Vol. 01 Contemporary Music Festival
Programme Notes

The technique of bringing church modes (the Gregorian modes) into jazz was introduced to the wider world in 1959 with Miles Davis's album Kind of Blue, and went on to exert a deep influence on later modern jazz. At a time when bebop was breaking chords down into ever finer subdivisions, themes and improvised lines built around scales rather than chord changes must have felt strikingly new.

All three pieces in Suite: MIDTOWN EAST are written in twelve-bar blues form, repeated in a fixed pattern. The harmonic flow, however, departs from the standard blues progression: it is built around minor-seventh chords that carry the colour of the Dorian mode, and it sets out the impression of New York that I carry inside me.

This work draws on the Tale of the Heike and the Battle of Dan-no-ura.

I still remember the strange feeling that came over me the first time I visited the Kanmon Strait — its raw, unforgiving landscape. What a fitting place for being tossed about by fate.

When I came to think about the chamber-ensemble forces, I wanted music in which each instrument is, in turn, the protagonist; and I wanted to learn from the great composers who came before me. That led me to choose the form of the chamber concerto.

The piece traces the rise and fall told and retold across generations, alongside the figure of the sea — of nature — indifferent to whether human beings live or die.

If Bach and Beethoven took German folk song as a foundation, then surely Japanese composers should begin from Japanese folk song — that is what I believed all through middle and high school. Putting it into practice, however, turned out to be extraordinarily difficult. I sketched this piece as a high-school student, but it was not finished until I was twenty. I could not make it sound Japanese at all; Copland's manner had pushed its way in, vivid and unmistakable.

At Tokyo University of the Arts there was a class called "Orchestration", and twice a year, students who submitted a work would have it sight-read by the in-house professional orchestra. There I sat beside the lecturer, Toshiro Mayuzumi, score in hand, and listened to the sight-reading together with him.

Maestro Mayuzumi seemed quite taken with the piece, and asked me, "Are you fond of Ives?" I was very interested in Ives at the time, but no scores or recordings of his music were available at any nearby library; even glimpsing them was extremely difficult, and I knew next to nothing. Perhaps the way the piece is stuffed throughout with all sorts of disparate material reminded him of Ives.

The piece is laid out as a rhapsody: the principal theme — heard as a kind of "don-ta-ka-tā" rhythm — is followed by the Miyazaki folk song Hietsuki-bushi, and then a transformation of the chorus of Bamba Odori. After a brief development Hietsuki-bushi returns, and finally Bamba Odori turns into a samba and brings the work to a close.

In 2003 I appeared as a violinist with a local group at the Kitakyushu Music Festival, and was asked whether I might write a short piece for the occasion. Around the same time, the wind ensemble of my old school, Nagasaki Nishi High School, asked me for a piece for their annual concert. From 1999 onward, Izaino — that is, Harada — had also been a member of a society called "Hakata Gaku", and as part of its fifth-anniversary plans there was talk of "creating and presenting a new work that combines noh theatre with orchestra" at ACROS Fukuoka. I covered all of these requests with this single piece, which is why versions exist for piano quintet, wind ensemble, and orchestra. Later, an expanded orchestral version was prepared for performance in Russia, and tonight's reading will be the fifth.

Among the songs sung at celebratory gatherings in the Hakata district is the Hakata Iwai-uta (also known as Iwai Medeta), in which a call of "ē-i-shō-e!" rings out. That motif is quoted throughout the work, which sets the lively bustle of the Hakata streets against, by contrast, a serene inner world.

The title was originally that of a new noh play I was hoping to write. The libretto for the noh, however, kept being rewritten, and in the end the doll maker disappeared from it altogether.

This piece weaves the Japanese works Etenraku and Furusato through the Korean folk song Doraji. I wrote it in anticipation of a possible joint performance between Busan National University of Education and the Fukuoka University of Education orchestra, so technically it is on the easier side. Sadly that performance never came to pass, but it was a small discovery — and a meaningful experience for me — that Doraji and Furusato can in fact be played simultaneously and somehow work. The Korean title reads "To-he Myong-hyang", which we usually shortened to "Tohe".

Lining up three pieces from such different periods this time, I find that it has also given me a fresh look at my own approach.

In a book by Romain Rolland that I read in high school, there was a sentence to the effect that "however new a work may be, somewhere in it there must remain something the listener already knows". (It was probably from Jean-Christophe, which I never managed to finish.) That sentence may by now have become a kind of personal credo.

Then there is melody and motivic writing built from combinations of fourths and seconds. "The third feels un-Japanese," my ear keeps telling me. How to bring it into a comfortable working relationship with the triad has come to feel like a problem for the rest of my life. I close with my deepest thanks to everyone who has joined this occasion.