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YOICHI SUGIYAMA CHILDREN SCENES The often wrongly used term »Portrait CD« seems exceptionally well suited to describe this collection of four works by Yoichi Sugiyama. It is not difficult to find connections between these works and central biographical events that still leave traces in his music today. For the first of these events we must go back to his earliest childhood years. Born in Tokyo in 1969, Sugiyama began playing the violin at the age of three; he only gave up the instrument when he was a student at the Toho School of Music. This childhood experience of a performing musician's perspective—particularly a string player—is most evident in the Children's senses for four violas (2017) commissioned by the Ohara Museum of Art. Despite the supplementary subtitle after R. Schumann it is by no means just »arrangements« of the 13 piano originals. Rather, these have been completely re-imagined for the ensemble with great skill and astonishing imagination - as we hear at the outset, where the source material has been atomized into short, almost "Webernian" fragments that interlock like a hoquetus to create timbres to create a rich timbre melody. Throughout the piece, Sugiyama demonstrates an exceptional command of contemporary string techniques, including a wide variety of harmonics, microtones, glissandi, fretboard rapping, use of a metal damper that produces a sound "like an LP or a transistor radio," or on a Even make playful whistles of the melody. So Schumann was not re-arranged, but rather re-composed – and above all “modernized”. This brings us to a second central aspect of Sugiyama's career: early exposure to contemporary music. Again he started young: his first violin teacher, Isako Shinozaki, played in the ensemble for new music »Vent d'Orient«, and even as a child Sugiyama met the key figures of the Japanese new music scene. Only a short time later he began to compose himself and took lessons from Akira Miyoshi at the age of 13; later he studied with him in Toho. There Sugiyama founded the festival for new music »Theater Winter« and the ensemble »Mis En Loge« together with his colleagues Sunao Isaji, Yasuharu Fukushima and Takashi Niigaki. He invited personalities such as Akira Nishimura and Yuji Takahashi to the concerts, which were also broadcast on NHK radio. This intensive preoccupation with contemporary music is clearly evident in the Children's senses, although these are based on pre-existing strictly tonal material. Incidentally, the same applies to all the pieces on this CD, which all contain similar borrowings. But Sugiyama's interest in contemporary music also took him in other directions. The Vent d'Orient ensemble brought several Italian composers to Japan, which fascinated Sugiyama so much that he began studying with Franco Donatoni and Sandro Gorli before finally moving to Milan more or less permanently. The connection with Italy had another side effect: Gorli entrusted Sugiyama with conducting commissions, and he began to learn the craft in earnest from Emilio Pomàrico - the beginning of a significant career, highlights of which include meticulous performances of the music of Franco Donatoni, recorded on CD at the label NEOS (NEOS 11410). This is another biographical detail reflected on this CD. This may sound paradoxical, but it is striking that Sugiyama does not appear here as a conductor; but if it is part of a conductor's role to see a score not as a fixed "object" but as a blueprint for live performance, then he is clearly present in that role. An example of this is Two Verses by Du Fu for female voice and instruments (2014), commissioned by the Music from Japan festival and dedicated to "the many victims of various events this year". There is no score, only individual parts in which Sugiyama notates pitches without fixed lengths. He leaves the other parameters to the performers, with the help of a few written instructions. Sugiyama's extensive experience as a conductor gave him the confidence to leave such important decisions to the players; or as he put it: »My goal is that you can play your own creative phrase by yourself«. Wie die Children's senses This work also contains a find from existing music: a folk melody from Shian, home of the Tang Dynasty poet Du Fu (712–770), on whose verses it is based. Which leads to another point in Sugiyama's resume: his exploration of "folk music and ethnic instruments." This is particularly evident in Kuguhi (Swan Song) for 17-string bass koto, dedicated to the memory of his teacher Miyoshi. Here the reference to folk music is clearly recognizable simply through the use of the »ethnic« instrument. But there is another source in this work: a Riuka-Song from the gagaku-Repertoire sung exclusively at imperial funerals, telling of the ruler's metamorphosis into a swan. Not only did the musical material emerge from this, but also the four-part form (slow-fast-slow-fast). Unlike many other Japanese composers, Sugiyama does not use these "traditional" references to create a kind of pointed demarcation between "East" and "West". Since he oscillates between the two, he is more likely to look for aspects to connect them: for example along the former "Silk Road" that unites them (the China of Du Fu), or in the Gregorian chants used by Portuguese missionaries in the 16th century were brought to Japan and the classic Koto movement Rodukan (and which are quoted for this instrument in another work by Sugiyama). In Kuguhi Sugiyama considers the connection more subtle, primarily through the way he writes for the instrument. This work is also intensely idiomatic, blending traditional techniques and even sounds - including a clearly audible pentatonic scale - with contemporary Western performance practices; but in some cases, like pitch bends or glissandi, it's hard to tell which category they actually belong to. The most recent aspect of Sugiyama's development reflected here is related to the 2003 Iraq war, which "sensitized him to the [...] political circumstances." This awareness comes in The Last Interview from Africa (2013) to the fore. The work was commissioned by the Tokyo Gen'On Project and is dedicated to the victims of the 2011 tsunami. Again, many of Sugiyama's main concerns are clearly evident. The work is performed without a conductor, with an "open score" that only gives entries for individual parts that are not fully defined. There is a pre-existent "ethnic" source: a prayer sung each week at the grave of Ken Saro Wiwa, recited here in microtonal quasi-unison. This creates a kind of noisy heterophony that evokes the raw African singing. There is also a theatrical aspect: the musicians enter one after the other in African costumes, the drummer begins the procedure by drumming on a symbolic oil can and later goes on tour with a Nigerian bush drum. However, the fifth member of this »quintet« – a taped sound montage – brings in the political aspect by repeating Saro Wiwa's last interview 200 times, although you can only hear it at the end. This ambitious work offers us the most complete 'portrait of the artist as a mature composer' to date – but given the composer's dynamically developing career, it is unlikely that this portrait will be considered complete for long. peter burt program:
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