Hear chamber music by Toru Takemitsu, considered the greatest 20th century Japanese classical music composer, and the work of distinguished living composer, Joji Yuasa whose Solitude was written in memory of Takemitsu. Fluidity and power mark the energetic performance of percussion ensemble Sonoma County Taiko, who will share the primal rhythms of this Japanese cultural artform.

 

Arrive early to see exhibits of historical photos and artifacts as well as a documentary film that tells the story of cultural diversity and interdependence between the Japanese American and Caucasian communities in Sonoma County before, during and after the war.

The performance will be introduced by journalist and local historian Gaye LeBaron and Marie Sugiyama, a local resident who was interned at Amache camp.

Underwritten by Sonoma County Japanese American Citizens League
Festival of Remembrance series is made possible by The James Irvine Foundation

 

The Festival of Remembrance is a collaborative community event that encourages audiences and performers to examine their understanding of these significant historical events in light of the evocative music presented on stage.

Program Notes
by: Steven Ledbetter

TAKEMITSU:Quatrain II, for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano

Toru Takemitsu was one of Japan’s best-known composers, both at home in Japan and in the West. His career came about as an unlikely result of an accident that occurred when he was sixteen. While mountain climbing, he dropped his camera into a waterfall. In trying to retrieve it, he caught pneumonia, and was forced to spend a long period convalescing at home. There he listened to music on the radio for hours on end and—though he had never studied music up to that time—decided to be a composer. He bought scores and taught himself to play the piano. Though he became the private pupil of Kosuji Kiyose at the age of eighteen, he is largely self-taught as a composer. Within three years he had organized Tokyo’s Experimental Workshop, a society for the performance of avant garde music, and in 1966 he created, with Seiji Ozawa and Toshi Ichiyanagi, the group Orchestral Space.

Takemitsu’s earlier music made fleeting obeisance to the expressionism of the second Viennese school and still more to the melodic and harmonic gestures of French music from Debussy to Messiaen. But for the most part his music is entirely sui generis. He does not concern himself with traditional theory or musical structures. His rhythms are irregular and very flexible. His harmonies are not functional. For the most part, he has been interested in timbre and texture, in the most varied and delicate colors of sound—and, as a corollary, with silence. In this respect his principle Western influence comes from French music. Much of his music finds inspiration in poetry, especially the work of his favorite writer, Mahota Ooka, who is a contemporary of the composer’s.

Takemitsu’s earliest large work, Requiem for string orchestra (1957), was heard in 1959 by Igor Stravinsky, who declared it to be a masterpiece. This came at a time when the young composer was still regarded as an ill-educated upstart, but Stravinsky’s praise played a vital role in the building of Takemitsu’s career, because it caused many to reconsider his music and to find in it qualities that had previously eluded them. After giving lectures with John Cage at the East-West Center in Hawaii in 1964, Takemitsu staged a series of “events” in Tokyo in collaboration with Cage and others. At the same time, he became interested anew in such traditional Japanese instruments as the biwa and the shakuhachi. He used the biwa in his 1962 film score Seppuku and later employed both instruments in a sort of double concerto called November Steps, composed in 1967 for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic. Many other film scores have come from his pen, including music for the well-known 1964 film Woman of the Dunes and the highly acclaimed Ran, a Japanese version of King Lear, by the distinguished director Akira Kurosawa. In these, and in a large output of pieces for orchestra and for various instrumental combinations, Takemitsu showed the ability to write in whatever style was required by the character and setting of the film, often fusing Asian musical gestures with those from the West in a language that is personal and idiomatic.

Inspiration from nature has for centuries been one of the most characteristic features of Japanese art, whether in poetry or the visual arts or—as so often in Takemitsu’s work—music. He found a kindred spirit in Claude Debussy, whose use of color and light, rather than line, as a basic approach, and whose frequent translation of visual images into musical form, were most congenial to Takemitsu. A quick survey of titles makes clear his passion for evocations of nature (sometimes through the mediation of lines of poetry): Rain Coming, Garden Rain, Rain Spell, Waterways, Waves, Rain Tree, Rain Dreaming, Water Music, Music of Trees, Tree Line, And Then I Knew ’Twas Wind, Eucalypts.

Quatrain II is an arrangement of a work that Takemitsu originally composed in 1975 with the title Quatrain, which was for the chamber group Tashi and symphony orchestra. That version was premiered in Tokyo in 1975 by Seiji Ozawa and the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra with the American ensemble Tashi. In 1977 Takemitsu reworked the piece for quartet alone, maintaining the makeup of Tashi’s instrumentation. The piece is an homage to Messaien (whose Quartet for the End of Time calls for the same combination of instruments), while at the same time it took shape in the composer’s mind in a form based on a Japanese style of scroll painting called emaki--a series of scenes on a long scroll, in which each figure is independent but is nonetheless thoroughly interlocked with its neighbor.

YOJI YUASA:Solitude in Memoriam T.T., for piano, violin, and cello

Yoji Yuasa was born in Koriyama, Japan, in the year before Toru Takemitsu. He began studying composition on his own at the age of 15. In 1948 he moved to Tokyo, where, three years later, he joined with a group of young Japanese musicians (including Toru Takemitsu), painters, photographers, musicologists, and others to form an experimental laboratory (Jikken Kobo) for interdisciplinary work. Thus from his earliest professional years, he was affiliated with Takemitsu. Like most musicians of his generation he studied the work of Schoenberg, Webern, Bartók, and Messiaen, drawing from them specific lessons for his own music, but he also used them in his own encounter with traditional Japanese music, certain aspects of Zen Buddhism, and especially the Noh drama.

From 1981 to 1994 he taught at the University of California in San Diego, and is now an emeritus professor there.

Solitude in Memoriam T.T. was one of two works commissioned by the Japan Society for a memorial concert in New York’s Merkin Hall in February 1997, some months after Takemitsu’s death (the other was by American composer Lukas Foss). These new works, presented among a selection of Takemitsu’s own pieces, played in chronological order, aimed not only to honor the late composer, but to reflect aspects of his own music in the new work.

Yuasa’s Solitude is an elegy, mournful in its basic character, fusing traditional Japanese elements with virtuosic outbursts, but mostly sustained and thoughtful.