Program Notes

Program notes by Robert Kirzinger

From the perspective of the West in our time, Toru Takemitsu is, incontrovertibly, the most important Asian composer. To say anything suggesting a lesser role is to fly in the face of evidence both direct and circumstantial: his works are easily the most often performed in the West of any Japanese, even any Asian, composer, a situation that has obtained now for about forty years. Beyond this, his influence continues to resonate not only in Japan but in Europe and America as well, as younger composers, including the Chinese-born Tan Dun and Japanese-American Ken Ueno also on this program, continue to be influenced directly by Takemitsu's music and more abstractly by the precedent of the cultural ties he forged between East and West.

Takemitsu came to Western music during World War II. One of the paradoxical results of war is the increase of cultural awareness and interplay among the peoples and nations involved in the conflict, among allies as well as adversaries. During and following World War II, for example, the United States was forced to raise its gaze from internal domestic problems to confront, and later work with, peoples with which Americans had had limited experience, particularly in the Far East. There was a reciprocal situation in Asian countries (and, albeit temporarily, Central Europe and Russia).

Arguably, the effects of this new receptiveness were even more dramatic for post-WWII Japan, whose isolation was longstanding and traditional. The occupying forces of the United States army naturally rankled many Japanese, but as the vanguard of an exotic and dynamic culture the presence of the Americans - and the capital of reparations - was exciting and revitalizing. Greater ease of communication and travel also had a major role.

Another important force in the reshaping of culture both West and East was the sense among members of the generation that came of age during the war that the aesthetic structures and mores in place at the start of the war were, if not responsible for, then at least complicit in its causes. It was in part a desire to tear down these structures and build new ones that spurred the post-war artistic progressives: from Visconti to Kurosawa; Beuys to Pollock; Dickey to Mishima. In music, the standard-bearers in the West were Boulez, Stockhausen, and John Cage. Cage, of course, was the key figure in bringing Eastern aesthetics to the attention of the U.S.

It wasn't until the 1960s that Takemitsu and Cage became acquainted, then close friends. Already in 1951 Takemitsu and several colleagues from different disciplines including the visual arts, dance, and literature had formed the Experimental Workshop, a proving ground for the investigation of new ideas in the arts. By the time of his first meeting with Cage, Takemitsu had already attracted attention in the West, notably through a comment about his Requiem for strings by Stravinsky, who declared it a masterpiece. It was November Steps, written for the New York Philharmonic in 1967, that truly established his reputation as the most important Japanese composer of "Western" music, although his many film scores also disseminated his work far beyond the concert hall. Champions like the Boston Symphony Orchestra's Seiji Ozawa and other major American orchestras kept his works in front of the public. Ultimately Takemitsu's mastery of his medium and the breadth of his accomplishment, along with his generosity as a teacher and advocate for the music of other composers, established him as one of the most prominent musicians in the world, East or West. It is with this in mind that the Boston Modern Orchestra project presents this concert in tribute to his memory in the year of the seventy-fifth anniversary of his birth.

KEN UENO (b. 1970)
To be announced (World Premiere)

Boston-based composer Ken Ueno was born in New York to Japanese parents. His father was an executive for a Japanese airline, and the family moved several times during Ueno's childhood, to Japan, to Switzerland, and finally to California, where he attended high school. His first formal music training came in the form of clarinet and recorder lessons and at sixteen he took up the guitar, but he had little notion at that time of entering into a career in music. Instead, intent on coming to grips with his role as an American, Ueno participated in debate and speech activities in high school and ran track, and after graduation entered the officer training program at West Point, with an ultimate goal of entering into politics.

At the end of his first year at that school, Ueno suffered an accident during training that kept him in physical therapy for more than a year. While recuperating he took up the guitar again, playing every day for hours on end, and also began to rethink his chosen career path. He began playing guitar in bands and writing songs, eventually deciding to restart his higher education by attending Berklee College of Music. It was his first exposure to Bartók's Fourth String Quartet that steered him toward new music composition, and following Berklee he attended Boston University, Yale, and Harvard. His teachers have included John Bavicchi, Bernard Rands, and Mario Davidovsky, among several others. An important aspect of his activity is that of "evangelist" for new music, and in that capacity he has taught at a halfway house for court-involved teens as well as produced and hosted a cable access television program, "The Modern Music Show w/DJ Moderne," where his guests have included Davidovsky, John Harbison, Beth Wiemann, and many others. Ueno himself recently joined the faculty of the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where he is an assistant professor and director of the school's electronic music studios.

Ueno's work has been performed by numerous ensembles around the world, including BMOP, the Hilliard Ensemble, Eighth Blackbird, the Prism Quartet, and the American Composers Orchestra, to name just a few. He has received numerous grants, awards, and recognitions, including recent commissions from the Fromm Foundation for the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra and the Radius Ensemble, and Harvard's John Green Composition Prize, which included a summer residency at Fondazione William Walton in Italy last year.

Ken Ueno is an insatiable intellectual polymath whose deep interest in modern critical systems (including the work of Derrida and the post-structuralists), literature (particularly Samuel Beckett), and film has influenced his work on many levels from the abstract to the particular. His ongoing development of a compositional language has led him to a method of "phonetic" or "alphabetic" details juxtaposed with more complex musical "ideograms" - a metaphorical construct taken from observation of Western, alphabetic languages versus the pictorial Japanese, which coexist in Ueno's own experience. This is one basis, as well, for the establishment of musical gestures operating on different, often seemingly independent, levels. In recent works, Ueno has concerned himself with the organic extension of apparently chaotic, or locally unpredictable, gestures into large-scale forms of satisfying, even seemingly inevitable cohesion. One way of achieving this kind of unity, for example, involves the employment of discrete pitch arrays that, through various transformations, remain the (mostly) audible foundation of a particular work (almost, but not quite, analogous to a "key"). This array may be based on an analysis of a key instrumental component of the ensemble. Microtonal inflection is often present as explication of a specific overtone.

But at first experience, the listener to Ueno's works isn't struck by their compositional rigor so much as by their tactile, physical nature, a quality that recalls the composer's early experience with music as a disciple of Jimi Hendrix and a purveyor of virtuosic heavy metal. The impact of Ueno's work is still positively palpable and sensuous, driven even when apparently static, with, at its core, that essentially human quality of played music, music that grows directly from the bodies and hands and hearts and minds of expressive musicians - music of real soul. It's this that ties his work most closely to that of Toru Takemitsu.

Ken Ueno's new work, a BMOP commission written in tribute to Takemitsu, receives its world premiere this evening.

TAN DUN (b. 1957)
Water Concerto (Written in memory of Toru Takemitsu)

Born a generation or so after Toru Takemitsu, Tan Dun is one of several prominent Chinese composers now working predominantly in the U.S. and Europe, also including Qigang Chen and Bright Sheng. These composers, using Takemitsu's path to the West as a model, have integrated Chinese traditional instruments, Western ensembles with modernist techniques to create new and personal compositional voices. None is more prominent than Grawemeyer and Academy Award-winning composer Tan Dun, whose Oscar-winning score to Ang Lee's film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon made him internationally famous on a level of which most composers never dream.

Tan Dun was raised in rural Hunan Province, and his early musical experiences were with the folk traditions of the area. Like most of his countrymen, his life in the 1970s was directed by China's Cultural Revolution, and whatever his life goals might have been, he was sent to a distant province to plant rice. He immersed himself in the music of the area, however, collecting local folk songs and organizing a performing "orchestra" that consisted of whatever the participants had to hand - homemade bamboo flutes, pots, pans, and other found objects. The group would perform for weddings or funerals, for ghost operas, or for any occasion. Later Tan Dun became a fiddler and arranger with a Peking Opera troupe.

In the waning days of the Cultural Revolution Tan Dun began attending the Central Conservatory in Beijing in 1978, and as China was starting to open to the West there was opportunity to meet such important composers as George Crumb and Hans Werner Henze. He also saw the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Seiji Ozawa during their first trip to China in 1979, opening up for him an entirely new world of Western music performed at a very high level, in contrast to the unpolished or less authentic performances he might have heard locally.

Tan Dun's early music, for example his first string quartet, Feng Ya Song (1983), reflected a synthesis of the styles of such 20th-century masters as Bartók and Schoenberg with traditional Chinese music. At the same time, Tan was exploring the rich folk traditions with which he'd been familiar as a child, and he began a movement to elevate the folk and classical traditions indigenous to China. Officially, he was criticized for leaning too much toward European tastes, and for part of 1983 performances of his music were banned. Finally, in 1986, he received a fellowship to travel to the United States for study with Chinese expatriate Chou Wen-Chung at Columbia University. New York City has been his nominal base of operations ever since. 1986 also saw the completion of one of the composer's most important works, On Taoism, in which he successfully synthesized Western and Chinese musical concepts in an ultra-avant-garde statement of his artistic goals.

In the ensuing years, Tan Dun wrote for traditional Western genres like the string quartet or orchestra while at the same time pursuing experiments in less traditional, more elemental media, such as "instruments" made of paper or stone. These two musical worlds come together in such works as the ambitious Orchestral Theater works, in which theatrical elements and avant-garde compositional techniques are combined in a richly textured, complex, yet also directly expressive presentation. Other significant works with multi-media elements include his opera Marco Polo, the symphony Heaven Earth Mankind, the Water Passion after St. Matthew, and The Map, Concerto for Cello and Video, written for Yo-Yo Ma and the Boston Symphony.

Tan Dun wrote his Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra, another "elemental" work, on a commission from the New York Philharmonic, which premiered it on June 3, 1999. Kurt Masur conducted, and percussionist Christopher Lamb was soloist. The work is subtitled "In Memory of Toru Takemitsu." Tan Dun's relationship with Toru Takemitsu began in 1983, when Takemitsu selected him as winner of the Suntory Prize Commission. Clearly they shared a reverence for unique, pure sound, as well as for silence, in their music, and a ritualistic thread runs through the work of both men.

The Concerto is in three movements plus a Prelude. The soloist is positioned at the front of the stage, between the conductor and audience; a vibraphone for the soloist's use is placed at the back of the stage. There are two additional percussionists, one placed on either side of the stage. The strings, woodwinds, and brass are positioned normally. All of the percussionists perform on a variety of water-based instruments and basins, including tubes, shakers, and water gongs, which are amplified with contact microphones. The score also calls for lights for the soloists, adding to the theatrical element. In addition, members of the traditionally composed orchestra are called on to sing as well as play their instruments in a variety of standard and non-standard ways. The orchestra also provides harmonic and textural backdrop for the shamanistic, choreographed movements and sounds of the soloist and his/her partners.

TORU TAKEMITSU (1930-1996)
Requiem for Strings
Three Film Scores
November Steps

Toru Takemitsu first became attentive to Western music as a fourteen-year-old conscript made to working in deep military bases in Japan's mountains in preparation for a potential American attack. There he was able to hear an officer's gramophone recordings of banned Western music. When the Americans did arrive to occupy Japan's cities, further exposure was made possible via the Americans' Armed Forces Network radio, to which the future composer listened avidly during recuperation from an illness. To Takemitsu, this music was "full of hope." Among his lasting influences were Debussy and Messiaen; Edgard Varèse, Cage, and Xenakis - composers with whom he shared a love for the unique and special qualities of sound itself.

The Requiem for string orchestra was one of Takemitsu's first major works. He wrote it in 1957, and its premiere in Osaka that year established him as a significant force in new music in Japan. Takemitsu wrote the piece as an elegy for Fumio Hayasaka, composer of film scores (most famously The Seven Samurai). Takemitsu's score, praised by Stravinsky for its sustained intensity, already reveals elements of the composer's future mature style, such as the supple use of tempos and dynamics within its flowing forward motion. The pitch and gestural language is clearly linked to the Second Viennese School, Webern in particular, but a lushness of texture recalls Messiaen.

Takemitsu wrote 93 film scores over forty years, including Kurosawa's Ran and several for Kobayashi and for Teshigahara. There is very little remove between his film work and his concert music, all of which bears the indelible stamp of his musical personality. He is perhaps the most important composer, along with Schnittke, to have successfully worked in both media. Three Film Scores is a short suite of string orchestra pieces that Takemitsu assembled in 1994 using passages from the music to José Torres (1959), The Face of Another (1966) and Black Rain (1989). The first performance of the suite was given by the English String Orchestra, William Boughton conducting, at the CINEMUSIC Festival in Switzerland in March 1995. José Torres, a short documentary film about the Puerto Rican boxer, was Takemitsu's first important film score and the beginning of his long collaboration with director Hiroshi Teshigahara. The "Music of Training and Rest" features syncopated, quasi-tango "training" music with the smooth, lush music of rest. Black Rain, directed by Sohei Imamura, is based on the Masuji Ibuse novel, which takes place in the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing. The cue here is the uneasy "Funeral Music." The "Waltz" from Teshigahara's The Face of Another captures the surreal nature of this tale from Kobo Abe's book.

Toru Takemitsu wrote November Steps in fulfillment of his most significant Western commission to that date, from the New York Philharmonic on the occasion of their 125th anniversary (which also resulted in Luciano Berio's Sinfonia). Seiji Ozawa was the natural choice to conduct the world premiere, since he was not only Takemitsu's most visible champion among well-known conductors of that time but was also a protégé of the New York Phil's then music director, Leonard Bernstein. Kinshi Tsuruta, biwa, and Katsuya Yokoyama, shakuhachi, were soloists in the first performance, which took place in Philharmonic Hall on November 9, 1967. Takemitsu had written his Eclipse for Tsuruta and Yokoyama the previous year, and it was Ozawa that suggested he revisit those instruments in his commissioned orchestral piece.

Of November Steps, Takemitsu wrote:

1. A composer should not be occupied by such things as how one blends traditional Japanese instruments with an orchestra. Two worlds of sound: biwa-shakuhachi and the orchestra. Through juxtaposition it is the difference between the two that should be emphasized.
2. To create several different audio foci is one aspect (an objective one) of composing. And to try to hear a specific voice among numerous sounds is yet another.
3. Sound in Western music progresses horizontally. But the sound of the shakuhachi rises vertically, like a tree.
4. Do you know that the ultimate achievement the shakuhachi master strives for in his performance is the re-creation of the sound of wind blowing through an old bamboo grove?
5. First concentrate on the simple act of listening. Only then can you comprehend the aspirations of the sounds themselves.
6. There is something suggestive in the biologists' report that the dolphins' communication takes place, not in their sounds, but in the length of silences between the sounds.
7. Like time zones on the globe, arrange the orchestra in several time zones - a spectrum of time.
8. A composition should not give the impression it is complete in itself. Which is more pleasurable, a precisely planned tour or a spontaneous trip?
9. Many contemporary composers have been building walls of sounds following their own clever devices. But then, who lives inside those rooms?
10. Eleven steps without any special melodic scheme. . .constantly swaying impulses, like those in a Noh drama.
11. November Steps, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary, premiered in November 1967 by that orchestra.*

The aphoristic and anecdotal style of these comments might be traced to the style of Cage's writings, but could as well come directly from the seemingly uninflected language of the Zen koan, a major influence on Cage. The eleven "steps," or structural divisions, in the work may also be a reflection of Cageian practice.

As Takemitsu writes, the actions of the orchestra and the Japanese instruments are kept largely separate. The composer - rather boldly in this high-profile commission - limits the role of the orchestra, focusing more than a minute at a time on either of the Japanese instruments in solo roles and on both in several duets, including one of more than seven minutes' duration dominating the second half of the twenty-minute work. Takemitsu heard these increasingly broad statements as another metaphor from nature, writing, "For me the sound of the biwa and the shakuhachi was to spread through the orchestra gradually enlarging, like waves of water." Some of the writing for these instruments would not be out of place in their traditional contexts, but the composer asks for extended techniques and sounds as well. The biwa and shakuhachi, already "other" to Western ears, have become new for all ears.

The brilliantly faceted music for the orchestra, most prominent at the beginning of the work, is, by contrast, relatively orthodox "avant garde" (pardon the oxymoron) for the middle 1960s, with hints of a twelve-tone pitch language, and also textures not too dissimilar to those found in music of Stockhausen and Xenakis.

Takemitsu's stage setup has the ensemble divided into two groups of strings, each with a harp nearby, with two groups of percussion, and brasses and woodwinds more or less as usual, in the middle rear of the stage. There are some antiphonal effects but generally one has the impression of passages arriving from various directions rather than from one large musical organism. By the onset of the orchestra's final, closing statement, the listener (and perhaps the orchestra itself) has been transformed by the music of the shakuhachi and biwa and hears something entirely different, somehow, than it was possible to hear at the start of November Steps.

* From Takemitsu's collected writings, Confronting Silence, translated by Yoshiko Kakudo and Glenn Glasow

Copyright 2004 Robert Kirzinger

Robert Kirzinger is an active composer who writes frequently for the Boston Symphony Orchestra program book and is editor of the program book for the annual Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music.