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By Anton Vishio

“Paregmenon is a figure which of the word going before deriveth the word following.” So Henry Peacham defined the rhetorical device, in one of the word’s earliest English attestations.<1> Paregmenon was originally a participial form of an Ancient Greek verb whose basic meaning of “to lead by or past a place” spawned a number of metaphorical extensions—including ones which involved the path a word might take to become another. In its English borrowing, the term came to be applied specifically to describe root-related words deployed in proximity.  Peacham cites a classic biblical example: “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise.” His contemporaries made ample use of the device, sometimes in combination with other techniques, as in Measure to Measure: “To sue I live, I find I seek to die, And seeking death, find life”.<2>

But Peacham also goes on to assess the effects of such rhetoric.  Of paregmenon, he wrote: “The use hereof is twofold, to delight the eare by the derived sound, and to move the mind with a consideration of the nigh affinitie and concord of the matter.” This could serve as a description of the manifold pleasures that Jo Kondo’s music makes available to its listeners.  Kondo has pursued a similar compositional art of juxtaposition—the “affinitie and concord” of sounds placed aside one another—as a means to capture in music the effect of an apparently “flat surface” that is nonetheless perceptually active. This creates what Kondo refers to, relishing the apparent contradiction, as “dynamic stasis.” Surveying the scarred landscape of Dartmoor, Kondo experienced a similar assemblage in the visual domain, a “patchwork of green rocks and reddish earth, none of them being confined to the foreground or background”.<3> There is no obvious path through such a landscape; rather we might just discern a way forwards, driven by subtle shifts in the local equilibrium suggested to us by the placement of similar materials—by attention, that is, to their common derivation.

In choosing Paregmenon as the title of his 2011 composition for combined string and percussion quartets, Kondo thus gave expression to a distinctive aesthetic preoccupation.<4> The title seems relevant in another way, in relation to the composer’s avowed interest in Hellenistic thought, and even in connection to his self-identification with a “Western music world” as opposed to a specifically Japanese one.<5> For his engagement with the former sometimes reveals itself at an angle, and paregmenon enters even at this level; several of the descriptors that Kondo applies to his own music themselves appear to be rooted in yet subtly branch off from familiar Western music theoretical concepts, including as we shall see such fundamental ideas as line and form.

Kondo observes that his musical paregmenon relies on successions of shared “root intervals”.<6>  Example 1 presents a reduced score of the first fourteen measures. The succession unfolds slowly, so that each sonic object can be savored for its distinctive configuration. To take Peacham’s definition literally, it is as if we are inside each unfolding paregmenon, experiencing its derivation from within.  The first sonority in this context would seem an especially fruitful starting point; it voices an all-interval tetrachord, rich in potential “roots.” But even more palpable connections between sonorities are available to our audition. The use of common tones, a preference for minor ninths and their compounds, and recurrent semitone-tritone complexes are all features that one might take up in a more extensive analysis. The instrumental disposition of the work—a joining together of two disparate ‘instruments’ to create a third that, as Kondo notes, is somehow different from both—is no less involved in the collocating of sonorities. Example 2 reproduces the same music, but with attention to the actual scoring. Initially, we have the sense that each pitch pairs an instrument from each quartet, but this is quickly destabilized. A myriad of evanescent linear connections emanates from these pitch and timbral connections, in what Kondo terms a “pseudo-polyphony.”<7>

In this terrain of constant change, what does it mean for a sonority to recur?  Indeed, the first sonority reappears, with only slight adjustment, on the downbeat of measure 13. Similar repetitions are seeded into the fabric of the composition, as they are in Kondo’s music in general; the act of juxtaposition can lead us in many directions, including apparently back to where we started.<8> Such events ward off a hearing which pays no heed to memory. Kondo’s music requires us to be alert to—and wary of—the constant possibility of renewing our path through recollection of its previous states. Indeed, recollection is as much a part of the experience of paregmenon as derivation. While listening, we are navigating a middle course between the experience of literal repetition and variation, what Kondo refers to as “pseudo-repetition.”<9> This pseudo-repetition suggests a particular approach to the reconstructive capacity of memory that aligns with the occasionally more humbling aspects of the experience: Kondo’s paregemenons destabilize the object one might remember. Certainty is always in question, and the possibility of error is constantly before us, just as it is in the practice of real memory.

Despite its richly connected surface, this opening music moves through a dizzying array of close or distant sonorities with no regular pulse beyond a constant pushing and pulling of chordal interactions.  There is no single organizing reference, no textural center.  Borrowing a term from William Caplin, we can refer to this music as manifesting ‘loose’ organization. His term becomes even more useful when we discover, later in the composition, the music suddenly aligning into a contrasting, ‘tight-knit’ pattern that features a dialogue in the style of a frieze pattern between alternating marimba duo and string quartet, about an insistent, refrain-like figure in the vibraphone.<10> The second such passage is shown on example 3. The intervals in the refrain seem responsive to the intervallic content of the duo and quartet, suggesting that a “root interval” may be derived from a process of distillation.   At core, such a context allows us yet another format in which to experience the affinities at the heart of paregmenon; the anxieties of an unfamiliar terrain have given way to a sense of wonder at its fragile beauty.
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<1> Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence appeared first in 1577; I’ve used the slightly changed definition from the 1593 edition, available online at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collection?collection=Perseus%3Acollection%3APeachum_Garden (accessed January 10, 2018).  The original wording appears in the OED.  (His last name is occasionally spelled “Peachum”.)
<2> Peacham sources the Biblical example from Isaiah, although in this paraphrased form it appears in 1 Corinthians.  The Shakespeare example comes from Jean-Marie Maguin’s useful catalogue, “Words as the Measure of Measure for Measure”: Shakespeare’s Use of Rhetoric in the Play”, Sillages critiques 15 (2013), at http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/2618?gathStatIcon=true&lang=en (accessed January 10, 2018).
<3> Kondo, liner notes for CD ALCD-57 (2000); the disc contains his Trio (moor), from 1982.  For the landscape itself, see for instance the second picture at https://historicengland.org.uk/research/research-results/recent-research-results/south-west/dartmoor-nmp/ (accessed January 10, 2018).
<4> The work was premiered by the Quatuor Bozzini and Slagwerk Den Haag in November 2011.  Unfortunately, there is no commercial recording available.
Kondo has recently commented on the properties of his titles: “When I give a name to a sound structure, I consider very carefully: if the sound construction has this name, what psychological image does it evoke in the listener?” Interview with Barbara Eckle, appearing in the liner notes to Wergo CD WER 7342 2 (2016)
<5> Personal communication; see also the composer’s dialogue with Stefan van Eycken that followed the premiere of Paregmenon: https://slagwerkdenhaag.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/interview-jo-kondo-stefan-van-eycken/ at 4:27 (accessed January 11, 2018).  This is not a negative assessment by any means; he acknowledges that being Japanese undoubtedly affects his musical voice, but he has chosen to leave this unanalyzed.  For an example of a recent attempt to link Kondo’s musical personality to specifically Japanese concepts, see John Liberatore, “Mutual Relationships: an Aesthetic Analysis of Jo Kondo’s High Window”, DMA dissertation, Eastman (2014): 24-28.
<6> Dialogue with van Eycken, at 2:14. In music theory, “root intervals” usually refers to the intervals between the roots of successive triads, a topic studied rigorously in contemporary neo-Riemannian theory; Kondo’s use is unrelated.
<7> An excellent introduction to “pseudo-polyphony” can be found in Liberatore, op. cit., 8-11.
<8> A reading of Kondo’s music particularly sensitive to the effects of different kinds of repetition is Paul Zukofsky’s essay, “Jo Kondo’s Still Life”, available at http://www.musicalobservations.com/publications/jo_kondos_still_life/ (accessed March 3, 2018).
<9> Kondo, “The Art of Being Ambiguous: From Listening to Composing,” Contemporary Music Review 2: 2 (1988), 7-29.  The definition and related discussion are on pages 25-26.
<10> This alignment is all the more striking following some extremely fast music, in Kondo’s sen no ongaku [linear music] style.  I borrow the ‘loose’ vs. ‘tight-knit’ distinction from Caplin, Classical Form: A Theory of Formal Functions for the Instrumental Music of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
***
Anton Vishio is an Assistant Professor at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ, where he teaches music theory and composition.  His research involves analysis of a variety of composers of late 20th century music; recent papers have explored works by George Lewis, Priaulx Rainier, Brian Cherney, and Milton Babbitt.

By Jung-Min Lee

Unsuk Chin, born in South Korea and now based in Germany, has only occasionally engaged with traditional Korean or Asian music. Among a handful of examples is the last movement of Akrostichon-Wortspiel (1991), titled “Aus der alten Zeit,” described as “an ironic commentary on the traditional Korean court music” (it is left to the listeners to determine which features are based on Korean music and why they are “ironic.”)<1> She also wrote for the traditional Chinese instrument sheng in Šu for sheng and orchestra in 2009. She emphasized, however, that her motivation to write for a traditional Asian instrument was the new sound possibilities revealed in the playing of the virtuoso sheng player Wu Wei, rather than a broader interest in mixing Asian and Western music. The first movement of Chin’s Cello Concerto, written in 2008 and revised in 2013, is a rare case in which she refers to specific element of Korean traditional music, with the subtitle “Aniri.” Yet Chin has not explained what that subtitle means, or how it relates to the movement, leaving it up to listeners and performers to make their own interpretations.

Let me first introduce the term aniri, before offering a reading of how it may explain a structural aspect of the first movement of the Cello Concerto. Aniri is an element of the Korean traditional vocal genre pansori, a narrative epic drama performed by a vocalist, soriggun, and a percussionist, gosu. The vocalist tells a story through singing (sori), speech (aniri) and theatrical gestures (nuhreum). One may understand pansori as a solo opera, and aniri as a recitative.

Aniri in pansori serves specific functions. First, it drives the narrative forward by connecting different episodes of sori. In the sori (singing) parts, the performer details specific moments within the story or sing a monologue, often indulging in, much to audience’s amusement, various delicious onomatopoeias and mimetic words, which are rich in the Korean language. During aniri, the omniscient singer provides backgrounds to those moments elaborated in sori, thereby helping audiences understand the overall storyline. For example, the singer can act as a narrator and inform a change of scenery or temporal space. Or, taking on the roles of various characters, the singer may explicate their emotional states or enact dialogues. Serving sometimes as a bridge between sori episodes, aniri helps audiences place themselves in the luxuriously elaborate storytelling. Second, aniri provides a resting point for both the singer and spectators. Such a breather is necessary because a pansori performance can last hours—sometimes up to eight hours (in modern performances vocalists choose certain parts of a story).<2> A singer can rest his or her voice during aniri, while the shifts between rhythmless aniri and rhythmic sori helps refresh the attention of the spectators.

<1>Unsuk Chin, “Akrostichon-Wortspiel. Sieben Szenen aus Märchen für Sopran und Ensemble (1991–1993)” [Acrostic Wordplay, “Seven scenes from fairy-tales for soprano and ensemble (1991–1993)”], in Im Spiegel der Zeit: Die Komponistin Unsuk Chin, ed. Stefan Drees, (Mainz: Schott, 2011), 60.
<2>Robert Koehler and Ji-yeon Byeon, Traditional Music: Sounds in Harmony with Nature, eds. Jin-hyuk Lee and Colin A. Mouat (Seoul: Korea Foundation: Seoul Selection, 2011), 56.
<3>The performance took place on November 11, 2015 in the “Beyond Darmstadt” concert by Curtis 20/21 Ensemble, of which Chin was composer-in-residence for 2015–2016. A video clip of this performance is available on YouTube: “Alize Rozsnyai, Soprano “Akrostichon Wortspiel”—Unsuk Chin,” YouTube video, 21:10, posted by “Alize Rozsnyai,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S– aZw6r2-wM (accessed 12 February 2016).
<4>See Program Note on Boosey & Hawkes’s website: “Chin, Unsuk: Miroirs des temps,” Boosey & Hawkes, last accessed February 23, 2018, http://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Unsuk-Chin-Miroirs-des-temps/5584.
<5>Chin adapts literary works by novelist Harry Mathews and German dramatist Arno Holz in this work. “Chin, Unsuk: Cantatrix Sopranica,” Boosey & Hawkes, last accessed February 23, 2018, http://www.boosey.com/cr/music/Unsuk-Chin-Cantatrix-Sopranica/45367.
<6>Unsuk Chin and Patrick Hahn, “Honjae doen jŏnchesung kwa ŏnŏ yuhhŭI” [Mixed Identity and Wordplay], in Stefan Derees, and Hŭi-kyŏng Yi, Chin Ŭn-suk, miraeŭi akporŭl kŭrit: ‘Arŭsŭ noba’ Chin Ŭn-suk, hyŏndaeumakŭl ‘ŭmak’ ŭro mandŭlda [Unsuk Chin, drawing the score of the future: ‘Ars Nova’ Unsuk Chin turns contemporary music into “music”] (Mainz: Schott, 2011), 58-59. See Homi Bhabha, Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994).
***

Jung-Min (Mina) Lee has recently earned her PhD from Duke University with a dissertation on Korean National Identity and Modern Music after World War II. She has taught at the Montclair State University and Baekseok Arts University in Seoul; next year, she will teach courses on Music in Modern Korea and K-pop at the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department at Duke University. Her study on Korean composer Chung Tae-bong has been published in a collection of essays by the Seoul National University Press in 2017. Current research interests include Isang Yun’s early serial music as well as the reception of Béla Bartók in South Korea in the post-WWII decade.

By Tomoko Deguchi

This essay contemplates one of the underlying Japanese cultural tendencies, an emphasis on the significance of individual parts (as opposed to the whole), and its manifestation in the music of Tōru Takemitsu. Takemitsu’s surface musical language is based on the idioms of European modernism. However, his music is perceived by many as “Japanese-sounding,” although he clearly avoided sounds of traditional Japanese music or Japanese instruments in the majority of his works. Takemitsu’s early musical style was influenced by the music of Messiaen and Debussy, and those influences remained noticeable even though his compositional style changed over time. Despite the apparent Western compositional influence observed in Takemitsu’s music, I believe that one of the reasons that his music is thought to sound Japanese is because it privileges the same quality perceived in other Japanese arts and Japanese language: the significance of the parts.

When the object of analysis or interpretation is an entire composition, analysts who are trained in Western music tend to perceive music as a unified “whole.” However, I question, does music need to have an organizational strategy that ties its compositional elements together to create this unified whole? Is the notion of a unity a Western construct that may or may not be applicable to music by non-Western composers? Is finding codes of organized sounds the best way to approach the understanding of musics by non-Western composers? Perhaps traditional methods of analysis to determine large and small sections and to identify large-scale coherence between those sections might not be suitable for analyzing Takemitsu’s music. Additionally the notion of  unity or “wholeness” might not be applicable to music by a composer who became increasingly aware of his Japanese heritage as he searched for his voice, admitting that it is impossible to escape from the influence of a culture in which he was born and raised.<1>

In analyzing Takemitsu’s music, especially his music after the 1980s,<2> the significance of the “parts” takes on more relevance than does large-scale coherence in the interpretation of his music. The importance of individual “parts” is important in many aspects of Japanese culture, including traditional Japanese gardens, Japanese language and literature, and Japanese architecture. It is well known that Japanese gardens gave great inspiration to Takemitsu, who saw connections between them and the coloristic shades of sounds, which exist alongside other natural fluctuations.<3> Many of his works from the mid-1980s are modeled on Japanese gardens, especially those designed by the 14th century Japanese monk Musō Soseki.<4> I find it especially crucial to investigate how the metaphor of following the garden path is manifested in Takemitsu’s music.<5>



The strolling gardens (or kaiyūshiki gardens) were never meant to be viewed as a whole – the bird eye view of the garden has no effect or significance on the meaning of the Japanese garden. Rather, appreciation and contemplation lie in the garden’s details. Kanto Shigemori writes about the kaiyūshiki garden:<6> 

“When the kaiyūshiki garden is viewed in two dimensions, it does not form a geometric or symmetric garden as in the Western gardens. The kaiyūshiki garden pursued diverse perspectives in all directions. The main characteristics of the two-dimensional plan of the kaiyūshiki garden is that the spectators are guided through their walk to appreciate, then led to contemplate while appreciating, and in that contemplation, they perceive poetry and purpose or effect of the objects at each turn. … The visitors are led to appreciate, to contemplate, and merge the experienced beauty and the illusionary beauty by placing themselves in a philosophical imagery. As the path guides them, not to just stroll through the garden, but to guide them mentally, the two-dimensional plan cannot be just simple repetition or materialistic change of color. … As the spectators walk through the garden, the landscape expands or shrinks as they find beauty in the darkness, or sweetness in the brightness, and the moss or grass dyes their footsteps green, or white sand blurs into the ground.”<7>

Paul Rudolph, who was considered at the time to be the champion of modern American architecture, critiqued this aesthetic. “The details of the various parts of kaiyūshiki garden in Katsura Imperial Villa (in Kyoto) are remarkable, but as a whole, it is lacking an appealing unification. I think there are too many details.”<8> The kaiyūshiki garden is a microcosm of the earth in which mountains and gorges are expressed by rocks and sand. Every part and every section of the garden interconnects organically; each are small variations of different themes and their boundaries are ambiguous.<9> Many parts of the garden are intricate and suggestive and they invite imagination – a stone garden lantern suggests an old unvisited Buddhist temple nearby; the sound of water heard through thick vegetation evokes a hidden ravine; and the strollers who arrive at the bottom of a gentle slope are reminded of never-ending mountain paths.<10>

Namio Egami remarks on the Japanese cultural tendency to incorporate ideas or matters without thinking through all of the ramifications or without strictly planning.<11> For instance, the concept of city planning as a completed product was foreign to the Japanese.<12> In a smaller scale, Japanese architectural spaces began with a small space and gradually expanded outwards as needs arose. The whole was viewed simply a result of compilation of parts. Similarly, Japanese sentences are structured so that they force the reader to know the details before knowing the subject’s action.<13> Other examples from literature are renga, or continuous poetry, and zuihitsu (for a lack of strict definition this term is often translated as “personal essays”).

Shūichi Katō also agrees that Japanese have a tendency to emphasize the “parts” rather than the overall organization or unity of the “whole,” and that the “whole” is simply seen as the accumulation of the related and organically evolving “parts.” This tendency is instantiated in diverse Japanese arts, culture, and behavior patterns.<14> Katō  argues that the fundamental basis of this tendency derives from the Japanese conception of time. He categorizes four basic concepts of time. They are 1) time that has both a beginning and an end; 2) time that has a beginning but not an end; 3) time that has an end but not a beginning; and 4) time that has no beginning or no end.<15>  When time is conceptualized as open ended it is impossible to quantify and structure it. Since there is no “entirety,” time cannot be divided into sections. Thus time is conceived as a compilation of each moment of the “now.” The “now” is not a fixed quantity, but a flexible entity that possess elasticity. Since time is not seen as objective, the partitioning of past, present, and future remains obscure.

With this in mind, I invite readers to listen to Far Calls, Coming, far! (1980), one of the representative works Takemitsu composed in the 1980s.

This piece is written for solo violin and orchestra, and is one of Takemitsu’s works that adopt their titles from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.<17> Many writers have pointed out that the soloist parts in Takemitsu’s works for solo instrument and orchestra do not function as they would in traditional concertos. Rather, the soloist and the orchestra have equal partnership. In this work, the “parts” evolve organically and devise a musical path through time that branches out. The initial three or four note gestures evolve into different related timbres, either within the orchestral texture or within the soloist’s sound events or within the combination of the two forces.
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<1>Toru Takemitsu, Confronting Silence: Selected Writings, trans. and ed. Yoshiko Kakudo and Glenn Glasow (Berkeley, California: Fallen Leaf Press, 1995), 142. Takemitsu wrote about his conflicting feelings towards Japanese traditional music, initially detesting any sound that reminded him of the old Japan. He considered himself to be a composer who wrote in the modern, Western style.  However, he wrote, “I am not a composer who represents Japan, nor even a composer who is intentionally conscious of having Japanese nationality and incorporate Japanese elements into their music. But born and raised in Japan, even as I try to free myself from that influence, at the same time I became more aware that is impossible.” Takemitsu discusses his early experience as a composer in his book, Toi Yobigoeno Kanatani (Beyond the far calls) (Tokyo: Shinchousha, 1992).
<2>In 1970s Takemitsu underwent significant stylistic changes. One critic asked that “Has Tōru Takemitsu forfeited his avant-garde standing amongst his peers?” The timing of Takemitsu’s stylistic changes in his music coincides with when Takemitsu identified many of his compositions as inspired by the Japanese garden.
<3>Arc for piano and orchestra is the earliest work in which Takemitsu explicitly explained the relationship between the Japanese garden and Arc.
<4>Musō Soseki (1275-1351) is a celebrated Zen Buddhist who is renowned for his gardens. Saihōji in Kyoto, also know as Kokedera (moss temple), is one of the most famous among his gardens. Takemitsu composed an orchestral piece inspired by Musō Soseki. Musō was a contemporary of Yoshida Kenkō who famously wrote the Essays in Idleness.
<5>Takemitsu writes “My music is like a garden, and I am the gardener. Listening to my music can be compared with walking through a garden and experiencing the changes in light, pattern and texture.
<6>Japanese strolling gardens normally feature a path where the visitors are led around a pond or small lake. By following the path, they are presented with a series of scenes, which are specifically intended to be viewed at key points around the path.
<7>Kanto Shigemori, Nihon Teien no Shii: Seisei to Kanshō no Bigaku (Thoughts in Japanese garden: The aesthetics in creation and appreciation) (Tokyo: Nichibōshuppansha, 1970), 67. My translation.
<8>Noboru Kawazoe, Nihonbunka to Kenchiku (Japanese culture and architecture) (Tokyo: Shoukokusha, 1965), 145. Kawazoe does not provide the source of this quotation. My translation.
<9>Kanto Shigemori, Nihon Teien no Shii: Seisei to Kanshō no Bigaku (Thoughts in Japanese garden: The aesthetics in creation and appreciation) (Tokyo: Nichibōshuppansha, 1970), 68. My translation.
<10>Ibid, 70. My translation. Noboru Kawazoe describes the paths in kaiyūshiki garden are planned to evoke surprising psychological effects. Kaiyūshiki garden is a closed space surrounded by walls, but its winding paths do not give a sense of closed space in the least. There are movements felt in the space and space felt in the movements. The objects in the garden give signs to the strollers; for instance, the stepping stones suggest the strollers to walk slowly and look at the surroundings, or watch their steps, or walk straight forward, precisely giving instructions which the visitors follow unconsciously. … As the strollers move away from the Shoin (residential quarters), the scenery becomes more rustic, giving impression that they are deep in the mountains. As they walk, the scenery then changes as if at a mountain village, followed by an impression that they arrived at a plain, then back to the Shoin. The space gives you the impression that more you move away from the Shoin, it gives you the feeling of “far away.” Also Kawazoe quotes several of Michio Takeyama’s writing (there is no information of the source) such as, “If you walk this path straight forward, you will bump into that pillar (of the gate). The gate ahead seems to invite you, but at the same time it seems to reject you,” and “This is not just an gate with an open passage. It invites and rejects the visitors at the same time.” See Noboru Kawazoe, Nihonbunka to Kenchiku (Japanese culture and architecture) (Tokyo: Shoukokusha, 1965), 14 and 150-151. My translation.
<11>Tadao Umesao and Michitarō Tada, eds, Nihonbunka no Kouzou (The structure of Japanese culture) (Tokyo: Koudansha, 1972), 61. My translation.
<12>The kaiyūshiki gardens are designed with an end product and affects in mind; however, the designs were never intended as unchangeable. For instance the gardens that were built by Musō Soseki, the celebrated Zen monk, originally had strong conceptions when they were built, but as time passed, they changed their appearances and designs adapting to that time. His gardens at any age were always regarded as first rate. They are metabolic gardens that human and nature recreate through the ages. The same things can be said about cities, as they adapt metabolically through time.
<13>Shūichi Katō, Nihonbunka ni okeru Jikan to Kuukan (Time and space in Japanese culture) (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 2007), 45. My translation.
<14>Ibid, 10.
<15>Ibid, 7.
<16>To summarize, Katō argues that the idea of reincarnation exemplifies time as half circular and half linear; the religion of Miroku Buddhism exemplifies time that has an end but no beginning; Buddhist’s “end of the world” belief (mappou shisou) exemplifies time that has a beginning but no end. Masao Maruyma argues that in Kojiki, Japan’s oldest book of legends that exemplifies time that has no beginning or end, lies Japan’s historic consciousness. See Chapter 2 on Maruyama’s theory of historic consciousness. See Shūichi Katō, Nihonbunka ni okeru Jikan to Kuukan (Time and space in Japanese culture) (Tokyo: Iwanamishoten, 2007), 15-31 on his discussions of the four archetype of time.
<17>The others are Riverrun (1984, for piano and orchestra), a Way a Lone (1981, string quartet), and a Way a Lone II (1981, string orchestra)
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Tomoko Deguchi’s research interests include music of Toru Takemitsu and other Japanese composers, musical narrative, film music, musical form in the 20th-century music, and intersections between music theory and culture and aesthetics. She is also active as a pianist specializing in contemporary music. She is an associate professor at Winthrop University.

By Amy Bauer

The only student of Erkki Sven-Tüür, Estonian composer Helena Tulve shares her former teacher’s  eclecticism and love for nature. Yet Tulve’s music eschews expressionist drama, reflecting more keenly the influence of French spectralism and her studies at Paris’ IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique). Her compositions often begin with one or two central pitches or intervals whose constant timbral transformation sustains a taut structural tension until resolved. The award-winning Sula (Thaw) for orchestra depicts a crystalline, organic world in constant change, if moving slowly. Yet Tulve has been equally inspired by Gregorian chant, folk instruments, and Mediterranean vocal traditions.  Her vocal compositions incorporate texts from various spiritual backgrounds within ensembles that blend instruments associated with contemporary music, early music and indigenous musical traditions.

L’Équinoxe de l’âme (The Equinox of the Soul), for soprano, triple harp or kannel (an Estonian zither, part of the Baltic psaltery family), and string quartet, is based on a lyric text by the Persian mystic and philosopher Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi about the mythical Persian firebird Simurgh (using Henry Corbin’s translation of L’Incantation de Sîmorgh). The Simorgh is no mere phoenix, but a benevolent creature that guides the soul—it lives in a white world, manifests itself to us in daylight, and is too dazzling to view directly. This firebird is a creature of paradox, outside of space and the normal concerns of men; as the poem notes, “All are with it [the Simurgh], but most are without it.”<1>

Tulve’s music occupies a similar space of paradox: her vocal technique nods to Gregorian and Mediterranean vocal traditions.  But this voice is supported by a string quartet, whose members rely on trills and glissandi to blur the boundaries between pitch, timbre and rhythm. Ornamentation extends to frequent harmonics (string overtones), as well as on barely-pitched and pure noise tones. The quartet is accompanied by a triple harp, which makes use of “split doubling,” shakes and ornaments associated with Celtic folk harp traditions.  In L’Équinoxe de l’âme the timbre of instruments, particularly the sounds unique to the string quartet and the folk traditions associated with the triple harp, obscure clear melodic and harmonic cues.  Yet the entire piece is informed by a single-line impulse, blurred and compromised by the sonic flux around it: what was perceived as harmony becomes timbre or rhythm, and vice versa, For instance, clear emergence of a melody in first violin is echoed in remaining strings en route to the first entrance of the voice in m. 31, as can be seen and heard below.

Tulve places melody in the center of her process, “as principle or linear current. … everything else must be in its service.”<2> Yet this current is clouded not only by ornaments but by voices, which arrive a step below or above an existing tone, amid frequent heterophonic duplication (inexact repetition). Strings play at the top of their range, with each tiny gesture approached and left by graduated dynamics: constantly pulsing between quiet and loud. Pitch and rhythmic tropes repeat—always with a difference—to shape the organic form of the work. And the ascent of an instrument through a harmonic series emphasizes central tones with a delicacy that emphasizes their impermanence.

One passage with a clear melodic and harmonic focus sets these instabilities in relief. A low Eb in cello in m. 75 comes to rest under a rare tonal harmony: a half-diminished seventh chord, under the text’s assertion that those protected by the Simurgh “will pass through fire, protected from being burnt” (see the example below). The harmonic collection built from this chord is resolved by parallel harmonic series that rise from two fundamental tones a tritone apart—Eb3 and A4—under the highest notes in violins. This flight of the protected through the flames is countered by a chordal descent in mm. 99–100 under a text where the Simurgh’s incantation “reaches everyone but only a small number listen.” <2>

All of Tulve’s works are unified by an aesthetic that prioritizes “slowness”: a careful attention to sonic transformation and flow that favors sustained listening.  Tulve’s timbral choices are bound to multiple sensations that drive the compositional process: the qualities of the “sound material” and its natural expression in space. Such a sustained focus on sonic detail functions as an ethical choice as well, reflecting the composer’s deep-rooted ecological concerns, bound to music of surpassing timbral richness and textural complexity.

L’Équinoxe de l’âme can be heard on Tulve’s ECM recording Arboles iloran por iluvia (ECM 2243), excerpted here, as well as on spotify and classical archives. Her recent work is available on soundcloud.
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<1>L’Équinoxe de l’âme, Shabab al-Din Suhrawardi, trans. Henry Corbin (French), and Tyran Grillo (English), program notes, Helena Tulve: Arboles lloran por lluvia (ECM New Series 2243, 2015).
<2>Tulve in conversation with Ia Remmel, “An Oasis for Concentration. Metamorphoses in the Music of Helena Tulve,” Music in Estonia 7 (2005), 22.
<3>L’Équinoxe de l’âme, Grillo trans.
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Amy Bauer is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Irvine. She has published articles and book chapters on the music of György Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Carlos Chávez, David Lang, Helmut Lachenmann, Salvatore Sciarrino, Claude Vivier, the television musical, and the philosophy and reception of modernist music and music theory. Her books include Ligeti’s Laments: Nostalgia, Exoticism and the Absolute (Ashgate, 2011), and the collections György Ligeti’s Cultural Identities (co-edited with Márton Kerékfy, Routledge, 2017) and The Oxford Handbook of Spectral and Post-Spectral Music (co-edited with Liam Cagney and Will Mason, forthcoming).