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Tristan Murail: Gondwana (1980)
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Masakazu Natsuda: Gravitational Wave for orchestra (2004)
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Toshiro Mayuzumi: Nirvana Symphony * (1958)
｜Tristan Murail: Gondwana (1980)
The title has two meanings. It is an ancient Indian legend about a vast, sunken continent, as well as the name geologists have given to one of the two giant landmasses which once comprised the earthʼs entire dry land and whose break-up has gradually formed the contours of the various continents on the earth today. The music mirrors this process in its perpetual drifting and transformation: certain elements of a texture are gradually exaggerated or deformed to create a new texture. For example, the haze of trills for full orchestra, which occurs about three minutes into the piece, is progressively extended into scales and, eventually, wide spanning arpeggios − the series of regular clicks on the wood-block, a few minutes later, are gradually pulled out of phase to generate several different pulses and layers. At certain moments, the music is violently accelerated or decelerated, compressing the transformation processes to such an extent that they can seem almost like a complete break. A pervading use of regular, periodic rhythms and sequential passages allows the listener to measure the progress of the music and the rate at which it is being transformed.
Gondwana continues Murailʼs innovative use of electronic techniques as generators of instrumental music. In this case, the harmony is generated by frequency modulation, a method of tone-production often used in digital synthesizers (Yamahaʼs DX instruments, for example). This gives rise to complex, untempered chorals which have a bell-like sonority. Another important element in the piece is the fluctuation between moments of “noise” (in the acoustic sense of “white noise”), represented by scratching or col legno on the strings, toneless breathing on woodwind or brass and by percussion instruments (maracas, sizzle cymbal and snare drum) and moments of “sound” represented by clean, pure instrumental colours and consonant harmony close to the natural harmonic series. These two opposing and autonomous elements can interpenetrate or “influence” each other.
The music abounds in wave-like patterns of rise and fall, such as crescendo-decrescendo, acceleration-deceleration and tension-relaxation. If these waves of sound recall the legendary, sunken Gondwana, the geological Gondwanaʼs turbulent history is vividly evoked in the musicʼs more dramatic moments, especially in the volcanic “eruption” near the end of the work.
(from texts by Julian Anderson)
Premiere: July 21, 1980 at Festival de Darmstadt
Cracow Orchestra conducted by Antony Witt
Tristan Murail
Born in Le Havre in 1947, Tristan Murail received advanced degrees in classical and North African Arabic from the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes, as well as a degree in economic science, while at the same time pursuing his musical studies. In 1967, he became a student of Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory, and also studied at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques in Paris, graduating three years later. In 1971, he was awarded the Prix de Rome, and later received a First Prize in composition from the Paris Conservatory. He spent the next two years in Rome, at the Villa Medicis.
Upon returning to Paris in 1973, he co-founded the Ensemble LʼItineraire with a group of young composers and instrumentalists. The ensemble quickly gained wide recognition for its fundamental research in the area of instrumental performance and live electronics.
In the 1980s, Tristan Murail used computer technology to further his research in the analysis and synthesis of acoustic phenomena. He developed his own system of microcomputer-assisted composition, and then collaborated with Ircam for several years, where he taught composition from 1991 to 1997, and took part in the conception of the computer-assisted composition program “Patchwork”. In 1997, Tristan Murail was named professor of composition at Columbia University in New York, teaching there until 2010.
Again in Europe, he continued giving master-classes and seminars all over the world, was guest professor at the Mozarteum University in Salzburg for three years, and is currently guest professor at the Shanghai Conservatory.
｜Masakazu Natsuda: Gravitational Wave for orchestra (2004)
The image of the universe, which the latest astronomical observation and theoretical physics have been revealing, is appearing before us more and more as a region that we cannot verbally describe (in our day-to-day vocabulary), as we realize how limited human ability is in visual imagination and expressing it in words.
In such context, I feel, for us humans to think about the “universe” (= space and time) is closer to imagine the realm of “God”. I composed a series works for larger ensembles - from “Soliton” (1995), which I wrote in my second year of study in France, followed by “Megalithic Waves” for chamber orchestra (1997), “Astration” for orchestra (2001), up to this “Gravitational Wave” (2004); they all deal with various acoustic movements that arise in the time-space, and, while keeping distance from personal taste or expression specific to certain culture, attempt to aspire to and to approach the realm beyond human understanding, a realm where physical senses or psychological emotions are irrelevant, and to overcome the limited audio imagination by means of visual conjecture and logical reasoning.
“Gravitational Wave” consists of five concise sections. In the first section, as an introduction, three bass drums placed in distant corners of the auditorium, create a sort of varying density and fluctuation of the space: a status between existence and non-existence. In the second section that follows, ever-rising glissandi, with the continuous B-flat and its harmonic undertones, swiftly enable the energy to pour out. The rising move is a phenomenon in itself, while creating specific place = space, too. All the transformations occur in this “place”. At the culmination of this rising move starts the third section, somewhat of a transition. Here, a harmonic overtone spectrum of E-note illuminates and fills the open space for a while, but soon starts to collapse with its own weight, gradually folds its fan to close, and eventually converges into a single C-sharp. The fourth section that follows describes how a body of sounds circulating between B-flat and E creates a distortion of space, and then spreads to neighboring spaces in the form of waves (the title “Gravitational Wave” was derived from this). In the coda-like fifth section, a single harmonious sound played in tutti, blocked by loud bass drums, is gradually replaced by another compressed sound.
I wrote this work in 2004, at the request of Suntory Foundation for the Arts, after receiving 2002 Akutagawa Award for Music Composition (currently Yasushi Akutagawa Suntory Award for Music Composition). It was premiered in August of the same year by New Japan Philharmonic conducted by late Kazuhiko Komatsu.
The English title was “Gravity Wave” at the premier, but this revival performance gave me the chance to rename it “Gravitational Wave” which reflects my intention of the composition more precisely.
(Masakazu Natsuda / translated by Tadashi Mikajiri)
Premiere: August 29, 2004 at Suntory Hall, Tokyo
New Japan Philharmonic conducted by Kazuhiko Komatsu
Masakazu Natsuda
Masakazu Natsuda was born in Tokyo in 1968. After completing his graduate studies at Tokyo University of the Arts, he moved to France. He studied composition and conducting at Conservatoire of Paris, where he graduated from the composition department with a unanimous 1st prize from the jury. Natsuda studied composition under Teruyuki Noda, Masayuki Nagatomi, Jo Kondo, and Gérard Grisey, conducting under Kazuyoshi Akiyama and Jean-Sébastien Béreau, and accompaniment under Henriette Puig-Roget. He has received numerous awards and honors, including Akutagawa Composition Award and Idemitsu Music Award. Commissioned by Ministère de la Culture, Suntory Music Foundation, Ensemble intercontemporain, and numerous other public institutions, performing groups, and soloists, his compositions have been featured in various music festivals and concerts around the world.
As a conductor, Natsuda has been involved in many premieres of Japanese works and introduction of foreign contemporary works. He conducted the Japanese premieres of Griseyʼs Vortex Temporum, Quatre Chants pour franchir le seuil, and Reichʼs Tehillim. He also conducted Ivesʼ Symphony No. 4 (new edition) in December 2022, marking its first performance in Japan in this century. He and conductor Kanako Abe founded lʼAssociation Franco-Japonaise de Musique Contemporaine in 2013 and served as its first executive director. Through this association, he has since been involved in planning and organizing various educational programs, concerts, symposiums, and other events. In 2021, as Artistic Director of 6th Ryogoku Art Festival, he planned and conducted 6 concerts of 3 different programs to great success. In January 2024, the “Masakazu Natsuda × Arnold Schönberg” performance at Kanagawa Kenmin Hall C × C also drew a great response. In March 2024, he conducted Ensemble “Венера” in a performance of Messiaenʼs great work Turangalîla-Symphonie by a mixed orchestra of professional and amateur players.
｜ Toshiro Mayuzumi: Nirvana Symphony (1958)
Ⅰ Campanology Ⅰ
Ⅱ Sũram. gamah.
Ⅲ Campanology Ⅱ
Ⅳ Mahãprajnãpãramitã
Ⅴ Campanology Ⅲ
Ⅵ Finale
After World War II, Kunihiko Hashimoto (1906-91), who had accepted wartime requests from the military, was expelled from the composition classes of Tokyo Music School (currently Department of Music at Tokyo University of Arts). Tomojiro Ikenouchi (1906-91), who returned from France, and Akira Ifukube (1914-2006), who was almost self-taught in Hokkaido, took his place. It was Akio Yashiro (1929-76) and Toshiro Mayuzumi (1929-97) who studied under these three. After graduating, both started attending the Conservatoire de Paris in 1951, with the aid of Bourses France Excellence program (French governmentʼs scholarship for foreign students).
Yashiro stayed in France for 5 years, completing the curriculum of the Conservatoire, and then pursued his own style, absorbing elements of non-French Prokofiev and Bartok, too. In contrast, Mayuzumi rejected the old-fashioned education there, aborted the stay in one year, and returned to Japan. This decision marked his conscious embarkation on to the stream of Ifukube and Stravinsky who influenced him, clearly stepping away from his remaining attachment to the vision of Ikenouchi and of Ravel, his ideal, which he had held until around 1950 when he wrote the chamber work “Sphenogrammes”, influenced by Gamelan music.
For example, even in “X, Y, Z” (1953) in which he tried musique concrete, electronic music born in France, we hear nothing but the sound of “The Rite of Spring”. We can well understand why he came closer to the style of Edgar Varèse (1883-1965) in his orchestral/wind pieces, since Varèse was influenced mainly by Stravinsky. To utilize state-of-the-art avant-garde sounds, in order to express the primitive energy before the rise of modern European civilization, mirrors exactly the spirit of “The Rite of Spring”.
In addition, after tracing the techniques of “Studies I”, the electronic music of Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928-2007), Mayuzumi added his own new ideas on such works as “Music for Sine Wave by Proportion of Prime Number” (1955). Here, he must have touched on the method of constructing tone-rows based on sound-frequencies, as well as of synthesizing sounds, leading to “Phonologie Symphonique” (1957) and “Campanology” (1957), both of which are considered as precursors to “Nirvana Symphony”.
In the former, twelve-tone rows ‘inspired by harmonic overtones of bellsʼ are distributed to groups of instruments to constitute chords (Mayuzumi calls them ‘sound clustersʼ).
In the latter, which was later included in “Nirvana Symphony” as its first movement, Mayuzumi tried to reproduce midnight bells from temples on Silvester night. NHK (The Japan Broadcasting Corporation) helped him by analyzing the acoustics of various bells, and Mayuzumi planned to approximate the results with quarter-tones (one octave divided by 24, or half of half-tones), but eventually he deliberately chose to use the data acquired from Keiji Yamashita (1899-1969, a physicist)ʼs treatise on ‘Experimental Acousticsʼ, and forcibly squeezed the minute tones which were recorded and analyzed into simple twelve-tone scales (See Yuriko Takakuraʼs paper for details, which revealed this practical compromise).
More concretely speaking, among the three thematic chords at the beginning of “Nirvana Symphony” ʼs first movement – Mayuzumi calls them ‘combined soundsʼ – the chord A which sounds from the stage is “the large bell of Byodo-in Temple”; the chord B by brass from the right side of the audience is “an average sound of multiple large bells” (Mayuzumi imagined it to be the large bell of Todaiji-Temple); the chord C by woodwinds from the left is based on “small bells(a) of various temples”. However, Mayuzumi aimed more at covering all the twelve-tone scale with the three chords, than strictly reproducing the bellsʼ sounds, and thus at times he added notes that did not exist in the recorded sounds, or transposed notes as is common with twelve-tone technique (The approach in line with the twelve-tone technique was further cultivated in the next orchestral work “Mandala Symphony” (1960)).
The first movement ‘Campanology Iʼ is a free passacaglia based on chords A, B and C as mentioned above. The scoreʼs section marks indicate that Mayuzumi intended the movement as a theme with eight variations. As the variations progress, chords of seven other large bells − those of ‘Honen-in Templeʼ, ‘Zenrin-ji Templeʼ, ‘Myoshin-ji Templeʼ, ‘Kako-ji Templeʼ, ‘Daiun-ji Templeʼ and two more small bells(b) and (c) − are added and transposed. Pointillismic passages in the 2nd and 3rd variations are based on twelve-tone-rows. The 7th variation reaches the climax with B note at the bottom (B is the tonic of “Nirvana Symphony” and its Italian name ‘siʼ is homophonically equivalent to Japanese word ‘shiʼ, meaning ‘deathʼ), and the last 8th variation steers toward silence.
The second movement ‘Sũram. gamah.ʼ and the other even-numbered movements have male chorus passages like Buddhist sutra, with orchestra in the background. ‘Sũram. gamah.ʼ is a sutra chanted during Zen services by monks walking in single file. The text is a Chinese translation of an original Sanskrit scripture, and the Chinese characters are recited in Japanese phonetic readings (Kana). It has various metric patterns, and the number of tones sung by the chorus increases and decreases in line with the tone-rows. As the music heats up, all the twelve tones sound simultaneously.
The third movement ‘CampanologyⅡʼ returns to instrumental, and Mayuzumi leaves the elements of the first movement to vary freely, straying away frequently from the bellsʼ images. While the first movement transformed itself slowly in gradation, this third movement contrasts different elements with each other more clearly.
The fourth movement ‘Mahãprajnãpãramitãʼ Six soloists instead of chorus start the movement in portamenti with ambiguous pitches, praising the flawless wisdom leading to the ultimate enlightenment. They repeat ‘Mokohojahoromiʼ (Great is the completion of enlightenment), another Buddhist sutra, again pronouncing the sutraʼs Chinese-translation in Japanese phonetic readings. When the chorus finally comes in, the soli and chorus respond to each other in a manner like ‘Call-and-Responseʼ.
The fifth movement ‘CampanologyⅢʼ resembles the climax of the first movement, where ‘all the bells at all the temples resound and fill the hillsʼ. Here, the male chorus without words joins the echo of the bells. Towards the end of the movement, the lowest tone goes down to B or ‘si/shiʼ, and a bright echo shines in, leading to the final movement.
The sixth movement ‘Finaleʼ The cheerful melody repeated here is based on ‘Isshin-kyo-raiʼ (Respect in one united heart), a Tiantai Shomyo (a Buddhist chant) respecting Buddha, Buddhism and the monks. The core notes of this melody, A-F#-E, are also base notes (the lowest notes) of the chords A, B and C (This structure resembles Alban Bergʼs idea to quote J. S. Bachʼs chorale in his violin concerto). Bells sound in multi-layers, and diminish and fade away, around the axis of B
(‘si/shiʼ) note.
(Takayuki Komuro, translated by Tadashi Mikajiri)
Premier: April 2, 1958 Tokyo, Shinjuku Koma Theater
NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo conducted by Hiroyuki Iwaki
Tokyo Choraliers
