working on a rhythmic concept of one by one21 in which the temporal implications of individual notes were of·Moder~

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Takemitsu, Requiem, start of the central section. © 1962 Ongaku No Tomo

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ten unrelated to the rest of the material, the idea being that each sound is capable of individually finding its way into the listener's emotional universe. Requiem is a modal composition. Later on Takemitsu was to discover Messiaen's concepts of modes, but his ftrst encounter with the use of modes was during the period of the American military occupation, when he listened to a lot of jazz on the American Armed Forces Radio; this had led him to read the writings of George Russell28 to study modality in greater depth. The mode used for Requiem is the Lydian mode and its tonal center is F. In the long opening eight-bar melodic sequence, the initial modal feel is disturbed by an oscillation between F and p# that is caused by the transposition of the mode from F to C (ftg. 6.9).29 The restless, dark mood created by the constant oscillation between the basic modality of the piece and the recurrent chromatic dissonance is tempered and made more transparent by the part writing, which is primarily homorhythmic. The opening eight-bar sequence is a self-contained unit that is followed by a powerful cadenza. The section after the cadenza, marked Plus lent, presents a new motif that is built around Takemitsu 's favorite intervals: major and minor seconds and sixths and the augmented fourth. This motif is subjected to a series of harmonic progressions as the textures are progressively reduced to their basic elements and the second part of the Encore plus lent theme appears over choral-like homorhythmic chords. Toward the end of the second section of the piece a transposed version of the Plus lent motif reappears following a sort of recitative played by the lower strings. Encore plus lent is followed by Madere, in which the rhythmic flow is interrupted by a sharp, upward rush of accented triplets. This new theme is interlaced with cells from the original theme, though here the material has been reworked harmonically and metrically (ftg. 6.8). At bar 61 the return to the First Movement is a reprise of the exposition, this time with the second part of the theme transposed up a third. The piece finishes unexpectedly with distant harmonics. The structure of the Requiem is not complex and its musical idea is not as advanced as that of other important works ofTakemitsu's, such as Dorian Horizon for strings or Arc or Textures for orchestra, but what is new and important in

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Figure 6.9.

Takemitsu, Requiem, transposition of the Lydian mode from F to C.

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Requiem is a non-Western conception of meter and variation that makes this work especially fascinating. The writing is characterized by phrases that appear in endless, uninterrupted arches and by the density of the texture. It was not until his more mature works that he achieved a style of writing illuminated by the use of contrasts and empty spaces that gave a greater depth to his music. Stravinsky heard the Requiem while on a visit to Japan a couple of years after its first performance and was so impressed with the work that he asked to meet the young Takemitsu.30 Takemitsu had never been a great admirer of Stravinsky's music, considering him to be principally a "great orchestrator,"31 but the meeting with Stravinsky made a deep impression on him and it also helped establish his career, particularly in America, when he was still not yet thirty years old. Le son-calligraphie (1960) for eight strings brought Takemitsu 's frrst decade of activity as a composer to a close. This piece has an almost sensual sweetness. Its structure is not one that moves logically from the beginning through to the end, but offers extracts from "the stream of sounds that surround us in everyday life."32 The concept of the piece is based on opposition (though this opposition is not fully exploited) created by the division of the instrumental group into two quartets that play against each other. Takemitsu makes much use of fragmentation and silence, and the poetics of irregular meter are taken to an extreme. The opening phrase, which is assigned to the viola of the frrst quartet, contains eleven of the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. The only notes that are repeated are those played as harmonics, while the twelfth note is the A that is held over in delayed suspense to appear as the frrst note in the intense phrase that follows, played by the frrst violin of the second quartet (fig 6.10). However, the technique used by

= Figure 6.1 0.

Takemitsu, Le son-calligraphie I, beginning. © 1958, Salabert.

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Takemitsu in this piece is not strictly dodecaphonic but is a chromatic intensification of the language used in previous compositions. Unlike Yuasa, Takemitsu never totally gave up the use of melodic sequences, not even in this finely honed, radical piece. The music of Le son-calligraphie is a series of fragments and cells that nearly always start with an anacrusis or begin and end with either harmonics or pp. The occasional low phrases in the cellos and the frequent use of homorhythmic part writing for all eight instruments (a technique already used, as we have seen, in the Requiem) both contribute to heightening the sensation of the music as a collection of special moments, full of cross-references and part writing, that is in parallel, contrary, and similar motion.33 As the title suggests, the graphic presentation of the score is an important aspect of the way the piece is written, and Le son-calligraphie represents the first of a series of scores that used graphic elements and were to culminate with Corona and Blue Aurora. In 1953 Fukushima Kazuo, who was spiritually and musically close to Yuasa and Takemitsu, appeared on the music scene, but after 1978 he virtually stopped writing to become director of the prestigious Research Archives of the University of Ueno Gakuen, where he devoted himself to academic research. His frrst creative period was from 1953 to 1%2, during which he wrote primarily for the flute. Fukushima had studied flute manuals that had been compiled around 900 AD. from ancient Chinese sources and had evolved his personal conception of sound as breath and soul: "Human life becomes manifest through the sound of the .fite (flute). Breath is air and wind and the sound of the fue represents the union of Nature and human life. Breath contains ki (spirit). This is why thefue is such an important instrument."34 The frrst work of the period was Todaenai uta (1953, from Poesie ininterrompue, by Paul Eluard) for solo violin and the last work was his best-known work, Mei (1%2) for flute. Mei was commissioned by the Venice Biennale and Fukushima wrote it in Cambridge (where he spent the whole of 1%2). It was first performed at the 1962 Venice Biennale and was also given a highly successful performance later that year at Darmstadt. Mei was composed in memory of Wolfgang Steinecke.35 During this first period much of Fukushima's music was based on Messiaen's modes and rhythmic ideas. He also used the twelve-tone method and in works such as Ekagra (Concentration, 1957) for alto flute and piano he tried to merge serial ideas with the Buddhist ideas of no music. ''Time should not be interpreted as an uninterrupted flow," he wrote, "but as a series of successive yet separate moments full of an interior life and total self-awareness. Each moment is complete in itself."36 One of the most significant works of this frrst period is Kadha (Poem, 1958-60), a cycle of three compositions for chamber ensemble. Kadha is a Sanskrit word that Fukushima chose to stress his attempts to compose according to rigorous Buddhist principles. In words that in spirit recall the work of Yuasa of the same period, Fukushima describes his approach thus: "I believe that composing is a deep-rooted process. It is one of those most intrinsic elements of life itself, which also include "communication of mind" and "the assertion of one's existence." In other words it is a process of self-identification that totally contradicts itself."37 The Kadha cycle includes

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Kadha Karunli (1960), which became the best-known work of the cycle and which Fukushima also transcribed for flute and piano. It is indeed a work that breathes through its asymmetrical structure and lack of ictus. The series consists of wide intervals mostly based around the octave, with frequently occurring sevenths acting practically as alterations of the octave. The work is in three parts. While the middle section is quite lively, in the outer sections the instruments play mainly solo and hardly ever overlap, while the flute line is sinuous, relaxed, and indulges in no virtuosic displays. In this crystalline music, silence plays a central role. After Mei, Fukushima wrote nothing more for several years. The first performance of Tsukishiro for fifty-two strings, harp, piano, and percussion was in 1965. This work marks the beginning of his second creative period, in which the structural rigor of the first period is replaced by a greater interest in the timbre and color aspects of sound. During this second period, Fukushima wrote regularly and produced graceful music that dealt with the themes of water, wind, and flowers.38 However, the music of this period seems to have lost the spiritual inspiration and creative force that had so struck audiences in both Japan and Europe in his work of the 1950s.

6.2 ELECTRONIC MUSIC The first experiments with electronic music in Japan in the early 1950s have unfortunately been poorly documented. The first works involved the manipulation of recorded tapes and were realized in radio studios as well as some privately owned studios. The birth of electroacoustic music in Japan is most closely linked with Mayuzumi Toshiro (1929-97). He had studied with Hashimoto, Ikenouchi, and Ifukube at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music, where the piece he wrote as the final phase of his degree was Jugakki no tame no diverutimento (Divertimento for ten instruments, 1948). The next work, A Symphonic Mood (1950), commissioned by the NHK, was performed the following year at the ISCM Festival. Mayuzumi began to work in the studios of NHK in 1949, where he produced tapes to accompany a variety of cultural programs such as documentaries on Japanese cinema, Paul Gaugin, and Balzac. He then worked for Columbia writing film scores and songs. In August 1951 he moved to Paris, where in May 1952 he attended a concert of musique concrete. He also spent some time in Pierre Schaeffer's studio at Radio Television Franc:raise. On his return to Tokyo he was given access to the studios of JOQR (a radio station that broadcasted cultural programs). It was here that he realized Myujikku konkureto no tame no XfZ (XYZ for musique concrete), which was broadcast in 1953 as part of Geijutsusai (Festival of the Arts, internationally known as "Tokyo Summer Festival"), held in Tokyo. The broadcast included a detailed commentary on the history and techniques of electroacoustic music. In XfZ Mayuzumi used about forty sounds of

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metal objects and of machines (X); the sounds of human voices, animals, and running water (Y); and a collage of electronically manipulated instrumental sounds (Z). It is probable that other works commissioned by NHK and finished in 1952 were also broadcast as part of this program, works such as Akutagawa's Maikurofon no tame no ongaku (Music for microphone) and Fukai Shiro's Maikurofon no tame no kumikyoku (Suite for microphone, 1952).39 Fukai, a strong proponent of the need for an intense study of Western music, was not yet fifty years old. The basic material for Maikurofon no tame no kumikyoku was created by recording a group of seventeen instrumentalists. The second movement, "Kimyona Warutsu" (Strange waltz) is the most striking movement. Fukai gave the musicians a waltz he had written out backward for them to play. The recorded tape of this was then played backward and reverb effects were added. In this first phase of working with electroacoustic material many composers once again paid closer attention to sound itself and examined the irrational aspect of time. After hearing these works presented at Jikkenkobo's 1956 concert, Akiyama commented on the "emotions aroused by seeing sound as if through a microscope." In 1954 JOQR commissioned Mayuzumi to write another piece of musique concrete for a radio play called Bokushingu (Boxing) with a libretto by Mishima Yukio, a piece that won a prize at the 1953 Geijutsu Festival. At the same time, a group of technicians from NHK began some rudimentary experiments with electronic music and contacted the WDR studio in Cologne for help with theoretical aspects, equipment, and techniques. 40 In the autumn of 1955 the NHK Electronic Music Studio was set up in one of the radio buildings not far from the Imperial Hotel designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.41 The studio was equipped with many oscillators, including a melochord for creating sine waves and a monochord for sawtooth waves, as well as thirty band-pass filters and a wide range of recording and processing equipment. The equipment used was high-precision Americanmade machines built by Ampex that allowed fine-tuned manual manipulation of speed and other parameters. The studio's technicians were renowned for the care and precision with which they worked. One work that is generally listed as being by Mayuzumi was actually composed by several people working together. This is the thirteen-minute-long trilogy called Denshi ongaku (Electronic music, 1955) that was broadcast by NHK in November 1955. The three parts are: (1) Sosiihi no keiretsu ni yoru seigenba no ongaku (Music for proportional sine waves based on a prime number); (2) Sosiihi no keiretsu ni yoru henchoba no ongaku (Modulated waveforms based on a prime number); and (3) Tankeiba to kyoshijoba no invenshon (Invention for square waves and sawtooth waves). The following year, Mayuzumi wrote an article that was published in Ongaku Geijutsu, one of Japan's leading music magazines. He wrote: "the more technical equipment becomes inorganic, the more important it becomes to maintain a purity of spirit, a high level of sensitivity, and a finely honed intuition." He also wrote of his desire to give the materials total freedom and to no longer be hampered by the limitations of the performer. These wishes

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were also shared by those European composers who had begun to work with electronic music. However, from Mayuzumi's article it emerges that purity and that which cannot be expressed are the key aesthetic values that Japanese musicians ascribe to electronic music. In 1956 more mature and more musical works emerged, such as Shichi no varieshon (Variations on seven), a work in two parts composed respectively by Moroi and Mayuzumi. The number seven has various symbolic values in the musical structure of the price and in the electronic material that is built from multiples of seven on the seventh harmonic. The first part, written by Moroi, is the more solidly structured and it follows in the footsteps of the post-Webern school and the early works of Stockhausen (in particular Studio /I). The part written by Mayuzumi is less rigorously structured. The following year Mayuzumi continued his experimentation with an electronic version of the no drama Aoi no Ue. 42 Two singers sing the original voice part unaltered. The flute part is replaced with sine waves that glissando up and down, while the percussions are replaced with a mixture of white noise and rhythmic sounds that are filtered. It is surprising how effectively these sounds reproduce the irregular rhythms of no. At the end of 1957 Mayuzumi started work on an even more important project, studying and analyzing the sounds and resonances of the bells of the Japanese Buddhist temples and of the singing style, known as shOmyo, of Japanese Buddhist monks. As aresult of this research he composed Kanpanoroj (Campanology, 1957) for tape and electronic piano and his famous Nehan Kokyokyoku (Nirvana symphony, 1960) for large orchestra and male choir. But Mayuzumi was not the only Japanese composer who felt the need for new sounds and who wanted to use them without worrying about Western precepts. Takemitsu, too, while continuing to use the piano in many of his early works, began to feel the need to introduce sounds from the everyday world into his music. He recalls how one evening in the late 1940s he had been travelling on the metro and listening to the sounds of the doors and of the movement of the train. That was when he began to think about using noises and musical sounds together to give a "meaning to that stream of sounds that penetrates the world we live in."43 However, it wasn't until1955 that he had a chance to realize this idea when he created Hi (Fire). This was probably commissioned by Shinnihonhoso (New Japanese Radio)44 for its festival, as he realized the work in the Shinnihonhoso studios. The work was based on a text by Inoue Yasushi and he used sounds recorded both in the countryside and in the city that were collaged and electronically transformed. This piece was also the source of the material he used for Ruriefu-Statiku (Static relief), which was performed at the Jikkenkobo's historic concert of electroacustic musique discussed above. What characterizes all Takemitsu's different pieces of musique concrete is the use of a limited quality of material that is presented, analyzed, and subjected to minimal variations so as to always remain relatively recognizable. This feature can be heard in pieces as different as Vocalism A-I (1956), with its treatment of the word ai, which means love, and Mizuno kyoku (Composition for water, 1960), with its use of water

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noises. Takemitsu discussed the idea behind these works in detail in the many articles he wrote in the 1970s; in particular, he often talked of "thinking about music, or I should say more precisely I was thinking about sounds themselves quite apart from any obscure meaning or function in music."45 Takemitsu, in his writings about his ideas on composition, explains in greater detail the quality of listening required when the listener's attention is directed to the nature of sound itself: a tension is created in the listener when trying to isolate one single sound that is so utterly unique that it is possible to confront it with silence.46 Working with machines had a similar effect on Takemitsu to the effect it had on Ligeti and Yuasa, stimulating in each composer a clearer idea of his personal aesthetic. In 1959 the NHK studios produced a series of works for orchestra, chorus, and reciting voice and electronic devices: Pitagorasu no hoshi (Pythagoras's stars), by Moroi Makoto; Kuroi siiin (The black monastery), by Matsushita Shin'ichi (realized in the NHK studio at Osaka); and Ondine, by Myoshi Akira (which won the Prix Italia). Further productions in 1962 included Parallel Music, by Ichiyanagi Toshi; Phonogene, by Takahashi Yiiji; and Variete, by Moroi. The studio also produced music for radio plays and background sounds and music of many other sorts, and this work provided an excellent training ground for musicians such as Yuasa. In 1966 Karlheinz Stockhausen accepted an invitation from the director Uenarni Wataru to come to work in the studio for three months. In this period Stockhausen composed Solo for solo melody instrument with feedback, for which a device was specially built that could deal with several different types of feedback. He also composed Telemusik, which was realized using a fivetrack recording technique.47 However, Stockhausen played the work in public using a simple stereo system, something that surprised Yuasa,48 who at that time was working on Icon on the Source of White Noise, the first electronic masterpiece by a Japanese composer. Yuasa realized his first four electronic music works in the period from 1964 to 1970. These were the musique concrete composition Aoi no ue ( 1961 )49 and Projection esemplastic (1964; despite the title, this work is unrelated to the other works for piano bearing the same title). Both Aoi no ue and Projection esemplastic were created through the manipulation of white noise and the work on both served as a preparation for Icon on the Source ofWhite Noise (1967). In 1970 he composed the tape piece Music for Space Projection. An idea central to Icon, and one that was to return many times throughout Yuasa's music, is his favored conception of art as a fundamental tool of human consciousness, of its essential role in the evolution of all the higher levels of symbolism that constitute human culture. For Yuasa, in art it was not much that "in the beginning was the Word"; more likely, he saw sound connected with symbolic visual representation (such as a cave drawing or a religious icon). In Icon, Yuasa is dealing with "the endless horizon of sound."50 This idea was probably inspired by Herbert Read's book Icon and Idea, discussed above.51 As before, Yuasa's concern is with the human horizon, which looks onto the large backdrop of the

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Cosmic Unconscious. Yuasa had so far dealt with this subject in an abstract fashion, but in Icon he looked toward its more distant primordial origins. This "archaeological" interest in the origins of the cosmos, to that sonic world where Yuasa felt that song, cry, and music had still been one, returns more distinctly in his later works for voice. Yuasa's interest in white noise reflects his zen interest in nondiscrimination. "Every sound that appears to be a single sound is in reality a complex of sounds .... [I]t is interesting how this links up with the Buddhist idea of 'One in many, many in one.' One sound is actually the combination of many sounds and, vice versa, a compound sound is heard as one sound. I became aware of this through the practical experience of working with sound and it was a true revelation that revolutionized my approach to music." 52 These comments immediately bring to mind similar comments made by Stockhausen: "Between 1952 and 1956 I discovered the natural laws of vibration, a new world in the microcosm of sound; it wasn't merely an intellectual research; quite the opposite, I was filled with total wonder at this unknown miracle that exists in the world of vibration."53 Thus for Stockhausen, too, experiments with electronic techniques had a profound influence on every aspect of his approach to composition. In Icon Yuasa used various filters, in particular ring modulators, to create "sculptures" with white noise. This piece is recorded on five tracks and it is meant to be played back over five loudspeakers. There is a deliberate asymmetry in the way the sound is sent to the various loudspeakers. Of the twenty-five sounds (five per track), fifteen are relayed monophonically and the other ten are relayed in stereo. There is no 1:1 relationship between the tape tracks and the loudspeakers; Yuasa did not want to create the effect of each sound coming from a single source, but rather the effect of a carpet of sound that moves, creating sonic "shadows" and sounds that chase and overtake each other in a tapestry that multiplies the acoustic perspectives.54 Thus the spatial implications of Icon are clearly evident. Yuasa creates new timbric material and the structure of the work is based on the interaction between sounds resonating on different sonic planes and on the sculpting of these planes (Yuasa indeed talks of the "solid shape of sound"). Using dynamic and directional effects he shapes a concept of time that carves out the physical space it occupies. For example, through the structure of the music, the impressive sound masses that appear in the last four minutes of the piece have a profound significance that connects them to the material heard at the start of the piece. Music for space projection, written only three years later, is a six-track work that displays a further refinement of Yuasa's technique. Icon used totally synthesized sounds to describe a horizon, the two-dimensional space of an image. Space Projection, as the title suggests, offers a three-dimensional space that creates sounds that seem to come from sources that do not exist, such as an opening in the floor beneath the listener's feet or rings of sound that spiral on themselves to conjure up a negative space to change our accepted psychologi-

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cal perception of the space around us. The formal contraposition of different sonic planes is a continuation of ideas from Icon, but this structure is hidden behind a more organically unfolding process in a dialectic between concrete and abstract images, between abstract sounds and acoustic sounds that have very often been electronically transformed (though not beyond recognition), noises, instrumental sounds, or the kakegoe (shouts uttered by the no percussionists). Electronic music is composed using rules that are different from the rules used for composing acoustic music (something Yuasa strongly denies), but thenarrative content that emerges is similar to that inherent in instrumental music. The difference is that in his previous instrumental music the narrative coincided with the music's structure. In 1967 the NHK studio built a "multipiano." This multipiano is a piano with eighty-eight contact microphones (which do not pick up airborne sound waves but convert the instrument's physical vibrations directly into an electronic signal). This signal is then passed through a series of modulators and filters. Mayuzumi rewrote Campanology for multipiano and Ishii Maki composed Kyo-o (Resonance-correspondence)55 for orchestra (without woodwind), multi piano, four percussionists, and electronic sounds. In Kyo-o it is the rhythmic aspect that prevails over the avant-garde techniques and over the concept of sound groups that typified Ishii's other works of the same period. Through the reelaboration of acoustic sounds, the electronic sounds manage to sound less artificial and there is a greater (almost pictorial) sense of color than in Ishii's previous works. After the opening ff the sound of the orchestra becomes fragmented and there are frequently moments when the focus is on a restricted set of sounds, often those of just the percussion or the multipiano. These moments, which are precisely delineated through timbre and material, are often broken up by long silences (one example being the long central percussion solo) and they alternate with moments in which there is a buildup of density and dynamics, through the use of a pedal, minimal events, and small cells that aggregate to form a longer phrase. In 1968 the NHK studio was moved to a new location in Shibuya, where it was expanded. NHK had funded activities in the studio through commissions for the composers who came to work there, but this arrangement was now becoming increasingly problematic. Furthermore, there had been a proliferation of other electronic music studios, including the studio at the Sogetsu Art Center where Takemitsu, lchiyanagi, and Takahashi worked (in 1966 it became a private studio owned by Okuyama Jiinosuke) and the studio at the University ofGakugei where Sumitani Satoshi worked. In the mid-1970s Sumitani set up his own electronic music studio, called TATA.56 The Japanese and Western composers who came to work here explored many avenues-space, the relationship between sound and visual images, and the use of electronics, creativity, and composition to teach music. Important collaborations were also set up with institutions such as Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique

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Musique (IRCAM) or the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University. The 1969 edition of the Cross Talk Festival57 was entitled "Intermedia" and it presented events with projection of visual images, electronic music, experimental theater, and light shows. However, the most important mixed media event in the histotjr of Japanese electronic music was the Osaka World Exposition of 1970. The works of twenty-five Japanese composers were presented here in a collection of pavilions, the most impressive being the Space Theater and the Festival Square Pavilions. The Space Theater was funded by the Japanese Iron and Steel Federation and its artistic director was Takemitsu. There were four six-track tape recorders, five mixing desks, and thirteen hundred loudspeakers. The sound seemed to emerge from the walls, the floor, and the ceiling and to physically fill the entire space. First performances given here included Kurosshingu (Crossing) for two orchestral groups, by Takemitsu; Hibiki Hana Ma for orchestra, by Xenakis; and Yeguen, by Takahashi. The sound was no less impressive in the Festival Square Pavilion, where eleven tracks were mixed from two six-track tape recorders (one track was reserved for a vocal microphone) and there were over a thousand loudspeakers. The music presented here included works by Ichiyanagi, Takehisa Kosugi ( 1938- ), Matsushita Shin' ichi, and Matsudaira Yoriaki (1931- ) , who is Matsudaira Yoritsune's son. In the Textile Pavilion Yuasa presented his tape piece Supesu purojekushon no tame no ongaku (Music for spatial projection) and in the Car Pavilion Ishii Maki played his electronic music opera Musique Mobile. The spectacular Osaka World Exposition, with its large number of first performances of works by Japan's major composers and the generous sponsorship from many Japanese industries, marked the apex of experimental activity in electronic music. Then, from the mid-1970s, the audio equipment market became monopolized by a few large companies who brought out products aimed primarily at the consumer market, which appeared and disappeared at an incredible rate (the so-called "Japanese factor"). This had serious repercussions on those companies producing electronic equipment for serious research purposes.58 While the NHK music studio still exists and is still well-equipped, its activities then became increasingly geared to the production of material for ordinary radio broadcasts. Added to this, the Japanese music scene had turned its attention more toward trends involving crossover with traditional music. Research into electronic music had fallen behind and composers such as Yuasa who were intensely interested in this area had been forced to continue their work at American universities. So, for a while, the bulk of work in this area in Japan was carried out in a few private studios with limited equipment or at studios in the universities, which were mainly used for didactic purposes. There have been a few exceptions, such as the studio at the Kunitachi University of Tokyo, which is truly well equipped. Now, the situation is changing, prices have fallen, and composers are able to equip their own studios with a reasonable range of equipment.

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6.3 THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSIC LABORATORY During the Nationalist era the 1940 alliance between Japan, Germany, and Italy led to performances of works by Richard Strauss, Ildebrando Pizzetti, and Alfredo Casella, as the works of these composers became relatively well-known. However, other composers and the more recent avant-garde music remained unknown. Immediately after the war Japanese composers formed many new associations: Nihon Gendai Ongaku Kyokai (the Japanese Contemporary Music Association, the Japanese section of the ISCM) was reestablished in 1946; other independent groups included Shin Sakkyokuha Kyokai (the New Composers' Association), set up by Matsudaira Yoritsune, Kiyose Yasuji, and Hayasaka Fumio, and Shinseikai (the New Voice Association), set up by Shibata Minao (1916-96), Irino Yoshiro (1921-80), Bekku Sadao (1922- ), Toda Kunio (1915- ), and Ishiketa Mareo (1916- ), members of a younger generation of composers. The composers of Sakkyokuha Kyokai were those who had been active before the war, whose music reflected an interest in the heritage of traditional Japanese culture and whose training had not been academic. The composers of Shinseikai included Moroi Saburo's best students, some of whom (such as Bekku and Toda) were more conservative and others (such as Irino and Shibata) who were more innovative. The composers of Shinseikai belonged to the generation that fell between the older generation of Sakkyokuha Kyokai and the younger generation of JikkenkobO. They represent a unique group in the history of twentieth-century music in Japan and a sort of academy in the best sense of the word. They grew up in the period immediately following the first large-scale importation of Westem music, they had access to a wide range of materials, and the music scene during this time was well organized. Both Irino and Shibata, for example, went to Tokyo University. Irino graduated in economics and Shibata graduated in botany. Shibata was the grandson of one of the first scientists who had gone to study in Germany. He grew up in a sophisticated family that had adopted Western customs; he studied piano with his mother and then studied cello. As a student he played in the same university orchestra in which Toda played trombone; he sang bass in the professional choir that worked with Shinkyo (the orchestra Joseph Rosenstock conducted for many years); he attended classes at the Gregorian Academy in Sophia University; and before starting composition lessons with Moroi (with whom he studied from 1939 to 1943) he studied the theoretical treatises by Prout and Rimsky-Korsakov in great depth.59 He also took a second degree, in aesthetics, in 1943. After finishing university he decided to abandon his scientific career and joined a professional orchestra. After 1943 Shibata worked for many years as a composer of sound tracks for films and for more than twenty years he wrote a popular column on music for a magazine as well as conducting a radio program. He then joined the staff of the Tokyo University of Music. This brief account of Shibata's career clearly shows how Western-style musicians were now following well-established paths.

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A different path of development was followed by the younger Yuasa. Through his father he had been exposed to music from an early age, for his father had many opera recordings and scores bought during trips to Germany.60 He had also taken part in amateur performances of no. But the war had interrupted this process and forced him to rethink his whole attitude to his heritage completely afresh. And it was probably due to this process of reexamination that the JikkenkobO group of composers became the most original of postwar Japan. The Shinseik:ai group, for its part, is held responsible for the official acceptance of twelve-tone music in Japan.61 Toda, who worked as a diplomat, was imprisoned in Saigon along with the last contingent of troops stationed there. Here, via a French officer,62 he came into possession of Rene Leibowitz's book Schoenberg et son ecole. Since this dealt with dodecaphonic music, a kind of music he was not interested in, he passed it on to Irino Yoshiro and Shibata Minao (who were fellow students of Moroi) in 1948. Irino in particular studied this work, lectured about it, and began to compose using the twelve-tone technique.63 Irino's composition Nanatsu no gakki no tame no shitsunai kyosiikyoku (Chamber concerto for seven instruments), written in 1951, was the first Japanese twelve-tone composition and he achieved quite a deep maturity using this method in many of his later works. For example, in his second twelve-tone composition, Sinfonietta (1953) for small orchestra, Irino went a step further and composed a series for the rhythmic parameter.64 This was quite noteworthy considering that little information about similar developments was filtering through from Europe at that time and it was not until Moroi Makoto went to Europe in 1955 that proper contacts were made between Japanese and German composers of this generation. Throughout his whole career Irino Yoshiro dedicated himself to refining his use of the twelve-tone method, for it reflected his fascination with geometry and intricate constructions. With his rigorous style, Irino occupies a singular position on the overall scene of twentieth-century Japanese music, comparable perhaps to that of Matsushita Shin'ichi or Matsudaira Yoritsune. While an economical use of materials and a rigorous approach in music and art were always appreciated by the Japanese, strict logical thinking was considered alien to creative work. Irino's technique combines an imaginative use of logic with a tactile awareness of sound, never hindered by any pedantry, and his compositions offer large, colorful soundscapes with no attempt to dazzle by eclecticism or sentimentality. He remains a respected composer and the composition prize that bears his name is famous worldwide. However, although his music is studied by many experts it is not popular and is rarely performed. There are very few recordings of his music (unlike with Shibata) and he has never received the official recognition accorded other Japanese composers.65 This may perhaps be attributed to various factors: his musical inspiration was decidedly European; the titles of many of his compositions are merely formal indications (quintet, trio, concerto, symphony, etc.); and the principal expressive mood, especially in his early works up to the late 1950s, is basically postexpressionistic. After other works with a more "contemporary" feel,

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these stylistic traits reappeared in 1967 in Sonata for violin and piano. One example of such a contemporary work was Ongaku (Music) for two pianos, written in 1963. In Ongaku the material for two instruments remains completely independent and they meet and share material at only three moments, a device that recalls the "nodes" typical of the instrumental music of many different genres of traditional Japanese music. Like many of Irino's rigorously serial compositions, Sonata follows the traditional formal structure in four movements with the Scherzo being the third movement. The series is stated right at the beginning and all the standard variants of the series are employed, as are some new variants, such as exchanging the flrst and last notes of the series or grouping notes and similar procedures. One favorite procedure that Irino often used was to work with a selection of notes from within the series and to use the intervals that occurred to give such groups a separate thematic identity. Sangakusho (Three movements, 1969) for solo cello was his flrst work for a solo instrument other than the piano. It is a beautiful work and Irino's use of the sound of the cello is especially impressive. For example, the flrst movement, entitled "Prelude," opens with a phrase that remains of importance throughout. This is a four-note phrase whose intervals are augmented fourth, perfect flfth (played on the open D and G strings), and augmented fourth. The central section of this flrst movement, an Andante, opens with an arpeggio that uses these four notes. The central movement, entitled "Metamorphosen," is characterized by microtonal oscillations and rhythmic fluctuations; a long silence is followed by an impetuously moving figure in which the inversion of the series is reworked to create groups of intervals that recall motifs that appeared earlier in the piece (flg. 6.11). Irino was also a very active teacher and he wrote several piano pieces for children; these are lively pieces based on melodies from different musical genresfrom folk music to pop music to jazz. In his usual disciplined yet imaginative manner, Irino also included material taken from traditional Japanese music in his work. His use of Japanese instruments in his music is not only interesting but in my opinion unique, for he used them as "linguistic objects" that remained clearly distinctive but were nevertheless totally absorbed into Irino's musical language, in a very different way from Takemitsu or Ishii, who used them respectively to create contrasts and meeting points. Perhaps it was this unique approach that led

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Irino to compose Ongaku (Music) for two koto in 1957, well before the muchheralded rediscovery of traditional instruments by other Japanese composers. In Ongaku, both instruments are tuned to the series. The first koto is tuned to the original form of the series and the second is tuned to its inversion, and each instrument's thirteenth string is tuned to a note that is a fifth above the first note of its respective version of the series "to create harmonic stability." Another important work of this nature was Ten (usually given the German translation Wandlung, 1973) for two shakuhachi and orchestra. This work continues with the orchestral ideas Irino had pursued in the 1950s. In Ten Irino exploits the fascinating sound of the shakuhachi, as the whole composition hinges on the two solo voices, with the instrumental families in the orchestra echoing the soloists' melodic motifs. This approach ensures that there is no break between the soloist's music and that of the orchestra. Ten does not use any of the more extreme musical languages of the postwar period, yet it remains one of the most successful attempts to combine Japanese and European instruments.lt exudes a great sense of creative liberty and it is remarkable how Irino creates a dense interplay of timbres enriched through the sound of the shakuhachi and the many percussion instruments without stepping outside his own musical language. Another successful composition in this vein was the chamber opera Sonezaki shinju (The lovers' suicide at Sonezaki), based on a famous text by Chikamatsu Monzaemon and commissioned by various literary associations for a performance in honor of this great dramatist. Irino wrote a first version in 1977 and revised it in 1979. It was staged just a couple of months before the composer's death on 10 May 1980. It was scored for five voices (S, mezzoS, T, 2 baritones, though at the first performance the male voices were 2 T and 1 baritone), two flutes,jittozao (a larger version of the shamisen), koto, shakuhachi, percussion, and piano. One of the two baritones is assigned the role of narrator, a role that is halfway between the narrator-singer of the original drama in the bunraku theatrical genre and the character Chikamatsu, who represents the writer interacting with and commenting on his own characters. As would be expected in a play with a story so deeply rooted in Japanese culture, the character's pieces are all very colorful; in the scoring the detailed instrumental writing and choice of timbres reflect these colors, though without any of the ostentation to be found in the music of similarly narrative works by other composers. During his lifetime Irino received several prizes and other honors. In 1962, while in Europe, he was awarded a bourse artistique by the French government and in Salzburg he received a prize for his television opera Aya no tsuzumi (The brocade drum). After this he returned to Japan via New York. Back in Japan he took a teaching post at Toho Gakuen, one of Tokyo's most important conservatories. Unlike Shibata, Irino had never begun a career in science and he abandoned his job in banking immediately after the war to dedicate himself to music, highly aware of the role he was fulfilling as part of the Japanese cultural scene.66 Shibata studied twelve-tone music with Irino, initially (from 1949 to 1950) as

Group Shinsakkyokuha. On the left, Ta kemitsu Toru; in the center, Matsudaira Yoritsune; on the right, Hayasaka Fumio and Kiyose Yasuji.

lchiyanagi Toshi with Frank Zappa.

Ishii Maki.

Kondo}6.

Mamiya Michio.

Yamada Kosaku.

Hayasaka Fumi6.

Miyoshi Akira.

From the left: Yuasa }oji, Akutagawa Yasushi, and Takemitsu Toru.

Shibata Minao.

Hayashi Hikaru.

Matsudaira Yoritsune.

lchiyanagi Toshi.

Yuasa }oji.

Takemitsu Toru.

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part of the study group of composers who met to read the texts and analyze the scores that were available, and to collaborate on musicological publications. Shibata first used the twelve-tone method in Asa no uta (Morning song, 1962) for voice and piano, basing this method on the series Berg had used in his cantata Der We in. Shibata gradually extended his use of the series to other parameters, one example being in Kitazono Katsue ni yoru mitsu no shi (Three poems by Kitazono Katsue for soprano and orchestra, 1954-58). When not composing, Shibata dedicated most of his energy to analyzing and propagating the music of Bartok and of other contemporary composers, as well as making a detailed musicological analysis of contemporary music.67 From 1958 to 1979, Shibata had a radio program on NHK in which he broadcast and commented on recordings from major European contemporary music festivals, an activity that kept him up to date with the most recent developments. Shibata's analyses reveal his scientific and botanical training: he first proceeded to classify and then examined the musical organization and structure, leaving no element untouched. As a composer Shibata's linguistic preferences remain problematic. He began by writing several short works for voice in which the series he used were borrowed from other composers; it was not until1960 that he wrote Sinfonia, his fust significant large-scale, twelve-tone work. It must be said, however, that whatever trend or new musical language attracted him, be it a structural use of the series, electronic sounds, aleatoric devices, or even material from traditional Japanese music, he only incorporated it into his music after an extended period of reflection. It was as if Shibata needed time to let his ideas mature, as if he did not like just to experiment with new ideas, and as if he had to not merely absorb them but to truly internalize them. With this thoughtful approach his writing is characterized by a simplicity that is always considered and never trite. Even in his earliest works, such as a set of variations for piano that he wrote in 1943, it is clear that he was interested in, yet reluctant to use, the chromatic atonality that was popular among other composers of his generation. Yasashiki uta (usually given with its French title, La bonne chanson, 1944-49), which he had begun to compose in the last and harshest years of the war, was the fust of his works to become well known. In this piece the piano part is very elegantly written in a French style, but the soprano voice part follows the rhythmic asymmetries of the Japanese poetic text without any feeling of linguistic or formal unease. For this work, Shibata chose texts by Tachihara Michizo (1914-39). These poems exude a freshness and gaiety that also animate the uncomplicated vocal line and reflect the distance that young intellectuals were keeping from the terrible events taking place around them. In the works that followed, Shibata slowly acquired his own interesting personal style. A significant work of this second period is the aforementioned Three poems, which used texts by the surrealist poet Kitazono Katsue. This work, for soprano and orchestra, was started in 1954, but the third poem, "Black Distance," which evokes a distinctly expressionistic mood, was not finished until1958. The last work of this second period was Sinfonia. This title was given by the conductor who had commissioned the work,

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although Shibata had originally intended to call it Concert Ouverture [sic], for he had written it in the style of an overture for an opera. Once again, this is not an experimental work, but it represents more of a culmination of the various exploratory works that had preceded it. The work is a single tripartite movement (allegro-adagio-allegro, with a coda marked molto adagio) built from a series that is treated in an orthodox Schonbergian way. The introduction to the frrst allegro section is an exposition of the series in one of its derived forms. The material is organized using the Fibonacci series68 in a polyphonic texture that culminates with an episode played by the woodwind. It is only after this, at bar 13, that the original form of the series appears, played by the strings (fig. 6.12). The second section is more timbric in quality, often featuring the percussion, with a dramatic episode built from the augmented fourths and fifths that constitute the central section of the series. The third section recalls many features of the first allegro, through the use of the same series and of a similar central episode played by the woodwind. Shibata uses many devices such as thirds placed a semitone apart (a la Bartok), pointillist episodes, and the grouping together of motifs, but the result is always homogeneous and never sounds eclectic. After 1960 Shibata stopped composing for some years. "I no longer felt a special need to compose," he has said. "Quite frankly, I was confused by the thoughts of Cage and Ichiyanagi. ... I couldn't see how to accept such ideas within myself." 69 When Shibata once more found a way forward for himself, it was probably thanks to his investigation of the use of improvisation by Japanese instrumentalists. An example of this is Mihotoke no haru (Buddha's spring, 1966) for baritone, ryuteki, and Japanese percussion. Then followed two important compositions. The frrst of these was OiwakebushikO (Reflections on oiwakebushi),10 written in 1973 for choir and shakuhachi. This is an interesting osmosis of folk music and contemporary music. Not everything is precisely determined in the score and there is a spatial distribution of the sound in the hall. Oiwakebushiko demonstrates how improvisation and the use of space were always fundamental components of folk music. This work also uses some folk melodies in which Shibata tried to imitate the way folk singers use the voice.

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The text is taken from Uehara Rokushiro's Essay on Melody in Folk Music, written in 1892.71 The words are recited in falsetto, using a pentatonic scale, and in a way that rather ridicules Uehara's text. The second of these important works in Shibata's new, third phase was Yukukawa no nagare wa taezu shite (Ceaselessly the river flows, 1975), commissioned for the fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the ShOwa era ( 1926-76). The music is a colorful collage of the various styles of music currently in vogue, but the second part returns to Shibata's personal writing for choir, in which the text for the choir is taken from a work by Kamo no Ch0mei72 and the music is a collection of quotations from all sorts of styles from classical to pop, from film music to serial music, in a sort of reexamination of all the different styles Shibata had adopted in the course of his long career. The six movements of Yukukawa were then framed by works from various periods of Shibata's work. The resulting complex composition is entitled Triplexy, and while Shibata's skill and mastery is evident in many passages, the overall effect is rather kitsch. Moroi Saburo's son, Moroi Makoto (1930- ) spent a lot of time with the elder Moroi's group of students. Nevertheless, Moroi Makoto had been a regular student of the French-influenced, older Ikenouchi at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music and he gained his degree in composition in 1952. The two prewar academic schools find their confluence in the figure of Makoto-a solid technique with the French love of melody much admired by Ikenouchi and a more rigorous formal approach inherited from his father (who had been influenced by both Brahms and Hindemith)-but this was mixed with a certain curiosity for the music of Debussy (whose use of modes, in particular that adopted in Pelleas, Makoto studied).73 Makoto was a contemporary of the Jikkenkobo group of composers and he, like them, participated in the postwar rebellion against the older generation. He studied the prewar avant-garde masters such as Stravinsky and Bart6k and searched out everything that was available on the latest developments in Europe?4 For his composition exam Makoto wrote Shitsunai ongaku daisanban (Chamber music ill) for five wind instruments and viola. The third movement of this piece used two series, while in the other movements the series is used in a thematic way and structured somewhat like a trope, as expounded by Hauer.75 Makoto was somewhat of a loner and he was more original and creative in his development of twelve-tone technique than Irino was. Although Makoto was unaware at that time of Berg's music,7 6 his initial use of the series was quite Bergian. However, he subsequently began an in-depth study of SchOnberg and Webern. His position as a figure of confluence of the French and German schools meant that right from the start he had more contact with avant-garde developments in Europe than in Japan. His Parutita (Partita, 1953) for solo flute was a parody of Bach using a twelve-tone row. It was submitted to the ISCM competition and was frrst performed in Oslo, where it received very positive reviews. In 1955 his composition for piano, a to 13 (a and 13) won the 1955 ISCM composition competition. As the ISCM Festival of that year was being held in Baden

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Baden, he went there and stayed on for several months in Europe. After the festival he went first to Paris as a guest ofBoulez in his house in Place de la Bastille, then went to Donaueschingen. Finally he went to Cologne, where he spent three weeks in Stockhausen's studio, where he got to know about some of the most advanced developments in electronic music. On his return to Tokyo in 1956 he had a very vivid idea of everything that was happening in Europe. Back in Japan, Makoto was invited to work in the NHK electronic music studio on a project with Mayuzumi Toshiro. They had studied at university together and Mayuzumi had just come back from a period of study in France. Makoto and Mayuzumi were agreed that they wished to set up a contemporary music event in Japan similar to that of Darmstadt or Donaueschingen. They worked on this with two other fellow students of Moroi Saburo's, Irino and Shibata, both of whom had been childhood friends of Makoto. Other collaborators on this project included some outstanding instrumentalists such as the violinist Iwabuchi Ryiitaro and the flautist Mori Tadashi. Yoshida Hidekazu, one of Japan's leading musicologists, was the project's patron. The first edition of Gendai Ongakusai (Contemporary Music Festival) was held in 1957 in the beautiful setting of Karuizawa77 and it was organized by Nijiiseki Ongakukenkyiijo (Twentieth-Century Music Laboratory). The festival program had an introduction written by the musicologist Hans Mersmann (1891-1971) and an article by H. H. Stuckenschmidt, who personally attended the festival. In his article, Stuckenschmidt explained how events such as Darmstadt and Donaueschingen had helped make people in Europe aware of the music of Mayuzumi, Moroi, and Matsudaira. He congratulated the Japanese on the quality of their achievements and of the quantity of exchanges and contacts with Europe (even though the balance was still in Europe's favor). He warned Japanese composers of the dangers of a lowering of standards if they remained too passive in their adoption of elements from other cultures. There was also a special article by Theodor W. Adorno. He expressed the hope that since neither Japanese music nor Oriental music in general had been subjected to the "yoke of tonal organization and rhythmic symmetry," they would be able to have a profound and long-lasting influence on contemporary music that would go far beyond any superficial esoteric magic. All the other articles by the young composers manifested their enormous excitement at having been able to create such a festival, in which Japanese composers could meet and compare their work and ideas with those of composers from abroad. In the three days of concerts there was a Webem evening that included many first Japanese performances (Bagatellen op. 9, Vier Lieder op. 12, Kammerkonzen op. 24). There was an evening of music by Japanese composers that included Mayuzumi's Mikurokosumosu (Microcosmo) for seven performers, Moroi Makoto's Kihakuna Tenkai (Ethereal development) with texts by Kitazono Katsue for soprano and orchestra, Shibata's SokkyiJkyoku (Improvisation) for piano, and Irino's Ongaku (Music) for violin and piano as well as Stockhausen's Kontrapunkte and Boulez's Premiere Sonate for piano. The third evening was dedi-

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cated to the "masters of contemporary music" and included works by SchOnberg, Berg (including the first Japanese performance of the Lyric Suite), Stravinsky, and Messiaen (including the first Japanese performance of Modes de valeurs et d'intensites), and Density by Edgard Varese. The festival of the following year featured some seminars, including one by Shibata on Messiaen's language, one by Irino on the twelve-tone method, and one by Kato Shuichi on contemporary aesthetic trends. There was also the first edition of the composition competition, whose sponsors included the publishing house Ongaku no Torno, the daily newspaper Asahi, and NHK. One concert featured Stockhausen's XI Klavierstuck (replacing Zeitmasse, which had to be cancelled at the last minute) plus a selection of works by members of the Twentieth-Century Music Laboratory, including Moroi's Orudoru (Order) for cello and piano and Irino's Gojusiikyoku (Quintet). Another concert was dedicated to Messiaen and featured performances of Vingt Regards sur /'enfant Jesus and Visions de /'Amen. The works that were submitted to the competition included Fukushima's Ekagra, Matsushita Shin'ichi's Shitsunai konpojishon (Chamber music composition) for eight performers, and the work that won the prize: Takemitsu's Le Son-calligraphic for eight strings. It was from this year that JikkenkobO merged its public activities (though probably not its private discussions) with those of the Twentieth-Century Music Laboratory. The following year, 1959, the festival opened with a concert of music by Monteverdi; Stuckenschmidt led several lectures, while there was a concert dedicated exclusively to the works of Boulez that included a highly anticipated performance of Le Marteau sans Maztre;78 and in another concert Zeitmasse was fmally performed. The performances of works by young Japanese composers included Yuasa JOji's piano piece Purojekushon-toporojikku (Topological Projection). The influence of JikkenkobO in the artistic direction of the festival is apparent in the inclusion of an evening of modem jazz and one of experimental cinema. Among other activities, Mayazumi and Takemitsu led a roundtable on music for tape. There was no festival in 1960, and in 1961 it was moved from Karuizawa to Osaka. A commemorative concert given in honor of the anniversary of Schonberg's death included a performance of the Kammersymphonie op. 9 (though none of the works of Schonberg that were presented in this concert were receiving their first Japanese performance). The main event of that year's festival (one whose influence was to be felt for a long time to come) was a concert of works by the American composers Christian Wolf, Morton Feldman, Stefan Wolpe, Earle Brown, and John Cage. This concert had been organized by Ichiyanagi Toshi, who had just returned from a period in America.79 In his presentation of the concert, Mayuzumi pointed out the difference between Stockhausen's rational use of aleatoric techniques and John Cage's more anarchic approach. Akiyama Kuniharu wrote an article debating what the future of contemporary Japanese music might be and to what extent Japanese composers were aware of the possibilities that lay ahead. There were only two more editions of this festival. One was held in Kyoto in 1963. A concert that year was dedicated exclusively to Italian composers, with

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performances ofDallapiccola's Due studi, Nono's "Ha venido": Canciones para Silvia, Berio's Sequenza I, Bussotti's Phrase atrois, and Castiglioni's Tropi (only the works by Dallapiccola and Nono were receiving their first performances in Japan). There was another concert in which important works by Japanese composers were presented, including Takemitsu's Sakurifaisu (Sacrifice) for flute, lute, and vibraphone; Ishii Maki'sAforisumen (Aphorisms); and Takahashi Yiiji's Meikai no heso (Hell's navel, dedicated to Antonin Artaud), as well as other works by Irino and Shibata. Ishii (1936- ) had just returned from Berlin, where he had graduated in 1961 at the Hochschule fiir Musik Berlin, where he had studied with Boris Blacher and Josef Rufer. Takahashi (1938-) was to become one of the most independent and original talents on the Japanese music scene and his composition Mekai marked his official debut. The last edition of the festival was held in 1965 in Tokyo. But the whole atmosphere had by now completely changed: the 1960s had been marked by social unrest and violence; information on new ideas was now circulating freely and rapidly; and Japanese musicians were becoming increasingly interested in timbre and in concepts of traditional Japanese music. The 1965 festival featured a new work that was significantly representative of these new trends: Moroi Makoto's Chikurai goshO (Five movements of the wind in the bamboo) for shakuhachi. There were also performances of works by Ligeti and Xenakis. In the only commentary published in the festival program that year, the critic Yoshida commented on the Festival of Japanese Arts, which had just ended in Berlin, and he wondered just how much the Europeans might have been able to understand of the Japanese arts they had seen. He stated also that in previous Twentieth-Century Music festivals there had been far more European composers than Japanese composers; this was something that needed to be remedied. The postwar avant-garde's first great season had drawn to a close.

6.4 COMPOSER'S ASSOCIATIONS One of the most significant phenomena of the postwar years was the large number of composer's associations that were set up. Some had very restricted memberships, while others had large memberships; some were mainly for setting up concerts for performances of works by their members, while others met to debate issues related to composing. This incredible flowering of different groups was not just an indication of how many musicians there were and of how much music was being made, but it was also a direct response to the problems facing musicians. There were many social restrictions and public funding was limited, so it was not easy to organize concerts. It was also a clear indication of how strong the need was for fresh and uncensored input after the cultural blackout of the war. This tendency to form groups has its roots in the nature of Japanese society and the Japanese approach to creativity. For the Japanese, identification with a collective is a

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psychologically important moment and it is a driving force behind artistic creativity. Indeed some composers belonged to more than one group at the same time, as in this way they were able to find recognition and engage in discussions that covered the various veins of their music. For example, Mayuzumi was a member of Sannin no kai (whose main activity was organizing concerts), of several avant-garde groups such as the Twentieth-Century Music Laboratory, and of Ars Nova, a group set up to "purify" the artistic spirit of the musical avant-garde (Moroi Makoto, and the conductor Iwaki Hiroyuki were also members of Ars Nova). The age range of the membership of each group determined whether it pursued ideas that had been initiated before the war or whether its aim was more the discovery of new, original creative paths. The year 1948 saw the foundation of Chijinkai (Earth-Human Association), which was active from 1950 to 1955. Its charter stated that "since the members of the group had been born and raised nowhere else than in Japan" the purpose of the group's activities was to encourage "a deeply honest and sincere appreciation of traditional Japanese culture, of Western traditions, and of the future of music." In fact this echoed similar prewar ventures that had looked for a way to unite the characteristics of Japanese melody and European techniques through a French approach to harmony and structure. It had been thought that French aesthetics were closer to Japanese aesthetics and relatively free of the academic strictures of German music. The most interesting member of Chijinkai was Hirao Kishio (1907-53). Unfortunately he died shortly after the group started its activities and in 1954 a concert was given in his memory that included his best-known works for chamber ensembles, including Nihon min'yo kumikyoku (1941), a suite of Japanese folk songs for soprano and pianoforte; Kisokumikyoku (Capriccio suite, 1950) for string quartet, three woodwinds, and piano; and the Sonata (1947) for violin. Hirao had studied harmony and counterpoint at the Schola Cantorum in Paris. When Vincent D'Indy, the influencial director of the Schola, died in 1931, Hirao went to the Paris Conservatory, where he studied composition with a pupil of Cesar Frank's, gaining his diploma in 1936. Hirao is one of the composers who provided a musical bridge between the prewar and postwar generations. Being a flute player he had a special empathy with the sound of woodwind instruments and his use of these timbres can be quite charming; his harmonic and contrapuntal skills enriched the accompaniments, which were always well written. A good example is the piano writing in the happy flow of music in his Sonatas for woodwind instruments (for flute, 1941, and for oboe, 1951) or the textures of his Trio (1949) for flute, violin, and piano. Hirao's language is orthodox and rooted in the French style, and while it tends to be melodically less inventive than Ikenouchi's music, it is richer and denser. His use of Japanese melodies in his works for voice and in those for orchestra (such as Kodai sanka, Ancient paean, 1937) is sincere and sensitive, rather than tinged with rhetoric. Other noteworthy members of Chijinkai were Abe Komei (1911- ) and Takata Saburo (1913- ). Abe was a cello player who composed mainly chamber music,

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including fifteen very conservative string quartets. He had studied with Pringsheim and Rosenstock and, together with Fukai, had been a member of Prometeo. In 1939 his Concerto for cello won the Weingartner Prize. Takata had studied with Nobutoki and Rosentstock at the Ueno School of Music and gained his diploma at the start of the war. His family came from Nagoya, where his father was a lawyer and his family had adopted a Western lifestyle. He was an active supporter of the process of modernization and westernization, though after 1950 he tried to find a way of mediating bunmei, 80 with the roots of the Japanese moral values of simplicity and purity. The result of this was reflected in his Chamber Suite for five wind instruments (written one year after Hirao's Capriccio Suite), in which he abandoned the French-influenced style he had adopted until then. Takata taught for many years at one of Japan's main universities, the Kunitachi University, where he gathered a large group of students around him. In 1958 his students set up Tsuchi no kai (the Earth Society). This group of composers continued to compose in his chamber music style, with its predilection for woodwind timbres and liberal indulgence in all the stylistic traits of French music. A similar group to Chijinkai was Hakutokai (the White Whale Association), which made its official debut with a concert given in 1950. Its stated aim was "to reelaborate traditional Japanese music to make it become something of which we can be proud internationally." Hakutokai's central figure was Otaka Hisatada (1911-51), who had studied composition and conducting in Vienna. In 1938 he conducted a program of Japanese music with the orchestras in Budapest, Vienna, and Berlin. After his return to Japan in 1940 he became very active as a conductor (working especially with the Shinkokyogakudan, later renamed Japanese Symphonic Orchestra) and as a composer. One of his most famous compositions was Midare (Disorder, 1939) for orchestra. The title is taken from a classical work for koto and the music is fairly original and rich. 81 After Otaka's death, NHK set up an annual composition competition (which is still a prestigious competition) bearing his name. Hachi no kai (the Group of the Bees), set up in 1955 around Fukai and Takata, was one of those groups whose members included composers who had already been active before the war. Hachi no kai was particularly interested in the relationship between poetry and music. In 1956 Fukai's internationalist ideas inspired the formation of the New Music Group. Also in 1956 the pupils of Kiyose Yasuji and Hara Taro (a composer who was very involved in political activities) set up the Young People's Group. Inspired by Hara's ideas, the Young People's Group dedicated its attention to the problems of art and the masses. Ashi no kai (the Society of the Reed) was set up in 1955 by some graduates of the Nihon University. In 1951, an American composer called Eugene Hemmar was the central figure in the founding of Jiyii sakkyokuka kyokai (Association of Free Composers). This somewhat eccentric group took a positivist stance to the postwar process of reconstruction. However, none of the members of these groups played a particularly significant role.

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In 1953, three young composers, Dan Ikuma (1924- ), Akutagawa Yasushi (1925-90), and Mayuzumi Toshiro, each of whom possessed a different compositional style, formed Sannin no kai (the Group of Three). They adopted tactics that immediately brought them notoriety and made them the object of criticism. They were united ideologically by the belief that not everything of the prewar period was to be rejected and that any newly evolving style should try to find links with ideas from the past, such as Hayasaka's Pan-Asianism. They spent enormous sums of money hiring halls and orchestras for performances of their works in a period when social life was not at all lively. Mayuzumi, the most famous of the three, was dissatisfied with the academic training he had had from Tony Aubin at the Paris Conservatory (1951-52). He had begun his compositional career by working primarily with material from Asian music in, for example, Sphenogram (1950) for flute, saxophone, marimba, violin, cello, four-hand piano, and voice. This work was the first work he wrote after completing his studies in Japan before going to Paris. It combines the pentatonic slendro scale of Javanese gamelan music with bebop rhythms and Indian liturgical music. It was performed the following year at the ISCM Festival in Frankfurt. Microcosrrws (1957) for clavioline, guitar, vibraphone, xylophone, piano, bongo, conga, and musical saw was a twelve-tone piece (a technique he seldom used) that explored unusual timbric combinations. Tonpureromasu (Sonic plenitude) for five saxophones, five trumpets, woodwind, percussion, and saw was a rather insipid tribute to Varese. In 1957 Mayuzumi renewed his musical exploration of Indonesia with ShOkyoku (Small piece). Scored for prepared piano82 and string quartet, it was an attempt to capture the sounds of the Balinese gamelan with a music worked from sixteenth and thirty-second note rhythmic patterns. This first period of research into Asian music culminated with a setting of a Sanskrit text Nehan kOkyo kyoku (Nirvana symphony, 1958) for chorus and orchestra. In this composition, Mayuzumi brings together many elements of his musical research, in particular his research into the sounds of Japanese Buddhist temple bells. Through his sonograph analysis of these bells, Mayuzumi had discovered that the first ten harmonics did not include the second and third harmonics (the octave and the fifth) or any multiples thereof. This was a fascinating discovery, because the second and third harmonics are present in the harmonic series of nearly all instruments. Mayuzumi used this unusual harmonic series to create two pentatonic scales, with which he created textures that he called "sound masses." These sound masses are dissonant chords that are played by three instrumental groups in sequences that are not melodic but rather a sort of Klangfarbenmelodie. The three instrumental groups saturate the space surrounding the listener, in much the same way as Stockhausen did with Gruppen (1955-57). Even though there is no serial organization of the musical material, the music sung by the twelve-voice male chorus covers all twelve semitones of the chromatic scale.83 Some fascinating moments filter through a music that can sound slightly bombastic at times, while the chanting of the Sanskrit text by a "Western" choir now and then sounds awkward. It should be remembered that this was the first postwar composition based entirely on "native" material (Buddhist chants and the sound of temple

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bells). It also marks a change of musical direction for Mayuzumi. Having previously been a passionate rebel, he now began to move toward a greater use of traditional material and became increasingly reactionary.ln the works that followed, such as the Mandara shinfoni (Mandala symphony, 1960), there is a dissociation in Mayuzumi's music between the technique and the musical content that creates a sort of hypnotic and mystic effect. The same is true of the well-known Bugaku (Dance music, 1962),84 which was commissioned by the New York City Ballet but never choreographed. The elements that Mayuzumi used with skill to create the musical texture of Bugaku include repeated notes, rhythmically regular phrases grouped together, and the use of a syntactic structure to create the climaxes. The most representative work of Mayuzumi's musical credo and stylistic development is Kinkakuji (The golden pavilion). Kinkakuji is the title of a novel by Mishima Yukio; the German libretto was prepared by Klaus H. Henneberg. Kinkakuji was staged in Berlin by the Deutsche Oper in June 1976, but despite a basically positive reaction by the critics, it was not staged in Japan untill991. This was probably due to elements that would have passed over the heads of a German audience but that in Japan had a profound significance, such as the unfortunate role assigned to the American army, a reactionary and rhetorical use of traditional Japanese culture, and the tragic inclusion of misogyny. All this with a well-written score that misses no opportunity to play to the gallery. This composition was followed by a period of relative isolation, but toward the end of his life Mayuzumi reemerged as a leading figure of the Japanese musical scene. Attentive observers such as Akiyama saw this as indicative of a disturbing reemergence of nationalist fervor. 85 Twenty-one of Ikenouchi's students came together in 1955 to form Shinshinkai (the Group of Intense Innovation). Their interest was in founding a new academy dedicated to a renewed interest in French music, to encourage a return to proper training in the traditional skills of harmony and counterpoint, and to counterbalance the various avant-garde movements, which they felt were receiving a disproportionate amount of attention. Ikenouchi himself was a skilled craftsman with a firm grasp of traditional techniques and two of his students were to prove to be highly interesting but totally different in musical style. These were Miyoshi Akira (1933- ) and Shinohara Makoto (1931- ). After Shinshinkai ceased its activities, some members joined with students of lshiketa Mareo 86 to form Tamaki (the Circle), one of whose members was Yoshizaki Kiyotomi (1940- ). Miyoshi Akira's approach to composition is particularly Japanese in the way he mediates between a composed, French-inspired style and honest but restrained use of more avant-garde techniques. Like Matsudaira Teizo and other composers who adopted a similar approach, Miyoshi is not necessarily being conservative. Moreover, his is a readily identifiable style that has nothing in common with the conservative use of tonal structures typical of the 1970s. Miyoshi is not interested in a facile communicative style based on the resusci-

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tation of previous musical styles, but in exploring the internal structure of a chosen musical language. The language that Miyoshi explores is that of the European music of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with its use of modulation, variation, and closed formal structures (such as sonata form). When Miyoshi began composing at the end of the 1950s, this style still represented one of the unresolved problems of twentieth-century Japanese music. One of his biggest musical influences was Henri Dutilleux (1916-99). Miyoshi had heard much of Dutilleux's music through radio broadcasts and he met him personally during his stay in Paris from 1955 to 1957 (though he was never a student of Dutilleux's). The first work in which Miyoshi clearly found his own personal style was Kokyo sanshO (Three symphonic movements, 1960). The writing in this piece, which was commissioned by Geijutsusai (the 1960 Tokyo Summer Festival), where it won a prize, is orthodox and at times tinged with a delicate romanticism and at others colored by outbursts of bright timbric contrasts. The whole work is created from the transformation of seven simple motifs (some being cells of just three notes) in a composition that is quite well structured. The first movement is in a tripartite form with a reprise, but the form is fairly free. The central section is not a development section but echoes elements of the first and third sections and introduces further elaborations of the rising figure played by the strings to conclude the main motive (a descending major seventh followed by a rising major fourth, fig. 6.13, 1). The reprise section features the first cell, now played by flute and violas, which is then handed over to the bassoon and cellos and expanded in a difficult, rising, twisting figure. In the second movement the violins introduce two motifs. The first is a rising phrase with rhythmic irregularities and the second is a sextuplet

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Figure 6.13.

Miyoshi, Three Symphonic Movements, the first three motifs.

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derived from the first figure. An episode played by the piano, xylophone, celesta, and percussion brings a new feeling of color that, after the entry of the brass, is further spiced with jazz rhythms. The mood of the third movement is more rarefied. A new motif is intertwined with some of those already heard (the three motifs of the first movement and the third motif of the second movement) in a series of variations. These variations include changes of tempo and of orchestration and they lead to a central section that rises to a climax created through ostinato repetitions that display the influence on Miyoshi of both Stravinsky and Ifukube. Miyoshi often used established structures such as tripartite form or sonata form, but he never used them straightforwardly for it is clear that he was trying to elaborate simultaneously both the work's form and its material. This he achieves through an ample use of variations, a form he learned to use well and that became a central feature of his writing. The Japanese musicologist Narazaki Yoko described this approach as an "aesthetic of magnificent metamorphosis."87 Miyoshi's variation technique is not a deconstructive one of taking a theme apart to examine its individual components. Miyoshi maintains the profile of the theme and keeps its intervallic and rhythmic relationships intact; he alters the character of the theme partly through timbric and dynamic transformations, but more often through a process of combining, dividing, andrecombining elements of the theme. He also varies the theme by inserting extra material, by the intermittent repetition of sections of the theme, such as an interval or a cell, or by mixing the original with a variation of the original (fig. 6.14a). Miyoshi wrote that he composed his Concerto (1965) for violin and orchestra in order to confirm for himself his inner empathy with romanticism. In this piece, the variations on the theme acquire a new format. He develops an organic process in which the augmentation derives from variations on small details. In the resulting "vegetative" form, 88 what follows cohabits with what came before. He used the same technique in Concerto (1962) for piano and orchestra, a work that marks a turning point in Miyoshi's output, as his music became more impetuous and intense. The nature of the orchestra's serpentine theme imparts a sense of urgent movement to the piano's variations and the theme itself is also subjected to variations that maintain, however, its characteristic rising and falling pattern (fig. 6.14b).

RJ I Nucleo motivico ll (Tre Movimmli ail!{tmiCI)

Figure 6.14a.

' y 2 Variazione batt. 36

Miyoshi, variation techniques.

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Tema dell'orchestra (Concerto per pianoforte e orchestra)

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Figure 6.14b.

Miyoshi, variation techniques.

One of the most beautiful works of the 1960s was his opera Ketto (Duel, 1964) for soprano and orchestra which used texts by the symbolist poet Hagiwara Sakutaro. Its surreal atmosphere induces a sort of hallucinatory expressionism that makes the work a direct descendant of Schonberg's Erwartung. This was a fertile period in which Miyoshi also composed his Concerto (1964) for orchestra. In this Concerto, Miyoshi tried to harmonize "the outer life of a sound with its internal system." It is another tripartite composition in which Miyoshi continues with his development of variation technique as organic transformations. In the frrst movement the theme is strongly assertive, but both the rhythmic and tonal parameters are irregular (for the former 4/8 + 3/8; for the latter an abundance of sevenths, seconds, and augmented fourths). The second movement oscillates between a vaguely ecstatic Lento (played by celli, celesta, vibraphone, and harp) and a straightforward Allegro (played predominantly by the strings). The theme of the third movement is obviously related timbrically and melodically to the frrst movement, and themes from the second movement also reappear. This fmal movement, marked Prestissimo, is a sort of perpetuum mobile that concludes with a stripping down of the theme that finally emerges at the end in its bare essentials played as long repeated notes. With his second Quartet (1967) Miyoshi takes his leave of the world of late romanticism with one of his most avant-garde ventures. In this work the technique of joining varied cells together is reminiscent of Bartok. In his frrst Quartet (1962), the flow of the music had been created out of thirds by superimposing major with minor (a very Bart6kian device), to create friction. In the second Quartet, Miyoshi honed his personal style by experimenting with single intervals that assume a thematic importance; ostinato figures in rhythmic unison on all instruments are interrupted by octave leaps; there is little imitation between the parts; and so on. Another turning point that affected more the content than the form came in the 1970s as Miyoshi introduced greater human elements into his music. This is apparent in works such as Requiem (1971) for choir and orchestra, with texts taken from a collection of Japanese antiwar poems, and Odeko no koitsu (That fellow with the protruding forehead,89 1972) for children's voices

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and piano, which used poems by Horai Taizo that dealt with the contemporary situation in Biafra. Requiem is reminiscent of Luigi Nono's Canto Sospeso (1964), though it is not clear which works of Nono's Miyoshi might have heard, since he had never left Tokyo (where he had taught at the Tooo University since 1966). The music has a monolithic feel in its constant structural contrasts between light and shade and between emptiness and density. This too is a tripartite work. The first movement sounds like a competition between the orchestra and the voices, with the solid motet-like writing for the choir that contrasts with the ethereal writing for the orchestra. Skillful touches that are typical of Miyoshi's style include a very moving phrase that is first played on the violin and is then passed from instrument to instrument, and the cadences that the percussion add to all the narrative episodes. The final section has an immaterial quality, with the choir accompanied by the celesta and by harmonics on the strings. The second movement opens with an episode of sharp dynamic contrasts, then the opening phrase dissolves, leaving the voices reciting a spoken text. Mter this the voices chase each other, uttering distressed calls spread over the whole vocal range. The last movement reaches a violent climax, with the agitated voices accompanied by the woodwind, brass, and percussion. The tension continues to build until the text "I am dead" is reached. It then collapses into an abyss of despair illuminated only by the icy sparkle of a lonely flute phrase. The 1970s continued with works for male chorus marked by an intense sensitivity. The Requiem itself was followed by Shihen (The book of psalms, 1979) for chorus and orchestra with a text taken from the Jomon collection by the poet So Sakon, and Kyomon (1984)90 for children's voices and orchestra with another text by So. These three works form a trilogy. Miyoshi's writing, marked by an elegance and a deep spirituality, is lyrical and often has a feeling of dramatic introspection, which give it a unique quality that is difficult to categorize within the panorama of twentieth-century music. Miyoshi is very highly admired in Japan and abroad, especially in France, where he is considered a talented and inspired musician. Shinohara Makoto, by contrast, was a composer who was fully immersed in contemporary ideas and who was considered by his teacher Ikenouchi to be the most talented of his many students. He was born in Osaka, studied in Tokyo, and in 1954 won a scholarship to study in Paris, where he studied at the conservatory, first with Tony Aubin unti11959 and then with Olivier Messiaen. From 1959 to 1960 he studied musique concrete in the studios of the Groupe de Recherche Musicale at the French broadcast. His first works, which were immediately successful, represent a sort of "academy with no teachers." His Sonata for violin and piano, which he wrote for his diploma, was published by Leduc, and Obsession (1960) for oboe and piano was a commission from the Paris Conservatory for a competition for the oboe class. Although the influences of Bart6k and Messiaen are vaguely recognizable, what establishes Shinohara's individuality is his restrained conciseness and the way he uses asymmetry and silence together with an unusual use of intervals. He then entertained hopes and expectations that he did not know how to realize. However, in this period

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of personal creative stagnation, his visit to the Darmstadt Ferienkurse in 195991 proved to be an important event. At Darmstadt Shinohara found fresh stimuli and his discovery of the music of Stockhausen, Boulez, and Berio showed new expressive paths to follow. Although nearly thirty years old, he decided to embark on a new course of study by visiting the major avant-garde centers in Europe. In 1960 he went to Munich, where he spent several years working in the Siemens electronic music studio. In 1962 he went to the Hochschule fiir Musik in Cologne, where he studied composition with Bernd A. Zimmermann and electronic music, first with Michael Gottfried Koenig and then with Karlheinz Stockhausen (whose assistant he became in 1965). In 1961 he composed Solitude for orchestra, which was first performed in Utrecht as part of Gaudeaumus Week, an international music festival held by the Gaudeaumus Foundation in Amsterdam. It was in Solitude that he began to use serial grids for the organization of pitches, timbres, and durations. This was followed by Alternance for six percussionists. A preliminary version was performed in Darmstadt in 1962 and it was given its first full performance in New York in 1963. Shinohara's meticulousness and sensitivity emerges fully in this work, which was the first in which he adopted some of the latest European avant-garde techniques. The techniques that interested him were pointillism, those that use structural techniques that work on single aspects of sound or let the performer take specified choices in the performance of a work, and Stockhausen's Momentform. These were all ideas that Shinohara continued to develop throughout his career. Alternance is an important work that makes use of a wide range of colors and of concepts of space and time. It is a work in nine sections: one section contains an exposition of the pitches, four sections continue this focus on the parameter of pitch, and the other four tum the focus to dynamics and contrasts. The work contains moments of extreme dynamic energy that suggest a feeling of development, but this is contradicted by an interplay of sounds and timbres of sophisticated detail that imply that each single moment is more important than any ongoing development (fig. 6.15). In his many aleatoric scores £\UI.t-.,o::-+---t-

Figure 6.15.

Shinohara, Altemance, beginning.© 1969 Alphonse Leduc & Cie.

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Shinohara is interested principally in controlling the relationship between sounds, because the form is determined by all the different possible realizations of the piece. Tendance (Trend, 1963) for piano was also composed in this way: "one of my characteristic traits as a composer, or if you want, my personal tendency ... every composer develops their personal traits or tendencies. That is another meaning for 'trend' ."92 Tendance was composed in Cologne between 1962 and 1963 and then subsequently revised in Berlin in 1969. It is made up of twenty-one fragments that are divided into six categories according to their character and structure. The performer has to begin with material from category A and end with material from category F; the sequence of the remaining fragments is left open to the performer. However, the performer must not play any single element or any succession of fragments twice, nor insert pauses between elements, as all necessary silences are precisely notated in the score. There is also an element of choice with regard to durations, pitches, and the performer's virtuosity. No matter how the work is performed, it's identity always emerges. It uses the natural resonance of the piano and is structured around moments in which fragments and single sounds play a primary role. These single sounds are grouped together in rudimentary figures, such as an interval, a cluster, or an ornament, or in the sequence of a note followed by a silence or by a resonance within the piano. There is a unique gracefulness in Shinohara's music. His "personal tendency" toward a formal, syntactic order, never drawn to exaggeration, and the avoidance of effect for effect's sake give his music an intimate and profoundly expressive quality. The titles of the following works are self-explanatory: Omoiwazurai (Reflections, 1970) for oboe; Relations (1970) for flute and piano; and Rencontres (Encounters, 1972) for percussion. After these works, Shinohara felt obliged to deal with his Japanese roots. The first work to emerge from this creative change was Tayutai (Fluctuations, 1972) for koto, percussion, and voice. After almost twenty years in Europe, writing European music, Shinohara appeared ready to tackle the seemingly impossible task of integrating Japanese and European musical thinking. The score is fully notated and Shinohara's sharply felt need to constantly experiment is never hidden, but always placed firmly in the foreground. Pictorial suggestions are used to maintain the fluctuating character of the title in the writing for percussion, obtaining ulterior precision with an appropriately chosen notation (fig. 6.16). The koto part, which Shinohara wrote before the others, is for the koto with thirteen strings. However, the strings are not tuned in the traditional manner, but are tuned to an eleven-tone series (A is missing). Neither does the vocal writing follow traditional canons, yet it is never far removed from a sense of traditional Japanese music in style and quality. There is a short text in which the voice intones a few Japanese verses about the sense of solitude that comes with the evening and there are many exchanges between the voice and the koto that recall traditional music. Inevitably the rich timbric effects sound very Japanese. There is a percussive part in which the koto player has to hit the body of the instrument with various kinds of plectra and create percussive effects using many delicate oriental sound sources such as Chinese shell chimes, Japanese bamboo, and Philippine urchin chimes.

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The work seems to have no implicit superstructure; it is simply a collection of different materials joined together in a meaningful sequence.93 It has an austere quality in its long silences and in the simplicity of the materials that make it an extremely moving piece of music. With great insight, Leigh Landy alludes to the similarity between this work and Luciano Berio's Sequenzas in the way they explore new ideas and techniques in instrumental writing, inspired by each individual instrument's sound and history. Shinohara, with his typically systematic approach, drew up a chart of the characteristics that are distinctive in Western and Japanese music in order to set to work at integrating them.94 Another work of this period is Birth of the Bass Koto for jushichigen (seventeen-string koto), which was commissioned by the leading koto player, Kikuchi Teiko; it is a work that has remained very popular with performers. Twelve of the seventeen strings are tuned to the chromatic scale and the remaining five are tuned to create important intervals. The performer is called on to play harmonics, microtones, and glissandi produced by moving the bridge on the soundboard. Strong, assertive episodes are contrasted with quieter, more introspective ones. Another interesting work is KyUdO A (1974) and B (1973). A is scored for harp and shakuhachi, B for solo shakuhachi. As Landy comments: "The B version, written a year earlier, is for shakuhachi and harp (East meets West yet again). The A version is simply the extraction of the shakuhachi part from the B version. Is the A version emptier and less complete? Is the harp unnecessary?"95 Shinohara received substantial funding from major institutions, which enabled him to visit Holland, Berlin, New York, and Canada. In 1978, he finally settled in Utrecht, though he maintained contacts with friends and institutions in Japan. Cooperation (1990) is a piece for eight Western instruments and eight Japanese instruments. The title itself clearly explains the work's intentions of "investigating the integration of the very different worlds of Japanese and Western culture." Each instrumentalist is given a few percussion instruments; the instrumental lineup is organized as two quartets; during the piece one player from one group dialogues with one from the opposing group. During each duet, percussion accompaniment is provided by the other musicians. There are some larger sections involving all sixteen musicians, who "while maintaining their individual freedom and personality, try to influence the rest of the group, so that the overall effect is one of consonance.'>% It is a very poetic work in which the delicate sounds of the percussion instruments are shattered by the Japanese instruments and the writing for the Western instruments is characterized by the spareness and profundity that is one of the most fascinating features of Shinohara's writing. In 1956 Matsudaira Yoritsune's students came together to form the group 20.5, a name chosen to symbolize the second half of the twentieth century, which had only just begun, and to stress the importance of using musical creativity to look forward to the future. The members of 20.5 included Matsudaira's son, Yoriaki (1931-) and Shimoyama Hifumi (1930- ). Matsudaira Yoriaki did not initially

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follow in his father's footsteps and had decided on a career as a biologist. In his music he adopted serialism, using the Allintervallreihe (the series that contains all eleven intervals) in works such as Configuration I and II (1963) for chamber orchestra (1963). In works such as Coherency for flute, clarinet, percussion, harp, and electric piano he used a technique of quotations that he described as a "neomodal" style, at the same time using intervals and pitches in a way that the chords can be derived from the Allintervallreihe. In what looks like a move to distance himself from his father's expressive style and from research for new techniques, Yoriaki wrote music that was playful. Shinoyama is an interesting composer who was chosen to represent Japan at several ISCM festivals (in 1961, 1967, 1974, 1977, 1979, and 1980). In 1982 he won the Prix ltalia with a composition inspired by Haley's comet and in the 1970s he took part in an Italian-Japanese Festival of Contemporary Music held in Tokyo at the Italian Institute of Culture. Examples of associations that flourished outside Tokyo are the Musician's Group of Kyoto and Elan in Osaka. Elan was founded in 1958 and had only a short life span. The intellectual driving force behind it was the composer Matsushita Shin'ichi (1922-90), a very talented person who even as a young child was fascinated by mathematics, music, and astronomy. Immediately after graduating Matsushita joined the staff of the University of Osaka and then, in 1965, he went to Hamburg as a researcher in theoretical physics and quickly became an international authority on phase analysis. He also received recognition as a composer and his music has been performed and awarded prizes in Europe and Japan. In 1958 he collaborated with the Twentieth-Century Music Laboratory, which presented a performance of his twelve-tone work Composition for chamber orchestra. In 1957 he composed Kasokuna jikan to isoteki jikan (Measurable time and topological time) for piano, which was based on an abstract, mathematical interest in time (he was later to consider the stars in the same way). In 1960 and 1961 he produced Canzone da suonare (Song to play) and ligen (Dimensions), subtitled "Symphonic Prayer" (his third symphony). These were two important works in which he continued his research into the stratification of time and the use of timbre and in which he explored post-Webemian styles, from pointillism to Stockhausen's group composition theory. In these pieces single sounds are often accompanied by a sort of drone, as if Matsushita were working on a mix of point and line, where these superimpositions create different rhythmic layers, abolishing bar lines and giving a structural freedom to the performers. There are no separate movements; extended techniques are used to create unconventional noises, such as breathing noises, to heighten the sense of the music's philosophical and spiritual basis. From the mid1960s Matsushita began to explore the idea of speed, also giving a limited amount of freedom to the interpreter. A well-known work of this period is Fresque Sonore (1964) for flute, oboe, clarinet, hom, harp (one of his favorite instruments), violin, and cello. This was performed three times in 1965 alone (at the Zagreb Biennale, at the Madrid ISCM Festival, and in October by the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Boulez). The work is divided into very small sections, each with its own

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unique material. This material is based either on pitches, timbres (a frequently recurring color is the combination of harp and flute), or textural qualities (such as the use of harmonics played pp or glissandi on the strings to create an ethereal effect). As the title suggests, the music is conceived as if it were a fresco with no one instrument emerging above the others. Great attention is dedicated to the instrumental writing to create well-defined instrumental combinations (woodwind and hom, the strings, or the harp and flute). Spectra II (1967) for piano represents an important turning point. This was not so much a stylistic turning point as an expressive turning point. The six pieces of Spectra II are a spiritual evocation of some Japanese myths from a text called Kojiki, which is the oldest in Japanese literature. The cycle Spectra I to IV (1964-73) uses material grouped in blocks using the group composition theory coupled with Matsushita's customary restrained use of chance methods. What is special to these works is the expansion of the technique of group composition to create more extended phrase lengths and greater control over the colors of the piano. In 1968 Matsushita composed Astrale Atem for chamber orchestra (he later reorchestrated it for full symphony orchestra). This composition marked the beginning of Matsushita's most fertile period, in which he achieved a greater personal assimilation of certain elements of avant-garde technique. Preceding works such as Das Zeichen (1965) were in a certain sense preparatory works for Astrale atem. Although the title page of the score bears a poem by R. M. Rilke ("Ich m6chte beten. I Und einer von allen Stemen"), the astral aspect of the music is cosmic in the astrophysical sense of the word, dealing as it does with the Milky Way, novae, and exploding galaxies. The music evolves lyrically and the main focus is on the expressive content rather than the structural content of the musical material. The opening E~-E cell, which is played on the harp and sounds like the taking of a breath, is a leitmotif that runs throughout the work and returns (now expanded to a major second) in the concluding "Explosion in der Galaxie NGC 3561." But it is not so much an explosion as a moment of confusion, the disintegration of a texture already corroded by the alteration of the breath phrase. The works he wrote between 1968 and 1971 are based on fragments of Einstein's universal equations, on Heisenberg's formulae, or on the concept of mobile coordinates (in Repere Mobile for cello, 1971).97 This urge to use powerful and abstract ideas as the organizational basis represents a spiritual tendency that led to works such as Gestalt 17 (1970), which has a deep content, at the extremes of religious thought. Other works of this nature include Eki5 (Buddhist ceremony, 1972) and the symphonic work Sanga (Buddhist community, 1974) for soloists, choir, and orchestra with Buddhist texts. In the very dramatic music of this fifty-minute work, Matsushita appears even to include the use of tonal techniques. In Repere mobile II the musical structure develops through a process of the mutation of a few sonic events, while tension is created through contrasting internal micro events. This tension is used to generate specific characteristics that form macro structures. This is particularly evident in the second section. The cells that had appeared in the first section

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with varying degrees of prominence and importance are now given equal importance and prominence by expansion of the smaller events and contraction of the larger ones. As it is a piece for a solo instrument, this is easy to hear. In Gestalt 17 for harp, piano, three percussionists (including electric organ), and three trombones, each instrument is treated autonomously and there are several references to musical styles that are idiomatic for a particular instrument. Some trombone passages, for example, are meant to evoke the atmosphere of a Catholic mass; others are supposed to suggest jazz swing. According to the author the percussion is meant to evoke an Islamic atmosphere, while the choir, when it is accompanied by a chorale played by the electric organ ("Erhalt uns in der Wahrheit, gib ewigliche Freiheit"), evokes a Protestant church service. The use of the word Gestalt in the title is meant to refer to these ecumenical forms. According to the composer the number 17 is nothing more than a reference to Subject 17, a group based in San Francisco that he had visited in 1970, while 1 and 7 are figures that appear in 1970. The unusual instrumental lineup is due to the fact that the work was commissioned by a group of Swedish trombonists. There is a wealth of invention in the music and some passages come off particularly well. Matsushita felt great empathy for the European avant-garde and he spent a lot of time in Europe. His use of abstract procedures to organize the musical material (an approach that was very fashionable in Europe in the 1950s) led to compositions that work successfully, with an innate musicality and a sense of idealism. In 1953 Hayashi Hikaru (1931- ), Mamiya Michio (1929- ), and Toyama Yiiro (1931- ) formed Yagi no kai (the Association of the Goat). 98 The musical poetics of this group are interesting because it tried to make a fresh start in dealing with the problem of evolving a music capable of expressing a more Japanese spirit. The idea was to make a clean break and to move away from the ideas behind nihonteki naru ongaku (the nationalist musical thought), which had been encouraged by the propaganda of the prewar years.99 Yagi no kai had a strong political bias that is evident in the titles of the compositions by the group's members, as well as in the aims set out in the group's manifesto (which talked of socialism and the need to reassert the independence of the people). It is worth noting in this context that postwar concerts in Japan featured many works by figures who had little to do with developments in the official European mainstream, such as Shostakovich (whose Eighth Symphony was performed in 1948), Bartok (whose Third Piano Concerto was performed in 1951), and Khachaturian. As had happened in the 1920s and 1930s, the Russian school offered a model for a similar national style of composing that made use of the highly elaborate techniques and linguistic syntaxes of European music while preserving the national poetic and aesthetic artistic heritage. However, the main figure that Yagi no kai looked to for inspiration was Bartok (in particular it looked to his work as a collector of folk music). Toyama eventually dedicated most of his career to conducting and became first coprincipal conductor (together with lwaki) of the

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NHK orchestra, then principal conductor of the Kyoto Philharmonic. The most interesting composers of the group were Mamiya and Hayashi. Mamiya and HayashiHJO (the latter especially in the world of musical theater) were among the most active of their generation. Mamiya Michio was born in Asahikawa on Hokk:aid.O. His father was a primary school teacher who also gave music lessons, and thus Mamiya began to play piano when he was only four years old. Hokk:aido had only recently been settled and its inhabitants were mainly farmers and working-class people, and it is likely that there were many performances of folk music. However, Mamiya's father then moved to Aomori (in the northwestern part of Japan's main island of Honshu) and here Mamiya heard a great deal of Japanese folk music. Aomori was home to the great Nebuta Festival, a competition in which men and women displayed their bravura in the performance of popular songs. Mamiya recalls how he was struck by the beauty of the min 'yo songs and of their relationship with people's daily lives. 101 Mamiya's formal education followed a conventional path and culminated in his diploma in composition in 1952 at the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music. After receiving his diploma he returned to Aomori, where he began to compose music using folk melodies. Representative music of this period includes the second movement of SanshO (Three movements, 1952) for two pianos, the frrst Sonata (1953) for solo violin, the Piano Concerto (1954), and his Symphony (1955). He did not merely use the folk melodies as simple quotations; he also integrated elements from other styles of folk music from around the world as well as elements of jazz.102 In 1955, inspired by the work of Bartok and Kodaly, he initiated a project with the singer and musicologist Uchida Ruriko to research and document the folk music of all the regions of Japan. Over the course of ten years they assembled five volumes of folk melodies, for which Mamiya provided piano accompaniments that were published as Nihon min'yo shu (A collection of Japanese folk songs). Mamiya states that his arrangements are totally unlike those "stereotyped arrangements that are used to accompany the music when it is performed outside its usual social context. They are arrangements that enhance the music's original lightness and grace." 103 In the accompaniments, Mamiya respected the tetrachordal structure of the music by using the scales and melodic patterns that the shamisen normally plays when it accompanies such music. He also created a style of writing that underlines the lively rhythms of the songs and whose melodic lines are often similar to those of spoken language. In 1958 Mamiya wrote GasshO no tame no Konpojishon (Composition for mixed choir). This was the frrst of a series of fourteen works (1958-94) that Mamiya began writing as a result of his analysis of the rhythm and the melodic patterns of the nonsense words used in various categories of folk music, called hayashi-kotoba, for accompanying the movement of the body and shouts used while working in the fields and during the dance, called l«lkegoe. He felt that these must somehow reflect the way the voice was frrst used and the frrst expressions of musicality in Japanese culture. The works of the Konpojishon cycle have no preplanned structure and the inspiration

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for each piece is different. As can be seen, for example, in the use of a sorrowful poem in number IX, they reflect Mamiya's Weltanschauung and empathy for folk music. The first composition is divided into four movements: I, kiyari (Song of the wood bearers); ll, Work Songs; ill, warabeuta (Nursery rhymes); and IV, Religious Songs. Here the choral writing is a free adaptation of a Western-style harmony. The second composition is in two parts. In the first part flute and percussion are instructed to play out of tune to catch the spontaneity of a folk dance, while the second part is more lyrical. The fourth is for children's voices and the musical form resembles that of a concerto grosso. The fifth composition, called Chiiju giga (Animals in frolic, 1963),104 is scored for mixed choir, two percussionists, and double bass. Bongo oni (1981), the tenth, is interesting, for Mamiya adopts a more aggressive style of choral writing. Quartet for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, written in 1952, was one his first instrumental compositions. Mamiya, an excellent pianist, wrote several sonatas and concerti for piano as well as for string instruments. In each of these works it is clear how the choice of solo instrument shaped the work's overall form. Some works of the 1950s, such as the Violin Concerto (1959), sound strangely conventional, despite the skillfully composed music. His frrst String Quartet is of interest for the complexity of the instrumental writing and for the use of the energy of sound to take the place of both motifs and melodic themes (except for an episode in the third movement). The unrestrained vitality of the frrst movement, the peaceful calm of the second, and the gaiety of the third create an atmosphere free from tonality yet not yet obsessed by dissonance. In many compositions of the 1960s, works such as the Sonata (1966) for violin, piano, bass, and percussion exploit the communicative power of jazz. Sonata is a weird but fascinating mixture of styles: the fust movement contains Japanese folk melodies, the second uses blues, and the third uses African rhythms as the basis for a free-jazz-style dialogue between four instruments. This episode follows a long and difficult violin solo. Sonata had been preceded by Deux Tableux (1965) for orchestra. Mamiya described Deux Tableux as a realization of his idea of music as gesture and movement: "I hope that what emerges is not so much the sound of the orchestra but how a sound produces an action, a moving action that is not a finite action." Although Mamiya had written many orchestral works prior to Deux Tableux, it stands out as a work full of amazing energy and shows that Mamiya had a good knowledge of how the orchestra works. The violent use of light and shade are the direct result ofMamiya's evident desire to obtain a music full of vital energy. The work has a raw, unrefined texture that deliberately avoids any use of motifs or harmony. The power of the sound and the compelling flow of the music convey an unusual feeling of a "modem classicism." This is probably what Mamiya was referring to when he talked of how the story of music had started from the feet and then worked its way up through the body.l 05 Mamiya's unrestrained creative energy led him to research the sounds of Japanese instruments well before many others. Between 1957 and 1958 he wrote a series of bizarre works, including one for four koto, one for eight koto and

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chamber orchestra, and one for three koto. In all these works Mamiya seems to have been more interested in the timbric possibilities of the instrument and not really in the instrument's musical tradition. A more "respectful" approach is evident in his Quartet for shakuhachi, shamisen, and two koto, which he wrote in 1962 under commission from Yonin no kai. 106 With a delicacy unusual for him, Mamiya leads the instruments through a wide range of disparate musical atmospheres: the meditative sound of the shakuhachi, the folk music of the shamisen, and the timbric explorations of the koto. Contemporary to this piece is Three Movements for Woodwind Quintet, in which he gave full vent to his passion for jazz. The lively music of the work is of a clearly melodic nature, an unusual device in Mamiya's music of that period. Throughout the 1960s, Mamiya was driven in his instrumental writing by the quest for an instrumental voice that could be both a continuation of, yet also a challenge to, the possibilities offered by the human voice, an expressive ferment that emerged particularly in his sonatas for solo strings. In his Cello Sonata (1968), for example, the possibilities of the cello are taken to their extremes. In the ftrst movement the material is based on ftft:hs, while in the second movement a folk melody is subjected to expositions and variations that make it sound incredibly contemporary (ftg. 6.17). In his ftrst period Mamiya had written primarily for strings and voice. As well as his work with folk music, he had also written several chamber operas. The 1970s represented his most mature period. In 1970, inspired by his admiration for the playing of Nojima Minoru, he wrote his second Piano Concerto. This concerto is not based on contrast or polarity between the piano and the orchestra or between the work's individual movements. It is based on a typically Japanese structural form calledjo-ha-kyu (introduction, development, acceleration-finale). It is in just two movements, with an introduction upstaged by the immediate appearance of the theme, a two-part theme based on two motifs and used in both movements. Mamiya tries to incarnate an ideal sound for the piano, for he feels that it contains a "much deeper flashing of life" than the sound made by, for example, string instruments. In the second Sonata for piano,

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Mamiya continues his hunt for powerful ideas. If in the Concerto this idea had been the independence of the human spirit and the dramatic contrast between life and the concept of eternity, in the Sonata it was the idea of the process of decay and rebirth as one of the greatest phenomena of life, 107 and indeed the complex and imposing structure of the work communicates the existential questions that are the basis of the music. In All the Life Has Sprung from the Ocean of Harmony (1980), it can be seen how Mamiya continued to develop his range of continuous meditation and how his musical ideas continued their explorations. All the Life Has Sprung from the Ocean of Harmony is his second string quartet and it was written for Tanaka Chikashi's quartet, which was based in Chicago. In the first movement he uses Melanesian flute music, in the second movement xylophone music from the Congo, and in the third movement a sad Finnish song. The work is more compact, ecstatic, radical, and obsessive than the first quartet. There are many homorhythmic passages, especially in the first movement, in which the sound of the quartet is sculpted like one single block. The piece continues the musical language of Deux Tableux, in particular that of the first tableux, with a language that has become more refined and mature and that is shot through with moments of sharp violence. In the 1960s nearly all the associations discussed in this section disappeared. The postwar intellectual crisis lost its relevance and in the 1970s the various new developments led each composer to seek out his own individual and personal path.

NOTES 1. The era that followed was a period of amazing economic growth that reached its peak in the 1980s (the so-called baboru, or bubble); see Kosai Yutaka, The Era of HighSpeed Growth: Notes on the Postwar Japanese Economy (Tokyo: Tokyo University Press, 1986). 2. Takemitsu Toru, private conversation, February 1995. 3. See Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments and Happenings (New York: Abram, 1969); Japon des avant gardes 1910-1970, ed. Fran~oise Bunnefoy (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1986); and S. Osaki, A Monferrini, and M. Cossu, eds., Giappone all'avanguardia: 11 Gruppo Gutai negli anni Cinquanta (Milan: Electa, 1990). 4. Originally this group had been called Atom, but not all members were happy with this name. It was Takiguchi Shiizo who proposed the name Jikkenkobo; see Experimental Workshop: The 11th Exhibition Homage to Takiguchi Shiizo (Tokyo: Satani Gallery, 1991). 5. The meetings were held at Fukushima's house and it was Fukushima who introduced Takemitsu to Takiguchi in 1950. Akiyama and Yuasa had already met several years earlier, while taking part in a seminar on contemporary music,led by Murata Takeo at KeiO

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University; Akiyama had frequently told of discussions with Tak:emitsu "in the 1940s." What has been documented in various sources is the meeting of Akiyama and Yuasa with Tak:emitsu in December 1950, when at the end of the seventh concert of the Shinsak:kyokuha Kyokai series, they went to congratulate him on his Lento in Due Movimenti for piano (2 Lento was the work that brought Tak:emitsu to public attention).lt was probably through knowing Kiyose that Tak:emitsu had joined Shinsak:kyokuha Kyokai. Fukushima left it in 1952, when JikkenkobO was at the height of its activities. 6. In an interview with the author in the summer of 1989, Akiyama told how he had read an article on John Cage from Art and Architecture in 1947 or 1948 and another article by Cage on the prepared piano from Musical America in 1949. Inspired by these articles, he wrote to Cage to say that he wished to organize a concert dedicated to his music. Akiyama did not manage to do this until 1962, when he organized a concert as part of the activities of New Direction. 7. Claude Rostand, La musique fran~aise contemporaine (Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 1952). 8. See Yuasa's article "JikkenkobO to Meshian" (Jikkenkobo and Messiaen), Ongaku geijutsu, no. 10 (1978), pp. 26-55. 9. Quoted by Jean Roy in Presences contemporaines: Musique fran~aise (Paris: Nouvelle Editions Debresse, 1962), pp. 331-32. 10. A problem discussed by Boulez in his article "SchOnberg is Dead," first published in Score (May 1952). 11. Yuasa wrote many theoretical articles. See, for example, "Gendai ongak:u to fio," Kokubungaku 10, no. 3 (1986), pp. 51-55. 12. The exhibition was organized by the editor of the daily newspaper Yomiuri. It was opened on 16 November 1951 in one of the most prestigious halls in the area of Hibiya. The orchestra was conducted by Tak:emitsu. 13. That the originality of this was incomprehensible to many is demonstrated by a comment about Messiaen that the critic Yamane Ginji made to Kiyose in reference to the concert: "doko no uma no hone mo shiranai" ("I don't know where the bones of that horse come from" -a comment that the Japanese would consider to be relatively coarse). 14. See Jean-Paul Sartre, L'existentialisme est un umanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1954), p. 55: "Man is nothing more or less than his own project and each person exists only insofar as they are able to realize their project. In other words, man is nothing more or less ... than his own life." 15. See Suzuki Daisetsu, Zen and Japanese Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); for the English publication Suzuki revised and expanded his original Japanese text, Zen to Nihon bunka (1938). 16. This was discussed by Yuasa in an article entitled "How I See the World of No," written in 1958 and published in the program notes of Hana no Kai Association's seventh concert: "Ordering and structure end up by separating themselves from the true life force of human existence, and they tend to become an end in themselves concerned only with the method itself. Thus, in music, the concept of the creation of a work as an incarnation of the emotions is progressively diluted and in the end it becomes merely the display of a collection of sounds." 17. Yuasa commented: "There are two types of communication in music: the first is the refmed, personal communication between the composer and the listener; the second is that of the sensations which reach us from the external world .... What I want to express

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in music are the sensations I receive that are not my own personal feelings; it is not my desire to use a musical language to refme my personal feelings." From a private conversation of 16 July 1990. A further comment by Yuasa on this is found in "How I See the World of No," in which he says that music "transcending the simple expression is no more than the definition of a way of being." 18. Jean-Paul Sartre, "La temporalite chez Faulkner," in Situations, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), pp. 65-75. 19. Read uses "haptic" to define the vitalistic style of the Paleolithic Period; see Herbert Read, Icon and Idea (London: Faber and Faber, 1955). 20. In the liner notes for the Colombia COCO 6274 recording, the critic Sano Koji proposes a different division of the piece. However, it is my feeling that Sano Koji 's division does not follow the internal logic of the composition. 21. Yuasa Joji, "Music as a Reflection of a Composer's Cosmology," Perspectives of New Music 27, no. 2 (1989), p. 192. 22. Yuasa commented that topology is "a different way of looking at things; it is, for example, the difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, whereby one thing can become something completely different." Yuasa Joji, private conversation of 16 July 1990. Topology is a fascinating theory of geometry proposed by Georg Cantor around 1880.1t is the study of forms and shapes from a homeomorphic point of view. Yuasa encountered topology through an elegantly written little book by Toyama Hiraku, Mugen to Renzoku (Infmity and continuity, 1952), which was conceived as an introduction to the beauties of mathematical theories. Yuasa was inspired by the concept of topology to write works that were the musical equivalent to the mobiles of Ernst Calder. 23. Takemitsu Toru, Oto chinmoku to hakariaeru hodoni (Tokyo: ShinchOsha, 1971); see also his English collection of essays, Confronting Silence, ed. Kakudo Y. and G. Glasow (Berkeley, Calif.: Fallen Leaf, 1995), p. 4. 24. Takemitsu, Corifronting Silence, p. 79. 25. Takemitsu, Confronting Silence, p. 12. 26. From his 1937 collection of poems Yosei no kyori (The distance of the elves). 27. Quoted from Akiyama Kuniharu, "Gengaku no tame no Rekuiemu," in Meikyoku kaisetsu zensha, vol. 13 (Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha, 1961), p. 459. 28. George Russell, jazz pianist, band leader, arranger, and composer. His The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization for Improvisation (1953) provided the basis for modes in jazz used by people such as Dizzy Gillespie, Lee Konitz, and Eric Dolphy. 29. Takemitsu describes this technique in Yume to Kazu: Dream and Number (Tokyo: Libroporto-Aruku Shuppansha, 1987), pp. 31ff. 30. Stravinsky was struck by how such a small man could write such intense music. However, in translating Stravinsky comments the Japanese critics translated "intense" as "kibishii," for they were more interested in its connotations of austerity, rigorousness, and vigor than the more usual English connotation of strength of emotional feeling.lt was probably this meeting and Stravinsky's subsequent mediation that led to a commission from the Koussevitsky Foundation in 1966 for which Takemitsu wrote the Dorian Horizon for seventeen strings. 31. See Takemitsu's interview with Tania Cronin and Hilary Tann published in Perspectives of New Music 27, no. 2 (1989), p. 207. 32. Takemitsu TOru, private conversation, February 1995. 33. "My music is composed as if fragments were thrown together unstructured, as in dreams." Takemitsu, Confronting Silence, p. 106.

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34. Fukushima Kazuo, "Meine Welt," from the program notes for the 1996 Nah Fern Festival, Leipzig, pp. 72-73. 35. Founder in 1948 of the Darmstadt internationale Ferienkurse fiir Neve Musik who died in a car accident in 1961. 36. Fukushima Kazuo, "No Theater und japanische Musik" (paper presented at the 1961 Internationale Ferienkurse fiir Neue Musik); subsequently published in Darmstiidter Beitriige jar Neue Musik 4 (1961), p. 110. 37. From an article published in Ongaku Geijutsu 5 (1960). 38. Themes that were typical of Chinese and Japanese poetry. 39. Both Akutagawa's Maikurofon no tame no Ongaku and Mayuzumi's Xl'Z were presented live in 1956 in a concert promoted by Jikkenkobo. 40. This publication was the Technische Hausmitteilungen des NWDR, Sonderheft uber Elektronische Musik, 1954; see Shibata Minao, "Musique et technologie au Japon," in La Revue Musicale (Musique et technologie. Reunion de Stockholm 8-12 June 1970, UNESCO) (Paris: Richard Masse, 1971), pp. 268-69. See also Moroi Mak:oto, "Elektronische und konkrete Musik in Japan," Melos 29, no. 2 (1962), p. 49ff. 41. The hotel was torn down in the late 1960s to make way for the skyscraper that still stands on the site. 42. Aoi no Ue is a classic no drama from the fifteenth century. It is one of the most beautiful and popular of the no dramas. Yuasa too made his own electronic version of it in 1961 (seep. 169) and, later on, other composers made use of its texts. 43. Tak:emitsu, Oto chinmoku, p. 25ff., and Confronting Silence, p. 79ff. Akiyama claimed that Tak:emitsu had talked about this with him "toward the end of the 1940s." See part 2, chap. 6.1, pp. 201-2, note 5. 44. Shinnihonhoso is now owned by the daily newspaper Mainichi. 45. Tak:emitsu, Confronting Silence, p. 80. 46. Tak:emitsu has written extensively in Japanese on this subject. But readers of English can gain a clear idea from the chapters "Nature and Music" and "A Single Sound" in

Confronting Silence. 47. It was during this visit to Japan that Stockhausen also composed Adieu for wind quintet. The material for Adieu was taken from music used in an ancient ritual from the Todaiji Temple at Nara; seeK. Stockhausen, "Erinnerungen an Japan," in Texte sur Musik 1970--1977, DuMont Dokumente, vol. 4 (Cologne: DuMont, 1978), pp. 442-55. 48. Yuasa Joji, private conversation, Tokyo, July 1990. 49. See above, note 42. 50. Yuasa, program notes for the first public performance of "Crosstalk-Intermedia," 1969. 51. See the discussion of Cosmos Haptic in part 2, chap. 6.1, p. 154. 52. Yuasa Joji, "Tepuongak:u to kigak:u he no kage" (The influence of tape music on instrumental music), Transonic 4 (1973), p. 42. In this article Yuasa explains the technique he used when working with recorded sound. He also analyses in depth how some of the ideas in his writing for instruments had been inspired by his work with synthesized sound. His description of how he came to view all music from a three-dimensional graphic perspective is especially interesting. 53. Karlheinz Stockhausen, private conversation, Bergamo, May 1981. 54. See Yuasa's description of this in the article "Gekijo-kono higekijotekina mono. Envairanmentarn-media toshite" (The nontheatrical elements of theater as environmental media), Transonic 1 (1972), pp. 47-51. It is important to bear in mind that over the past

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two decades complex electronic programs have been used to create similar spatial treatments of sound. 55. This is the literal translation of the title's two ideograms, which when read together mean "hurriedly reach an alliance." For more detailed discussion of Ishii's music see part 2, chap. 7.2, p. 246 and part 2, chap. 8.2, pp. 276-79. 56. Probably an acronym for Tokyo Audiovisual Topological Art, since they are words that recur frequently in the titles for concerts and other activities that Sumitani organized under the TATA umbrella until the late 1980s. 57. The Cross Talk Festival was sponsored by the Cultural Center of the American embassy. The festival was set up in 1966 by Yuasa JOji and Akiyama Kuniharu, together with the American composer Roger Reynolds. The aim of the Cross Talk Festival was to present new developments in American and Japanese music. It had a series of artistic directors, one of them being lchiyanagi. After roughly fifteen years it changed its name to Interlink. 58. Hugh Davies, "Storia ed evoluzione degli strumenti musicali elettronici," in NuovaAtlantide, pp. 17-59 (Venice: Biennale di Venezia, Settore Musica, 1986), p. 37. 59. Ebenezer Prout, Harmony: Its Theory and Practice (London, 1889); Nicolay A. Rimsky-Korsakov, Practical Manual of Harmony (Saint Petersburg, 1884), which was translated into Japanese by Hattori Ryiitaro in the 1930s. 60. Yuasa's father was a well-known pathologist. 61. Scores of works by SchOnberg and Stravinsky had first been brought to Japan by Nobutoki Kiyoshi (1887-1965) on his return to Japan from Berlin in 1922. Schonberg had, of course, not yet produced any of his first twelve-tone music; moreover, Nobutoki, who was a very conservative composer, had no understanding of the historic importance of Schonberg's atonal style and of the new features of Stravinsky's writing. According to Mayuzumi, the first Japanese composer to write atonal music was Hashimoto Kunihiko (1904-49). Hashimoto went to Europe to study for three years. On his way back to Japan he stopped off in Los Angeles, where thanks to a letter of introduction from Egon Wellesz, he was able to pay a personal visit to SchOnberg at his house in Brenton Park. Back in Japan he wrote an article describing the profound impression made on him by both SchOnberg and his music. This article was published in a special edition of Ongaku Kenkyu 3, no. 1 (October 1937), which was dedicated to SchOnberg. Although a large number of articles on atonality and SchOnberg's music were published in many different Japanese magazines, Ito Noboru was the only composer who was interested in this area of work in the pre-war period. 62. Robert Duhamel, son of the writer George Duhamel (1884-1966). 63. Irino published many books and articles on this topic. In 1953 Junion no ongakuShenberuku to sono gihO (Twelve-tone Music: Schonberg and his method) was published by Hayakawa Shoten. As part of its series on contemporary art, Ongaku no Torno published two books that Irino had translated: ]union ni yoru sakkyokugihO (Method for composing with twelve notes), by Josef Rufer (in 1957), and Rene Leibowitz's book on Schonberg, Shenberuku to sono gakuha (in 1965). Irino always joked about the fact that, before becoming a professional musician, he had worked in banking during the war and how Schonberg had had a similar job. 64. For a detailed analysis of Sinfonietta, see Sawabe Yukiko, Neue Musik in Japan von 1950 his 1960 (Kolner Beitrage zur Musikforschung, Regensburg: G. Bosse Verlag, 1992), pp. 56-70. 65. Concerts and other events were held on the twentieth anniversary of his death, indicating that there is now greater official recognition of his work, but there is still a lack of publications and recordings dedicated to his music.

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66. "I survived the war. I needed to do something that gave me pleasure"; Yajima Shigeyoshi in "Irino Yoshiro," Ongaku Geijutsu 18, no. 2 (1960), pp. 77-82. Irino was aware of the importance of his role on the Japanese scene, as can be seen from an interview with Miyake Haruna for this same magazine in which he stated, "If I had not composed, I think that the Japanese music scene could have remained very backward, don't you agree?" 67. Shibata Minao, "Barutokuron" (Treatise on Bart6k), Ongaku Geijutsu, no. 9 (1949). In 1957 Shibata published his Japanese translation of S. Moreux's book, Bela Bartok: sa vie, ses oeuvres, son langage" (1949). He also wrote numerous other articles, including "Orivie-Meshian no hito to ongaku" (Olivier Messiaen: the man and his music), Ongaku Geijutsu, no. 8 (1958) and "Pieru-Burezu no ongakugohO ni tsuite" (On Pierre Roulez's musical language), Ongaku Geijutsu, no. 8 (1959). Of the twenty or so books he published, among the most important are a three-volume history of Western music and a book on Japanese music, Ongaku no gaikotsu no hanashi (A discussion of the structure of music) (Tokyo: Ongaku no Torno, 1978). 68. The Fibonacci series had first been used in music in 1953 by Xenakis in Metastasis for orchestra; the use of the Fibonacci series in music has been discussed in E. Lendvai, "Symmetries of Music," Symmetry 1, nos. 1-2 (1990). 69. Shibata Minao, from a private conversation that took place in May 1989 in Shibata's beautiful house. 70. See part 2, chap. 6.4, p. 208, note 101. 71. See part 1, chap. 3, p. 108, note 2. 72. Kamo no Chomei (1153-1216) was a writer at the imperial court who withdrew from court life to become a monk. He wrote Hojoki (Diary of a refuge, three meters square). Hojoki opens with a phrase that is typical of Buddhist philosophy: "The flow of the river never ceases and the water is never the same." It is obviously this phrase that inspired the title that Shibata chose to give the work. 73. He studied Debussy's use of modes with the help of Julia D' Almendra's book, Les modes gregoriens dans l'ceuvre de Claude Debussy (Paris: Enault, 1950). 74. In a private conversation Moroi Makoto told me that the main piano exam of the composition course was often the occasion of a first Japanese performance; he himself had played the fugue from Hindemith's Prima Sonata, Mamiya Michio played Prokofiev's Visions Fugitives, Mayuzumi Toshiro played the piano solo from Rhapsody in Blue by George Gershwin, Toyama Yuzo played a work by Poulenc, and so on. 75. Joseph M. Hauer, Zwolftontechnik. Die Lehre von den Tropen (Vienna: 1926). 76. In 1985 Moroi set up the Alban Berg Society in Tokyo and invited Pierre Boulez to be honorary president. This society is still extremely active, organizes concerts and conferences, and produces a publication of the same name, dedicated to theoretical work. 77. This small town is set in the central mountains of Japan and is surrounded by thick forests. Many of the leading families of Japanese society as well as many musicians spent their summer holidays there, so it had already hosted a certain amount of musical activity. Many composers and conductors, including Ozawa Seiji, still have a house there. Mrs. Takemae Takie recounted how Ozawa, as a small boy, earned some pocket money by helping lady friends of the family to ride bicycles. 78. The program does not indicate whether this was the work's first performance in Japan and it has proved impossible to fmd any reference to any other possible first performance.

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79. For further discussion of the importance of this event and of the work of lchiyanagi, see part 2, chap. 7 .1, p. 220ff. 80. See part 1, chap. 2.2, p. 80. By the end of the war bunmei had become an obsolete expression and it was probably Takata's personal artistic development that inspired him to make use of it. 81. This description of Midare holds true also of Otaka's transcription of it for two pianos. I personally heard a performance of the transcription by Atsutada and Michiko, Otaka's two children. 82. It was probably the first work by a Japanese composer to use the prepared piano. 83. Mayuzumi discusses this piece in "Nehan kOko kyoku ni tsuite," the liner notes for the recording on T TA-8012; Judith A. Herd provides an analysis in "The Neonationalist Movement: Origins of Contemporary Japanese Music," Perspectives of New Music 27, no. 2 (1989), pp. 133-38; see also Sawabe, Neue Musik in Japan, pp. 142-52. 84. The name for dance in the gagaku repertory. 85. See "Nihonteki naru mono no kyoko," the first of a series of six articles that were published in Ongaku Geijutsu (1978), in numbers 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, and 12. Unease about a possible resurgence of nationalist sentiment is expressed in the first article, p. 56. 86. Ishiketa Mareo (1916-) is a conservative composer showing a vague influence of expressionism. A good example of his work is Tsuki ni hoeru (Shouting at the moon, 1979) for baritone, clarinet, percussion, piano, violin, and cello. 87. Narazaki Yoko, "Miyoshi Akira, Matsumura Teizo no sakkyoku yoshiki ni kansuru kenkyii-kangengakusakuhin ni okeru henso giho" (Analysis of the compositional style of M.A. and M. T.: variation technique used in their orchestral compositions), Ongakugaku 30, no. 2 (1984), p. 121. This definition was coined by Akiyama in his treatment of Miyoshi in Nihonno sakkyokukatachi, vol. I, pp. 57-80. However, Narazaki confirms this definition with a thorough analysis and that is why it seems preferable to ascribe it to her rather than to the more illustrious Akiyama. 88. It was Shibata Minao who came up with this description in an article on Miyoshi published in Ongaku Geijutsu 21, no. 5 (1963), pp. 46-48. "Miyoshi Akira No.2, 3 no sakuhin ni okeru mochlfu nohenyo ni tsuite" (On the Motif Changing in Two or Three works by Miyoshi Akira). 89. The Japanese regard such people with strange foreheads with sympathy because they consider them not to be completely human. 90. Kyomon means "Buddhist writings." However, the characters used to write the title are homophones that have another meaning: sound (as in resonance) and sign (as in heraldic symbol). 91. This was the year that featured "Neue Musik aus Japan," in which Heinz-Klaus Metzger led a discussion and some works by Matsudaira, Mayuzumi, Matsushita, Takemitsu, and others were performed. 92. Quoted by Akiyama Kuniharu, Nihon no sakkyokukatachi, 2 vol., (Tokyo: Ongaku no Torno, 1979), vol. 2, p. 135. 93. These statements by Shinohara are quoted in a beautiful article by Leigh Landy, "An Analysis of Tayutai for Koto (1972) Composed by Makoto Shinohara: A 3-Dimensional Approach," Interface 16 (1987), p. 77. 94. I have a manuscript copy of this chart that was given to me by the composer. A version entitled "Zusammenarbeit: eine neue integrative Musik aus japanischen und europliischen Urspriingen" was published in MusikTexte 59 (June 1995), pp. 21-29.

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95. Leigh Landy, "Analysis of Tayutai," p. 95. 96. Shinohara, liner notes for the recording issued on Camerata 30CM-375. 97. These are all key concepts not just of science but of all fields of twentieth-century thought. Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle asserts that the observation of an event changes the event itself. The concept of mobile coordinates comes from the French mathematician E. Cartin. 98. This was a wry reference to a painting by Picasso representing Pan. 99. See part l, chap. 4.2. and part l, chap. 3.2, pp. 98ff. 100. For a detailed discussion of the work of Hayashi Hikaru, see part 2, chap. 8.3, pp. 289-91. 10l. The term min 'yo (popular song) was coined at the beginning of the twentieth century by Machida Yoshiaki, who had begun to make recordings of this music, a project that was later sponsored by NHK. This pioneering fieldwork was followed by musicological studies, the most important figure in this being Koizumi Fumio. One category that was particularly well studied was warabeuta, which includes a large repertoire of nursery rhymes that are musically very interesting. Warabeuta songs are all based on the interval of a fourth that contains an intermediary note that is usually at a distance of a third (though sometimes it might be a minor second or occasionally a major second). In the folk music of Okinawa, this intermediate interval is always a major third. The other categories into which min 'yo songs are usually divided are working songs, drinking songs, songs to accompany the dances of the bon-odori festival held in August, songs for the matsuri festivals (popular festivals that occur very frequently), and songs for evening social gatherings. There are many subcategories of the work songs, one of which is the uri-uta, a style of call used by street vendors. In min'yo there are styles of singing called oiwakebushi and yagibushi. Oiwake is a solo style. It is sung by boatmen and wagoners and the singers are sometimes accompanied by the shakuhachi. It employs an extensive range and is rhythmically free. Yagibushi is a choral style. It is rhythmically less varied and its melodic range is more restricted. It is accompanied by the shamisen and percussion, or even by only hand clapping. Min'yo uses a similar scale to warabeuta. Another scale used in min 'yo is the myakobushi scale (see part 1, chap. 1.1, p. 58, note 27), which uses the two tetrachords D, Eb, G and A, Bb, D. This scale is derived from the instrumental music of the shamisen and the koto. 102. Works and recordings that Mamiya remembers as having left a deep impression on him when he was boy include Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto, an LP of Sergey Rachmaninoff performing his own compositions, and a live recording of a concert by Eric Dolphy, an important jazz saxophonist. 103. Quoted in the preface of the score of Nihon min'yo shii, published by Ongaku no Torno, 1971. Tokyo. 104. ChOjii giga (Satirical representations of animals) is a series of drawings attributed to Kakuyo (1053-1140). They are kept in the Buddhist temple at Kozanji and are generally held to be one of the most charming works of all Japanese art. There is no text that tells a story, but it is agreed that the drawings probably had an educative purpose and could be interpreted as a biting satire on human weaknesses. 105. Both this and the preceding quotation are taken from the program notes for the first performance of Deux Tableux given in 1965 by the NHK orchestra, conducted by Toyama Yuzo. It was this performance that won Deux Tableux the Otaka Prize. 106. For details on Yonin no kai, see part 2, chap. 7 .2, p. 239. 107. These ideas are culled from the liner notes for EMI EAA85012.

Chapter Seven

The 1960s

During the second half of the 1950s, Japan recovered the economic status it had enjoyed before the Second World War. This was followed in the 1960s by Japan's dramatic development into the world's third greatest economic power (after the United States and the USSR). The 1960s opened with Japan's most sensational postwar strike. Workers at the Mitsui factory, after holding demonstrations, went on strike for 282 days, although in the end they did not achieve their aims. After the strike there followed demonstrations by students and intellectuals against the renewal and revision of the military treaties between Japan and the United States.1 The Anpo movement, which was strongly supported by the Communist Party and other left-wing groups, was opposed to the security treaty drawn up with the United States in San Francisco in 1951. Through this treaty Japan had allied itself formally with the United States in the cold war and this had enabled the United States to set up and operate military bases on Japanese territory. Japanese intellectuals had severely criticized the use of Japan as a base by the U.S. military for its operations in the Korean War and when the treaty came up for renewal in 1960 there were violent demonstrations not only against the renewal of the treaty but also against the granting of any extension of the use of Japanese territory to the United States for military purposes. Throughout the 1960s there continued to be numerous bitter student demonstrations (zengakuren) against the system, and against Japan's role in the war in Vietnam, followed by the return of right-wing movements.2 Despite the insistent and vociferous criticism by left-wing intellectuals of the renewal of the treaties with the United States, by 1963 the process of modernization had created a new climate. The right-wing began to regain credibility and was able to curtail the so-called "honeymoon era between intellectuals and the government" that had nourished the democratic ideals of the postwar era.3 The 1964 Tokyo Olympics symbolized Japan's economic growth and helped create a new, positive image of Japan abroad, an image that was strengthened by the world exposition held in Osaka in 1970. This image of an economically victorious Japan was taken as a model for the developing nations in Asia and revisionist theories such as those put forward by Hayashi Fusao became popular.

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Throughout the 1960s there was a general reconsideration on all political fronts of Japan's cultural roots and of Japanese arts and aesthetics. In the immediate postwar years, American ideas on the importance of the individual and on democracy had been superficially incorporated into Japanese society. Now there was a widespread desire to find a social model that was free from American pragmatic social values. Yet, at the same time, traditional social structures had begun to disintegrate. Traditional Japanese moral values had been rigid and hierarchical and were certainly very different from American moral values, yet they had proved efficient in guaranteeing the ethical functioning of society. The far-reaching results of this uprooting of moral values began to be apparent among the younger generation in the 1990s.4 Artists, too, such as Takemitsu, Oe Kenzaburo, Ishihara Shintaro, Tanikawa Shuntaro, and Hayashi Hikaru, joined with others in 1960 in political protests against the American-Japanese treaty by setting up Wakai Nihon no kai (the Young Japan Association). On the musical front, throughout the 1960s Takemitsu developed and refined his ideas and poetics and this period can certainly be called one of his most creative, one in which he produced several masterpieces. Sacrifice for alto flute, lute, and vibraphone is one of a series of pieces that are scored for a similar lineup of instruments and also includes Ring (1961) for flute, terz guitar,5 and lute and Valeria (1965) for two piccolos, violin, cello, guitar, and electric organ. In 1962 Takemitsu wrote of Sacrifice: "I believe that the spirit of a piece of music often starts with prayer. Instead of observing the external world as if it were an object, we need to let it enter us so that it becomes ours through meditative silence .... I believe that form in music is a more intense version of the ceremony of prayer."6 Sacrifice is in two parts: Canto I and Canto II. The composer described it as being similar in mood to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, though portraying an individual and meditative rite as opposed to Stravinsky's collective rite. This emerges through the delicate sound colors and the use of isolated sounds to convey a mood of solitary meditation. This style of writing was to become increasingly important as Takemitsu's music grew ever more rarefied in his process of "saying" more. Yoshida Hidekazu, a well-known Japanese musicologist, was one of Takemitsu's greatest admirers and toward the end of the 1970s he made the statement that "Takemitsu's music is intoxicating." And indeed the restless works of the 1970s are pervaded with a kind of ecstasy, a sense of otherworldliness. Stanza (1969), Les yeux clos (1979), and A Way a Lone (1981) are works imbued with a refined delicacy of color and emotion; each forms one part of a cycle of compositions on the themes of water and the sea, plants, and the sky and fog. The artistic transformation of nature is typical of Japanese art, though the depiction of nature in works of art is often highly formalized and tends to be one of artifice rather than representation. Takemitsu, aware of the aesthetics of classical Japanese music, developed his own personal musical aesthetic through combining a Japanese openness to the nature of sounds with the ideas

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developed by Cage. In 1968 Takemitsu said "The form of my music springs naturally and directly from the sounds themselves; it is not a premeditated structure." Nearly thirty years later he added: "I do not want to control sounds. I prefer to leave them to be free. I like to gather them around me and just give them a little push to set them in motion." 7 The first work in the cycle dedicated to trees is Kino Kyoku (Tree music), which was commissioned by the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra and composed in 196l.lt is not program music, though it is inspired by a poem by R. M. Rilke in which the poet is standing by a tree listening to the sound of the leaves rustling as if the sound represented something pulsating within himself; Takemitsu's music recreates this interior dialogue. The score is divided into three sections, but the music runs without a break. The three sections consist of a short prelude, the exposition of the material on which the music is based, and a series of variations on this material. The alto flute and the soprano sax provide colorful timbric effects that shimmer in short, soaring melodic cells like short bursts of conversation; the guitar is sometimes part of the large keyboard section (celesta, vibraphone, xylophone, and piano) and sometimes part of the group that includes the string section, small cymbals, and harp in a transparent texture of harmonics. This work is a perfect example of the originality of Takemitsu 's musical language in his mature period, with moments of sound clearly separated by moments of silence. Sometimes these moments of sound consist of only two notes marked by a striking color or a cell matrix out of which the material develops, moving toward larger and stronger aggregations of sound (in this instance, one cell consists of a rising fifth and a rising fourth, while the other consists of a descending sixth and a descending third (fig. 7 .1). At other times he uses an indecipherable harmony constructed by using two superimposed tonal chords, both of which have added

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quent pieces, such as Time Sequence (1976). 1ime Sequence, also for solo piano, uses the same process of ostinati and interlocking of the parts allocated to each hand. The utilization of this idea is more sophisticated and flexible but perhaps not quite as exciting. The piece is structured in three sections, with the first and last sections based on a ten-note ostinato, but in the central section the ostinato is reduced to the interval of a minor third played in the high register. In the concluding section the right hand gradually picks up the ten-note motive from the left hand and deconstructs it. The piece breaks off when both hands unexpectedly synchronize. Futatsu no sonzai (Two existences, 1980) is a work for two pianos that was ftrst performed by Ichiyanagi with Takahashi Yuji. The piece uses ostinati not as a structural device but as a device for creating mutual exchanges between the two pianos. A dialogue is created using echo effects, harmonic reverberations obtained by silently depressing the keys, and the reciprocal expansion of melodic cells. In the long central section the pianos exchange rapid, liquid quintuplets and sextuplets in the high register, while shorter phrases appear under this material in a lower register (ftg. 7 .12). This happens in the ftrst part, in which the identical ftgures are explored, as well as in the second part, in which

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the pace of the music becomes more insistent. This composition was followed in 1981 by Kukan no kyoku (Reminiscences of space), lchiyanagi's first concerto for piano and orchestra. With this concerto lchiyanagi started on a new phase in his work in which he seemed to return to the more traditional musical language he had used in his earlier works with such prodigious skill. Takahashi Yiiji was another of the leading figures whose music was featured in the concert series promoted by SAC. Takahashi was born in Tokyo on 22 September 1938 and his father was one of the founders of the leading music magazine Ongaku Kenkyu (Musical research) and taught violin at the Ueno School. His mother, a pianist, gave him his first piano lessons. Yuji showed early signs of having creative talent and he started taking composition lessons with Dan Ikuma when still in primary school. This meant that his scholastic career was continually interrupted, but his musical career proceeded smoothly. At fourteen he started studying harmony and counterpoint (subsequently he also studied composition) with Shibata Minao at TohO. Takahashi had an impressive analytical ability and began to use chance operations and mathematical systems in his compositions at an early stage. He began to study for a master of arts degree, studying seven languages, but did not complete it. Instead he took a job as a rehearsal accompanist for the Niki Kai Opera Company. Although not much younger in years than the generation of composers who had established themselves in the immediate postwar years, the slight age difference made it easy for him to look up to them. His main spiritual mentors were Takemitsu and Ichiyanagi. With Takemitsu he worked on some ftlm scores and with Ichiyanagi he founded the group New Direction in 1962. New Direction very quickly became a major driving force behind the activities of SAC.37 In the spring of 1961 Takahashi met Iannis Xenakis, who was in Tokyo for an international conference.38 Takahashi had been studying Xenakis' scores in detail over the previous three or four years and Akiyama presented Takahashi to Xenakis at a concert given as part of the conference by the Ensemble Europeo, conducted by Bruno Madema. In the same period Takahashi performed a concert at the Sogetsu Hall with a program that included Takemitsu's Piano Distance. Xenakis came to this concert and, much impressed by Takahashi's pianistic talent, dedicated Herma to him and sent him the score so that it could be included in a concert programmed for the following spring. In this period of the early 1960s, SAC continued to be very active, promoting concerts of music by important composers (including a series of events in Tokyo). On 3 November 1961 a concert was given in the Sogetsu Hall entirely dedicated to the works of lchiyanagi, who had just returned from the Osaka Festival. After his brilliant debut concert in 1960 Takahashi became well known as a talented pianist and many of his concerts included works by radical avant-garde composers. In 1962 New Direction organized a tour in Japan for Cage and Tudor that included a concert given at the Sogetsu Hall. Tudor performed at a piano to which many contact microphones had been attached. Toward the end of the concert he began to hit the underside of the piano with a hammer. Cage sat at a table on which he had placed a variety of everyday objects, such as saucepans and tin cans. The sounds

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they created ranged from barely audible to deafening, from commonplace to extraordinary; the whole concert made a strong impression on all those present and, as mentioned earlier, many were profoundly shocked. The shocked reaction of the Japanese to Cage's concept of freedom has already been mentioned. But there was another delicate point central to the renewed artistic awareness in Japan of the 1960s that Cage challenged: through his abolition of the borderline between art and daily life he came into severe conflict with the Japanese sensibility to the aesthetic values of everyday life and to their appreciation of the aesthetic interconnections between art and life; Cage's ideas in this matter placed Japanese musicians in a somewhat uncomfortable position. If, for some, Cage's visit caused problems, for New Direction it was a moment for celebration. Among other acts of hospitality, Cage was taken to the Shinto sanctuary at Ise39 for a purification ritual. Cage came back to Japan again in November 1964, this time with Tudor and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. With all the other events being promoted by SAC, this tour proved to be extremely costly and in the end caused a financial loss that was serious even for the munificent Teshigahara family. As a result, Teshigahara Hiroshi lost a lot of his power in the decision-making processes within SAC. The avantgarde musical activities of New Direction were cut back so much that the group finally disbanded. Nevertheless, it had up to that point been able to introduce the Japanese public to composers such as Kagel, Bussotti, Berio, Boulez, Penderecki, Earle Brown, George Brecht, and La Monte Young and had offered radical Japanese composers such as Ichiyanagi and Takahashi the possibility of hearing their works performed in public. In the years prior to this decline, SAC had covered a wide spectrum of all the arts; as well as concerts of avant-garde music, it had also presented leading groups and personalities of cool jazz (Lewis, the Modern Jazz Quartet), of avant-garde theater (Genet, Jarry), of painting, and of happenings involving Fluxus artists, off-Broadway shows, and the like. It most definitely exercised a strong influence on the activities of Japanese artists during its life span. While SAC was losing its importance as an initiator in the world of the arts and music, Tokyo continued to enjoy the cross-genre collaborations between musicians and architects, painters and poets that characterized the 1950s and 1960s. Takemitsu, in collaboration with the designer Sugiura Kohei, created Corona for one or more pianists and Corona II for strings. Yuasa worked with the poet Tanikawa Shuntaro. Exciting exchanges such as these reached their acme in many of the events that were created for Expo 70 in Osaka, but afterward fewer such projects were realized as there was less enthusiasm for mixed-media projects, thus composers returned to working within the more clearly established confines of their respective, established musical languages. For whatever reason, New Direction's decline in fortunes coincided with Takahashi's departure for Berlin in 1963. Not only was Takahashi one of the most interesting composers on the Japanese scene, he had also been one of the driving forces behind New Direction, having started his creative career at the beginning

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of the 1960s. In his first works he made structural use of the philosophy of chance and of mathematical concepts at a time when such compositional and stylistic procedures were virtually unknown in Japan. However, despite his use of logical, structural grids, his conception of the art of composing was guided by a humanistic philosophy, particularly when dealing with radical avant-garde ideas. Takahashi had been invited to go to Berlin by Xenakis as a Deutscher Academischer Austausch Dienst fellow and he left Japan after the first performance of his first major work, Fonogene (1962) for electronics and twelve instruments which had been commissioned by the NHK Electronic Studio. In Berlin he met Elliott Carter and Frederic Rzewski, and Xenakis became his composition mentor (something Xenakis practically never did). Takahashi worked with Domaine Musicale as a pianist and his compositions, such as Cromamorphe I for seven instruments and Cromamorphe II (1965) for piano, clearly show the influence of Xenakis. Cromamorphe II was composed using logic systems and the basic material used is two groups of sounds. This gives the piece quite a natural narrative, dialectical quality. Six Stoicheia (1965) for four violins was composed using stochastic processes.lt starts with a single violin that, after a brief non vibrato prelude, plays a long thematic phrase to which the three other instruments add comments and interjections (fig. 7 .13). In this work, Takahashi makes great use of subtle changes in dynamics that are often applied within the duration of a single note, a sophisticated device that recalls the attention to detail of traditional Japanese aesthetics. In 1965 he went to Stockholm, where he worked with the experimental music group Vierkingen, after which he returned to Berlin. In 1966 he was awarded a grant by the Rockefeller Foundation and he moved to New York. Throughout this whole period he remained, of course, in contact with his friends and institutions in Tokyo. For the period from 1968 to 1969 he was given a research grant by the State University of New York at Buffalo and, while there, he wrote Or:fica on commission from the Nihon Philharmonic Orchestra. The score carries a quote by Nietzsche: "Everything passes, everything changes. The Wheel of Life turns etemally."40 Taka-

7.13.

Takahashi, Six Stoicheia. © 1966 C. F. Peters Corporation.

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hashi uses this quote to refer to Orpheus, who is thought to be halfway between Apollo and Dionysus, and to Orphism, which held that Chaos gave birth to the immortal soul, borne on the wheel of reincarnation. He wrote: "It is through music that the metempsychosis cycle is interrupted. Music is also the catalyst for the soul trying to escape from the cave where it is confined."41 The composition is based on the use of five instrumental textures: staccato, legato, glissando, pitch undulation, and tremolo. These are used to shape fifteen complex trinary cells; that is, each cell is composed of three elements whose sequence varies to include all nine possible combinations of A, B, and C (e.g., ABC, repeated to become BCA or CAB, etc.). Each of these fifteen cells interlocks with three events, giving rise to twenty "phrases without punctuation."42 The same system is used to define intensity, continuity, and density. Having decided on the form and the material, the details were arrived at using the CDC6400 computer at Buffalo University's computer center. However, the piece does not sound "computerized," for several of the cells are easily recognizable and there is an overall sensation of flexible continuity, two facts that confer on the piece a sense of emotion and of an adventure for the soul. It is this rigorous logic that gilided the creation of the piece and gave rise to its musicality. In the same period Takahashi wrote Rosace I and II. Rosace I (1968) is for amplified violin and is dedicated to Paul Zukofsky. The scordatura of A and I)# and the dryness of the writing give the piece a sense of distance and otherworldliness. Rosace II (1969) is for piano and is dedicated to La Monte Young. In this piece the score is written on only one stave and a synthesizer is used to modulate the tempered scale of the piano. This effect (applied both with and without the sustain pedal) creates a mysterious effect of a rambling and extremely fluid melodic line. In 1969-70 Takahashi was in San Francisco, where he taught piano at the School of Music. In 1971 he was given the chair of composition at the University of Indiana, where after several years he once again met up with Xenakis. In Berlin he had assimilated many precious gems from Xenakis's work and teaching, but now his concern was to establish his own identity. In 1972, after an absence of nearly ten years, he went back to Japan, where he started the group Transonic and founded the magazine of the same name. Takahashi's political thinking became extremely radical, as he began to rethink the social significance of composing, and at the same time all the major Japanese composers (including Ichiyanagi, Yuasa, Tak:emitsu, and Hayashi) allied themselves with him. Fired by revolutionary ideals, Takahashi threw himself into an intense period of promoting music that was on the fringes of art genres with prominent artists such as Steve Lacy and Kosugi Tak:ehisa. This period is marked by moments of sonic violence, by a mature virtuosity and a feeling of tension toward an ethereal quality of sound, without any of it being of a conceptual nature, as Takahashi continued to grow in his awareness of the political potential of musical activity. At the same time his musical language became ever more transparent and charged with emotion. In For You I Sing This Song (1976) for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano Takahashi makes use of melodies of revolutionary songs from Vietnam and Puerto Rico, and from the Navajo Indians. The piece is in three movements and the four instruments are given short ostinato motives to be played

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asynchronously (fig. 7 .14), with the melody being varied as if it were making free use of the intervals to create a sense of a fluid organization governed by the emotions (a device similar to that used in Six Stoicheia). The beautiful phrase Fin the second movement and the words "We are brothers here I The eagle protects us I We are all children of the same mother,'' which are uttered by all the musicians "in a quiet, tense voice" at the end of the movement, are moments that convey a pure and moving intensity untainted by sentimentality, when the simplicity of the writing creates a genuine sense of dignity. In 1978, after Transonic disbanded, Takahashi started the group Suigyii (Water Buffalo) to perform political protest songs from Far East Asia. One of the pieces from this period is Kwanju, senkyUhyakuhachijiinen gogatsu (Kwanju, May 1980) for piano, written in memory of tragic events in Korea that month.43 With his technique of bringing together material based on mutual internal relationships and the compact logic of these relationships he gives a meaningful depth to the uncomplicated, diatonic, melodic material (fig. 7 .15). His profound, intimate study of many aspects of Far Eastern music, coupled with his vast knowledge of literature, enabled him to create a music of immense poetic beauty from very limited material. An example of this is his composition Sieben Rosen hat ein Strauch (1979) for solo violin, based on a melody he had written for a poem by Bertolt Brecht.44 The violin is bowed sul tasto with a loosely held bow and played without .

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vibrato, as this gives a special color to the sound. A long introduction leads into a section that, while being fully notated, is intended to sound like an improvisation, similar to "the presentation of the raga in a performance of Indian music."45 The piece is built using an underlying pentatonic scale with D as kakuon46 and features a recurrent oscillation between F and f#. It is interesting to note how, after the more abstract Adagio, the Andante adds fanciful ornamentation to the variations on the original melody (fig. 7.16). These are all new elements in Takahashi's language, which in this period was transparent and essential. Takahashi is a reserved person and, because of his radical left-wing ideas, the mainstream of contemporary Japanese music (protected by its system of patronage) had somehow secluded him. However, in the 1980s it became impossible to ignore his artistic importance.

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Takahashi wrote his first orchestral scores at the end of the 1960s. Hannia haramita for four voices and four orchestral groups was first performed in Buffalo in 1969. Orfica, which was discussed above, was followed in 1989 by five preludes for organ entitled Unwone, Orphisch. The title is taken from a short cycle of five poems by Goethe entitled "Damon," "Das ZufaJ.lige," "Liebe," "Notigung," and "Hoffnung."47 "Five divinities at the birth of life. These are words that are in a constant state of transformation, in the same way that the musical expression of Time moves through repetition and similarity."48 Takahashi, however, has not written a large number of works for orchestra. The reason for this lies in his perhaps unconscious refusal to deal with a big ensemble that might cause problems when individual participation is called for. It is a parameter that offers little scope for control, though he did attempt to tackle it in Non musica-musica (1974). He seemed to find a solution in Yeguen, composed for the Osaka Expo 70, which successfully combined orchestral groups with electronics. Takahashi has a grand mastery of electronic equipment and, thanks to the grant he received from the Rockefeller Foundation, he was able to dedicate himself at Buffalo to research projects on electronics and the use of the computer. In 1991 Takahashi started the first Pacific Rim Computer Music Festival and in 1992 he started the Cyber Sound Week in Tokyo. In both of these festivals he presented works he had realized using the computer. By the end of the '80s Takahashi had once again begun to rethink his ideas on music and to adopt different compositional methods: "I think that writing scores is no longer relevant to my way of working. Therefore I have not written scores for my most recent compositions. Instead, I give each performer different material and I complement this with instructions that I give verbally."49

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He continued to work like this in the 1990s, writing works for small groups that gave the performers full scope for expression and interaction. A typical piece is Poem of the End (1989), written for the Kronos Quartet and based on the poem of the same title by Marina Cvetaeva, for amplified quartet and voices. Takahashi gives precise instructions for the layout of the performers on the stage and for how the piece is to be performed. In the manuscript score the names of the performers are used to indicate the instruments. The pitches of the notes are given, but there is the usual openness in the rhythmical and metrical parameters, as the performers are left to determine these during the performance. There are also two quotations from Janacek. The first is taken from String Quartet no. 2 Listy Duveme (Intimate letters) and the second is a quote of a quote by Shostakovich in the eighth of the twenty-four preludes and fugues (1950-1951) of op. 87. In Sen no hagurama (Thread cogwheels, 1990) for koto and orchestra he brilliantly managed to transpose into an orchestral setting the same sense of space and poetry that characterized his writing for chamber ensembles. The musicians are given short phrases that serve as examples of melodic patterns together with a page that lists the signals the conductor has to use to indicate when the musicians start and stop. The orchestral parts are derived from the part written for the koto and it is the koto's unusual tuning that to some extent inspired the various melodies written for the orchestra. Other works that Takahashi has written for the koto include Hashi wo watatte (Crossing the bridge, 1984), inspired by a Vietnamese folk song, for a seventeen-string koto. Many of these pieces for koto were inspired by literary texts; they also make some use of improvisation; and some of them were written in collaboration with Sawai Kazue, one of Japan's greatest koto players. Uma no atama eien ni mukatta (The horse's head looks toward infinity, 1988) for koto and alto flute was inspired by a poem by Emily Dickinson. Both instruments are given similar melodic patterns around which they have to improvise. Zanshikyoku (Song gossamer, 1988) for large koto is accompanied by a tape with a recording of the composer reciting a poem from the tenth century. In his recent work Takahashi has written very little for other performers. Most of what he has composed he performs himself with a few close colleagues. Als ich im weissen Krankenzimmer der Charite (1989) is a delicate, intimate piece inspired by Bertolt Brecht's last poem. Since it is mentioned in the poem, the music includes the transcription of the song of the blackbird (though transposed down two octaves). It is written in three parts that can be superimposed at will: one for violin (played by Suzumi Kishiko, who had premiered Sieben Rosen hat ein Strauch), one for steel drum (probably written with the famous percussionist Yoshihara Surnire in mind), and one for marimba (probably written for Abe Keiko, who has inspired and commissioned many works for marimba by contemporary Japanese composers). Kafka (1990) uses a similar structure, though the music is harsher and tenser. The instrumentation is for keyboards (played by Miyake Haruna, with whom Takahashi has worked many times over the years), saxophone (played by his friend John Zorn), three singer-actors, and electronics processed by Takahashi, who also wrote the polished libretto.

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Another composer who took part in Transonic was Yuasa. He was interested less in the social implications of music than in the relationship between music and reality. He explains: "Working on the concept of music as an activity that comes out of the whole of a person's being led to the creation of a creative movement dedicated to expanding all humanfaculties.50 What Yuasa is dealing with is strictly limited to communication within human society: "I am not trying to write music that portrays human society and activities ... and in no way am I trying to express things such as solidarity with any political movement through my music." 51

7.2 THE BOOM IN TRADITIONAL MUSIC Prior to the Second World War composers had been faced with a crisis of national identity caused by working with European musical techniques, that is, in a musical tradition that was basically foreign to them. After the war, however, all music became considered to be new music, regardless of origin or nationalist bias. Of the many groups that emerged after the war, there were several who set themselves the goal of reexamining all imported musical languages from a Japanese point of view. One such group included Mamiya Michio and Hayashi Hikaru, both of whom were inspired by Bartok's research into folk music. But the younger and more original composers of the new generation (such as Takernitsu, Yuasa, Ishii, Ichiyanagi, and Moroi) did not, at the beginning, worry about which cultural or musical patrimony they belonged to. Their main preoccupation was with the development of an individual language in harmony with their personal ideas, which might be Western-influenced but which were nevertheless different from those of the West. However, in the ensuing torrent of compositional activity, the problem of identity made itself increasingly felt. For Takernitsu it was while listening to a bunraku performance, with its fascinating style of recitar cantando, 52 that he realized the importance of reconsidering his cultural identity. For Moroi the realization came while listening to a performance by the great master of the shakuhachi, Sakai Takeyasu (with whom he then worked for many years); for Mamiya it came when an ensemble of traditional instruments commissioned him to compose a piece for them; for Ishii and others it presented itself on their return to Japan after studying abroad. This realization was the need to fmd a cultural identity that was more in tune with their emotional and social reality and with the environment in which they had grown up (before the culture shock of going to study in Europe). By the 1960s the rigors of the immediate postwar period had receded and Japanese society was beginning to take a new look at itself in a process of self-analysis that was driven politically and artistically by libertarian student and left-wing intellectual movements. Musicians were also beginning to reexamine not only the musical qualities of traditional Japanese instruments and genres but also the principles and theories of traditional music. Cage's libertarian ideas had a strong influence on all those musicians whose interest in Western

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avant-garde trends was not just from an academic interest. Cage's ideas stimulated them to think again about the use of elements that up until then had been considered irrelevant to the development of a modem musical syntax. These considerations inspired the composition of many works that used traditional instruments or elements of traditional musical syntax, a trend that became known in the 1960s as h0gakki-boom. 53 In 1947 NHK carried out a research project into hiigaku schools and techniques (Hogaku Ginosha Kenkyiikai) that resulted in an important series of broadcasts entitled Gendai hiigaku (Contemporary hiigaku) and directed by Ono Mamoru, Kineya Masakuni, Kikkawa Eishi, and Fujii Bondai.54 The aim was to provide new performance possibilities for performers from the different schools of traditional music and to give them a broader outlook on music so that they could have contact with Western music, with some knowledge of its basics, its notation, and its instruments. In 1950 Hogaku konkiiru, a competition for hiigaku music, was set up with the cooperation of NHK, the daily newspaper Tokyo Shinbun, and the Ministry for Culture. This competition continued until1963, every year awarding two prizes: one for a hogaku performance and one for a hiigaku composition. One association that promoted hogaku was the New Japanese Music,55 which after Miyagi's death began to build up contacts with Western-trained performers and composers, but it was NHK that offered opportunities for the world of traditional music to emerge from its enforced isolation. Many musicians, especially young traditional musicians, were asked to come and take part in what was to become a major initiative. This initiative stimulated those musicians who had sought refuge from a massively westernized society by creating their own musical "enclaves" to come back and take part once more in the mainstream of cultural life. The beauty of traditional music was rediscovered and it became a social trend. The practice of traditional instruments and the study of traditional music styles became popular once more, and the standards of both amateurs and neoprofessionals were high. As with all oriental arts, the study of traditional music is closely associated with the aim of raising the spirit and morale of its practitioners. This renewal of interest in traditional music was further helped by the fact that the attitudes of the performers of traditional music were also changing. In 1959 two young shamisen performers from the Tokyo University of Fine Arts and Music refused to accept the professional names of Kineya and Yoshizumi and set up an autonomous group of their own. This shocked the musical establishment of the time. In the 1960s a group of innovative young musicians emerged who were to play an important role in helping to change attitudes. They moved away from the career route traditionally open to performers of Japanese music. In an attempt to pour new life into traditional music making and to stop it from becoming just a museum piece, they asked some fellow students who were studying composition to write new pieces for them. This opening up of traditional music to Westerntrained composers went completely against everything enshrined in ryu (the thousand-year-old guild tradition), for despite the hiatus of the Meiji era, traditional

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musicians still felt that it was not right to share their music with outsiders. Thus a new repertoire began to be created that had no exclusive affiliation with any ryu. The koto player Suzuki Kayoko also contacted Western-trained composers and it was her initiative that led to Irino composing Ongaku (Music) for two koto. In the same year (1957), inspired by the success of their tour of Russia,56 four young performers of traditional music formed Yonin no kai. However, getting this group off the ground presented conceptual as well as musical difficulties. The members of the group were Kitahara Tozan (shakuhachi), Tsuchihashi Akiko (shamisen), Goto Sumiko (koto), and Kikuchi Teiko (seventeen-string koto).51 Kitahara had taken courses in traditional music run by NHK and the three young women had studied with Miyagi, first at the School of Music (later known as the University of Fine Arts and Music). This meant that none of these four young musicians belonged officially to any traditional ryu (even though whatever instrumental technique they had learned must have come from a traditional school). Moreover, the very instrumental lineup itself, with the inclusion of the "new" seventeen-string koto, was a radical departure from tradition.58 In this sense the group was truly revolutionary. They tried to completely free themselves from any involvement with the iemoto family system, which in that period was still functioning exactly as it had for centuries, maintaining its monopoly on the traditional repertoire. They gave their inaugural concert in October 1958. At frrst their repertoire consisted of works by Shimizu Osamu59 and compositions by other traditional composers such as Shimofusa and Matsumoto Masao. They then began to commission works from young Western-trained composers. In 1962 they gave the frrst performance of Quartetto for two koto, shakuhachi, and shamisen, by Mamiya Michio. In this way, composers whose studies had previously not brought them into contact with traditional music and who had had only passing contact, if any, with it were stimulated by Yonin no kai and by Suzuki Kayoko and others to study its techniques, theory, and music. Traditional players guided such young composers through the secrets, subtleties, and symbolism of traditional music and led them to uncover rich creative resources within their own culture. The postwar situation for composers trying to create a style that mediated between Western and Japanese music was totally different from that which prewar composers had had to face. First of all, postwar composers made use of elements of contemporary music that are also to be found in traditional Japanese music (such as rhythmic freedom, microtonal intervals, and nondevelopmental structure).60 Second, there had been a massive increase in Western-influenced study and analysis of traditional Japanese music and this research had also influenced compositional theorizing. However, because of the enormous differences between Western and Japanese music, finding a satisfactory solution continued to present serious problems. Each composer had to fmd their own individual and personal path forward (and this held true for dealing with all aspects of the problems posed by contemporary music). The solutions ranged from attempts to harmonize and amalgamate elements of both cultures to attempts to emphasize the contrasts, from attempts to use

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Western techniques within a conceptually Oriental approach to the use of Japanese instrumental and formal techniques in a conceptually Western approach. Some composers used or still use traditional instruments in an abstract way, primarily exploiting the unusual sound qualities. But most have tried to make use of the more idiomatic aspects of instrumental technique that have been consolidated over the centuries. Slowly interest has moved from the purely superficial aspects (an instrument's timbre and playing techniques) to a deeper aesthetic understanding of the theoretical concepts. This can be seen in the importance of spatial concepts in Takemitsu 's music or in Yuasa's reflections of the concept of time. This process of musical synthesis is not something that can be formalized or be incorporated into conventional composition techniques. The most successful experiments with this process include works by Irino such as Wandlungen (1973) for two shakuhachi and orchestra, Takemitsu's famous November Steps (1967) for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra, and many works by Hirose and Ishii. It is not surprising to discover that these works opened up new individual pathways but that none provided a suitable model, since they had no theoretical outline that might be reconstructed and offered no clear path forward for other composers to follow. Takemitsu used elements of traditional Japanese music and aesthetics as a source for materials to create new atmospheres, ideas, and colors, but the success of such works in performance relies heavily on the sensitivity of the musicians and the knowledge of traditional Japanese music. Like Matsudaira Yoritsune's work, Takemitsu's output of compositions for traditional instruments is quite limited compared with that of other composers. Takemitsu's first studies of traditional music were undertaken with Hirata KyokushU (1905-64), who belongs to the Chikuzen biwa school,61 and it was these studies that inspired the soundtrack he wrote for Kishi Tsuruta as part of the film Kwaidan, directed by Kobayashi Masaki in 1964. In 1966 Takemitsu wrote Shoku (Eclipse) for biwa and shakuhachi. This was followed the next year by November Steps for biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra, one of his masterpieces and universally recognized as one of the most outstanding compositions of contemporary Japanese music. November Steps was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for its 125th anniversary in 1967 .It grew out of ideas inspired by Hayasaka and was written as an exploration and appreciation of the timbric and spiritual contrasts between Eastern and Western musical instruments. Takemitsu did not try to create an unrealizable aesthetic synthesis but a dialectic showdown that would act as a mirror (a key word for Takemitsu) to the inherent differences. He found himself raising questions without giving the answers to them: "Sometimes these two worlds of East and West envelope me with gentleness but more often than not they tear me apart. What I try to do is to follow both directions simultaneously. I wish not to find a resolution to this creative paradox but to bring the two opposing sides into conflict.'>62 In this problematic yet fertile encounter there is no attempt at mediation. The orchestra and the Japanese instruments face each other as from two separate worlds. The tight ensemble playing of a Western orchestra (which at times can verge on the mechanical) and

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the densities of the orchestral textures are in stark contrast to the delicate and transparent sounds of the Japanese instruments that, with their rich overtones and extraneous noises, offer a deep sense of spirituality. In The Dorian Horizon Takemitsu had explored in great detail a new approach to orchestral writing. In November Steps he fully exploited the brilliant colors offered by the sound of a full symphony orchestra, applying all the skills he had acquired in the use of a nonthematic language that is transparent and full of tension between sound and silence. The piece is structured as a concerto so as to emphasize the contrasts between the two soloists and the orchestra. Although this contrast is a fundamental concept in November Steps, in the actual writing there is some continuity of texture between soloists and orchestra. The orchestral tuttis and the instrumental groupings within the orchestra all take their musical cues from the two solo instruments, even though the soloists and the orchestra rarely play together. In the exchanges between the soloists and the orchestra, sometimes the orchestra offers the material that the soloists take as the opening music for their subsequent entry (fig. 7 .17), while at other times it takes on board the material that has just been played by the soloists (fig. 7 .18). The layout of the instruments is not the usual orchestral layout. The soloists are placed at the front; on either side of them are placed the two groups of strings, the two harps, and the two identical groups of percussion (though the left-hand group, which is placed behind the biwa, also includes Chinese cymbals). In the center, behind the soloists, sit the woodwinds and brass. The two orchestral groups are differentiated more in the material they play than in the general character of the music assigned them. There is never any rhythmic doubling of the parts and, in addition to the alternation of solo and orchestral music, there is also a continuous alternation between orchestral tuttis and passages for solo instruments. The solo writing within the orchestra is mainly for the harps and for the woodwind and brass, with the writing for the woodwind being mobile and vibrant and that for the brass consisting of long, low notes. The music for the harps is usually symmetrical (whether they are playing solo or as part of an orchestral tutti) and it tends to include playing techniques that somewhat reflect the playing techniques of the biwa-striking the instrument on its soundboard; playing short, sharp chords; playing fast arpeggios; and so on. The orchestral clusters are thickened by doubling notes (either at the octave or at an interval of a second) toreinforce the most important notes (fig. 7 .19),63 but at times the number of notes can accumulate so that, for example, at the beginning in bar 5, all twelve notes of the chromatic scale are used. In these thick textures, the entry of the individual instruments is rhythmically finely detailed so as to create the effect of accents (fig. 7 .20). The writing for the solo shakuluu:hi and biwa follows the traditional style of the music for these instruments. Only the pitches are given, while the phrasing and other rhythmic parameters are left open, thus allowing the soloists to recreate the feel and flow of music they know best. The whole piece, with its solo and orchestral episodes, is made up of eleven sections. "November" in the title refers to the month when the first performance was given in New York and "steps" is the literal translation of dan, the word used in

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While Tak:emitsu did not write a lot of music for traditional instruments, Shii.teiguwa (In an autumn garden) is an important fifty-minute long work for the court music ensemble. He started it in 1973 and finished it in 1979, and it is perhaps still the only piece of contemporary music that has become an established part of the repertoire of gagaku court music, which dates back over many centuries. Tak:emitsu also used traditional instruments in his film music. His writing for sound tracks was nearly always minimal and very light: short fragments played on traditional instruments; a great deal of vocal music (street calls or tender children's songs); and the sounds of insects, frogs, and water. His music was intended to underline moments of emotional importance rather than accompany action scenes, and it was always full of long passages of intense silence.

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Another extremely successful work for Japanese instruments and orchestra (being the result of a long period of thought and preparation) was So-Gu II (1971) for gagaku and orchestra by Ishii Maki. Ishii Maki was the third child of Baku (a pioneer of new forms of modem dance in Japan) and Yae (an actress). He had grown up in an extremely creative atmosphere, where music (both traditional Japanese and Western classical music) was very present. He had a conventional musical training, with instrumental instruction on violin and piano and composition lessons with lfukube and Ikenouchi.lt was Yamada Kosaku, a long-standing friend and colleague of his father's, who suggested a period of study at the Hochschule ftir Musik in Berlin. Maki left for Berlin in July 195866 and came back to Japan at the end of 1961. From the late 1960s he divided his time equally between Berlin and Tokyo. In Berlin he studied composition with Boris Blacher, studied harmony and counterpoint with E. Pepping and H. F. Hartig, and in particular followed a special course given by Josef Rufer on twelve-tone technique. Unlike other Japanese composers, Ishii has always numbered his compositions and the first acknowledged work is Priiludium und Variationen jar neun Spieler (1959). This was a strictly twelve-tone composition that was performed under the direction of Bruno Madema at Darmstadt in 1961. In the same concert Vier Bagatellen (1961) for violin and piano (another twelve-tone composition) was also performed. Here the music had become more mature and more personal (though the series had not yet acquired a structural function). Several years later Ishii realized that the music of Vier Bagatellen resembled the sound of gagaku, which he had heard when young.67 Back in Japan Ishii composed Aphorismen (1963) for violin, viola, cello, percussion, and piano, a work in seven short movements in which he continued his exploration of avant-garde European styles. There is a different rhythmic figure associated with every pitch of the series and there are many chance elements. For example, in the last movement the part for the strings is fairly aleatoric, while the parts for the piano and the percussion are fully notated. Hamon (Ripples, 1965) for violin, instrumental group, and tape (realized in the NHK studios) marked the beginning of a more personal and impetuous style and Ishii's sensitivity to the quality of the sounds he was using became more evident. Expressionen (1967) for string orchestra was his first work for a large orchestral group. The music demonstrates a mature use of avant-garde techniques and the sonic texture is highly interesting: the phrases are broken down into their essential parts (using Stockhausen's concept of group composition) and these are assigned to each string section and to the solo parts of each string section; the instrumental writing is extremely effective in its use of technical devices, such as the delicate sounds that provide a background for the attacks. These delicate background sounds slowly come to the foreground, after which they slowly move to form a new, distant background figure. This is similar to a technique called shakkei, in which the Japanese garden incorporates distant landscapes that lie beyond its borders. Ishii applied the same procedures to the technique of stratification and to the notation of the rhythmic patterns (at times strictly notated and at others notated more freely). The rhythm of the background figure

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contrasts with that of all the instruments playing the foreground figures, a device that recurs on several occasions.lt is in this work that Ishii evolved his aesthetic of gestures in sound that gave his orchestral writing a strongly tactile and physical quality and that was to characterize his large-scale orchestral works of the 1970s. In reference to Expressionen, Ishii described how he had been influenced by classical Japanese music and this may explain the heterophonic style of writing that was to become a characteristic of his music. The process of stratifying the orchestral textures in events with a recognizable gesture (which had shaped Hamon and Expressionen) was continued in Kyo-o (1968) for multipiano, electronic sounds, and orchestra.68 The next piece was Kyo-so (1969) for percussion and orchestra. The title of this piece is a straightforward combination of the ideogram of sound or resonance with that of layer. In this strictly structured piece, the layers that unfold are linked in their rhythm and timbre both vertically and horizontally. The decisions to be taken by the performers are also stratified in relation to pitch and time. While various twelve-tone sequences (in original, retrograde, and transposed forms) occur sporadically, the work does not have a twelve-tone structure (fig. 7 .21). The music flows as a succession of clearly contrasting moments full of suspensions and intense sounds. The opening section builds up to a section in which episodes in the woodwind contrast with clusters played by the rest of the orchestra. This intensity then dies down to an episode of brief instrumental phrases, followed by a long pause. In Kyo-so Ishii displays a kaleidoscopic use of color and the climaxes are dense and tense. The critic Sano Koji claimed to hear echoes of the sounds of Japanese instruments such as the sho in Kyo-so. In my opinion, this is irrelevant compared with the influence of traditional Japanese music on Ishii's concept ofheterophony, in which there is no attempt to amalgamate the different sonic layers. The multicolored textures and his energetic feeling for the rhythms used in the percussion are an indication of the music he was to compose using Japanese drums. In 1969 Ishii returned to Berlin as a DAAD composer in residence. In this year he composed La-sen (Spiral) for flute, oboe, harp, piano, and three percussionists. The following year he wrote the better-known La-sen II for solo cello. Both the material and the overall shape of this work are meticulously structured, but there are

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choices left in the hands of the performer that ensure a certain degree of formal flexibility. The performer is given seven fragments and the sequence in which these fragments is to be played is left open. Each fragment is based on a small group of notes, each of which is to be performed with a different technique: tremolo, ponticello tremolo, pizzicato, double and triple stopping, harmonics, and glissando. In 1970 Ishii wrote his first work that brought together a Japanese instrument with a Western instrument. This was So-gil (Encounter), which was commissioned by the Berliner Festwochen. Given the presence in Berlin of Yokoyama Katsuya, the shakuhachi virtuoso, and Sonoda Takahiro, the famous Japanese pianist, Ishii decided to write the piece with them in mind. Like kyo (which he used in many titles), the word so-gil is central to Ishii's poetic concepts. Kyo, as partly explained above, means not just sound, but also reverberation and resonance together with the sounds of the environment, and it is certainly a word that aptly describes Ishii's large orchestral canvases. Ishii resolved the problems presented by the combination of piano and shakuhachi by writing two pieces that are linked conceptually, and the compositional technique and style are the means used to create the desired encounter. As always, Ishii's writing displays his fluency with Western techniques coupled with his aesthetic awareness of Japanese musical sensitivity. Both the piano part and the shakuhachi part are written in Western notation. Of course, this style of notation does not exclude the traditional nonnotated aspects of shakuhachi playing, which give the instrument its characteristic sound. The clean sound of the piano does not match easily with the less "refined" sound of the shakuhachi and, with traditional and modem music (both Eastern and Western) side by side, the juxtaposition of these very different musical worlds could easily have led to an incoherent composition. But what holds the music together is the musical and stylistic unity of the material that the musicians have to interpret. The performers are free to choose the moment of their encounter, having at their disposal suitable materials written specifically for this purpose (fig. 7 .22). So-gil II (1971) boldly transferred this concept to an orchestral composition, scored for gagaku ensemble and large symphony orchestra (fig. 7 .23). In this piece, it is the conductor who has to chose the appropriate moment for the meeting, though the individual performers follow the conductor's decision at their discretion. Ishii has said that "basically it is within the indeterminate sections of both pieces that the 'meeting' I had in mind really occurs."69 In fact, So-gil is the combination of two separate compositions: Dipoz7° for the symphony orchestra and Shikyo for the gagaku ensemble. The title Dipol refers to the contrasting roles of the two musical ideas behind the piece and Shi-kyo (Purple sound) refers to the difference in sound between the two groups. The overall structure of both these pieces is precisely planned. The composition for the orchestra is fully notated with only some episodes left open. One of these open episodes occurs in the middle section, when the strings are given some material that has to be repeated, but each single player decides when to repeat and at what speed to play the material

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independently of the other players. There are also some solo parts that have to be played within clusters or against clusters. The gagaku piece is written in Western notation with the pitches set but the tempo left almost completely in the hands of the players. Here Ishii relied on the talents of traditional Japanese musicians, on their ability to improvise rhythmically, and on their innate sense of timing (sense of ma). Because of its powerful spiritual connotations, Ishii had found it quite hard to compose for the shakuhachi. However, having developed a hybrid lan-

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communicative power and he uses the color and dynamic potential of the instruments with great imagination. So it is interesting and fascinating to hear how he manages to manipulate these two extremely different sound worlds. They conflict yet at times miraculously blend with each other. Examples include the episodes in which strings and percussion overlap with the textures of the gagaku ensemble; the large orchestral washes of sound of the symphony orchestra that arrive like a tsunami swamping the delicate strains of the gagaku ensemble; and the sense of time that is stretched by the flow of the gagaku ensemble or condensed by the Western precision of the symphony orchestra. Ishii has written many works for mixed ensembles of Japanese and Western instruments in which he exploits his concept of a temporal flow created by the use of heterogeneous sonic elements that occur in different tempi and constitute different static or dynamic layers that are organically related to the structure of the material. In 1973 he composed Polaritiiten for solo harp and biwa with orchestra, a combination full of delicate colors (it should be remembered that the sound of the biwa is quite close to that of a bass lute). He subsequently rescored it, adding two more paired soloists: shakuhachi and flute. Then there is the well-known composition Mono-Prism, which he wrote for the percussion group Ondekoza (now called Kodo), from the island of Sado, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Other works use music styles taken from Japanese theater, such as Omote (Mask, 1978) or Kumano Fudaraku (1980; the title refers to a voyage of initiation). Omote uses elements from n0 theater and Kumano elements from bunraku theater. This mixture of stylistic elements is not so elegant, nor is the use of Buddhist shOmyo chanting71 in works such as Hiten-raku (1981) and Kaeru no shOmyo (1984). The recent opera Tojiiraretafune (1999) for instrumental ensemble, on-stage flautist, group of Buddhist monks chanting sh0my6, and two male solo singers (one of whom sings in a contemporary style and one of whom sings in a sort of gidayu style) is a more successful work in this type of melange. In recent years public institutions have begun to dedicate a lot of attention to traditional culture and it now receives a lot of support and help. Festivals and concerts of traditional music are organized regularly. One of the most spectacular events is the concert organized by the Tokyo National Theater when it commissions a contemporary composer to write a work that incorporates traditional musical instruments and techniques. The event is spectacular because the Tokyo National Theater makes a vast array of resources available and the composers are inspired to write works for large, unusual combinations (which might, to cite but one example, include a choir of two hundred monks, all finely attired in traditional costume), and the performances can be staged in a variety of different spaces. In the 1960s works were commissioned from some of the leading Western composers, such as JeanClaude Eloy, John Cage, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. For Stockhausen in particular, the visit to Japan had a profound effect, which he described in his writings72 and which can be seen in his personal mythology of the world of sound, which lead to

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pieces such as Telemusik (1966) for electronic sounds and Inori (Adorations, 1973-74) for two soloists and orchestra. In an interview in 1982 with Paul Griffiths, Stockhausen described how the inspiration for Licht (a "cosmic" seven-part operatic cycle) came while he was in Japan. This was in 1977, when in response to his commission from the Tokyo National Theater Stockhausen wrote Hikari (the Japanese word for light) for an ensemble of traditional Japanese instruments and mime (whose movements are coordinated with the music). Stockhausen subsequently rewrote Hikari for symphony orchestra, renamed it Der Jahreslauf, and incorporated it into the frrst nucleus of Licht. The Japanese found Stockhausen's use of traditional instruments uninteresting and almost blasphemous, so after this it was decided that commissions would be given only to Japanese composers. Nearly all major composers have received a commission from the National Theater. For many, this represented an artistic and economic opportunity to work on a project that would otherwise have remained unrealizable. It was the very fact that many of the compositions grew from "unrealizable" projects that created problems, as many of the works performed remained tainted by the "unrealizable" nature of the original idea. Sometimes it seemed as if every possible device had been brought into play, but for no particular artistic purpose. The works created for these commissions have called for mimes, dancers, and actors in costume and even very ancient instruments such as the kugo, 73 as well as theatrical sets, lighting, and other theatrical devices. But the main reason for such extravagances seems to be to keep the audience's interest alive for a whole evening of such eccentric shows. Of course it is possible that such works contain elements that are incomprehensible to a Western listener but that for a Japanese listener are full of significant references. And of course composing for kugo can be no less meaningful than composing for didgeridoo.74 But it is difficult to incorporate meaningfully every single component of the vast assortment of odd instruments and elements that Kido Toshiro, the former director the National Theater and a very cultured scholar, encouraged the composers to consider. As mentioned above, Takemitsu's composition for his commission for the National Theater was In an Autumn Garden. Another beautiful piece composed for traditional instruments and musicians was Kanso no shuji: Mandara (Seeds of contemplation: mandala, 1986), by Hosokawa Toshio. This was performed at the 1986 Rimini Meeting Festival in Italy. It was performed by four Tendai Buddhist monks with five members of the court gagaku ensemble (two ryuteki, shO, hichiriki, and kugo). In the performance the musicians sit on a specially prepared mandala of different colors (as indicated in the score). This very suggestive work is in six movements (introduction, four movements depicting the four seasons, and finale). It makes skillful use of the orchestral colors, of motifs deriving from original gagaku melodies, and of the otherworldly quality of the shOmyo style of singing to create a hypnotic atmosphere. Hosokawa's frrst commission by the National Theater had been Tokyo 1985, which he had written the previous year. This work, scored for sh6myo and gagaku

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ensemble, is in two parts. The first part is a gentle piece of music, as if Hosokawa were trying to treat sound not as an "object," but as energy. The music is full of air and breath noises and other single, isolated sounds. The second part is more tongue-in-cheek, being a sort of parody for gagaku ensemble of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

NOTES 1. Nichibei anzenpo shOjoyaku, U.S.-Japan Security Treaty; see George R. Packard, Protest in Tokyo: The Security Treaty Crisis of 1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966). 2. See Andrew Gordon, ed., Postwar Japan as History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), especially part IV, "Democratic Promise and Practice"; see also Packard, Protest in Tokyo. 3. J. Victor Koschmann, "Intellectuals and Politics," in Postwar Japan, Gordon, ed., pp. 395-423. 4. Bryan Appleyard, "A Smell-Free Never-Never Land," in Independent (London), 13 April 1994; see also Oe Kenzaburo, "A Portrait of the Post-war Generation," in Japan Quarterly 12, no. 3 (1965), pp. 347-51. 5. The terz guitar is a small guitar tuned a minor third higher than today's instrument and that has a clearer and sharper sound. It was used in the early nineteenth century by composers such as Mauro Giuliani and Anton Diabelli. 6. From Takemitsu's postscript to the score for Sacrifice, published by Ongaku no Torno. 7. Takemitsu Torn, conversation with the author, February 1995. 8. Takemitsu discussed Arc at length in Takemitsu Torn, Confronting Silence, ed. Kakudo Y. and G. Glasow (Berkeley, Calif.: Fallen Leaf, 1995), pp. 120-26. 9. Sano Koji, "Takemitsu Torn," in Nihon no sakkyokuka 20 seiki (Twentieth-century Japanese composers), ed. Hori Tadashi, pp. 180-85 (Tokyo: Ongaku no Torno, 1999), p. 181. 10. Quoted by Akiyama Kuniharu, Meikyoku kaisetsu zenshii (Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha), vol. 13, p. 455. Takemitsu further adds that his friend the composer Hachimura Yoshio (see part 2, chap. 8.2, pp. 290-94) had a significant influence on the composition. 11. The tetrachordal basis of traditional Japanese music has been exhaustively analyzed by Koizumi Fumio in Nihon dento ongaku no kenkyii (Studies of traditional Japanese music) (Tokyo: Ongaku no Torno, 1958). See also TanbaAkira, La theorie et l'esthetique musicale japonaises (Paris: Publications Orientalistes de France, 1988). 12. From a conference held in Tokyo in May 1984, published in Yume to kazu: Dream and Number (Tokyo: Libroporto-Aruku Shuppansha, 1987), pp. 26-27. 13. Yuasa Joji, "Tepuongaku to kigaku he no kage" (The influence of music for tape on music for instruments), Transonic 4, pp. 36-47. 14. "This made our work unpredictable, ... [using] an indeterminate composition for the performance, seeing that everything was useful only when it could bring a change in every performer's consciousness." John Cage, Silence (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).

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15. Yuasa JOji, private conversation with the author, July 1990. 16. From the introductory presentation, which was broadcast by NHK in 1970. 17. Ichiyanagi married Ono Yoko in 1957 and they separated in 1963. 18. Ichiyanagi told me that in his performances, despite his deep belief in Cage's philosophy, he was never able to completely forget about the audience the way Cage did. 19. Keji-shokku (the Cage shock), a term that appeared continuously in all the debates of that period, had been coined by the critic Yoshida Hidekazu. It was Akiyama who stressed the importance of Ichiyanagi's role in the shocking impact that Cage's ideas had. Akiyama said that the fact that a Japanese musician responded favorably to these radical ideas made them less Western, nearer to home, and therefore all the more disconcerting. 20. In the postwar years, Suzuki Daisetsu (1870--1966) gave a series of seminars on zen philosophy at various North American universities, including Columbia and Harvard. 21. As with all traditional arts, ikebana is handed down within schools that are the preserve of individual families and are operated like corporations. The other official schools are IkenobO and Ohara. For further discussion of the role of the Teshigahara family, see Gian Carlo Calza, "Forward into the Past" (paper presented at the Third Conference on Japanese Art, "In search of Elegance: Traditional Aesthetics in 20th century Japan," Venice, May 1996). 22. The building that now bears the name, Sogetsu Art Center, and this name also belongs to the family and was rebuilt by Tange. Shuteiguwa, by Takemitsu, for gagaku ensemble, was performed at the building's inauguration ceremony in 1977. 23. Teshigahara Hiroshi, the family member responsible for the center, was one of Japan's leading film directors. One of his most important films is Suna no onna (The woman of the sand), with a soundtrack by Takemitsu, which won first prize at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival. 24. Iwaki later established himself as a conductor. In 1958 he founded the group Ars Nova with Mayuzumi and Moroi. The aim of Ars Nova was to "develop a truly avantgarde spirit." It ouly gave a couple of concerts. 25. The magazine Sogetsu Art Center (which was later renamed SAC Journal) was published regularly until1963. 26. See part 2, chap. 6.2, p. 168. 27. The sound engineer was the highly talented Okayama Jiinosuke, who had designed nearly all the equipment installed in the studio. He collaborated with all the Japanese and Western musicians who were interested in electronic music and who came to work at the center. 28. Imai had previously been a member of JikkenkobO. 29. Entitled Sekai konnichi no bijutsu (Contemporary art around the world), organized by the Asahi newspaper; see the exhibition catalogue 1910 Japon des Avantgardes 1970 (Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou, 1986), p. 242. 30. Tapie, the leading critic of the Informal Movement; see Giappone all'avanguardia: Il Gruppo Gutai negli anni Cinquanta, ed. S. Osaki, A. Monferrini, and M. Cossu (Milan: Electa, 1990). 31. Gidaya is the name that was given to the singing or recited parts, which were accompanied by a shamisen in bunraku theater. The name comes from a famous Osaka master of the seventeenth century. 32. lchiyanagi, program notes for the concert given in the Sogetsu Hall in November 1961.

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33. From a private conversation with the composer in August 1989. 34. Private conversation, August 1989. After each of his visits to the States, Ichiyanagi spent a lengthy period in Europe. He visited many countries, including Italy, Poland, Austria, and Germany, and he met Petrassi and Stockhausen (who he found more interesting than the more "lyrical Boulez"). He was very moved when Stockhausen was able to get many leading figures to sign a petition for the release of the composer Isang Yun from prison in Korea. 35. "My ears, like sea shells, desire sea echoes." Jean Cocteau quoted by Akiyama in the program notes for the concert. The quote has been retranslated from the Japanese, as it has not been possible to fmd the original. 36. Ichiyanagi, program notes for the concert dedicated to his music given in Suntory Hall, Tokyo, in 1988. 37. Akiyama relates that he started the group in the spring of 1963 together with Takemitsu, Takahashi, and Ichiyanagi. See Akiyama Kuniharu, "Sogetsu Ato-Sentli.," in Bunka no shikakenin (The builders of culture) (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1985), p. 481. 38. The Tokyo East-West Music Encounter Conference, at which Xenakis presented a paper on stochastic music for the section "Renewing the Musical Language." See Music: East and West, Papers of the East-West Music Encounter (Tokyo: Executive Committee, 1961), pp. 134-40. 39. The Temple of Ise is Japan's oldest and most important temple and its head priest is the Japanese emperor, as he is the most important priest of the ShintO religion. The temple was first built around the middle of the seventh century. It is made entirely of wood and is completely and identically rebuilt every twenty years. 40. This quote with his striking oriental flavor has been retranslated from the Japanese because it has not proved possible to trace the original. 41. Takahashi, the program notes for the frrst performance, republished in the liner notes for the recording released on Denon COC0-78453. "The soul trying to escape from the cave" is a reference to Plato's allegory of the cave (Republic, VTI, 514d), which describes a people chained in a fixed position in a cavern, able to look only at the wall in front of them, on which they can only perceive shadows of objects, rather than the objects themselves. 42. Takahashi, liner notes, Denon COC0-78453. 43. Kwanju, South Korea, came into the international spotlight as the site of a civilian protest demonstration on May 18, 1980. The protest was suppressed violently by Korean armed forces. It later became a "pilgrimage center" of a cult focusing on those killed in the 1980 massacre there. 44. From Liebeslieder III: "Sieben Rosen hat ein Strauch I Sechs gehor'n dem Wind I Aber eine bleibt I Dass auch ich noch eine find. I Sieben Malen ruf ich dich: I Sechsmal bleibe fort I Doch beim siebten Mal/ Versprich komme auf ein Wort"; from Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1967). 45. Liner notes of the fourth recording issued by Fontec of the music by Takahashi for the series "Real Time," FOCD3156. 46. See part 1, chap. 1.3, p. 63, note 88. 47. From a collection of his early works, Natur und Weltanschauung, in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Werke, Vol. 4 (Hamburg: Christian Wegner Verlag, 1964); vol. 1, pp. 359-60. 48. From the manuscript score.

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49. Takahashi YUki, private correspondence, 11 October 1993. 50. My italics. Yuasa Joji, "Ongak:u no darak:u to wa nanika" (About corruption of music), Ongaku Geijutsu, no. 11 (1977). 51. Yuasa Joji, private conversation, 16 July 1990. 52. Recitar cantando was a Italian type of vocal writing in which the singer might be said to be speaking in music. It was an attempt to find a middle ground between speech and song that was used in the late sixteenth century by the humanistic Florentine Camerata and other Italian composers to approximate the effects of declamatory freedom. Their intention was to create something similar to the singing in Greek drama. 53. For an explanation of hOgaku see part 1, chap. 1.1, p. 58, note 26. Hogakki are the Japanese instruments used in Hogaku. 54. The series kept this title until1964, when it was changed to Gendai Nihon no ongaku (Contemporary Japanese music). Recently the term hOgaku has once more been included in the program's title. The year 1947 is given in Heibonsha, Nihon ongaku daijiten (The grand dictionary of Japanese music) (1986), whose board of editors included Kamisango Yiiko, Hirano Kenji, and Gam5 Satoak:i. Togashi Yasushi, however, in an article published in 1974 in Ongaku Geijutsu, claimed that the date was 1955 ("Hogak:ki niyoru 80sak:u, sono susumi" ["Creation and Evolution of Japanese Instruments"]). Other authorities, such as Kojima Michiko, gave different dates again in an article published in 1978 in Kikan hogaku (Hogaku monthly) ("Gendai hogaku no rekishi" ["History of Contemporary Hogak:u"]). 55. See part 1, chap. 1.3, p. 53. 56. During this tour the group won a gold medal at the International Competition run by Young People for Peace. 57. There were to be many changes in the group's lineup. The first occurred in the 1960s, when Tsuchihashi was replaced by Yazak:i Akiko. 58. A small number of compositions from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were for a formation called sankyoku, with koto, shamisen, and kokyu (a sort of small violin similar to the Chinese erhu). At the end of the nineteenth century the kokyu was replaced with the shakuhachi. 59. Shimizu Osamu (1911-86) was a student of Hashimoto and Hasegawa. He was born into a gakunin family that belonged to an important temple in Osaka. Although he was basically Western trained and wrote a large quantity of music of popular appeal, he also wrote many pieces for traditional instruments. 60. See introduction, 0.1, p. 7ff. 61. Chikuzen biwa, like satsuma-biwa, is a secular style of narrative biwa music (even though both have strong historical connections with moso-biwa, the ancient Buddhist ritual instrument). Typical of the Chikuzen biwa school is the high degree of ornamentation in the vocal line and a gentler instrumental style. Chikuzen biwa as a distinct style dates from the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was brought from the Chikuzen (Fukuoka) region and became very popular in central Japan. 62. Takemitsu Toru, conversation with the author, February 1995. 63. This is what the Japanese call kakuon. See part 1, chap.l.3, p. 163, note 88. 64. Takemitsu had wanted to call the piece Water Rings, until Jasper Johns told him that this was what Americans called the dirty water marks left in the bath; in Takemitsu, Confronting Silence, p. 106. 65. See "Renzoku," a special edition of the magazine Nihon no bigaku 1, no. 2 (1984).

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66. His elder brother Kan, also a composer, had gone to Munich to study. 67. Ishii Maki, "Westlicher Klang-Ostlicher Klang. SchOpfung aus zwei Musikwelten: Frustration und illusion," in Die Musik Maki Ishiis, ed. Christa Ishii Meinecke (published in English, German, and Japanese) (Celie, Ger.: Moeck, 1997), p. 17. Priiludium was also performed at the Festival Gaudeaumus, while the Bagatellen were performed some months earlier in Berlin. 68. See part 2, chap. 6.2, p. 171. 69. Maki, "Westlicher Klang-Ostlicher Klang," p. 39. 70. Joachim M. Benitez, in the liner notes for the recording on EMI TOCE 7213, conducted by Seiji Ozawa, uses the title So (Pair), which intensifies the meaning of So-gil, the piece that evolved from this. In June 1966 I heard a splendid performance of So-gil II given in the Orchard Hall in Shibuya with Ishii conducting the New Japan Philharmonic with Shiba Sukeyasu's group Reigakusha. 71. ShOmyo chanting is halfway between singing and talking. The monks' singing style comes from the style used for reciting Japanese Buddhist prayers, which were originally recited in Sanskrit. 72. Karlheinz Stockhausen, "Erinnerungen an Japan," in Texte zur Musik 1970-77 (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 1978), pp. 442-55 (originally published in 1imes Literary Supplement, 25 October 1974); "Moderne Japanische Musik und Tradition" (Discussions in Kyoto with Japanese composers), in Stockhausen, Texte zur Musik, pp. 458-59. 73. The kugo is a sort of one-stringed, angular harp that has no resonator or sound box. For a Japanese composer to write for the kugo is like a Western composer writing for the panpipes. 74. The didgeridoo is a wind instrument used by northwest Australian Aboriginals. It is a wooden tube fashioned from a trunk or branch that has been hollowed out by termites. A few Western composers have written for it.

Chapter Eight

The Closing Decades of the Twentieth Century

8.1 THE LEADING COMPOSERS: MATSUDAIRA, YUASA, TAKEMITSU, ISHII, AND ICHIYANAGI Matsudaira Yoritsune's output is one of the most important contributions to twentieth-century music and he is regarded with respect in both Japan and Europe. He continued to compose energetically until his death in 2001; in 1993 wrote Shun-no-den for orchestra, an impressive large-scale work. The 1995 Salzburg Festival dedicated a whole concert to Matsudaira that included his recent Monoopera: "Genji monogatari" (A one-character opera: The Tale of Genji, 1993), a reworking of an earlier Lieder cycle for soprano and instrumental ensemble. In May 1996 the Salzburg Mozarteum invited him to give a series of talks on his musical poetics. For this, a series of concerts was also organized and performances were given of Trois airs du Genji monogatari (1990) for soprano, flute, sho, and koto and Trois ordres (1994) for soprano, flute, and koto. In 1997 his ninetieth birthday was warmly celebrated in many parts around the world, including Japan. Matsudaira did not begin to compose music for traditional Japanese instruments until1990. Matsudaira himself has wryly commented that he is probably getting sentimental in his old age, for he has become emotionally attracted to sounds he heard in his youth that he subsequently rejected for aesthetic reasons. Matsudaira uses the traditional Japanese instruments in his typical original way. His well-thought-out, abstract, and restrained handling of the timbres gives these works an impressive crystalline transparency. He has worked intensively with the singer Nara Yumi, who lives in Paris but works often in Japan, and many of his most recent works, such as Elegie and Requiem per Olivier Messiaen (1992), include a part for a female voice. In previous works, such as Katsura (1959) for soprano, flute, harpsichord, harp, guitar, and percussion, the vocal writing consisted of large leaps and long phrases derived from the clear, sk:illfully written instrumental music and was an integral part of the overall musical structure. In his more recent works Matsudaira allows the voice to "resonate" in long difficult melismas, as if he were enjoying letting the voice loose

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in a sort of free flight. However, this beautiful vocal display always remains tightly controlled in a music that is bold, dry, and faithful to the traditional Japanese artistic ethic and aesthetic of sparseness. In 1972 Yuasa Joji composed Chronoplastic for orchestra (subtitled Between Stasis and Kinesis). In this work, Yuasa built up layers of sounds, timbres, and rhythms that interact to create an itinerary that shifts between stasis and movement. 1 The most interesting aspects of this work are the irregular tempo changes and the fact that the work's structure is not based on a hierarchical order of pitch preferences. This kind of writing and the sculpting of the strata are direct results of Yuasa's experience of working with electronic sounds. The composition opens with trills (played on the three flutes and one of the clarinets) accompanied by a -G tritone cluster (played by harp, celesta, and the other two clarinets). The trills and the metallic sound of the celesta gives this opening bar a tense feeling, which then dis-

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solves into the delicate sounds of the clarinets. This is followed by a seven-second fermata that dissociates the opening gesture from the one that follows. This silence is sharply interrupted by maracas and wood block (which enter at a distance of an eighth note). It is a dense and totally unexpected entry in every respect (fig. 8.1). Halfway through, there is a climax that is static in quality, despite the changing colors within it. All movement comes to a halt on a chord that continues with the string entry to crescendo into an abyss opened up by the jJJf. This creates a powerful sense of a stretching of time and space, an effect that would have been inconceivable before the advent of electronic music (fig. 8.2), in particular before the experience Yuasa gained from working with the graphic scores used for the elaboration of the electronic sound. The ideas behind Chronoplastic were continued in Time of Orchestral Tzme (1975). From the mid-1970s, Yuasa wrote many works for instrumental ensemble and for solo instruments. In 1975 he began work on the trilogy My Blue Sky (parts 1 and 2 for electronic sounds and part 3 for violin).2 Then in May 1976 he went to Berlin as a DAAD composer in residence and there wrote Not /, but the Wind for amplified alto sax (amplified by two microphones, one of which is fed through an echo device). There is a detailed, intricate use of dynamics and he exploits harmonics to

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create melodies. Domain (1978) for flute solo seems to depict a subconscious memory of nokan (the flute used in no performances). The mid-1970s mark an important turning point for Yuasa. Up until this point, the musical content in his work had coincided with the formal project. But in the works of the mid-1970s onward, he was obviously in search of new contents, finding new inspiration in the poems of Basho in particular. "In Basho's haiku I discovered an empathy with nature. His haiku expresses a sense of identification, a sense of the dynamic of space in stasis or in movement, of an energy that expands toward inftnity," as Yuasa wrote in the notes for the score of Projection on BashO's Haiku for chorus and vibraphone (the ftrst of the series of works he wrote using Basho's poetry).3 The vocal part of this work faithfully follows the natural rhythm and intonation of the spoken language and to my ears it is possible to trace the structure of no music in Il and in some sections of V. The material is minimal and exploits the contrast between male and female voices, which are rarely superimposed. InN the evocative words ''The sea darkens I the voices of the wild ducks I are faintly white" are sung by the female choir; over the held G sung by the other voices the soprano sings "the voices of the wild ducks"; "white" is sung in unison ppp with a slow ftgure that moves in semitone steps (fig. 8.3). Koto Uta BashO's Five Haiku (1978) for koto, seventeen-string koto, and voice is the second of the cycle of works using Basho's poems. In this piece Yuasa's writing for the koto is not syntactically different from his writing for Western instruments and the music follows the suggestive musical descriptions of each haiku. Two more works of the Basho cycle are Scenes from Basho (1980) for orchestra and A Winter Day: Homage to BashO (1981) for flute, clarinet, percussion, harp, and piano. These are purely instrumental works, a confmnation of Yuasa's ability to give his music a narrative content, even when no text is present. Scenes from Basho was Yuasa's fourth work for orchestra. It is in three movements that represent a winter haiku and two autumn haiku (two of them had already been used in Projection). The piece opens with a melodic theme that moves in minor seconds and is reminiscent of the vocal style of Japanese classical music. Delicate instrumental colors and the ebb and flow of different musical layers create a sense of immense spaces. An example of such writing occurs at the end of the second movement. After the entry of the cellos and basses the music breaks up and dissolves and a panorama reaching into infinity seems to come into view. In the last movement Yuasa moves away from the technique used in the previous movements of superimposing layers of different rhythms and time scales, and the writing for the orchestra acquires a homogeneous feeling of time and texture. This is because here, for the first time, Yuasa uses a modal scale based on a sequence of seconds and thirds. This use of a modal scale had not yet acquired a structural connotation, but over subsequent works Yuasa gradually refined this technique to resolve the problem of how to use serial material without falling into the trap of using serial organization.

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A Winter Day: Homage to Bashii takes its title from an anthology of Basho's works. Here, too, the music is frozen and static, as if Yuasa were mesmerized by the extremely evocative use of brevity in haiku to fix a moment full of tension in which nothing visible changes, in a stasis full of a palpable kinetic energy. It must also be remembered that in Yuasa's portrayal of Basho's words through music there is no use of symbolism. What fascinated him was the image itself and the tactile sensations that image provoked. In his brief introductory note to this work, Yuasa describes recent changes in his creative perspectives: "The work . . . reflects not only my interest in the temporal structure of music but also my interest in the semiotic depiction of music .... I am more interested in the musical gesture than in structural concepts." The piece is in six movements and the musical material given to the five instruments is reduced to a minimum: superposition of different patterns of repeated notes with irregular rhythms; ad libitum passages in

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which only the widely spaced pitches are indicated; short percussive patterns on the piano; and harmonics and flutter-tongue on the flute and alto flute (reminiscent of the no style of flute playing). These minimal elements are used to create a slow, simple song embellished with ornaments (perhaps more aptly described as "gestures"); according to Yuasa, it is in these minimal movements that the essence and most of the meaning of the music lay. With his move in 1982 to the University of California, San Diego, there was a slight drop in the quantity of his output, though he continued to compose without interruption. He also continued to produce Gebrauchmusik unabated throughout his career. A Perspective for Orchestra (1983), commissioned by the NHK orchestra, seemed to mark a return to the abstract ideas of the 1970s, with the occasional new element with respect to his previous orchestral writing. However, Yuasa continued to explore the juxtaposition of stasis and movement in his search to develop a new narrative style based on the use of a "neutral" twelve-tone modal scale. This scale is a collection of minor thirds and major and minor seconds that uses all twelve notes of the chromatic scale spread out over a range of two octaves (see fig. 8.6). These modal scales, like Yuasa's other series, have an internal symmetry, with cells that can be combined to create pleasant harmonies. The modal scales are also subjected to serial permutations, but this serial organization is not subject to the principle of using the same material vertically and horizontally. In his music based on twelve-tone modes, Yuasa applied different techniques to divide the melodic and harmonic material and he used grids to determine permutations of timbre, tempo, and pitch. The resulting juxtaposition of intervals often has tonal connotations that Yuasa does not shy away from. In 1984 Yuasa composed Towards the Midnight Sun: Homage to Zeami for quadraphonic computer-generated tape and amplified piano. This work marked an important turning point in his music, for it was in this work that the aesthetics and theory of no 4 became an overt aspect ofYuasa's music. Prior to Towards the Midnight Sun he had merely used some occasional musical element borrowed from no, but this new cycle dedicated to Zearni was very much composed in the spirit of no. Zearni envisioned that the highest level of aesthetic awareness was that which "absolutely transcends all the activities of the human mind ... [and] immediately awakens a preconscious reciprocal response." He illustrated this vision with an image: "In the heart of the night the sun shines brightly over Shinra." 5 At the highest level the abyss suddenly turns into a blinding light. "How can this be possible in the realm of linguistic description?" This is the midnight sun referred to in the composition's title. Yuasa realized the tape part of this composition at the University of California, San Diego, Center for Music Experiment. The sounds were generated from white noise and from prerecorded sounds (of stones, bamboo, bells, and so forth) and the computer was used to manipulate them spatially. In the performance the pianist interacts with these sounds in an almost ritualistic way. The music of Towards the Midnight Sun is based on a "neutral" twelve-tone modal scale of the type described in the preceding paragraph. In this version of the scale the second six-note sequence repeats the frrst six-note sequence in inverse retro-

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grade form. The whole work is constructed using fragments of the forty-eight transpositions, including intervals in the octave transposed position. The sounds of the piano and the tape fuse together as if Yuasa had interiorized his narrative idea of the "transcendental nonduality of the 'internal landscape.'" Again in 1984 Yuasa wrote yet another work based on a text by Zeami. This was Composition on Nine Levels by Zeami for male chorus. It used the text of the same title by Zeami. As in the choral setting Yuasa had written ten years earlier of Basho's haiku, the focus of Yuasa's attention in Composition in Nine Levels is on the pronunciation of the ancient Japanese texts. To indicate the tiny inflections of the no vocal style, he uses various techniques: sometimes he uses Western alphabet characters and at other times he uses the terminology traditionally used in no, such as yuri, which indicates a special kind of tremolo on a descending appoggiatura, or issei ni, which indicates the use of the high register. The next work he wrote had been commissioned by IRCAM. This was Nine Levels by Zeami (1987-88) for chamber orchestra and quadraphonic computergenerated tape. In both his Bash6 cycle and his Zearni cycle Yuasa repeats the same sequence of starting with compositions for voice and then proceeding to compositions for instruments. Nine Levels starts in the same way as Composition on Nine Levels, with a recorded voice giving the names of the levels in English. Some of the text is used in the recorded material and is often spoken in the original ancient Japanese. Sometimes it can be clearly heard and understood, but at others it is used purely as a sound element. Yuasa used the computer to time stretch the recording of the voice without changing its pitch or intonation and to replace the formants of the voice with other sounds, such as twenty different bands of white noise. It was the longest composition he had written so far, lasting a total of forty minutes, versus the twenty minutes of his most important works for orchestra and voice. It seems that what was important for Yuasa in this work was not only the use of the stylized narrative vocal style of no but also the use of electronic and acoustic materials to depict physical images (such as the blinding sparks of the golden hammer or the energetic wildness of the three-day-old tiger).lt is a kind of programmatic work with music that follows the narrative sequence of the text. As can be seen in the opening of the first movement, "The Style of Inceptive Beauty," there is no separation between the instrumental and the electronic textures. The tape part, rich with many layers of sound, "welds" itself onto the first orchestral chord-two perfect fourths superimposed to create a major seventh that is played by the full orchestra (but without strings). The tape leads into the orchestral chord with a series of descending figures of sounds that are similar to that of the orchestral chord. Immediately after this the orchestra moves up a major second to play an open major seventh, creating the powerful effect of a sequence of sounds that seem to make the musical horizon open up (this effect is extremely typical of Yuasa; fig. 8.4). In the last movement "The Supreme Flower," Yuasa deals, for the third time in his output, with the image of the midnight sun. The title announced on the tape is now totally unintelligible, perhaps to reinforce the unreachable height of this level. The ethereal quality of the level is present in the timbres used, such as single notes played by the celesta or the use of

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the top register of the piano and of harmonics in the strings to counteract the cavernous sounds on the tape. Out of this emerge a flute and then a bass flute; then the strings begin to freely bounce their bows between the bridge and the fingerboard, or to play circular motifs, tremolo glissandi, arpeggiated pizzicato, or fast ponticello phrases (all elements that Yuasa had not employed for quite some time).

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Two years before he wrote his impressive Nine Levels by Zeami, Yuasa had written another large-scale work: Revealed 1ime, a concerto for viola and orchestra. With reference to the composition, Yuasa had written, "the energy of the movement of sound comes from the space between stasis and movement, and in some respects [this piece] belongs to the series of works composed in the 1980s that includes A Winter Day: Homage to Bashii, A Perspective for Orchestra, Towards the Midnight Sun, and Cosmos Haptic II for piano. In these works I developed a sound that, within an atonal structure, resonates in a perspective of timbres."6 What was new in Revealed 1ime was the fact that it was a concerto; this was the ftrst time Yuasa had used such a clearly defined European form: "For a long time I had felt aversion to the idea of writing music in a form such as a concerto, with its formal concept of the opposition between the two dimensions of the soloist and the orchestra.... [But recently] I had begun to think that it might be interesting to investigate the many possibilities offered by the independent role of the soloist and the collective role of the orchestra.''7 However there is a big difference between the aesthetics of contrast and teleological development inherent in the concerto form and Yuasa's process of interaction and nonduality, in which the being of every moment of time is rooted in eternity. In Revealed 1ime there is also a melodic interaction between the different parts of the orchestra and between the orchestra and the soloist, whose part has an expressive, freely flowing lyricism. It is a one-movement work divided into four sections. Section I, Allegro (from bar 1 to bar 59), functions as an introduction. It starts in a traditional way, with an orchestral opening and the viola entering about halfway through. Section IT, full of lively movement (from bar 60 to bar 142) is the longest and most articulated section of the concerto. Section ill, Largo, begins with a general pause in bar 143 and ends at bar 238. Section IV (from bar 239 to the end) sees a return of the opening tempo. It starts with a high degree of tension but then the music moves into a concluding mood of stasis. The viola theme is an austere but evocative melody, full of minor thirds and major and minor sixths and sevenths, and it is somewhat reminiscent of the one in Berg's violin concerto dedicated to "Dem Andenken eines Engels" (fig. 8.5). The theme shows how Yuasa, after his works of the 1970s, had begun to totally rethink the function of melody. In 1988, after Nine Levels, he wrote Mutterings for mezzo-soprano (here the voice part is a solo part) and seven instruments: flute (i.e., doubling piccolo and alto flute), clarinet (doubling bass clarinet), violin (doubling viola), cello, percussion (vibraphone, marimba, tam-tam, tom-tom, wood blocks, timpani, and bells), amplified guitar, and piano. The text was taken from Do You Love Me?, a collection of "poems" by the antipsychiatrist Ronald D. Laing. In this text Yuasa discovered a

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new use of language in which meaning does not function on a rational level. Yuasa returned to Do You Love Me? again as a source for his text in A Study in White: I've Lost It (1987) for a speaking voice that was electronically treated. Mutterings is divided into five short movements that follow the sequence of the text: I. Erratically ("I couldn't believe it, ... "); IT. Loosely ("Do y'know what I mean ... "); ill. Confidently (" ... What's the problem? Is there any problem? ... ");IV. Under obsession ("No thinking ... no no action"); V. Catastrophe ("My neck is on the guillotine the blade comes down I my head goes this way the rest goes that I which side will I be on?"). There is no musical continuity linking the movements and each follows its own autonomous discourse. The experience gained during the composition of Revealed Time can be heard in the writing for the voice and the instruments. The voice adroitly follows the natural intonation of spoken English, which further helps to underline the text's obsessive repetitions. In the instrumental ensemble, the chromatic symmetrical phrases, based on a modal scale, pass from instrument to instrument (fig. 8.6). Mutterings features many symmetrically structured phrases and instrumental doublings with explicit use of madrigalism, that is, a "pictorial" representation of some words from the text in the music (for example, the falling of the blade in V). The accompaniments and descriptive details supplement Yuasa's previous tech-

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The Closing Decades of the Twentieth Century

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nique of writing different layers of timbre and of sculpting of time. The text is a theater of words and it echoes the theater of the absurd approach adopted in Questions and in Observations on Weather Forecasts (1983) for baritone and trumpet, in which the impersonal style of a weather forecaster is satirically "dramatized." Eyes on Genesis I (1991) was composed at CCMIX in Paris and in 1992 Yuasa composed Eyes on Genesis II for orchestra. In the universe of his creative fantasy (what Yuasa calls his personal "cosmology"), there are two poles: the universality of the cosmos at one end and the particularity of tradition and individualism, sometimes fully insensate, at the other. Eyes on Genesis I and II are ambitious works in which he tries to reach the origin of these two poles (already echoed in earlier works): "One thing I tried to avoid was the use of Western concepts of motivic development built up structurally from cells, from a microscopic to a macroscopic level. I do not find that this is an easy thing to do. It requires an enormous amount of energy to think music afresh from the dawn of humankind, and to recreate it from scratch."8 Conceptually, Eyes on Genesis II is related to Chronoplastic, with its astral inspiration. It shares with Chronoplastic the use of percussion to break up the temporal flow, the division of the wind instruments into different, precise, timbric layers, the oscillation between stasis and kinesis, and the sense of a contraction and expansion of time. The rich orchestral texture is the same as Yuasa had developed in his orchestral works of the 1980s, as he sometimes expands it semantically, sometimes makes it almost redundant. There is also a link between The Midnight Sun (1991) for orchestra, his personal homage to Sibelius, and the symphonic suite The Narrow Road to the Deep North: Bashii (1995). In this more recent work, each of the four movements is based on a haiku from the collection mentioned in the title. He had already used the fourth haiku from this collection ("All is quiet I stinging into the stones I the locust's trill") in Scenes from BashO and in Projection on Bashii's Haiku. The narrative intention is realized through both traditional Japanese and Western music, the Japanese being suggestive sounds and rhythms (such as the big voice of the taikiJ or the writing for the woodwind, which recalls the introductory music [jo] of traditional court music for mouth organ, ryuteki, and hichiriki), the Western being some delicate harmonies or the use of a strict logic. Nevertheless, in the density of the texture lies a sort of immaterial beauty. The music mixes serpentine semitone patterns with more straightforward figures (a mix that can sound somewhat conventional and self-referential). With his Piano Concertina (1994) Yuasa returns once again to one of his favorite instruments and to the soloist/orchestra confrontation that he had seldom tackled. The melismatic and Chopinesque theme introduced by the piano is based on a modal scale; the rhythmic texture is elaborate and the music is often interrupted by sharp, striking flashes of color. Especially in the first part, there is a tendency for the music to become heavily romantic, but Yuasa skillfully shifts the music back into its rich, narrative invention and marks it with silences, out of which emerge fragmentary quotations taken from Yuasa's early piano works. For example, the last piano entry before the final cadence is clearly a reference

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to Cosmos Haptic, and the material of this quotation is then amply developed in the cadenza itself. The whole piece closes in a luminous lightness, without any feeling of a true conclusion and without any further comment from the orchestra; it is as if the music were being abandoned halfway through its reminiscences. This idea of leaving a piece temporarily "open" was very new. It is not just a structural device Yuasa adopted for this work, but an idea related to a personal experience in the creative process. In the early 1970s Takemitsu was busy writing music for films, compositions for instrumental groups, and pieces for solo instruments. He composed the percussion piece Munari by Munari (1971), an open-form score inspired by Bruno Munari's book Libro Invisibile (The invisible book); Distance (1972) for oboe and sho, in which the two instruments engage in an echo game exploring decorative embellishments; For Away [sic] (1973) for piano; and Folios (1974) for guitar (a work in three sections, the third of which is based on a phrase taken from Bach's St. Matthew's Passion). The piano piece For Away is especially interesting. Takemitsu composed it after a two-week visit to Bali with Iannis Xenakis and Betsy Jolas. The music he heard there made a deep impression on him, as it seemed to embody his reflections on man, sound, and nature. It was his first work to be fully notated after a series of aleatoric pieces (such as Corona and Crossing, both written in 1962). Its structure was also new and the spasmodic concept of time was replaced by a more flowing continuity. Ornaments were used as constructional material and the element of freedom given the performer in previous works here became a freedom that enabled the performer to pace the flow of the music and to exploit the detailed pedal markings to create color changes. Takemitsu's idea would seem to have been inspired by the mechanical yet free feeling in gamelan music. The mood is not so much that of the strong pentatonic slendro scale as that of the gentler heptatonic pelog scale (with its sequence of five closely spaced steps with two more widely spaced steps between the third and fourth and between the seventh and eighth degrees of the scale). However, this verbal description may well be misleading because it suggests an apparent similarity with the Western tempered scale, when in fact the intervals between the degrees of the scale are irregular intervals. Takemitsu tries to capture this by oscillating and alternating between major and minor seconds, by the use of superimposed minor seconds, and by a structural use of the augmented fourth and minor second. There is often an underlying pentatonic scale (fig. 8.7), a detail that might be traced to Balinese music, in which pentatonic motifs can often be heard within the pelog scale. The importance of For Away lies in Takemitsu 's new concept of a musical continuum, which was slowly replacing his earlier concept of individual rhythmic and tonal units. It may be in this piece that Takemitsu began to work intuitively on an octatonic scale.9 He dedicated himself to working on these

The Closing Decades of the Twentieth Century

271

lt.--......1

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• ..___..e " Figure 8.7.

Takemitsu, For Away, for piano. Bars 5-7. © 1973 Salabert.

ideas after meeting Olivier Messiaen in New York, where Messiaen had played him his Quatuor pour lafin du temps on the piano. Takemitsu asked Messiaen for his permission to use the same lineup (clarinet, violin, cello, and piano) for one of his own works. This led to Quatrain I (1975) for quartet and orchestra and Quatrain II (1977) for just quartet. In Quatrain I, a work with some highly atmospheric moments, there is a clear distribution of roles, with the orchestra providing the harmonic background for the melodic material played by the solo quartet. In 1977 Takemitsu wrote Tori wa hoshigata no niwa ni oriru (perhaps better known by its English title, A Flock Descends into the Pentagonal Garden), one of his most important works of this second period. Takemitsu provided a detailed description of A Flock Descends in his book Dream and Number. 10 The title of the piece came from a strange dream Takemitsu had had of a flock of white birds, led by a black bird, that landed in a pentagonal garden. To translate this image into music, Takemitsu used a numeric code. The black keys of the piano (Cu, E~. p# A~. and B~) are centred on p# (a device that

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recalls the jazz standard "Bye Bye Blackbird"). With these notes he created two scales (one descending and one ascending) and a series of chords (fig. 8.8). The music moves forward, gracefully depicting moments of an "imaginary sonic landscape" that frames the image of the flock of birds in flight. The work's theme is presented by the oboe in the opening bars (fig. 8.9), but the pentagonal garden does not appear until the end (fig. 8.10). In other works of this period, Takemitsu makes a return to his use of impressionistic timbral/harmonic moods. His extreme sensitivity to sound and its "romantic" potential led him to overuse such devices over the following ten years, even though it is this very effect that was to become known as the "Takemitsian" style, and indeed most of his compositions of the 1980s are extremely "Takemitsian."

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Figure 8.9.

Takemitsu, A Flock Descends, for orchestra, bars 1-3. © 1977 Salabert.

The Closing Decades of the Twentieth Century

273

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Takemitsu, A Flock Descends, for orchestra, the final three bars. © 1977

The tonal climate that Tak:emitsu conjured up in A Flock Descends returned very clearly in a work that he wrote in 1980 entitled Far Calls: Coming, Far! (taken from the last paragraph of James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake) for violin and orchestra. In Far Calls there is a change in the way Tak:emitsu writes for orchestra. In earlier works, especially the big works of the 1960s (such as Arc or November Steps), he had treated all the instruments as soloists with individual lines, even in the accumulation of impressive clusters. In Far Calls the orchestral writing has become much more "conventional," with each instrumental section divided at most into

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first and second parts. Taking Hayasaka's idea, Takemitsu had moved from working with points to working with lines, even in the melodic parameter. Takemitsu was not retreating from his avant-garde stance to a more conservative outlook, but changing his control over the way the parts relate and converge. In Dream and Number Takemitsu explained how Joyce's phrase had suggested to him the technique to be used to "transfer the image of a river that flows into the sea onto a musical plane." Taking the German nomenclature for pitch, "sea" became E~-E-A (in GermanE~ is denoted by "Es." "The next keyword was 'far,' which suggested the two perfect fifths C-G and G#-0' because they are tonally very remote from each other and they mark the edges of the sea of tonality" (fig. 8.11). 11 Using the enharmonic equivalents of this pitch scheme, two major triads were created to form the basis of the work's harmonic structure. The violin melody (which is subsequently suitably developed by the orchestra) unfolds to depict the idea behind the composition: the "romantic idea of distance ... which cannot ever be bridged." The following year (1981), Takemitsu returned to Finnegan's Wake for the title of his next piece: A Way a Lone (taken from the passage "The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a long the"). He first scored this for string quartet and subsequently transcribed it for string orchestra (the transcription for orchestra gives greater emphasis to the lower strings). In A Way a Lone Takemitsu reused the "sea theme" E~-E-A, though in this piece he made greater thematic use of the interval of the fourth. He had not written especially for strings since the 1960s (when he had written masterpieces such as Requiem and The Dorian Horizon, as well as the brief string quartet Landscape and his aleatoric piece Corona). Melody was now paramount, becoming even lyrical, and this shift of perspective from point to line led to greater uniformity in the rhythmic parameter, and to a more measured sense of time far removed from the vivid use of time in his best works. His titles began to make increasing use of themes from nature, such as the sea, the rain, trees, and islands.

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Figure 8.11.

Takemitsu, far Calls. Coming, Far!, the interval relationships and chords.

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The Closing Decades of the Twentieth Century

There is a long list of works belonging to the "rain cycle." Rain Tree (1981) for vibraphone and two marimba exploits the timbre of these percussion instruments in a very interesting way. Rain Coming was written for chamber orchestra in 1982. Rain Tree Sketch (1983) is a brief work for piano, the title of which comes from an image by Oe Kenzaburo of trees that continue to hold raindrops even when all the other trees have become dry. The music is elegant, with different lines and ostinati that interweave to create mosaic patterns in a free prose-like rhythm. Rain Spell (also 1983) for piano, vibraphone, harp, flute, and clarinet continues the same style of writing employed in the preceding works. The last work of this "rain cycle" is Rain Dreaming (1986) for harpsichord. The title for From Far Beyond Chrysanthemums and November Fog (1983) for violin and piano once again exploits a literary inspiration, that of a poem by Oka Makoto. For this piece Takemitsu created two scales: a main scale and a secondary "shadow" scale (fig. 8.12). The music exudes that dripping sweetness that marked so many of his works of that decade, yet his craftsmanship and his skill with instrumental color give a meaningful shape to the work, which can be fascinating and capable of capturing the listener's attention. There is also a "star cycle." Of these works, Orion for cello and piano is musically similar to From Far Beyond and its melismatic writing for the cello has some outstanding moments. Orion and Pleiades for cello and orchestra was written in 1984. Gemeaux (1986) for oboe, trombone, and two orchestras used material created from constellation patterns using procedures described in Dream and Number. Dream/Window (1985) for orchestra belongs to the symphonic trilogy KyOto. It was composed jointly with Tristan Murail and R. Murray-Schafer. It depicts a landscape in Takemitsu's usual way, with the work constructed in sections that differ from each other in the use of timbre; the music remains basically monochordal throughout a series of episodes and interactions. Another work in this pleasant style, but with a stronger and more original touch, is Riverrun (1984) for piano and orchestra, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and given its first performance with Peter Serkin. I Hear the Water Dreaming (1987) for flute and orchestra took its title from an Australian Aborigine painting. The melodic writing for the flute and orchestra creates a smooth surface and the few

Figure 8.12. Takemitsu, from Far Beyond Chrysanthemums and November

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moments of interest seem more accidental than deliberate. Twill by Twilight: In Memory ofMorton Feldman (1988) for orchestra breaks away from this trend and comes to life with a few vivid tremors. Family Tree: Musical Verses for Young People (1992) for speaking voice and orchestra, with a text by Tanik:awa Shuntaro, is highly sentimental and virtually devoid of any musical interest. In Fantasma/Cantos II (1994) for trombone and orchestra, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, and Spectral Canticle for violin, guitar, and orchestra, commissioned by the 1995 Kiel Festival in Germany, however, Takemitsu seemed to rediscover his creative spark. While not, in my opinion, on a level with his music of the 1960s, they certainly display new ideas and a new sense of musical exploration. The atmosphere is definitely postimpressionistic, but the high level of control over the flow of the intricate textures with the preciousness of the details gives the works of this period a specific Takemitsian beauty, most of all in Spirit Garden ( 1996) for orchestra. In 1995 he wrote Air for solo flute for Aurele Nicolet's seventieth birthday. This is a straightforward work and, though it has a very different dramatic weight, it does mark a return to a musical style first heard in important works, such as Mask (1959) for two flutes. In the last years of the twentieth century, confronted with the problems of the cultural comparison and osmosis that had always been so close to his heart, Takemitsu moved further toward a position that was less purist and radical. This was possibly in reaction to the disturbing return of nationalist fervor that was making itself felt in Japan. He would talk more often of "meeting" and of the need to prepare for a global, universal future for young people. He lived this idea as a personal mission, with his usual smile, and his affability and intense strength, but in pursuing it was unfortunately interrupted by his early death. Up until La-sen II (1969),12 Ishii Maki had composed using structures built of cells. Then in the late 1970s he (like Ichiyanagi) became interested in using repetitive ostinato material. Using this technique, he composed the brief cycle Black Intention I (1976) for baroque flute, which he wrote for Frans Briiggen; Blacklntention II (1977) for oboe, clarinet, and bassoon; and Black Intention III: Piano Etude for Breath (1977) for piano, which he wrote for Takahashi Aki. Ishii used the same material for all three works: five melodic cells within a range of a fifth, from G to D, that interweave and combine in a polyrhythmic texture. The opening and closing episodes, which are similar in mood, contrast strongly with the central section, which exploits strong contrasts as it moves to a climax. Even in Black Intention III for piano, the length of every phrase is determined by the player's breath. Ishii was interested in the role of the interpreter. However, unlike Yuasa13 and lchiyanagi, who approached this role more from a psychological angle, Ishii viewed it as offering yet another parameter for the composer to work within: "One of my 'black intentions' in this piece was that the pianist should not only structure the work according to his or her breathing rhythm, but also play four different lines simultaneously, each with a different rhythm and tempo." 14 The concept of different layers that Ishii used in this piece was central

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The Closing Decades of the Twentieth Century

to his compositional style. However, the piece also marked the beginning of a new creative period in which Ishii began to investigate other formal techniques. The Black Intention cycle was followed by Ushinawareta hibiki (Lost sounds, 1978); Lost Sounds Ia for violin and piano; lb for violin, piano, and two percussionists; Ic for violin, piano, two percussionists plus harp, flute, and clarinet; II for organ; and III for violin and orchestra. All these works are based on one long melodic line played by the violin in the high register (in II, the organ uses the violin stop). This line is constructed out of repetitions of various cells that are all quite similar and move chromatically within a range of G to D~. The whole line is repeated six times with some slight changes in the durations of certain notes and in the internal phrasing (fig. 8.13). The fourth and fifth repetitions contain no new changes in the durations, while the sixth is interrupted by a few notes two octaves lower that mark the beginning of a very virtuosic episode. The instruments other than violins interrupt the ostinato patterns in various ways and finally converge on a series of other ostinati that are all similar in their moving in a spiral fashion. After the virtuosic passage played by the violin, the music of the third part of the work begins to break up. In Ib, for example, the violin hangs hypnotically suspended, playing long notes and trills; the vibraphone plays a delicate ostinato; and the piano plays quintuplets and septuptlets that disturb the slow movement of the violin phrase. The consonant harmonies become lost, unable to form any tonal sequence, though they do permeate the music superficially.

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Figure 8.13.

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Ishii, Lost Sounds Ill, for violin and orchestra. © 1987 Moeck Verlag.

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From the beginning of the 1980s Ishii began to write many important works using traditional instruments or voices. He also continued to work on ideas sketched out in earlier pieces, such as the idea of an "everlasting melody" in Lost Sounds or the ideas of consonance in Translucent Vision (1981-82) for orchestra. In Translucent Vision the consonances are masked by dissonances. Ishii stated that he was looking for an "intermediate" sound halfway between dissonance and consonance. The same idea of the superimposition of opposites can also be found in Ishii's use of rhythm, in which complex or indeterminate rhythmic figures appear simultaneously with simple, regular rhythmic patterns. Ishii is working not so much with layers, as with different backgrounds or drops (to use the theatrical term). However, the distances between the drops do not act in opposition, but are complementary to each other. For example, in Afro-concerto (1982) for percussion and orchestra, the ostinati of the African percussion form a natural part of the music's rhythms and sounds to create clearly distinct acoustic spaces with the membranophones and African percussion such as the balafon on the one hand and the orchestral percussion on the other. Melodic fragments of Sanusian and pygmean music are repeated and varied by both the soloists and the orchestra. Ishii displays an amazing tactile sense and the instrumental writing is accomplished especially in his handling of the percussion instruments, while the heterophonic quality of the compact and tightly woven music is impressive. Ishii followed this with a series of compositions written for a wide variety of occasions. Hiten-seido (1982) is a delicate and interesting piece scored for a gagaku group with one or two solo marimba. The ideograms used in the title suggest celestial figures portrayed in ancient Chinese paintings. The symphonic suite Kaguya-hime (The glittering night princess, 1984) is an important work for a group of Japanese and Western percussion, including a taiko. In 1985 he revised it for choreography by the Nederlands Dans Theater. This ballet was very successful and was performed many times. In 1986, continuing in the more rarefied atmosphere of Hiten-seido, he composed two works that exuded less of his usual energy and were more "autumnal" in quality. The first of these was Herbstvariante for orchestra. It was the third movement of a symphonic suite entitled Tokyo that had been commissioned by the Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra. Ishii included quotations from Strauss and other late Romantic composers to paint a musical portrait of the shabby autumnal sounds of Tokyo. The second of these works was Autumn-Metamorphoses for piano, harp, and vibraphone. The music of this piece is also of an eclectic nature, though here it is much starker. "The sounds of the piano, harp, and vibraphone," he wrote, "neutralize the linear shape of the romantic theme, and only the harmony of the theme is subjected to transformations using contemporary techniques." 15 This unusual (for Ishii) series of quiet, reflective compositions was interrupted in 1988, when the National Theater commissioned him to write Momotaro onitaiji (Momotaro defeats the demons), a work that proved to be an extremely large-scale and extravagant piece of music. The calm, meditative mood of Ishii's works in the 1980s culminated in Fu-shi (The shape of the wind, 1989), a complex work for orchestra, which he tran-

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279

scribed for nokan (the no flute) and small orchestra shortly afterward. Ishii initially gave Fu-shi a subtitle: hikokyo kyoku (nonsymphony), though he later withdrew this subtitle. He wrote: "One of Zeami's fundamental creative concepts was the tripartite principlejo (introduction)-ha (development)-kyil (fast finale). 16 I tried to apply this to every parameter of the work. Leaving aside my actual musical results, I tried to place this concept in a modem setting to fmd new ideas for harmony and unity. At the micro level, there are continual compositional variations and changes of the sound events, while at the macro level the sounds combine and interact in a way that symphonically highlights the large-scale nature of the structural transitions implicit in his use of jo-ha-kyu. This concept is profoundly different from that of the 'symphony' approach of Western music. And that is why I called it a 'nonsymphony."' 17 1t is extremely difficult to give a short description of Fu-shi. Its music is in continuous movement; constant changes occur in a thick, imbricate manner, with every single detail built using thejo-ha-kyu scheme. To illustrate this point, I will describe just a few details. The work opens with ten motivic fragments assigned to the various instrumental groups. In the central ha section of the work's opening jo section, muted strings play the principle rhythm that characterizes this jo section; this is then taken up by the woodwind, which together with a fast phrase played by the flute, leads the music into the kyu section of the work's openingjo section; this passage is colored by delicate atmospheric metal percussion sounds, assigned in the score to a cidelo ihos. Both in the orchestration and in the overall form of the work, Ishii depicts the Chinese and Japanese idea of the wind. Zeami laid great importance on the wind in Fushi kaden; indeed, the concept of wind appears in over a hundred terms that Zeami used to describe the aesthetic ideas behind no .18 All the internal characteristics of Fu-shi discussed above mark a new creative period in Ishii's output. We find a similar concentration in his next work, West-Gold-Autumn (1992) for string quartet, Ishii's first composition for this group of instruments. Here, Ishii (who was by nature an intellectual) examined the symbolism that the Japanese had imported from ancient Chinese theories that linked the cardinal points with the elements and with the seasons. The music uses the hyojo mode (E-F'-A-B-C'), which in the ancient Chinese schema refers to the west. Ishii then creates a further scale from the work's subtitle: E-Es-G-A-H-B (based on the German nomenclature, Es stands for West, G for Gold, and H for Herbst (autumn). The interval of the ninth provides another important building block. The music proceeds with clusters of harmonics, with motifs that are introduced but fmd no conclusion, and with textures that build up using brief ostinati (which are very different from those used in the 1970s). The whole piece is abstract, with an indistinct sense of time. Ishii's musical energy and idea of "meeting" seems to have found a new, deeper focus and drive. During the 1980s lchiyanagi composed primarily for piano and violin (he loved the piano and was an excellent pianist). His aesthetic interests of this period were focused on aspects of Japanese culture such as concepts of time and space, images

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such as the clouds, and the sounds of traditional instruments. In the period from 1978 to 1982 he composed the Scenes I-V cycle for violin and piano (the exception is Scene III, 1979, which is for solo violin). In this cycle the two instruments are given contrasting dynamics and melodic figures as well as different conceptions of continuity.ln Scene II there are no bar lines and the pulse is marked in single units (and its double or its half). The two asymmetrical instrumental lines move in opposing directions, as the music moves constantly faster. Then, at the end of the piece, the opening music returns, but is inverted between the instruments. lchiyanagi also seems to be investigating chromaticism. The piano plays three notes in the low register that then form into groups. These groups interweave with five notes played in the high register. The falling octave in this group of five is an important feature and it becomes a kind of ostinato that is subjected to slight variations. The violin plays the remaining four notes of the chromatic scale. While working with great harmonic freedom, Ichiyanagi never moves far from a basic diatonic plan, which heightens the impact of the chromatic passages. Paganini Personal was a very successful piece for marimba and piano that Ichiyanagi wrote to celebrate the frrst twenty years of lwaki Hiroyuki's musical career. 19 It is a frankly amusing piece with the tongue-in-cheek atmosphere of suspense, which Ichiyanagi had used in some other works, but it was also written with the serious intention of putting a percussion instrument in the limelight and of taking a look at a piece of music from the past. It was indeed so successful that Ichiyanagi rearranged it for a variety of different combinations. In 1982 it was played by Iwaki with his wife Kimura Kaori at the piano; in 1984 it was revised for marimba and orchestra; in 1986 there followed a version for marimba, piano, and choir with a text written by lwaki. The piece was based on the theme of Capriccio 24, by Paganini (which Brahms had also used). Ichiyanagi chose Capriccio 24 for its rhythmic interest and also for the challenge of trying to do something interesting with such a well-known piece of music. In lchiyanagi's piece, there is a brief "overture" played by the piano; then follow five free variations on the theme. The second part, which is in a looser style, begins with a kind of prelude in which the two instruments indulge in reminiscences. The work closes with a coda marked "Allegro con spirito." It is a lively and entertaining piece of music. There are ostinati passages that are typical of Ichiyanagi's style of writing of that period for the piano and there are elements of the instrumental confrontation he had adopted in Futatsu no sonzai for two pianos and in the Scenes cycle. The sequence of five variations also plays with quotes taken directly from Paganini's original Capriccio. lchiyanagi builds the variations following this scheme: his frrst variation follows the musical style of Paganini's fourth variation, using the contrary motion of the sixth; Ichiyanagi's second variation takes the triplets that Paganini uses in his frrst variation; and so on. The most interesting section is the Allegro molto of the second part. This starts with a nine-note ostinato that uses mainly the fourths from the second half of Paganini's theme, while the creative elaborations on small segments of Paganini's

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The Closing Decades of the Twentieth Century

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original theme are tossed back and forth between piano and violin (fig. 8.14). The work also exploits the theme's original tonal connotations. Ichiyanagi's interest in a return to tonality had first become apparent in 198i in Reminiscences of Space, his first concerto for piano and orchestra. With this piece,

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Ichiyanagi, who had previously been an iconoclast, moved toward a more traditional style of writing; some welcomed this as a sign of Ichiyanagi adopting a style that would allow this talented composer greater expressiveness, while others saw it as an act of betrayal that could only lead to less interesting music. Reminiscences is full of pathos and is at times almost epic. The orchestration does not mix the instrumental colors, while the solo parts within the orchestra provide a sharp relief to the piano part. The writing for the piano is in fact typical of Ichiyanagi's most mature music: a pictorial use of chords and a solo line that is not subjected to fragmentation. The third part of the work consists of a few ostinato figures built from the five-note cell that is the basis of the piano part. The music builds up and then dissipates into short patterns played by various instruments. The second piano concerto, Fuyu no shOzii (Wmter portrait, 1987) adopts a more standard four-part form that includes cadenzas for the piano. There are two main themes that run throughout the work and there is much use of ostinato: a variety of motifs appear to represent comparisons, such as between past and present, East and West, the inner self and contemporary society, concrete and abstract, and so on. Ichiyanagi's new descriptive style (which extends also to the titles of this period) continues with Inter Konzert (1987) for piano (in three movements entitled "Premonition," "Distant silence," and "Movement") and a violin concerto entitled Junkan suru rukei (Circulating scenery, 1983). The division into three movements (Lento espressivo, Adagio espressivo, Rubato-allegro) is a traditional one, that is, it is not one long piece of music with internal divisions merely marked by tempo changes. The solo part is very virtuosic, the orchestral part is in a late Romantic style, and the whole concerto has a very symphonic feel to it. While it cannot be denied that Ichiyanagi writes well and that the music flows easily between the soloist and the orchestra, this work definitely marks the high point (or the low point) of Ichiyanagi's yearning for aretour aIngres. At the same time, Cloud Atlas I-VI (1985-87) for piano was still shaped by the powerful writing of Ichiyanagi's previous works, in which different elements, such as color and rhythm, accumulate to create a texture that becomes increasingly dense. However, the tonal orientation is now clearly perceptible. The image of the cloud, an image that was frequently used in classical Japanese art, is transformed into the contemporary image of the mushroom-shaped cloud of the atomic bomb. Yet it is not a pessimistic work, and the music is full of the brilliant, energetic, and playful fantasy typical of works such as Piano Media or Paganini Personal. The string quartet Interspace (1986)20 is different again. The first movement is an Adagio espressivo in the style of a prelude. It is based on the ostinato figure first played by the first violin and that moves around the notes in the range of F to B~. The other instruments accompany this figure with more melodic material. The second movement, Allegro agitato, is composed of many fragments (mainly ostinato figures) that are deliberately unrelated. The last movement, Adagio molto, is almost a ro~nance, with the long, beautiful melody played by the first violin. It is worth noting how Ichiyanagi often uses this slow-fast-slow format rather than the fast-slow-fast format favored by Western composers.

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283

Berlin renshi (1988) for soprano, tenor, and orchestra is the most complex work of this period (and indeed, perhaps, of all Ichiyanagi's works up to the 1990s). The title recalls an ancient form of Japanese poetry in which different poets in tum add a verse to preceding verses. The text for Berlin renshi is a series of verses in German and Japanese by Kawasaki Hiroshi, Oka Makoto, Karin Kiwus, and Guntram Vesper. The ftrst part is purely orchestral and presents many motifs that return in the second part with the vocal soloists. The mood is vaguely expressionistic, stark, and heavy, something completely new in Ichiyanagi's music. The refined texture is a horizontal sequence of sounds and phrases over a coherent superimposition of parts toward a vertical harmonic structure. The resulting composition is a huge tapestry in which Ichiyanagi is not bothered with trying to deftne his "Japanese" mood, but in which he is establishing his style in a contemporary Western/international language. What is beautiful in the work is a distanced transparency that frames the voices and instruments, that is free of the bombastic quality that had occasionally emerged in his previous concertos. The long orchestral interlude that comes just before the ftnal collective strophe has an petrified, almost icy quality. Here, there is a brief episode that consists of contrasting lines played by the wind; this builds to a striking, delirious outburst that, while full of tonal effects, is nothing less than unmitigatedly contemporary. lchiyanagi continued his investigations into traditional Japanese and Western forms throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He wrote many works for traditional Japanese instruments being the artistic director of an important group of traditional musicians.21 In 1991 he composed Cross Water Roads, his third concerto for piano and orchestra. It is in three movements: Andante sostenuto, Adagio molto, and Allegretto grazioso.lt is a tonal work, but there is no thematic contrast between the movements. With the experience he had gained writing minimal music, Ichiyanagi organized the music into brief episodes that dissolve into one another and interrupt one another, exploiting color and intensity contrasts. In 1992 he wrote In Memory of John Cage for piano, using the notes C-A-G-E, also adding B (H in German nomenclature) for "John." lchiyanagi seems fmally to have reached a personal, mature style that might best be described as "freely conservative." This can be heard in large-scale works such as Undercurrent (1993), his second symphony scored for orchestra, four percussionists, and piano, in which the mosaic texture is unifted and driven by a spiral of instrumental colors. Of similar craftsmanship are Inner Communications and Recollection of Reminiscences Beyond, the titles given to his second and third symphonies, both composed in 1994. In 1995 he composed Momo, his opera based on the story by Michael Ende, with a libretto by Miura Masashi. Momo was staged and performed for the ftftieth anniversary of the Summer Festival, but was not a great success, probably because of the difficulties involved in trying to adapt an instrumentally articulated musical language, such as that of lchiyanagi's latest period, to the writing style required for an opera.

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8.2 AN OVERVIEW OF THE MUSICAL SITUATION IN JAPAN IN THE CLOSING DECADE OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY It is difficult to give an accurate estimate of the extent of musical activity in Japan and to convey the quality of the music being composed and played. However, it is important to point out that the rich panorama of activity that has been discussed in this book lives on the support given by private and public institutions 22 to orchestras, instrumental ensembles, and some professional musicians. Many composers make a living teaching in the many prestigious music universities. By now, all cities and towns, both large and small, have a good quality musical scene that is extremely varied. Even the relatively new town of Sapporo (on HokkaidO, Japan's northernmost island) has an internationally recognized symphony orchestra. An organization was set up in 1949 in Osaka whose aim was to finance and organize concerts for the working classes. Its name was Ro-on, which is an acronym for Kinrosha Ongaku Kyogikai (Workers' Society for Musical Events). It was organized by the workers themselves, and the members paid a small subscription that entitled them to attend the concerts organized by Ro-on. It started with a membership of four thousand and over twenty years grew to five hundred thousand. The society's membership came from a wide geographical area. In the 1960s Ro-on was also used as a means for bringing culture to Japan's remotest areas and to its poorest members of society. In the 1970s the society also extended its activities to include traditional Japanese music. However, as there has been a big increase in concerts and tours Ro-on has decreased its activities. Japan's musical life remains centered in Tokyo and in the big cities of Japan's central area (Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe) and in the main cities of the other provinces. In Tokyo alone there are at least eight auditoriums designed for performances of symphonic music and opera that can seat around two thousand people, as well as innumerable smaller halls. The towns of Tokyo's suburban belt (such as Yokohama, Kanagawa, and Kawaguchi) also have big halls for symphonic music and smaller halls more suitable for chamber music. Tokyo has ten professional symphony orchestras, all of a high standard. All ten orchestras have a regular subscription series and frequently commission works from both famous and less well-known composers. In Japan there are roughly five hundred composers, counting those who belong to GenOn (the Japanese branch of the ISCM) and those who belong to the Japan Federation of Composers (JFC). There are numerous annual events, competitions, concerts, and festivals that feature contemporary music, not to mention the activities for contemporary traditional music (which are partly financed by public money). The Suntory Musical Foundation (with its beautiful Akasaka Auditorium), the Festival of Contemporary Music, the Min-on Competition,23 and the Tokyo Summer Festival have all commissioned works from composers and presented many prestigious concerts dedicated to individual composers. Other semipublic institutions, such as

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the NHK, have regularly commissioned works from Japanese composers and NHK gives ample space to contemporary music in its programs. Music Today was a contemporary music festival that ran for twenty years (1973-92) under the artistic direction of Takemitsu. Its concerts included music by composers from Japan and from abroad and it also published a good magazine. When this festival closed, its magazine became an annual in-depth musicological publication. The Japanese recording companies have published (and continue to publish) complete series of recordings dedicated to contemporary music and special series dedicated to individual composers. There are magazines and specialist journals that discuss contemporary music and carry debates on related issues. The 1980s in particular saw a growth of interest in contemporary music, and although the economic climate of the 1990s led to a slight drop, the level of activity has remained high. With the recent emphasis on a more "Japanese" style of music, some of the better-known composers have tended to produce more prosaic works. But at the same time, the younger Japanese composers are in constant contact with composers from all over the world and seem to have a wider and freer approach, which is reflected in their music. Yet the feverish, explosive creative atmosphere in the 1950s and 1960s was a happy period that will be difficult to repeat, and not only in Japan.

8.3HOGAKU There is one area of musical activity in Japan that lies on the border between traditional Japanese music and Western music. The composers who work in this area include not only those who have had Western training and whose compositions include works for traditional Japanese instruments, but also those who have been trained in traditional Japanese music (which mostly means performers of traditional Japanese instruments) who are open to ideas and influences from music other than traditional Japanese music. As discussed in detail earlier in this book, traditional Japanese music had a healthy revival in the 1960s, as the social unrest and rebellion of that period contributed to this revival and stimulated a renewed interest in and appreciation of this area of music. Miyashita Shiiretsu (1909-93) was a composer trained in traditional Japanese music. He was a koto player of the Yamada school and wrote many experimental works (such as Soch6) in which he used a thirty-string koto or twelve-tone techniques (such as in his Fourth Concerto for seventeen-string koto and koto ensemble). Miyashita Susumu (1941- ), Shiiretsu's son, has continued his father's work and has collaborated with the composer Moroi Makoto. Miki Minoru (1930- ), the founder and artistic director of the instrumental group Nihon Ongaku Shiidan (Pro Musica Nipponia) is the best-known composer internationally who writes for traditional instruments. He graduated at Geidai but

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also took private lessons in traditional Japanese music; indeed his most interesting and inspired works are those he wrote for traditional instruments. He wrote many works for a twenty-string koto he designed and built with the koto player Nosaka Keiko. This instrument offered greater possibilities for modulation and had a greater range than the original thirteen-string koto, though it maintained the pentatonic character of the koto. Works such as Kodai bukyoku ni yoru parafurashi (Paraphrases of an ancient dance composition, 1965) were greeted as masterpieces on a par with those of the classical repertoire of the eighteenth century. Miki is also famous for his operas. His first opera, ShunkinshO (Shunkin's story, 1975) with a libretto by Maeda and taken from the novel of the same name by Tanizaki Jun'ichiro, was awarded the Wienerwald Opera Prize. The music is in the jiuta genre, in what the musicologist Nagao Kazuo defined as kurudando, a style that expresses the suffering of the lower classes. His second opera, An Actor's Revenge (1979), was commissioned by the English Music Theatre in London. The libretto was written in English and both the text and the music contain clear references to kabuki. When in London for the staging of An Actor's Revenge, Miki met Colin Graham and they decided to collaborate on Miki's third opera, Joruri (1985). This was commissioned by the St. Louis Opera House after the success of the American tour of An Actor's Revenge. Joruri, of which both story and music material are taken from the bunraku world, completed the trilogy on Japanese dramatic arts. Joruri was performed to acclaim around the world. It is moderately contemporary in style-there is no plot and little action, as the characters simply reflect and reminisce. In the vocal writing, Miki makes use of a style of intonation that recalls the singing style of the narrator in gidayu and Benjamin Britten's style of writing for the voice, perhaps due to the fact that the libretto is in English. Miki later commented that in Joruri he had felt free of all traditions, both Japanese and Western. His reworking of the traditional forms has some strange and fascinating moments. For example, Joruri opens with the epilogue of a bunraku performance in which the main character, accompanied by a Western vocal style, manipulates a marionette that personifies Tamenaga, a warrior of the "real" play. The overall style is similar to that used by Dan !kuma in his opera Yuzuru (1951). Mild's classical Japanese training had been perhaps more rigorous than Dan's and the thirty years that separated the two works mean that Miki's music had achieved a greater maturity, with the result that his music is more convincing and less naive. Miki subsequently wrote two further operas based on Japanese mythology and history, entitled Wakahime (1991) and Shizuka and Yoshitsune (1993). Shizuka and Yoshitsune tells the love story of Yoshitsune, one of Japan's best-loved and most popular heroes, who lived in the second half of the thirteenth century. Another composer who wrote interesting music in a traditional style was Hirose Ryohei (1930- ), who was born in Hokkaido. Hirose began to study music in Sapporo and then moved to Tokyo to study with Ikenouchi and Yashiro Akio. His personality and whole way of life were closely linked to the world of traditional music. He wrote many pieces for performers of traditional instruments, choir, and amateur groups. In his writing for individual instruments he always developed a close rap-

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port with the instrument and its performer and wrote specifically for the musicians with whom he was working. In 1971 he wrote a cello concerto entitled Triste for Iwasaki Ko. In this work he fully exploited similarities in the sound between the cello and the shakuhachi and he asked the cellist to use techniques used by the shakuhachi (yuri, meri, and kan) to give the cello a more malleable sound. The orchestral writing is very inventive. A large part of Hirose's output was for traditional instruments, especially the shakuhachi. Torso (1962), for two koto, shamisen, shakuhachi, and cello, was composed for Pro Musica Nipponia. Heki (Thunder, 1964) for three shakuhachi and strings, which he wrote at the height of the hiigakkiboom, was one of the most successful pieces of his career. In Heki the strings are divided into sections and use different techniques to create a tension that can withstand the comparison with the rich sound of the shakuhachi. What is apparent in Hirose's best music is his deep aesthetic approach to time and becoming; he articulates this in an unusual syntax that is different from that used by Miki, even though Miki was working along lines parallel to Hirose's. Toward the end of the 1970s, figures such as Akiyama Kuniharu were very outspoken about their dislike for all the discussion of traditional instruments and of their use in a "Japanese" style and in Japanese tradition; Akiyama found such discussions grotesque and they reminded him unpleasantly of similar discussions that had taken place just before the war.24 It is true that in the aftermath of the social unrest and student demonstrations of the late 1960s the Japanese government had followed policies aimed at a stronger social integration. In contemporary music at various levels, composers reviewed their personal styles, which bore the impact of artistic ideas and techniques learned from other cultures and other composers (a universal practice) and turned increasingly inward, to the sophisticated culture of their homeland. A discussion of orthodox traditional music making that strictly adopted only traditional instruments and performance practices is not offered here. It is not always easy to understand every aspect of the Japanese contemporary music that came out of the rich interfusion of ideas and practices of Western music with Japanese music. This is because such music is so much a part of intense local networks of ideas and cross-references, which are rooted in the country's rich artistic and cultural heritage. For outsiders, understanding of such music is doomed to remain superficial. Appreciation is easier for the music of composers such as Tak:emitsu or Hosokawa, for they adopted styles that can speak "across boundaries," and for the music of composers whose artistic "added values" are not so lofty that they evaporate into thin air. However, whatever difficulties contemporary Japanese music may present to nonJapanese listeners do not lessen this music's artistic worth and validity.

8.4 OTHER COMPOSERS

In Japan's rich and varied musical life there is an efficient system of private funding and a well-functioning infrastructure that have supported its contemporary musical culture. Many composers (in particular the major composers, such as

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Takemitsu, Yuasa, Ichiyanagi, Ishii, and Hosokawa, as well as many of the others discussed in part 2 of this book) are well known on the international scene, have direct contacts with Europe and America, and have received work, commissions, and critical acclaim around the world. But there are also many composers of undoubted talent belonging to the "Western school" who are well established and have received much recognition in Japan who, for a variety of reasons (such as their personalities or the unusual quality of their work) have not achieved special recognition abroad. But they are still a vital part of Japan's vast musical scene. It is important to remember that, in its acquired role as pioneer and model for cultural and technological modernization in Asia, Japan has remained primarily Eurocentric, preferring the old continent to the younger America. Moreover, Japan had a big role in the twentieth century as a musical leader in Southeast Asia and there has been a healthy network of exchange that has included, for example, young composers coming from many of these countries to study in Japan.25 In its Western-style education system, Japan has evolved a stratification system similar to that which characterized its traditional system of ryu and the different Western artistic styles can be clearly heard in the work of many composers, although mixed with their own personal, individual voices. The early sections of this book explained the historical reasons why Japan developed an academic music scene that faithfully followed the precepts of the most conservative trends and styles of European music. Since this scene is now over a hundred years old, it is not surprising to find figures like Matsumura Teizo or Yashiro Akio who are still pursuing musical paths and techniques that have lost all meaningfulness in contemporary Europe. Their use of tonality and of formal structures and their skillful adaptation of symphonic structures to a Japanese expressive content are far removed from contemporary trends. This description applies also to prewar composers such as Ifukube, Bekku Sadao, and Toda Kunio, even if the latter two displayed a certain ability in their use of outdated poetics and techniques. Such music is a curious mixture of conservative materials with a linguistic and intellectual approach that is very skillful and very Japanese, which makes it difficult to properly evaluate this music from a European point of view. Matsumura Teizo is much appreciated as a composer in Japan; Funayama Takashi, a leading musicologist, has compared Matsumura's vaguely hypnotic style to that of Wagner.26 Matsumura was born in 1930 in Kyoto, where he graduated in mathematics. He then moved to Tokyo to study music and embark on a career as a musician. He first came to public attention with Achime (1957) for soprano, percussion, and eleven instruments, performed by Shinshinkai (of which he was a member). After he wrote a few pieces that were vaguely experimental, a personal, eclectic style emerged that, in the twenty or so pieces he wrote up to the 1980s, was marked by a certain freshness and simplicity in a basically tonal ~tyle. His aim was to "look for notes the way a lover would ... looking for a music to express an Asian feeling, or for a music that springs from the deep-rooted energy of human nature." 27 Matsumura's music has a fairly beautiful melodic

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character and is brilliantly orchestrated. He makes a structural use of melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic ostinati (which also function as pedal points). The basic figures are subjected to minimal variations, though the music is not static, so that the constant recognizability of these figures creates a feeling of contraction and expansion, which is what gives his music its force. His major works include Zensokyoku (Prelude, 1968) for orchestra and Apsaras (the name for celestial dancers of Hindu mythology) for string orchestra and female voices accompanied by two harps, piano, celesta, harpsichord, and percussion. Apsaras was composed to be performed in the Matsushita Pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka. Also for this occasion, Matsumura composed Shikyoku (Poem) for koto and shakuhachi. This was the first of a brief list of works for Japanese instruments. He wrote two concertos for piano and orchestra (in 1973 and 1978). In the first concerto, C# is a key note that provides a sort of constant harmonic pedal in the piano in the work's first two sections; in the third section B~ assumes this role. In 1987 he wrote Trio for piano, violin, and cello, which was inspired by a poem by Inoue Yasushi. A kindred spirit to Matsumura was Yashiro Akio (1929- ) , who studied in Paris from 1951 to 1956 with Nadia Boulanger and Olivier Messiaen. Yashiro's music is more structured, but less inspired and less well orchestrated than Matsumura's. One work that was well received was his Concerto for piano and orchestra, which he wrote in 1967. There is also a large contingent of composers of mixed talents who produce music for specific purposes, such for film and television, as well as music for choir (there are hundreds of amateur choirs in Japan). There are many composers who write specifically for amateur and semiprofessional musicians. For example, Akutagawa Yasushi (1925-90), the third child of the novelist Akutagawa Ryiinosuke, conducted an amateur orchestra for almost thirty years. He was a student of Ifukube until 1949 and,he absorbed all of his teacher's stylistic traits: rhythmic and melodic ostinati, a colorful use of the most sonorous families of the orchestra, and a form that moves from one climax to the next. Perhaps his best-known and most interesting work is his symphony Ellora (1958), in which Akutagawa tried to reproduce in music the sense of space that he had felt when visiting the Ellora Caves in lndia.28 The music echoes the architectural structure of these cave temples in a process of subtraction rather than addition. There is no main motif running through the work, nor is there a formal structure of development, but there are moments in which the music is effective and vividly descriptive. Kuroi kagami (Black mirror, 1960) is another work of some interest. Akutagawa collaborated with Oe Kenzaburo on this work. In 1967 he reworked it for television and gave it the title Hiroshima no Orphee (Orpheus from Hiroshima). This version won a mention at the 1968 Salzburg competition for television opera. As a member of the Group of Three,29 he was very much aware of the power of mass communication and was very active with productions for radio and television. Other composers worked in more specialized areas. Hayashi Hikaru, for example, worked for many years with theater groups (such as Haiyiiza, Kokushoku

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Tento, and Konnyakuza). His music for the theater was a kind of theater-opera, sometimes more akin to an operetta or a musical. The piano and other instruments used were often present on the stage as part of the set, while the vocal parts followed the rhythms and intonation of spoken Japanese and were also sometimes mixed with elements of madrigals, opera, or light music, as the theatrical text dictated. Hayashi wrote many of his own texts in works based on the classics (Strindberg, Shakespeare, Lorca, and Brecht). But he also took popular music as a subject in works such as Atashi no Bitoruzu (My Beatles) or The Show. More recent works such Juniya (Twelfth night, 1989) or Hamuretto no jikan (Hamlet's time, 1990) have been very successful. But Hayashi has also composed music of a totally different nature, and which often touches on political issues. This was the case with his second Sonata for piano (1981), which was inspired by some words by Brecht.30 The first and most famous of these works was the cantata Genbaku shOkei (Small views of the atomic bomb) for mixed choir on texts by Hara Tamiki.31 The first movement, entitled "Mizu wo kudasai" (Give me water!), was written in 1958, but the work was not completed until1971. There is an insightful comment about this work by Herd that is worth quoting: In the first movement ... the victim's screams ("Give me water! Please let me drink! I'd rather be dead. Help me!") are sung in all four voices (SATB) with the parts overlapping in stretto. The music has very few simultaneous pauses among the vocal lines, creating an eerie illusion of the screams of hundreds of suffering people .... Both the text and the music are vivid and dramatic, but devoid of sentimentality. In the second movement, "Hi no kure chikaku" (Near sunset), a feeling of confusion and despair is created by the tone clusters marked ''vocalizazzione libero" [sic], beginning in measure 220, which are to be performed using any vowel sound and sung like a prolonged, painful, and slow moan. In sections of the third movement, "Yoru" (Night), where the text emphasizes the victim's anguish, there are extended sections in the musical score of notes placed in a disjointed pointillism. Hayashi recreates the landscape of Hiroshima, the fear, hysteria, and suffering, but makes no didactic conclusions. The beauty of Genbaku shokei is in its ability to allow each listener to empathize in his own way.32

There followed a couple of decades in which Hayashi wrote a lot of theater, choir, and chamber music and these works display his deep knowledge of both European and Japanese music. Then in 1989 he composed Legende, his frrst string quartet. This was his musical comment on the tragedy of that year in Beijing in Tiananmen Square. It is a narrative work, with much solo writing for the individual instruments, including the long "recitative" passages played by the two violins in the second movement (fig. 8.15). The three movements ("Fantasia," "Scherzo," and "In Memoriam 4/6/89") at times recall Shostakovich's writing for string quartet, yet the music is always full of Hayashi's magnanimity and intensity, informed by his optimistic humanism. 33 Hachimura Yoshio (1938-85) is a composer who, despite being well esteemed, has always remained a marginal figure due to his difficult personal life and premature

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