4. Probing the Compositional Relevance of Cultural Difference: Key Tendencies of East Asian New Music Since the 1950s

means, such as notes on paper or a discussion of theory. There are certain aspects of using instruments which are broader than one tradition of music. In tracing these techniques back to the original concepts we can find something hidden in these apparently very dif ferent traditions of Asia and [the] Pacific region. [...] I’m interested to start from how you produce the sound, instead of how you classify the sound. You make sound by contacting an instrument through your hand, finger or breath. Then there is a movement, a patterned movement, and you can start to combine those movements into larger units. [...] Let’s go back to the learning of music, the teacher and student, a one-to-one situation. The teacher plays a phrase, the student plays back a phrase. They play together. This is a copying, a synchronization of the movement of two dif ferent instruments. Another principle is response – you Example 3.19: Yūji Takahashi, The Song of the Blue Sword, Section D1 Copyright © 1980 by Yūji Takahashi, Tokyo III. Studies on the History and Analysis of New East Asian Music 231 play that and I play this in response. This is also a learning process which can be developed into the next phase, as in gamelan, for example [...].238 usually my approach to the traditional instruments is not from the written materials about register, timbres, playing method, etc., but through the actual collaboration with performers studying the hand movements, traditional disciplines. [...] i am trying to go back to the origin by changing the habitual playing methods accumulated through traditions. you may call it [...] anti-training. this is difficult without the cooperation of the performers for some period. also you cannot notate this part of the training on paper and send it [...] to the performers wherever they live in the world.239 These quotations make it clear how much the observational and ethnological approach helped Takahashi break away from the precarious polarities of cultural nationalism and cultural Westernization (to some degree represented by the position of the gendai hōgaku and preceding developments → III.1) as well as to liberate Japanese instruments from the widespread bias that assigns them a purely coloristic role: through careful observation and study of traditional performance practice, composer and performers reconstruct a kind of “physical archeology.” The performative approach becomes more concrete in that standardized sequences of body movements (kata) in ins trumental practice and the resulting sounds are considered complementary to each other. The confrontation with the most important musical instruments of bourgeois Edo culture (1600–1867), the arched zither koto and the long-necked lute shamisen, was the center of Takahashi’s attention for many years. Especially for Kazuko Takada (who died in 2007), and later also for Yumiko Tanaka and Yoko Nishi, a large number of works, for both solo instruments and chamber music ensembles emerged.240 Takahashi wrote that the shamisen was his preferred model because it was least suited for “modernization.”241 Through a tactile, sensualistic approach to sound production, Takahashi tried to overcome a fixed harmonic or tonal frame. His works, of course, do not spell out traditional forms. In Sangen sanju for shamisen solo (1992), for example, materials are eclectically combined from a variety of different genres to constitute the fictional genre “sanju” (the name refers to the well-known Korean semi-improvisational genre sanjo → III.5). With the help of a computer algorithm, Takahashi combined melodic variants of the koto repertoire, ji melodies from the narrative genre jōruri (→ V.1), elements from the repertoires of gagaku and gamelan as well as rāga and taqsīm models.242 The result does not sound eclectic at all, but suggests a close association of the traditional genres jiuta or nagauta with the shamisen’s 238 Takahashi, “Between Good and Evil,” 7–9. 239 Correspondence with the author, 16/06/2001 (original orthography has been retained). 240 Takahashi’s compositions for or with Takada include Kaze ga omote de yonde iru (The Wind is Calling Me Outside, 1986/94) for shamisen and voice, Sangen sanju for shamisen (1992), Nasuno ryōjō for shamisen and computer (1992), Nasuno kasane for shamisen, violin, and piano (1997) (→ III.5), and Tori mo tsukai ka for shamisen and chamber orchestra (1993, see above). Takahashi’s other works with Japanese instruments include While I Am Crossing the Bridge (1984), Thread Cogwheels (1990), Bosatsu kangen dennōdate (1992), Yume, Tori mo tsukai ka II, Hiru wa moetsukita, Kagehime no michiyuki (1993), Mimi no ho (1994 → IV.1), Ongaku no Oshie (1995), Mono-Gatari, Insomnia (1996), Samushiro, Ne monogatari, Kanashimi o sagasu ut, Sōjō rinzetsu (1997 → IV.1), Three Pieces for Ichigenkin, Ware wo tanomete konu wotoko, Momoka momoyo, Tsuginepu to itte mita, Oinaru shi no monogatari (1998), Aki no uta, Kotsu no utau (1999), Aomori gaeru, Sangen, Koto nado asobi (2000, see above), Palindrome (2001), To-i (2002), Sinubi (2007), Hanagatami 1 (2008), Ariake (2009), Tabibito ka herazu (2010), Yūgao no ie, Kasuka ni (2013), and Bai gui yexing huijuan (2014). 241 Takahashi, “Two Statements on Music,” 148. 242 See Takahashi, Tori no asobi. Musical Composition in the Context of Globalization 232 Example 3.20: Yūji Takahashi, Sangen sanju for shamisen, beginning Copyright © 1992 by Yūji Takahashi, Tokyo “incommensurable” timbre, which is hardly challenged by crosscultural melodic references (Ex. 3.20). In addition, Takahashi has taken a radical “ethnological” approach to some instruments and their repertoire based on critical source study, as exemplified by his shō duo Sōjō rinzetsu (1997), in which he implicitly criticized nationalist tendencies in Japanese music research (→ IV.1). The great potential of Takahashi’s basic attitude unfolds in his five works for archaic instruments, which were reconstructed in the context of a project led by Toshirō Kido (National III. Studies on the History and Analysis of New East Asian Music 233 Theater Tokyo).243 The interest in archaic instruments is consistent with Takahashi’s basic approach: it enables him to (re-)construct an instrumental idiom from instrumental movements for instruments whose playing practice has not been handed down to today through an unbroken tradition.244 In Unebiyama (1992) for five-string zither and incantation, for example, various stages of a “discovery” of the instrument by the musician are composed out (→ V.1): starting from elementary movements of the hand and fingers – the individual strings are explored one after the other in a careful tactile manner – the arpeggio over all five strings is suddenly “discovered” as a combination of these individual sounds, and the player is led into a trance-like state – a reference to the shamanistic context of the original instrument. For all his concentration on concrete aspects of performance practice, Takahashi’s composition is, on the whole, rather pluralistic. This is evident not least in the variety of contexts invoked by his music: his cautious treatment of the re-composition of European and Asian music and text materials, his intense engagement with Buddhist philosophy and practice in the 1990s, as well as his identification with artists such as José Maceda, Ossip Mandelstam, Pier Paolo Pasolini, or Sofia Gubaidulina, with whom aesthetic affinities are visible and to whom Takahashi dedicated works. The multifaceted relationship between aural tradition and writing in Takahashi’s œuvre, the complexity and originality of his intercultural references, and his negation of the simplifications of cultural essentialism assign him a prominent role within an intercultural history of twentieth-century music. Not least, his procedures make it clear how complex the task can be to place non-written components or various juxtaposed forms of transcription in a balanced and appropriate relationship to one another in an intercultural context. His scores mix elements of traditional Japanese notation with five-line staff notation and various verbal and graphic instructions in hybrid score forms in which the prescriptive element of conventional notation takes a back seat in favor of a documentary, descriptive, or physical-haptic iconography. This implies an adequately “informed” interpretation with reference to the “aural practice” thematized by the composer.