17-18 December 2022 - utamakura 7 for cello and dancer
04/11/22 16:58
Atelier Jaku will present the latest piece in my utamakura series, utamakura 7: Shiogama in two concerts in Tokyo on 17 and 18 December 2022. There will also be a free workshop performance in Fukuoka on 11 December 2022. Please check for details at the atelier jaku home page, and purchase tickets for the Tokyo concerts at Peatix here.
17 September 2022 - Ro for piano
12/09/22 05:04
Cheryl Duvall will premiere my concert-length piano solo Ro (inspired by my studies of Konparu Zenchiku’s nō aesthetics) at the Canadian Music Centre in Toronto on Saturday, 17 September at 8pm.
Tickets can be purchased directly from the Canadian Music Centre.
If you're not in Toronto, you can watch the livestream on YouTube.
Tickets can be purchased directly from the Canadian Music Centre.
If you're not in Toronto, you can watch the livestream on YouTube.
Shō and u: lecture at IRCAM 15 March 2022
11/03/22 09:59
Shō and u: An exploration of physical and generic limitations through a decade of collaboration with Ko Ishikawa
I will be giving a lecture about my own works for shō and u at IRCAM in Paris (I will be joining remotely) on 15 March 2022. My lecture will be followed by a lecture analysing my piece Fallings (2016) for shō (u), viola, and cello, given by musicologist François-Xavier Féron. My lecture will be in English, Féron's in French.
You can watch the archived recording of the lectures below, or check IRCAM's webpage.
My complete works for shō and u (in solo or chamber settings) are:
Spectral (for Kazuo Ohno) (2012)
fallen fragments (2015)
Fallings (2016)
Stravaig (2017)
Descants 1 (2020)
Click the image below to see the full 3-page pdf.
Programme séminaire 13_15.03.2022
I will be giving a lecture about my own works for shō and u at IRCAM in Paris (I will be joining remotely) on 15 March 2022. My lecture will be followed by a lecture analysing my piece Fallings (2016) for shō (u), viola, and cello, given by musicologist François-Xavier Féron. My lecture will be in English, Féron's in French.
You can watch the archived recording of the lectures below, or check IRCAM's webpage.
My complete works for shō and u (in solo or chamber settings) are:
Spectral (for Kazuo Ohno) (2012)
fallen fragments (2015)
Fallings (2016)
Stravaig (2017)
Descants 1 (2020)
Click the image below to see the full 3-page pdf.
Programme séminaire 13_15.03.2022
Feldman meets freq
11/02/22 09:55
From 18-20 Feb, a series of five concerts will be held in the Acoustics Building of the Faculty of Arts and Engineering of Kyushu University. 'Feldman meets freq' focusses on musicians from Fukuoka who have been influenced by Morton Feldman (and the surrounding composers).
Support: Asahi Group Arts Foundation, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research Designing the experience of listening to sound as the contact point between two cultures [19K21615].
Support: Asahi Group Arts Foundation, Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research Designing the experience of listening to sound as the contact point between two cultures [19K21615].
New paper out
04/03/21 13:09
My paper 'Field Recording and the Re-enchantment of the World: An Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Approach' focussing on Tsunoda Toshiya's Somashikiba (2016) was published 27 February 2021 in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism.
Abstract
Nonfictional field recording is a genre of music (sound art) which offers a glimpse of art beyond our late-capitalist age. The ongoing ecocide which we, in a state of abject detachment, are witnessing and abetting calls out for artists to reconnect and reengage with the nonhuman world that has been deemed valueless by our civilization. Countering the disenchantment of nature wrought by scientism, human-centrism, and above all capitalism necessitates a dissolving of the barriers we set up between ourselves and our environment, a task which can be only accomplished via religion or art: an art—like field recording—which affords reconnecting its audience with the enchantment of the ignored world surrounding them. In this article, Toshiya Tsunoda’s exemplary Somashikiba (2016)—recorded in locations forgotten by civilization—will be examined via interpretive tools adapted from Ueda Shizuteru’s Kyoto School aesthetics and Takahashi Mutsuo’s poetics. Ueda’s philosophy offers a way of understanding perception which eliminates the subject-object division. Takahashi’s project of recovering the spirituality of place through poetry is a model of historically and politically engaged art. Looking, as these contemporary Japanese thinkers have done, to the precapitalist, pre-formalist past to rediscover (sound) art’s function as a medium which reconfigures the listener’s perception of reality, I argue for the urgency of sound art such as Tsunoda’s which aids in the re-enchantment of the world to a future beyond capitalist, humanist “civilization.”
Abstract
Nonfictional field recording is a genre of music (sound art) which offers a glimpse of art beyond our late-capitalist age. The ongoing ecocide which we, in a state of abject detachment, are witnessing and abetting calls out for artists to reconnect and reengage with the nonhuman world that has been deemed valueless by our civilization. Countering the disenchantment of nature wrought by scientism, human-centrism, and above all capitalism necessitates a dissolving of the barriers we set up between ourselves and our environment, a task which can be only accomplished via religion or art: an art—like field recording—which affords reconnecting its audience with the enchantment of the ignored world surrounding them. In this article, Toshiya Tsunoda’s exemplary Somashikiba (2016)—recorded in locations forgotten by civilization—will be examined via interpretive tools adapted from Ueda Shizuteru’s Kyoto School aesthetics and Takahashi Mutsuo’s poetics. Ueda’s philosophy offers a way of understanding perception which eliminates the subject-object division. Takahashi’s project of recovering the spirituality of place through poetry is a model of historically and politically engaged art. Looking, as these contemporary Japanese thinkers have done, to the precapitalist, pre-formalist past to rediscover (sound) art’s function as a medium which reconfigures the listener’s perception of reality, I argue for the urgency of sound art such as Tsunoda’s which aids in the re-enchantment of the world to a future beyond capitalist, humanist “civilization.”