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March 15, 2007
UMBC Presents Music of Japan 2007
March 30, 31 and April 1, 2007
UMBC Fine Arts Recital Hall and Building
Three Day Festival and Symposium
Featuring Renowned Composers and Performers
Contact: Thomas Moore
Director of Arts & Culture
410-455-3370
tmoore@umbc.edu
 Note: You may view or download this release as a pdf file. |
The UMBC Department of Music presents the Music of Japan Festival and Symposium on March 30th, March 31st and April 1st, featuring performances and discussions of contemporary classical Japanese music and spotlighting the work of composers Hiroyuki Yamamoto, Shirotomo Aizawa and Hiroyuki Itoh. Performers will include renowned shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) player Retsuzan Tanabe (pictured left).
Western art music has existed for a relatively short time in Japan—it is only since the 1950s, countering Japan’s rush to adopt all that is “Western,” that some composers, led by Yuasa, Mayuzumi, Takemitsu and Ichiyanagi, began to move away from stylistic modeling of nineteenth-century European forms and twentieth-century dodecaphony towards a more individualistic approach. Concerned with reflecting philosophical and musical elements from their own culture, they began to discover and develop their “own music.” The music of these artists reflects a new global confluence of multiple cultures—a powerful cross-fertilization of aesthetics and musical characteristics from both East and West. The music is reflective of a variety of aspects of contemporary Japanese and Western societies, while at the same time deeply rooted in a traditional culture that has evolved over many years.
In Music of Japan Today 2007, UMBC will host a three-day symposium of performances, lecture-recitals, panel discussions, and paper presentations on topics that concern Japanese music from the widest possible range of disciplines and expertise.Three guest composers of international stature will participate in the symposium: Hiroyuki Itoh, a winner of international composition prizes in Europe and Japan (including the prestigious Akutagawa Award), has been commissioned and performed by major ensembles including the New Japan Philharmonic, the Nieuw Ensemble, and the Arditti Quartet; Hiroyuki Yamamoto, whose works have been performed at Forum ’91 (Montreal), Gaudeamus Music Week ’94 (Holland), and ISCM World Music Days (2000 in Luxembourg and 2001 in Yokohama), has received prizes for his work, including the Japan Music Competition, Toru Takemitsu Composition Award, and Akutagawa Award; and Shirotomo Aizawa, winner of an Ataka Prize, and composition prize from the National Theater in Japan. He has studied composition in Tokyo, Berlin, and Vienna, and conducting with Seiji Ozawa, among others.
Performances during the symposium will include a broad range of works for different genres (solo instrument, chamber music, computer and electronic music, traditional instruments) by Itoh, Yamamoto, and Aizawa, as well as other Japanese composers. They will include premieres of new works by the guest composers. The performers for these concerts will include faculty and students of the UMBC Department of Music, and guest musicians from the Baltimore/Washington DC area and other international new music centers. This symposium is the sixth in a series of events since 1992 to address Japanese and other Asian musics, organized by Kazuko Tanosaki and E. Michael Richards.
Complete schedule of events:
| Friday, March 30, UMBC Fine Arts Building | |||
| 9:00 a.m. | David G. Hebert, Boston University | “Alchemy of Brass: Spirituality and Wind Music in Japan” | |
| 9:35 | Colin Holter, University of Illinois | “Structural Integration of Television Phenomena in Joji Yuasa’s Observations on Weather Forecasts” | |
| 10:10 | Stacey Fraser, Northern State University | “Time Song II: Howling through Time” | |
| 10:45 | Yumi Hara Cawkwell, University of East London | “Japanese Composers in the Multicultural U.K.: Identity Tactics and Self-Exoticism” | |
| 11:20 | Airi Yoshioka, UMBC | “Ma (sense of time and space) as Compositional Tool” | |
| 1:40 p.m. | Antares Boyle, Sydney Conservatorium | “Flute Works of Toshio Hosokawa” | |
| 2:25 | Marty Regan, University of Hawaii, Manoa | “Composing for Shakuhachi and 21-String Koto” | |
| 3:00 | David Pacun, Ithaca College | “Style and Politics in Kosaku Yamada’s Folksong Arrangements, 1917-1950” | |
| 3:35 | Fuyuko Fukunaka, Keio University, Tokyo | “A Japanese Zero-Hour? Postwar Music and the Re-Making of the Past” | |
| 4:25 | Recital by Retsuzan Tanabe, shakuhachi | ||
| 5:10 | Concert of Computer Music from Japan | ||
| Wave Mechanics II (Airi Yoshioka, violin) | Karen Tanaka | ||
| Wandering Finger | Daichi Ando | ||
| Figure in Movement | Shintaro Imai | ||
| Labyrinth | Takayuki Rai | ||
| Koto Etude | Jean Ahn | ||
| Night Ascends from the Ear like a Butterfly | Hideko Kawamoto | ||
| Die Passion der Matthaus-Passion | Hiroyuki Yamamoto | ||
| Shizuku no Suzushi | Naotoshi Osaka | ||
| Robotic Music (video) | Suguru Goto | ||
| Sensors_Sonics_Sights (video) | Atau Tanaka | ||
| 8:30 | Student Concert featuring the UMBC Chamber Players, the UMBC Percussion Ensemble and UMBC Certificate Students | ||
| Herbstlied | Tchaikovsky (arr. Toru Takemitsu) | ||
| Sonatine | Yoritsune Matsudaira | ||
| Dawn | Nagako Konishi | ||
| Three Etudes from Japanese Folk Tunes | Shin Kawabe | ||
| Music of Electric Metronomes | Toshi Ichiyanagi | ||
| Peninsula | Hiroyuki Yamamoto | ||
| Rain Tree Sketch I & II | Toru Takemitsu | ||
| Monologue | Akira Nishimura | ||
| Saturday, March 31, UMBC Fine Arts Building | |||
| 9:00 a.m. | Yann Leblanc, Lumiere Lyon 2 Universite, France | “Zenshin kore mimi nari: To be all ears” | |
| 9:35 | Lorraine Plourde, Columbia University | “Modes of Listening in Tokyo’s Avant-Garde Music Community” | |
| 10:10 | Noriko Manabe, CUNY Graduate Center | “Ring My Bell: Cell Phones and the Japanese Music Market” | |
| 10:45 | Hideaki Onishi , National University of Singapore | “Forte’s Set Complex, My Superset/Subset Network: A Set-Theoretical Excursion into Takemitsu’s Japanese Garden” | |
| 11:20 | Peter Burt, The Open University, Vienna | “Music in the Bathtub: Reading Takemitsu’s Music Through Western Criticism” | |
| 1:15 p.m. | Misuko Ono, Kunitachi College of Music, Tokyo | “Beyond Tradition: Composer Toru Takemitsu and the Sound of sawari” | |
| 1:50 | Lecture by Guest Composer Hiroyuki Yamamoto: “The Grey Area of Music and Hearing” | ||
| 2:35 | Lecture by Guest Composer Shirotomo Aizawa: “Hogaku and Western Music Through the Shakuhachi” | ||
| 3:20 | Lecture by Guest Composer Hiroyuki Itoh: “Swaying Time, Trembling Time” | ||
| 4:15 | Margaret Lucia, Shippensburg University | “Transitions in the Piano Music of Keiko Fujiie” | |
| 4:50 | Shuri Okajima, University of Arizona | “A Comparison of the Works for Flute, Viola, and Harp by Toru Takemitsu and Claude Debussy” | |
| 5:25 | John Welsh, University of Maryland, College Park | “Kongoseki/Kongoseki Variations” | |
| 8:00 | Concert featuring performances by UMBC faculty and four world premieres | ||
| Salamander | Hiroyuki Itoh | ||
| Out of a Blaze of Light | Hiroyuki Itoh | ||
| The Wedge is Struck, the Fog Remains | Hiroyuki Yamamoto | ||
| Saxophone The Relay | Hiroyuki Yamamoto | ||
| Time of Time | Shirotomo Aizawa | ||
| Deposition | Shirotomo Aizawa | ||
| 9:15 | Panel Discussion with guest composers (immediately following the concert) | ||
| Sunday, April 1, Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. | |||
| 1:00 p.m. | Encore presentation of the 8:00 p.m. Saturday evening concert, with panel discussion to follow | ||
Admission
Admission to all events is free.
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Posted by tmoore at March 15, 2007 2:15 PM