If we can thank the heavens for something today, it is for bringing together Mayumi Miyata and Midori Takada. Released as part of CBS/Sony’s short-lived Sound Forest (サウンド・フォレスト・シリーズ) series,「星雲」～サウンド・フォレスト・シリーズ (Nebula) presents a different aesthetic within that series idea of “environmental music”. Not necessarily made to attract electronically-minded listeners, Nebula is a nebulous blend of truly ancient instruments — sho and assorted folk percussion — in a way that calls back to humanity’s timeless quest to match environmental sound with man-made instruments.
Rather than add to history of Midori Takada, who (thankfully) now has reams of web knowledge dropped for all of you to discover, our focus for this release has to be on Mayumi Miyata. The guiding force behind this release (and a previous collaboration baring parallel-minded fruit), it was Mayumi whose further advances in between the timeless and the increasingly modern, brought her shō technique to this juncture. Immensely influential, it was Mayumi whose study and performance of the shō freed it from its purely ceremonial and folk strictures.
Much like myself in winter, the shō isn’t an instrument you can just pick up and play, it needs to be specially warmed up first. The shō has a certain way of being played that is far more intimate than most instruments you’ll find anywhere. Mayumi came to the shō not via prodigious talent but by happenstance.
Her original instrument was the piano. While attending Kunitachi’s College of Music, she specialized in European-centric music, as that was what the curriculum offered. However, from a young age the music of elsewhere — Africa, Asia, and of the Anatolia — had called to her in ways she couldn’t quite grasp. After graduating from college, her study in musical aesthetics led her to realize the limitations of that instrument. To get closer to the “harmony of the universe”, so to speak, she’d had to get out of that Euro-centric world.
One day, after going on a really long walk along the river, she encountered a sound off in the far distance she couldn’t quite pinpoint. Divining in her a spiritual essence of sorts, it stayed vivid in her memory as that being what she wanted to play. Somehow, on that day, she headed home and put on a record by the iconic Japanese modern composer Toru Takemitsu that’d capture this sound she was struck by: 秋庭歌 <In An Autumn Garden> / 旅 <Voyage>, specifically “In An Autumn Garden For Gagaku (雅楽«秋庭歌»)“.
Using Japanese court music, gagaku, as a launching point for a unique kind of contemporary compositional work, it was the sound of the shō you hear there that were her sounds. Immediately, she became one of the few women (and young women at that) that would enroll in gagaku classes to discover this music she knew little about.
Learning not just shō itself but the way she’d have to integrate dance, discipline, and composition with in public performance, instilled in her the breath of drama possible in this droning instrument. Meant to mimic the call of the mythical phoenix, the shō required intense dedication to play and patience to master. As she parlayed her knowledge from the realm of classical music to a contemporary one, Mayumi kept discovering and promoting the improvisational character of this mouth organ on tape.
Mayumi’s solo debut 星の輪 ～宮田まゆみ笙の世界～ = Sho Cosmos on another of CBS/Sony’s wonderfully ahead of the curve series, Sound Adventure, brought her inline with others like Takio Ito and Tōsha Suihō, both also musicians well-versed in deep Japanese folk tradition but also as willing to risk transmuting it towards forward-thinking ideas.
On 「星雲」～サウンド・フォレスト・シリーズ (Nebula) she takes these ideas of universal folk music even further, with three compositions that appear initially as mere drone but upon closer listen evolve in ways mere electronic instrumentation simply can’t. There is space, ambiance, and resonation here that is tied to things that are seemingly quite unexplainable to this day. It’s not often you make someone like John Cage sit down and listen, but with music like this, it isn’t hard to understand why.