So apologies to those of you who have already heard this recording, but here is the Post Haste Reed Duo in their studio version of my 2011 piece, bioMechanics, for saxophones, bassoon and electronics.

It contrasted nicely with the Post Haste Duo’s performance of my chop-buster bioMechanics that was also on the concert (video of that performance coming soon).

In his essay on Japanese Aesthetics, Donald Richie explains a three-part formula for classifying the arts, shin-gyou-sou:

These three divisions, though, can also all be subdivided in threes, such as shin no sou (the more sou end of shin), shin no gyou (medium-shin), and shin no shin (the highest level of shin).

Enjoy it on a system with bassy speakers:

This piece, for shamisen and live electronics, is dedicated to my friend, Kawamura Shinyu. Shinyu was the first person I met when I arrived in Japan, and it was through him that I came to study the shamisen. Sadly, Shinyu also grappled with bipolar disorder, and took his own life during one of his depressive episodes. Through this piece, I hope to celebrate his life and express my gratitude for his endless kindness, hospitality, and generosity to me.

This last August, I had the chance to help out with a SYLFF project called “Together in Tohoku,” which brought graduate student musicians from three different institutions, (Julliard, the Paris Conservatory, and the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna) to work with children in Japan affected by last year’s earthquake and tsunami.

Rather than going into too much detail on this page, though, SYLFF has just posted my article on the experience here.

If you’re interested there is more background information about the project here.

Also, here’s a performance of Tairyo Utaikomi (mentioned in the article):

Elegy for Tohoku

and one of the many versions of Song for Japan

(Of course I’m very interested to learn about this piece as I work on my dissertation)

Video below:

Here are her thoughts on the work from and interview for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Project conducted by Dr. Anthony Brown on June 29, 2008 (apologies for the format, the Smithsonian transcribes these interviews verbatim, with all of the “ums” and “ers,” and, of course, all hyperlinks are my additions):

You know, sometimes the little things have to be triggers… he was talking about … how proud Duke was of being a black American, and his music [was] based on his race, a lot of ‘em, you know: “Black Butterfly,” what have you, “Black and Beige [Tan] Fantasy,” so on, … And that triggered me to, I should look [at] my heritage, ’cause … the normal belief in Japan was, to be Japanese and play jazz was a handicap. That’s the way, that was the normal thinking… [When] I read it I said, “Well, I’m a jazz player; I’ve been playing since I was sixteen years old… I’m not a bad player, I have probably more experience than a lot of young American players, but I have a different heritage.” … Maybe I could try to infuse something; maybe that would be my job.

So, that’s what triggered me, and at the same time, there was a Japanese soldier was discovered in the Philippine jungle. It was nearly thirty years, he didn’t know the war was ended. In fact, I think he has written a book—it’s a very interesting book. But anyway—Lt. Onoda, Second Lieutenant Onoda [Hiro]—and I was writing for the flute piece…. and also at the same time, my father was a student of noh play…he was a student of tsuzumi, which is a Japanese four-headed [drum]. And I always liked the sound, you know. Actually, I like all drums, I guess, but I really liked that sound, and I was thinking it’d be really nice to use that … so I had a tape sent from Japan. This was like a demonstration tape, a demonstration tape for the tsuzumi playing. And they have all kinds of ways of playing; this was the Kanze [-ryū] style of playing [chuckles]. Noh players… It took me … boy, ten years to put them together in one segment… And that was “Kogun”…

At 80 years old, Akiyoshi may have been misremembering things a bit, since I’m not sure that the timeline she suggests quite works out. Yokoi surrendered in January 1972, and Onoda March 1974 (though he was first contacted in February of the same year). Since “Kogun” was released (in Japan) in April 1974. So it seems more likely that Akiyoshi was inspired by Yokoi’s story, not Onoda’s (although she might just have an extremely fast turnaround time in composing), and it seems like it couldn’t have been ten years that she worked with the noh drummers (unless she’s referring to something else taking ten years to “put together”).

Nit-picking aside, it’s a great piece, and a fantastic performance by Akiyoshi’s husband and flutist Lew Tabackin.

Check back here later this month for more details about that experience, but, in the meantime, I’d like to share the first of hopefully many guest posts by Katherine Hollander, librettist for my upcoming opera, “A Lawn in the Sky.” She’s kindly offered to share her thoughts about her experiences in this creative project, and, in the first of these posts, below, she writes about how the working title of the opera came about:

In the mid-eighties, so the story goes, the young playwright Tony Kushner was visiting an installation honoring the work of the great choreographer, Agnes de Mille. A video recording of de Mille was playing; she was describing a dance piece she had created, and Kushner heard her say the name of the piece was “A Bright Room Called Day.” But that wasn’t the name of the piece. The name of the piece was “A Bridegroom Called Death.”

Somewhere in that mishearing was a particular magical slippage, a conflation and resonance. Kushner took the name “A Bright Room Called Day” and gave it to a play he was working on—a funny, poignant, sometimes ghoulish little tale about myopic but good-hearted dissidents in the early years of the Third Reich. (I say “little” with real affection for the work, and because Kushner’s other plays are so enormous and overflowing that “Bright Room” feels as intricate and manageable and miniature as a dollhouse by comparison.) Within the cozy and intimate artificiality of the title (which mirrors feel of the apartment in which the play unfolds) stalks the darker image of de Mille’s fatal bridegroom—and death and the devil do, in fact, haunt the play. I always admired the nesting dolls of meaning contained in the title and illuminated by the anecdote.

I can’t claim to do much at the level of this very great playwright, except, perhaps—as all of us do—to mishear. And the story about Kushner taught me to seize on these mishearings and use them for all they’re worth.

A few years ago, when I was living in Madison, Wisconsin (far from my beloved New England), my friend the singer-songwriter Rose Polenzani came and played a show at the coffee house and performance space Mother Fool’s. I’d always loved Rose’s music, and I found her stage presence profoundly compelling. After she had performed a few songs I knew, she began a moody, raw, but delicate tune that had me almost immediately near tears. It seemed to speak so much to the feeling of being askew, out of joint, choosing to be in one place, longing to be in another. The song gathered speed and force and began to circle around a refrain that conjured a strange and beautiful image: “A lawn in the sky,” I thought I heard Rose singing, “a lawn in the sky.” That lawn in the sky—isolated, lonely, and magical; safe, misanthropic and monkish; damaging and therapeutic all at once—seemed to be both where I wanted to be and where I already was.

Of course, Rose wasn’t singing “A lawn in the sky.” But the image stayed with me, and finally, quite a few years later, when Rose released an album that included this masterful song, and I learned its real name: “The Lawn and The Sky.” The central image in Rose’s song is a swing; the speaker seesaws between seeing the grass below and the heavens above. The song still gives me goosebumps—but the image of a lawn in the sky, it turned out, was my own, and mine to keep.

By this point, Simon and I had been working on our opera for some time. The lyrics I really needed to provide were for our protagonist, the straggler soldier who has finally realized that his belief that he is still at war is utterly false. I wanted to find a way for him to express the enormous let-down this realization represents; I also wanted to show him looking at the life he has lived—not from his usual view inside it, but from his new position of being outside it. It occurred to me that the image of the lawn in the sky was the way in.
A lawn in the sky is an impossibility. There is something diminutive and playful about it; it belongs to childhood. But it isn’t real. It’s a game that is over. As our hero sings, “But the lawn was an island. The sky/was the sea. The stars were far/ distant from me.” After I realized the centrality of the image, the words for the aria “A Lawn in the Sky” came to me quite quickly, in a kind of half-overwhelming trance. I knew right away that, for me, “A Lawn in the Sky” was the heart of the opera.

Months later, Simon wrote to me to say that he wanted to move the aria to a more privileged position, to make it more important to the piece as a whole. I agreed. Before we knew it, the aria had given its name to the opera.

I think Rose’s raw, eloquent swinging—her “The Lawn and The Sky”—haunts my “A Lawn in the Sky” in something akin to the way de Mille’s bridegroom haunts Kushner’s bright room. My own feelings of self-imposed exile are there, too, faintly. Another set of nesting dolls, not as magical or powerful as Kushner’s, to be sure, but there nonetheless.

I’m learning that an opera itself can be a lawn in the sky—an artificial, magical, impossible space where we witness hauntings and unfoldings that might resonate with our own. And that might, perhaps, even result in a few new beautiful mishearings.

Each day, the site features a new composer and one of her/his works.

If you haven’t already guessed, I’m posting here because I’m today’s featured composer. I’m thrilled to be part of this wonderful program to facilitate communication in the new music community. A heartfelt thank you to Eric for his initiative.

Since last year, my web postings here have slowed down a bit. One reason for this online inactivity is that, although I’ve been receiving many wonderful performances of my music by groups such as the Post-Haste Reed Duo, there’s a limit to how many times I can post a different recording of the same piece on my site before I reach a point of diminishing returns.

My compositional energy, too, has turned from smaller works to focusing on my opera and PhD dissertation, a two-act musical drama, currently under the working title, “A Lawn in the Sky.”

I say “my opera” but I don’t mean to purport sole ownership of the project, since I have a wonderful creative partner and collaborator in poet/librettist Katherine Hollander. We’ve been working together on this project for a couple years now, but, since it became my dissertation, I’m now on a strict, rigorous, and tangible timeline.

The opera focuses of a Japanese “straggler”, a World War II soldier, who, well into the 1970s, still believes that the conflict continues and hides in the jungles of the Philippines, waging guerilla war on the people there.

This phenomenon has been explored before (and perhaps I should put the word “explore” in scare quotes) in TV, films, and video games (including an early episode of Gilligan’s Island, whose depiction of a Japanese Straggler by Vito Scotti is far too offensive to provide a direct link here. Look it up on YouTube if you’re interested, but make sure you’re somewhere private).

My interest in the story of a Japanese straggler, though, comes primarily from my fascination with the effects of Japan’s post-war reconstruction and U.S. occupation.

Japan’s surrender after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki undermined the core values of Japanese society (at least those purported by the government): the assumption of the preeminence of the emperor, and thereby the Japanese people, which led to a kind of Japanese version of Manifest Destiny across continental Asia.

After the war, Japan faced a rapid Westernization of social values, and, many analyses claim, a crisis of national identity.

Perhaps, it would be easier to believe the war hadn’t ended…

…and, for the “stragglers”, it didn’t.

In the story of the opera, then, there is an opportunity to examine the interaction of wartime and post-war Japanese thinking. Wartime Japan and postwar Japan can engage each other in dialog (quite literally), and, furthermore, explore their respective relationships with the rest of the world. Beyond these historical ideas, too, our hope is that the opera will speak to universal themes of war, modernity, globalization, and, on an individual level, denial and loyalty.

Now, my task is how to portray this story (and wonderful libretto) musically, with my mixed ensemble of Western, Japanese, and electronic instruments. This is not a trivial task, and a discussion of the issues this raises is perhaps best saved for another time.

(Just a note: I do not mean to slander modern Japan by showing the propaganda materials above, as I’m sure many people in the U.S. are also very ashamed of the posters that we made 70 years ago, like this one here…

…Let alone the portrayal in Gilligan’s Island.)

More about the opera sometime soon, but, for now, my struggle, as it always seems to be, is balancing my time between my work as a composer, an electronic musician, and an ethnomusicologist.

These three roles, of course, aren’t mutually exclusive, so perhaps it’s more apt to say that I struggle to balance my time between thinking about music and writing music (and then subdivide that into writing music directly as sound, and writing music as notes on paper).

And then some time is spent watching cat videos on the internet.

The more I study and teach world music, though, the more I believe that an understanding of approaches to ethnomusicology is an invaluable tool for composers (and consumers) of new music. The skills that the students develop in my world music class are completely analogous to the skills of the students in my digital audio class.

Of course, on technical level, the information is very different–I think it might be tricky to spot the similarities between learning how Xenakis’s UPIC works and how to count the tala in Hindustani music–but core idea is the same: Here is music that is different from what you know, but, with a little work, we can find a way to understand it.

To take that idea to the next level, we build the skills to listen more objectively to an unfamiliar piece of music and use our critical thinking to understand what is happening, not just how this music compares to Beethoven or Mozart (or Nicki Minaj). We learn to listen for different ideas of pitch, time, structural, and timbral organization. We learn to discard the assumption that the values of Western music (or, for some students, pop music) are universal (“I can’t get into this piece or this piece. I like pieces that have a rhythm”… ), we learn to try to engage with a musical tradition on its own terms, and we better understand what “music” is (and can be) by using our objective and critical thinking to find the core of a given piece or tradition.

In a recent conversation, I referred to this as equivalent of how Neo “sees the matrix” at the end of the first of those films.

Perhaps, I was being a little overdramatic.

But I hope it’s also clear how these skills are useful to people far beyond the just context of music.

Aaron did a fantastic job, and you can hear the whole program here, but, for some reason, he’s passed the baton (the figurative baton) back to me.

Anyway here’s TONGTOKKUNG:

TONGTOKKUNG – Simon Hutchinson

Esther Fredrickson, flute;
Jannie Wei, violin;
Katie White, viola;
Kelly Quesada, cello.

One of the great influences and inventions of Western Music is its notation system. This system of recording a document of a musical work on paper allowed composers to explore complex counterpoint and harmony and convey these ideas to other musicians. From the perspective of world music, however, this system also has its limitations, and these shortcomings become more obvious when we notice that Western Music is primitive in its exploration of timbre, microtonal inflection, and rhythm relative to some other cultures’ traditions.

While I still use Western notation, I hope to explore some more complex rhythmic ideas in my piece, TONGTOKKUNG. We open with an uneven meter of seven beats, not uncommon in the rhythmic explorations of 20th-century composers, but then that rhythm switches to a traditional Korean rhythm, tongtokkung, a far more complex pattern of 24 beats. The piece then switches between these two ideas, and, to my ears, the “uneven” seven beats becomes a point of rest compared to the intensity of the tongtokkung.