Newsday, September 2004

While experts fret about the shrinking audiences and supposedly diminishing vitality of Western classical music, Japanese music seems to be thriving in New York.  

Recent months have brought visits by the kabuki ensemble Heisei Nakamura-za and the shamisen (three-stringed lute) virtuoso Agatsuma, as well as world premieres of works by Nobukazu Takemura and Somei Satoh. Meanwhile, Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, which explores the blending of cultures between Asia and Europe, will perform at Carnegie Hall Sept. 18 and 19. The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, too, has offered concerts on the East meets West theme.  

This week's program by the gagaku orchestra Reigakusha—at Carnegie's Zankel Hall—will celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Japan-U.S. Treaty of Peace and Amity and the 30th season of New York-based Music From Japan.  

Mari Ono, the group's co-founder and executive director, explained that Reigakusha's Wednesday program highlights one of the world's oldest living musical traditions. The origins of the Japanese imperial court music called gagaku date back to the seventh or eighth century. "Gagaku is still played in the imperial household during important rituals—when the emperor takes his throne or on New Year's Day, for example."  

While Japanese culture has sometimes seemed impermeable to outsiders, gagaku music is "amazingly multicultural," in Ono's view. It arrived in Japan from China and Korea, with some pieces influenced by the cultures of the southern Vietnam region and central Asia. "Back then, the Japanese government was young and very eager to incorporate foreign influences, especially from T'ang (China)."  

Japanese emperors established the great Shoso-in repository in Nara, near the Todaiji temple, to store instruments and artifacts from as far away as Persia. "To think that in the seventh and eighth centuries people were bringing all those artifacts all that distance," Ono marveled. "One of our interests in bringing this program to the United States was to show that people were sharing cultures back then."  

To Western listeners, gagaku music can have a chilly, mysterious elegance. Its palette includes the distinctively nasal sound of the hichiriki, a bamboo flute; the plucked and strummed koto, a silk-stringed zither; the biwa, a descendant of the Middle Eastern oud, or lute, often played percussively; and an impressive variety of drums and gongs.  

"Etenraku," one of the works on the Zankel Hall program, is a signature piece of gagaku, sometimes performed during wedding ceremonies at Shinto shrines. As heard on Reigakusha's CD, "Gagaku of Celebration," "Etenraku" unfolds with a stately grace, opening with a lone, fragile flute tone that is gradually surrounded by a filigree of drums and the icy, almost electronic drone of the ensemble.  

Reigakusha's concert also includes a reconstruction by the group's leader, Sukeyasu Shiba, of a gagaku work that survived as a flute part only. Shiba served as lead ryuteki or "dragon flute" player in the imperial household's gagaku orchestra for 27 years. He is from a family of musicians that has been associated with the temple-shrine complex of Kofuku-ji/Kasuga Taisha in Nara for more than 1,000 years. "Shiba is a very accomplished scholar as well as a fine composer and performer," Ono noted, "and his reconstruction incorporates a lot of replicated instruments from Shoso-in. I hope that audience members can get a sense of how dynamic and varied gagaku was before it really settled down to elaborate, ritualistic music."  

In the mid-1960s, Professor Toshiro Kido, then director of the National Theatre of Japan, spearheaded a movement to revive the use of the ancient instruments from Shoso-in and rejuvenate the gagaku repertoire, creating a genre of music known as reigaku. Kido commissioned works from contemporary composers, including Karlheinz Stockhausen and Jean-Claude Eloy. Kido will offer a lecture-demonstration before the Zankel Hall concert, which also features world premieres of two compositions commissioned by Music From Japan: Keiko Fujiie's "Rays of the Setting Sun" for winds and strings, and Kazuo Kikkawa's "The Trees: Echoes From the Past," for winds, strings and percussion.  

The program reflects the evolving mission of Music From Japan. "We started with a focus on contemporary Japanese music," said Ono, "originally presenting only works on Western instruments so that American performers could play music written by Japanese composers. But then eventually we realized that people in the United States really liked to hear traditional instruments."  

The group has helped spur the explosion of interest in multicultural music at New York's leading cultural institutions. "When we started out, audiences in the United States weren't really ready to listen to Japanese music in a very quiet mood," Ono said. "Nowadays, listeners are extremely receptive to new kinds of music."