The closing concert of the San Francisco-Shanghai International Chamber Music Festival on March 14 will feature masterpieces by Brahms and Mendelssohn, a premiere by the dean of composition at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and The Garden, a new work by Kenji Oh, winner of the Conservatory's student composer competition. Oh won't meet the student performers from Shanghai until days before the premiere, but he knows his piece will be exceptionally well-rehearsed. His only concern is in not knowing how they'll interpret his unconventional notation or the extensive notes and diagrams that comprise much of the score.
Only seven-minutes long, The Garden covers a lot of ground. It's a musical tour of a zen icon, the rock garden at Kyoto's fifteenth-century Ryōan-ji temple. But at its heart, the piece is a metaphysical meditation on the concept of ma, the 'negative' space that exists between forms, whether physical or musical, and sawari, a roughness or buzz that colors the sound of traditional Japanese instruments and signifies the acceptance of imperfection.
Oh's score prescribes how to prepare the instruments using paper and binder clips. It includes Wikipedia entries about zen concepts as well as photographs of Ryōan-ji itself. The music for each movement is suitably spare, consisting of a single staff system without barlines, key signature or meter. Performers have ample freedom to interpret based on their own feel for ma and sawari.
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The second movement of
The Garden by Kenji Oh
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At first, Oh hesitated to write a piece rooted in traditional Japanese sonorities. Ethnically half Chinese and half Japanese, he grew up refusing to self-identify as either. "I'm a human being living on the Earth. I'm not Chinese or Japanese. I had that kind of attitude and I moved to the states and I realized, wow, I'm so Japanese!" Inspired to plumb something deep in his composition, and remembering the sounds of Shinto liturgical music from his Kobe neighborhood, he decided to mine this side of his heritage.
But Oh says the piece borrows from the West as well. Its architecture is very symmetrical, with the central movement - the rock garden sanctuary - unfolding in retrograde inversion after a mid-point. A film score composer, Oh creates cinematic effects by choreographing the players' movements, creating the impression that listeners are passing through the garden gate or spinning like a camera around stone lanterns.
Oh, who studies with faculty member David Garner, clearly enjoyed the challenges of writing the piece. "Do you know any string trio ensembles? There are so many quartets. You can refer to so much repertoire for string quartet... but not for string trio." Ultimately, the exercise led him to his own kind of zen epiphany: when it comes to composition, "The simpler, the harder."
More information about the San Francisco-Shanghai International Chamber Music Festival.
Take Note: Conservatory News and Events, February 18, 2014 |
