IMJS: Japanese Cultural Heritage Initiatives
Columbia University
Treasuring the Past・Enriching the Present・Transforming the Future
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Symposium: “Aesthetics in Contemporary Japanese Sound”
Friday, November 10, 2000 @ 5:15 pm - 7:30 pm
Demonstration on the Traditional Japanese Shō
Panel Discussion
Co-sponsored with the Donald Keene Center for Japanese Culture and Music from Japan.
FEATURING
John Rockwell, Music Critic, The New York Times
Mayumi Miyata, Shō Performer
Toshio Hosokawa, Composer
Karen Tanaka, Composer
Lois V Vierk, Composer
Sharon Ann Nakazato, Moderator & Interpreter
JOHN ROCKWELL, KEYNOTE SPEAKER
John Rockwell is the editor of the Arts and Leisure section of The New York Times. A writer, critic, arts administrator and journalist, he was born in Washington, D.C. in 1940 and raised in San Francisco. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts; Harvard College; the University of Munich; and the University of California at Berkeley, from which he holds a Ph.D. in German cultural history. Following extensive freelance activity in California, he worked for the Oakland Tribune (California) and the Los Angeles Times as a classical music and dance critic before joining The New York Times in 1972. From then until 1991, Mr. Rockwell was a classical music critic for the Times (music editor, 1980-1991), and from 1974 to 1980 he also served as chief rock critic. Between 1992 and 1994, he was based in Paris as the Times’s European cultural correspondent, covering all the arts, as well as serving as the paper’s principal reviewer of classical recordings. In the fall of 1994, Mr. Rockwell left the Times to become the first director of the Lincoln Center Festival, an annual international performing arts festival. He rejoined The New York Times as Arts and Leisure editor in early 1998, having already programmed the 1998 edition of the festival.
Mr. Rockwell has published two books, All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century, a study of American music from classical to jazz and rock that was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and Sinatra: An American Classic. He has contributed widely to magazines, anthologies and encyclopedias, among them The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll and The Virgil Thomson Reader, which he co-edited.
He is a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters and a member of the Executive Board of the College of Letters and Sciences of the University of California at Berkeley and of the Board of Overseers of Harvard University.
MAYUMI MIYATA, SHO PERFORMER
Mayumi Miyata, Japan’s foremost contemporary sho soloist, was first introduced to the United States at a 1987 recital presented by Music From Japan, and she has since received international acclaim for her artistry. Her instrument, the sho;, is a mouth organ introduced from China in the Nara period (A.D. 710-784) and is associated with gagaku, Japan’s court music. Ms. Miyata is active in promoting new gagaku pieces by Takemitsu, Ichiyanagi, Ishii, Eloy, Cage, Mefano, Yuasa, Hosokawa, Artaud, Staebler and Giuliano, many of which have been written especially for her.
In 1986, Ms. Miyata was the featured artist in Eloy’s four-hour work, “Anahata” (Creation), commissioned for the Festival d’Automne de Paris, and that same year was introduced in a concert series entitled, “Today’s Performer Series IV” in Japan. She is a member of the Tokyo Gakuso and Reigakusha and since 1979, has been taking part in gagaku performances at the National Theatre in Tokyo. In 1983, she was invited to perform as a soloist in the Japanese Arts Festival in six major European cities and also presented her first solo recital in Tokyo. She has given recitals throughout the world, at events including Darmstadt Summer Course, Frankfurt Festival, Donaueschinger Musiktage and Akiyoshidai International Contemporary Music Seminar & Festival. In addition to her appearance in 1987, Ms. Miyata participated in Music From Japan’s 1995 season as a featured performer in New York, Toronto, and Washington, D.C. and also appeared with Reigakusha in the Lincoln Center Festival in 1996.
Mayumi Miyata was born in Tokyo and began learning gagaku after studying as a piano major at Kunitachi College of Music. While still a student, she started to study the sho under Ono Tadamaro of the Imperial Household Agency. Since her debut as a soloist, she has continued to present the distinctive and scintillating sounds of the sho; to an appreciative and ever-growing audience.
THE MODERATOR & INTERPRETER
Sharon Ann Nakazato, who holds Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees from the University of Michigan, spent eight years studying and working in Japan. She worked for three years as English editor of The East, and has also published articles in both English and Japanese. Her specialties as translator include arts and cultural history, literature and Buddhist studies. She is a licensed teacher of shodo; (Japanese brush calligraphy) and has lectured on many topics in both English and Japanese. She is presently writing and teaching American language and culture to Japanese people and also Japanese language to Americans.
THE COMPOSERS
Toshio Hosokawa, composer, lecturer, and essayist in high repute throughout Europe and Japan, has been credited for creating “a dashing glossary of avant-garde techniques.” He was Composer-in-Residence at the Salzburg Mozarteum and has been a guest composer and lecturer at numerous contemporary music festivals in Europe.
The New York Times recently lauded Karen Tanaka as one of the outstanding young Japanese composers of our time, and also described her work as “dynamic and atmospheric.” A Paris-based composer, she is the recipient of commissions from the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Radio France. She studied composition with Miyoshi Akira in Tokyo, with Tristan Murail in Paris, and with Luciano Berio in Florence.
Lois V Vierk‘s new CD “River Beneath the River” was released by Tzadik Records earlier this year. While she has spent most of her career in New York City, her music has achieved an impressive international reputation. Ms. Vierk was commissioned by the Lincoln Center Festival to compose “Silversword” for the gagaku orchestra, Reigakusha of Tokyo, and by the Barbican Center to compose “River Beneath the River” for the Kronos Quartet. This piece has been performed by the Quartet many times. Music From Japan also commissioned her to compose for percussion and gagaku flute, ryuteki. Among the many other performers and presenters who have commissioned her are Bang On A Can Festival, Ensemble Modern, L’Art Pour L’Art, the Relâche Ensemble, pianists Ursula Oppens, Frederic Rzewski, Aki Takahashi, and Margaret Leng Tan, and accordionist Guy Klucevsek. Ms. Vierk studied gagaku for 10 years in Los Angeles with Mr. Suenobu Togi, formerly of Japan’s Gagaku Imperial Court Orchestra (Kunaicho; gakubu), and in Tokyo for two years with Mr. Sukeyasu Shiba of the same ensemble.
In conjunction with the Gagaku-Hōgaku Classical Japanese Music Curriculum and Performance Program at Columbia University, launched in September 2006, the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies presents several public gagaku concerts and instrumental workshops to introduce the ancient music of Japan to a greater audience at Columbia University and in New York.
Concerts
Leading gagaku artists are invited from Japan to perform at our New York concerts. Members of the renowned gagaku ensemble Reigakusha, such Mayumi Miyata (shō), Hitomi Nakamura (hichiriki), and Takeshi Sasamoto (ryūteki), have presented pieces from the classical repertory as well as contemporary compositions for the ancient gagaku instruments. The concerts are an important showcase for newly-commissioned works for gagaku instruments. At the March 2006 and February 2007 concerts, new compositions by Hiroya Miura, commissioned by the Institute for Medieval Japanese Studies, were given their world premieres. These musical gatherings are also an opportunity for collaboration between musicians and artists from Japan and the United States, as well as between performers of eastern and western instruments. In November 2006, the gagaku musicians and bugaku dancers of the Ono Gagaku Society of Tokyo performed with Shrine Celebrant Kagura Dancers from the International Shinto Foundation in New York.
Workshops
Visiting gagaku artists from Japan also lend their expertise by providing instruction for open instrumental workshops. Participants, including both beginners as well as professional musicians, gain hands-on experience with their choice of the three gagaku wind instruments: hichiriki, ryūteki, and shō.
Japanese court music (gagaku) is the oldest continuous orchestral music in the world today, with a history in Japan of more than 1300 years. The term gagaku itself, which means elegant or ethereal music, refers to a body of music that includes both dance (bugaku) and orchestral music (kangengaku) handed down over the centuries by professional court musicians and preserved today by musicians belonging to the Imperial Household Agency in Tokyo.
Gagaku can be divided into three categories according to origin: 1) indigenous vocal and dance genres, accompanied by instruments and employed in imperial and Shinto ceremonies; 2) instrumental music and dance imported from the Asian continent during the 5th to the 9thcenturies; and 3) vocalized poetry in Chinese or Japanese set to music from the 9th to the 12thcenturies. The best known and most frequently performed is the music of the second category, known as Tōgaku (if of Chinese and continental origin), or Komagaku (if of Korean origin). Classical Tōgaku pieces are performed by large instrumental ensembles of up to thirty musicians, consisting of shō (mouth organ), hichiriki (double-reed pipe), ryūteki (transverse flute), biwa (pear-shaped lute), koto (long zither), taiko (large drum), kakko (cylindrical, double-headed drum), and shōko (bronze chime). When accompanying bugaku dance, however, the Tōgaku ensemble consists only of winds and percussions.
Gagaku is comprised of many musical traditions and influences that traveled the Silk Road from the Middle East through Central Asia and Tibet, flourished in T’ang Dynasty China (618-907), and finally journeyed further to Korea and Japan. Although this musical heritage has been abandoned in many other countries, this ancient orchestral music continues to be performed and preserved in Japan, a country where foreign cultural imports were readily absorbed and where aspects of ancient high culture were revered and rarely abandoned. Without a doubt, gagaku, in tempo and even in certain melodies, is not today what it was in ancient Japan or on the continent, but in many ways, today’s gagaku may be the only living evidence of those ancient musical ensembles, their musical instruments, musical sounds, and the musical cosmology of the Asian continent and of ancient Japan.
Until at least the 1960’s, due in great part to the Imperial Household Agency’s mission to preserve permanently musical forms that are more than a millennium old, gagaku musical traditions were transmitted as faithfully as possible to their originals. Over the past few decades, however, some imperially-trained musicians have become increasingly aware that preservation alone is not enough to keep an art alive. Pioneers such as former Imperial Household Music Department member Sukeyasu Shiba, who created the Reigakusha gagaku ensemble outside of the court, have held an important role in training new artists. His and other similar ensembles are impacting the present-day international musical scene with their performances of gagaku compositions, both classic and contemporary.