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PROGRAM NOTES by Klay and Karen Woodworth Tōru Takemitsu Dream/Window Tōru Takemitsu, primarily a self-taught composer, spent the first seven years of his life in the Japanese colony of Dalian in China where he spent many hours listening to early American jazz on his father’s gramophone. He returned to Japan to attend elementary school but his formal education ended when he was conscripted in 1944. It was the end of the war (the Japanese surrendered on September 2, 1945) and young conscripts were housed in rough barracks in deep mountain caves. When Takemitsu decided he would become a composer at age sixteen, occupied Japan was as flooded with Western culture as it was with Allied soldiers. Although he was revolted by everything that had been co-opted by the Japanese war machine, including traditional Japanese music, he was inspired by the Western music on the radio and was able to study musical scores in the library of the American military base where he worked. He educated himself through saturation — making musical friends, joining a community chorus, and gaining access to the piano in the base PX after hours. Later in life he would claim the works of Debussy and Messiaen were the principal musical influences of these early years, although he credited a piano piece by César Frank as having led him to devote himself to composition. He released his first composition for public performance in 1950. His works through the early 1960s followed an experimental vein as he explored irregular meters, employed extremes of timbre and register, and turned to electronics for a time. American composer John Cage, a long-time devotee of the Zen master Daisetzu Suzuki, helped Takemitsu to a new appreciation for traditional Japanese culture. This reintegration proved to be a font of inspiration for Takemitsu for the rest of his career. While Tōru Takemitsu is very much a twentieth-century composer with all the complications that implies, his bridging of East and West and modern and traditional often gives the audience several ways to approach his work. Peter Burt uses a very powerful phrase in discussing Tōru Takemitsu’s music of the 1980s — “towards the sea of tonality.” It gives us both historic and stylistic references through which we can try to grasp a piece like Dream/Window. First, as noted above, Takemitsu readily admitted to being influenced by the musical Impressionists. Like Debussy, Takemitsu often turned to either water or dreams for inspiration when writing a piece. Both of these evocative ideas allow for disjuncture and space when used for musical expression. In Dream/Window, Takemitsu incorporated sonic space but also used physical stage space to create sound groupings. Takemitsu maintained control of his musical materials in Dream/Window in two ways. The first is a short rhythmic motif initially heard sweeping through the entire orchestral range. The second is the tonal area of D, usually presented as a pedal sonority anchoring the repeating motives. Japanese essayist Noriko Ohtake adds these thoughts: A dream is a partial glimpse of one’s imagination; likewise, scenery viewed through a window is a partial impression of nature. From a window, one can fantasize the rest of the world; from a dream, one can create (‘distort’) a new vision of reality. Dream/Window was commissioned for the sixtieth anniversary of the Kyoto Shinkin Bank in 1985. Ottorino Respighi Gli Ucceli Ottorino Respighi was born in Bologna and entered that city’s Liceo Musicale at the age of 12. He finished his formal studies and began a career as a professional musician in 1901. Taking a position as a violist with the St. Petersburg Opera gave him the opportunity to study with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov for two years. He also worked in Berlin for a season, which allowed him to attend lectures on composition given by Max Bruch. Away from Italy, Respighi absorbed the many musical elements swirling around Europe in the first decades of the last century. Respighi joined the faculty of the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome in 1913 and made that city his new home. He served as the conservatory’s director for two years, but had turned to composition as a vocation by 1926. In the last decade of his life he conducted his music with orchestras around the world and served as an accompanist for singers. Those familiar with Respighi’s music will know that he was an avid historian as well as a talented composer and orchestrator. Almost all of his popular works have some kind of historic allusion if not a direct correlation to ancient sources. The little suite Gli Ucceli (“The Birds” – written in 1927) is one of the works in which Respighi borrows directly from the past. The pieces in Gli Ucceli originated in collections of keyboard pieces from the late seventeenth century. La colomba (“The Dove”) is borrowed from music by Jacques de Gallot. La gallina (“The Hen”) comes from a popular piece by Jean-Philippe Rameau. L’usignuolo (“The Nightingale”) is from the music of “an anonymous seventeenth-century Englishman.” Finally, Il cucù (“The Cuckoo”) is from music by Bernardo Pasquini. Respighi also leaned on Pasquini for material for the opening Preludio, although it introduces themes from the other movements as well. Respighi gives these little harpsichord pieces wings through light and engaging orchestration that features woodwinds and high brass. Akira Ifukube Ritmica ostinata Akira Ifukube was the third son of a Shinto priest on the northern island of Hokkaidō, where he was influenced by his own people (Japanese) and the native population of the island, known as the Ainu. His father did not want him to pursue a career in music, so Ifukube taught himself to play the violin by listening to recordings of Fritz Kreisler. Radio performances of Igor Stravinsky’s music (notably the Rite of Spring) led Ifukube to take up composition at the age of fourteen. Ifukube studied forestry at Hokkaidō University and completed his studies with a treatise on the acoustics of wood. His career in forestry was cut short by exposure to x-rays during experiments on wood strength and elasticity. Ifukube spent almost a year recovering from radiation sickness. Hospitalized when the Japanese surrendered to the Americans, he was pleasantly surprised to hear one of his marches being played over the radio by the military band at the ceremonies. It was just one sign that pointed him toward taking up composition and teaching full time. Ifukube taught at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and at the Tokyo College of Music, eventually serving as the college president and head of its ethnomusicology department. Although his many pieces for the concert hall are highly respected, Ifukube is primarily famous for his film music. He created the scores for over 250 Japanese films — most notably the “Godzilla” series, for which he not only wrote the music but also used his training in acoustics to invent sound effects (including the monster’s unique roar). Ifukube’s Ritmica ostinata is an exciting piece that is full of energy. The composer said the following about the piece: Ritmica ostinata means a rhythmic figure that is persistently repeated throughout a composition. Japanese traditional music is based on rhythmic patterns of even-numbered beats (an equivalent of simple duple or quadruple meter in Western music); on the other hand, the basic premise of Japanese poetry is 5-7 or 7-5 syllables. In this composition, I adopt rhythmic motives derived from Japanese poetry and a hexagonic mode (6-note scale), similar to those common in Japanese music. By combining those two different artistic elements and repeating them persistently, I intend to reveal our collective unconscious as a nation. Strict adherence to those self-imposed restrictions is a reflection of my deep-rooted admiration for an aphorism by Leonardo de Vinci: Force lives by restriction and dies from liberty. This concertino works through repetition of rhythm and contrast of dynamics. The piano is used as a percussion instrument. Listening to Ritmica ostinata is reminiscent of watching Kodo drummers perform. Also from the northern reaches of Japan, these drum teams strike extremely complicated rhythmic patterns that range from a whisper to bone-jarring thunder in a second. Ifukube seems to tap the same aesthetic in this piece. Variety is produced by the alternation of soft and loud, but continuity is provided by the rhythmic motives described above. One of the composer’s most popular concert pieces, Ritmica ostinata was given its premiere by pianist Yutaka Kanai and the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra in 1961. Paul Hindemith Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber The twentieth century will be a gold mine for future cultural historians. It was replete with artists who followed the avant-garde to fame and notoriety, and others who kept to a conventional track and ended their days in obscurity. In contrast, a handful of stubborn individuals simply followed their own muse. Paul Hindemith belongs to this last group. Hindemith received a conservatory education in Frankfurt and began a career as a talented string player, working both as a violinist and violist. He became the concertmaster of the Frankfurt Opera orchestra and violist with the Amar-Hindemith Quartet. He began writing music in the Expressionist style popular in Germany in the early part of the century and gained a certain notoriety for his operas. As it turned out, these operas led to official sanctions by the Nazis. Hindemith found himself working in Turkey and eventually emigrating, rather reluctantly, to America. His chamber music of the same time, though, was looking back to earlier models instead of following the Expressionists into atonality. Hindemith felt that there was a natural, scientific basis to using a tonal system in music and that moves by his contemporaries to expand musical expression beyond tonal structures were simply illogical. As he became a teacher in Berlin and later at Yale, he started to codify his thoughts on music theory; his theoretical writings eventually became the multi-volume text The Craft of Musical Composition. In 1953, Hindemith bought a home in Switzerland and returned to Europe. He spent the last years of his life very busy as a guest conductor and lecturer. His final works seem to embrace the transcendence of music—a Mass for unaccompanied mixed chorus, and the opera Die Harmonie der Welt that tried to capture Johannes Kepler’s “music of the spheres.” The Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber is one of Hindemith’s best-known works. At about the time Hindemith was establishing his tenure at Yale, he was working on a series of ballet scores. One of the projects suggested by his collaborator Léonide Massine was to use the piano music of Carl Maria von Weber. The oddness of creating ballet from fairly obscure chamber music by a composer best known for dramatic stage works might have given Hindemith a hint that the project was not going to work out. Hindemith produced a score, but could not resist using a theme from one of Weber’s operas. His music also went beyond the mere arrangements or orchestrations that Massine had in mind, and the composer and the impresario parted ways. Three years later Hindemith resurrected the Weber material and crafted it into a concert suite. The second movement is an extensive fantasy based on a rather small fragment from Weber’s little-known incidental music for Turandot (not to be confused with Puccini’s much-performed opera on the same story). The other three movements transform whole piano duets by Weber. Bright and accessible, the Symphonic Metamorphoses verifies everything Hindemith predicted for the continuation of music in the future. © 2008 Klayton Woodworth and Karen M. Woodworth |