It’s not often (if ever) that I get to reveal my own music to you, the reader. Not for nothing, as I related to Austin from Incidental Music who tapped me to contribute to his Tone Poem mix series, I rarely/if ever felt the excuse or pretense to slot myself along the great work of others I’d rather my listeners hone in on. This time I felt different.
When I was asked, I was immediately drawn to the actual title of this series: “tone poem”. A tone poem is defined by the grand dame of vocabulary as “a piece of orchestral music, typically in one movement, on a descriptive or rhapsodic theme.” It’s something you clearly hear in his own contributions to the series.
You see, from its creation in the 19th century, this tone poem has been defined as a composer’s attempt to use music to define or allude to a symbolic or physical thing. It could be a painting, an environment, or even stretch out to target fantasy and actual literature and poetry. Shifting away from the classical structure of music, a tone poem allowed a composer to create and inhibit a space which felt more akin to the organic structure of nature — as heard in the music Sibelius and Dvořák (to name precious few).
So, in a way, I felt that if I was going to contribute a mix full of contemporary music that I believe took inspiration from its early beginnings, I had to contribute a stanza of my own that could allude to the music it was inspired by. It was the only way, at least, I thought, I should close the circle on this creative cycle.
You see, it’s in the little appreciated (or known) music of Japanese musicians like Takako Ishiguro, who contributed to Della’s once running Isotonic Sound series, or Takashi Kokubo, who helmed his Ion Series, that I felt a certain kinship to. Much like Toshiya Sukegawa and Satoshi Sumitani — before we had an idea of what to create — we saw nature itself on equal footing to anything we could create. Rather than run away from nature as mere inspiration why not integrate it, with equal measure/respect, into the music?
In the past what one could allude to was novel. Now, I believe, with all the technology at our disposal, we have the perfect opportunity to find a way to bring into our creative space a nature, our earthly environment, in a way that journeys us much closer to an understanding, appreciation, and contribution to it. A healing landscape, I think, begins with our acknowledgement that one already exists somewhere in our vicinity — if we make time and space for it. A pure mind starts and ends with a feel of our real nature.
As for me: here’s my contribution to yours…
Lake – Isotonic Sound
Tracklist:
Diego Olivas – Seisan (Clearing) [Unreleased]
Kosei Yamamoto (山本公成) – Reflections
Shinsuke Honda (本多信介) – Morning Dew
Ryuichi Sugimoto (杉本竜一) – Eskimo Prayers
Takako Ishiguro (石黒孝子) – 夕凪
Hideki Okada (岡田秀樹) – Hawaii Calling
Utollo Teshikai (手使海ユトロ) – 銀河の魚のテーマ1 (Galactic Fish Theme 1)
Toshiya Sukegawa (助川敏弥) – 樹雫
Junichi Kamiyama (神山 純一) – ミスティー パストラル
長谷川武 & Albatross – 海からのおくりもの
Satoshi Sumitani (住谷智) – 青い月の下で
Junnosuke Yamamoto (山本純ノ介) – 明日への光に向けて
Nakada Satoru (中田悟) – Wilson roots1994April.26