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Over the last fifty years, the music of Jōji Yuasa has attained the zenith of international musical standards. A study of this great Japanese composer is long overdue. Persuasive and captivating, less “easy” than that of his lifetime friend Tōru Takemitsu, Yuasa’s music has also been a model for many young composers, both from Japan and further afield, thanks to the long period he spent teaching composition at the University of California, San Diego (1981–1994). This book serves to illuminate aspects of Yuasa’s work, intricately linked to deep, native roots which tend to be more opaque for western (and other) ears. It focusses on various aspects of Yuasa’s music as well as on the social, anthropological, aesthetic and critical contexts that have informed his compositional practice in the context of the postwar Japanese musical world. In a continual interior dialogue which includes Jean-Paul Sartre and Daisetzu T. Suzuki, Matsuo Bashō and William Faulkner, Henry Miller and Motokiyo Zeami, Yuasa’s avant-garde aesthetic project, western in conception, encounters the productive thought of an unambiguously Japanese aesthetic, i.e. that of Zen. An analysis of Yuasa’s main works will illustrate and complete the picture of Yuasa’s world. Yuasa’s works are placed at the centre of the most original of creative forces in the contemporary music world – a place where, for Yuasa, “in the same idea of creativity, there has to be an avant-garde component”.
In The Music Machine, Curtis Roads brings together 53 classic articles published in Computer Music Journal between 1980 and 1985.
Music of Japan Today examines cross-cultural confluences in contemporary Japanese art-music through multiple approaches from twenty international composers, performers, and scholars. Like the format of the MOJT symposia (1992-2007) held in the United States, the book is in two parts. In Part I, three award-winning Japanese composers discuss the construction of their compositional techniques and aesthetic orientations. Part II contains nineteen essays by scholars and creative musicians, arranged in a general chronological frame. The first section discusses connections of the music and ideas of Japanese composers during the time surrounding the Second World War to Japan’s politics; section two presents recent perspectives on the music and legacy of Japan’s most internationally renowned composer, Toru Takemitsu (1930-96). Section three investigates innovative, cross-cultural uses of Japanese and Western instruments (grouped by common instrumental families - voice, flutes, strings), shaped by historical traditions, physical design, and acoustic characteristics and constraints. Section four examines computer music by mid-career composers, and the final section looks at four current Japanese societies, within and “off-shore” Japan, and their music: spirituality and wind band music in Japan, avant-garde sound artists in Tokyo, Japanese composers in the UK, and the role of cell phone ringtones in the Japanese music market.
When we think of composers, we usually envision an isolated artist separate from the orchestra—someone alone in a study, surround by staff paper—and in Europe and America this image generally has been accurate. For most of Japan’s musical history, however, no such role existed—composition and performance were deeply intertwined. Only when Japan began to embrace Western culture in the late nineteenth century did the role of the composer emerge. In Composing Japanese Musical Modernity, Bonnie Wade uses an investigation of this new musical role to offer new insights not just into Japanese music but Japanese modernity at large and global cosmopolitan culture. Wade examines the short history of the composer in Japanese society, looking at the creative and economic opportunities that have sprung up around them—or that they forged—during Japan’s astonishingly fast modernization. She shows that modernist Japanese composers have not bought into the high modernist concept of the autonomous artist, instead remaining connected to the people. Articulating Japanese modernism in this way, Wade tells a larger story of international musical life, of the spaces in which tradition and modernity are able to meet and, ultimately, where modernity itself has been made.
First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Chou Wen-chung is one of the most influential musical figures of our time. His rich cultural background, his studies with Edgard Var and his interest in the genuine rapport between Eastern and Western musical traditions have been the major influences on his career. Although he is active in various artistic and cultural circles that include scholarship, education and cultural preservation, his major calling has always been composition. As a composer, Chou has created a group of works whose stylistic innovation and technical profundity are distinctive among composers of his generation. His music, which has received critical acclaim around the globe, documents his creative journey, especially in the realization of re-merger - the fusion of Eastern and Western music that has become a new mainstream in art music. Through extensive focus on sketch study, Eric Lai examines Chou's music to contribute to an understanding of his aesthetic orientation, his compositional technique, his role in the development of new music, and his influence upon the younger generation of composers.
Now updated and expanded with four new chapters, this book explores the history, theory, creation and analysis of electronic music.
Musicians are always quick to adopt and explore new technologies. The fast-paced changes wrought by electrification, from the microphone via the analogue synthesiser to the laptop computer, have led to a wide range of new musical styles and techniques. Electronic music has grown to a broad field of investigation, taking in historical movements such as musique concrète and elektronische Musik, and contemporary trends such as electronic dance music and electronica. The first edition of this book won the 2009 Nicolas Bessaraboff Prize as it brought together researchers at the forefront of the sonic explorations empowered by electronic technology to provide accessible and insightful overviews of core topics and uncover some hitherto less publicised corners of worldwide movements. This updated and expanded second edition includes four entirely new chapters, as well as new original statements from globally renowned artists of the electronic music scene, and celebrates a diverse array of technologies, practices and music.
The increasing interest in artistic research, especially in music, is throwing open doors to exciting ideas about how we generate new musical knowledge and understanding. This book examines the wide array of factors at play in innovative practice and how by treating it as research we can make new ideas more widely accessible. Three key ideas propel the book. First, it argues that artistic research comes from inside the practice and exists in a space that accommodates both objective and subjective observation and analyses because the researcher is the practitioner. It is a space for dialogue between apparently opposing binaries: the composer and the performer, the past and the present, the fixed and the fluid, the intellectual and the intuitive, the abstract and the embodied, the prepared and the spontaneous, the enduring and the transitory, and so on. It is not so much constructed in a logical, sequential manner in the way of the scientific method of doing research but more as a “braided” space, woven from many disparate elements. Second, the book articulates the notion that artistic research in music has its own verification procedures that need to be brought into the academy, especially in terms of the moderation of non-traditional research outputs, including the description of the criteria for allocation of research points for the purposes of data collection, as well as real world relevance and industry engagement. Third, by way of numerous examples of original and creative music making, it demonstrates in practical terms how exploration and experimentation functions as legitimate academic research. Many of the case studies deliberately cross boundaries that were previously assumed to be rigid and definite in order to blaze new musical trails, creating new collaborations and synergies.
What makes Japanese music sound Japanese? Each genre of Japan's pre-Western music (hogaku) morphed from the preceding one with singing at its foundation. In ancient Shinto prayers, words of power recited in a prescribed cadence communicated veneration and community needs to the divine spirit (kami). From the prayers, Japan's word-based music evolved into increasingly more sophisticated recitations with biwa, shamisen, and koto accompaniment. This examination reveals shortcomings in the typical interpretation of Japanese music from a pitch-based Western perspective and carefully explores how the quintessential musical elements of singing, instrumental accompaniment, scale, and format were transmitted from their Shinto inception through all of Japan's music. Japan's culture, with its unique iemoto system and teaching methods, served to exactly replicate Japan's music for centuries. Considering Japan's music in the context of its own culture, logic, and sources is essential to gaining a clear understanding and appreciation of Japan's music and dissipating the mystery of the music's "Japaneseness." Greater enjoyment of the music inevitably follows.