Sekai no hazama (Between worlds) (2023)
Duration: 22:00 minutes
Instrumentation: shamisen, 2 violins, viola, cello
Premiere: February 10, 2024 at Our Saviour’s Atonement Lutheran Church, New York, NY, by Interwoven, Yoko Reikano Kimura, shamisen
Notes:
In composing for shamisen and string quartet, I wanted to embrace the fact that these instruments come from different cultures and musical traditions and find a way for the piece to address this concept directly. In my research, I looked for extramusical material to help me think in a more expansive and metaphorical way, and I discovered that nineteenth-century ukiyo-e (woodcut prints) told exactly the story I wanted to tell. Of course, the nineteenth century was a turbulent time of fast-paced cultural upheaval in Japan, so it is natural that art from that era would reflect issues of cultural exchange in many ways. In the end, I settled on three prints by three artists as a starting point for my piece.
The first movement responds to The Blind Men and the Elephant, a lesser-known print by the great Hokusai, and the earliest of my three, dating from ca. 1818. This print illustrates the Buddhist story of the blind scholars who argue about the nature of an elephant, each only perceiving part of the truth and mistaking it for the complete truth (one feels the animal’s side and says it is like a wall, another feels its trunk and says it is like a snake, etc.). This story worked perfectly as a metaphor for the first movement, in which the quartet tries to “understand” the shamisen, but only sees component parts, not the whole. The viola interprets the harmony created by the resonating strings, the second violin focuses on the percussive plucking, the first violin responds to the characteristic sliding between pitches, and the cello imitates the sustained drone effect of the lowest string. Like the scholars in the story, these interpretations are all in some way correct, but they do not complete the picture. After each instrument has had their feature, there is an argument, interrupted by the shamisen, which brings the movement to its energetic conclusion.
The second movement responds to The Plum Gardens at Kameido, a very famous print by Hiroshige, dating from 1857, which was also copied by Vincent van Gogh in 1887. This picture and its copy tell a very direct story of cultural exchange; the original dates from the decade in which Japan was forced to end its Edo Period isolation, and the fact that Van Gogh studied and copied the image is an example of how the nineteenth-century European avant-garde held Japanese art in high regard. To translate this to music, I began with a nineteenth-century song (Uso no koe by Yamato Shourei) performed in authentic, traditional style by the singing shamisen performer. The quartet gradually enters and develops a free fantasy on the Japanese music. The ending is a recapitulation of the song, transcribed for string quartet alone: Van Gogh’s copy to the Hiroshige original.
The last movement, Skeleton Dance, responds to a very strange print by Kyosai dating from 1881. At first, I was simply attracted to the grotesque wildness of this print, in which skeletons caper about, making mischief and dancing (naturally, one of the skeletons is playing shamisen as well). But on a deeper level, the picture is imbued with the sense that the familiar world has been turned upside down. It was created during a period of rapid modernization and westernization in Japan, and Kyosai seemed to have had a particularly cynical view of the benefits of these trends, as his more directly satirical pictures show. For this movement, the shamisen strings are tuned in tritones (a modern, “unnatural” tuning), and the refined, traditional style of shamisen playing is replaced with a rougher and weirder style. Though grotesque, the textures and playing techniques in this movement bring the instruments together in new ways, as a unified sound bridging two worlds.