Luigi Irlandini's essay about non-western instruments in contemporary music. (2020)

Non-Western musical instruments and contemporary composition

Luigi Antonio Irlandini UDESC – Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina cosmofonia.lai@gmail.com

Abstract: Attention in this article is focused on the use of non-Western musical instruments in 20thcentury and contemporary art music composition, particularly New Music and contemporary composition that still perceives itself as a non-exclusive descendant of New Music. The term “World New Music” is proposed as the acknowledgment that New Music and composition are no longer exclusively European phenomena but global ones. The article explores the idea that the use of nonWestern musical instruments in World New Music is also part of the same phenomenon, by which there is a transcultural expansion of the musical instrumentarium, and of the figure of the composer.

The composer, in the 21st-century, becomes a “world composer”, and expands to creative methods beyond that of traditional European musical writing, often becoming a composer/performer.

Restraining cultural qualities and attitudes are discussed through a short critical review of how nonWestern percussion instruments have been handled along the 20th-century. This is followed by a discussion about the context of a few specific works by Iannis Xenakis, Lou Harrison, Hans-Joachim Koellreutter, Toshio Hosokawa and others with the main interest in understanding what caused the composers to employ non-Western instruments. Next, the article proposes that the composer/performer, because of their personal involvement with performance practices, is in a position to develop a culturally responsible musical practice with non-Western instruments by learning their original music and by creating a new music that is a truly neocultural phenomenon.

Keywords: non-Western instruments. New Music. Composer/Performer. Exoticism. Shakuhachi.

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Non-Western musical instruments and contemporary composition Luigi Antonio Irlandini

Introduction: the global scenario A new global1 context has allowed musicians of the 20th- and 21st centuries to make music with musical instruments that are not from their own culture. Today, it is possible to listen to a person from Cabo Verde (Cape Verde) playing the Australian didjeridu in Brazil, a Canadian musician playing the Japanese shakuhachi 2, people of several nationalities performing on a Javanese gamelan ensemble in California, Amsterdam or Dublin, a German playing the Hindustani tablā, and so on.

This tendency, by which musicians from around the world become interested in playing or mastering an instrument from a culture of which they are not natives, seems to be growing. It is even possible to find Western musicians who have acquired a musical education in some non-Western musical tradition. The fact that some musicians currently work extensively with non-Western instruments indicates that important changes in music have happened by means of transcultural exchange between musicians. Non-Western musical instruments are found in all kinds of music today: World Music, New Age, Pop Music, Jazz, and Classical contemporary (concert music or art music).

It is much more common for the non-Western instruments to be assimilated by musicians around the world than for their original, traditional musics. The reason for this is, perhaps, that the instruments, as objects, circulate much more easily around the globe than their respective musical traditions. These require the migration of people and years of dedicated study for their assimilation to occur in a new place. Moreover, the original music of a non-Western instrument may not be of interest to the musician who is not native from the instrument’s culture even though they would be willing to make use of it. For example, the didjeridu can be found around the world but the music being played is not aboriginal Australian music. Western players of the north-Indian tablā have asserted themselves with a creative work/performance of their own within genres such as Jazz, New Age or World Music rather than become known as performers of Hindustani rāga. On its turn, honkyoku, the classical music for shakuhachi solo, seems to be an exception: it has attracted so many people in Australia, Europe and the Americas since the 1970s, that there are, today, several

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This article presents the academic findings of a research stage concluded within the Research Project entitled Ancient and non-Western Contents in 20th-Century and Contemporary Musical Composition, coordinated by myself between 2012 and 2019 within the Research Group Processos Músico-Instrumentais (Musical-Instrumental Processes), in the Research Line Processos Criativos (Creative Processes) of the graduate studies program PPGMUS, at the Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina (State University of Santa Catarina) - UDESC, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil.

2 Although the new romanization of Japanese words changed the old form shakuhachi to syakuhati, I have kept the older form because it is far more popular than the new and most of the readers searching for articles on the shakuhachi would still be searching for it using the older spelling.

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accomplished non-Japanese shakuhachi masters performing honkyoku as well as sankyoku, a chamber music genre. On top of this, the shakuhachi has also been used in new contexts, from jazz and pop to New Age and New Music or concert music.

Therefore, the general tendency of non-Western musical instruments outside their cultures is for them to be assimilated into new styles. This gives them new roles and, therefore, re-significance.

The most common is for musicians to take up a non-Western instrument with the purpose of creating original music as an author (composer, improviser). “Original” simply means here that the music did not exist in any way before because it is not strictly following (or imitating) any already existing tradition. Whether that work will be “original” in the sense of artistic originality is an important question, and, to determine that, a study should be made about how the practice of performing new original music on non-Western instruments can lead to a successful artistic outcome, and what are the predicaments involved.

World Music, understood as the globalized pop music genre that developed in Western countries during the late 20th-century, is the realm where a scholar would most immediately look for new inter-cultural musical creations. It offers a wide and rich spectrum of examples that combine musicians or instruments from several cultures or in which musicians use instruments from cultures of which they are not native. However, this study focuses 20th-century and contemporary art music composition, specially New Music and contemporary composition that still perceives itself as a nonexclusive descendant of New Music, as this is the area in which I conduct my activities as a composer, performer and researcher. While the creative practices in World Music rarely involve musical writing and/or notation, but rather the multicultural interaction between musicians, the New Music composer’s creative practices has emphasized the employment of writing (écriture); this sets a up a predicament – absent in World Music – about how to deal with non-Western instruments within the realm of New Music.

Another important point to observe from the outset consists in that the study of inter-cultural and trans-cultural aspects of music composition must acknowledge today, that it is no longer possible to speak about “western music” or, as in here, “Western New Music”. The reason is that New Music has become a global phenomenon. There are New Music composers from Argentina to Canada, Finland to South Africa, Russia to Japan and New Zealand: New Music became a global reality with local characteristics that depend on the country or region of that country and on the existence and quality of the composer’s dialogue with the music of cultures of which they are not native. What we have today may be called a World New Music, understood as a globally international art which is no longer an exclusively European or Western internationality, and implies an expanded conception of New Music composition that includes, for the purpose of musical creation, the knowledge and assimilation of diverse musical traditions from around the world. The “world” in “World New Music” 3

does not indicate that it is some sort of “classical Word Music” because it might employ non-Western instruments. The “world” indicates that New Music is a global phenomenon occurring anywhere in the globe. The World New Music Days Festival3, organized annually by the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) refers to the subject of its Festival as World New Music, a fact that may indicate the acknowledgement of New Music composition as a global art in the terms I have just expressed.

With this perspective in mind, the term “composer” should also imply, today, that it is about a “world composer”, i.e., someone who writes art music and was educated and trained in the Western art music tradition, irrespectively of where this took place or of where that person comes from. Three are the reasons justifying this assertion: 1) if contemporary composition is a world phenomenon, it is no longer the case to call music which is composed as “Western music”, as just observed above4; 2) it would be awkward to write “the composer of Western music”, or “the Western music musician” and also inappropriate to perpetuate the assertion of the West as the only domain of musical composition; 3) it is equally awkward to say “Western composer” to someone who is not Western because it would be unfair to dismiss their particular cultural background and categorize the composer (as a person and as the music they write) as Western. It would be awkward to say that, for example, Tōru Takemitsu, a Japanese composer, was a “Western composer” based on the fact that he wrote music the Japanese themselves call yōgaku – precisely meaning “Western music”, which would result in his music being Western. Did Takemitsu write Western music? No, even with his background in Western music, which allowed him to be recognized as a composer in Europe, he wrote world art music with a large Japanese component, most often for Western instruments and the orchestra. Did Heitor Villa-Lobos write Western music? No. Similarly, he wrote world art music with a large Brazilian component. The intention with this distinction is not to create walls and borders, but rather the opposite: it is a recognition that composition started as an European art but has become, by now, a globally international art which includes Western and non-Western countries. It will never be denied that art music of Western countries will always remain as “Western music” and, in this case, Western composers will always continue to value their western and national conditions: French, Canadian, German and so on. However, in the case of countries that were Western colonies (such as Brazil and Mexico) or countries which suffered Western’s pressure to engage in international trade with them (such as Japan, for example), the sense of cultural identity has involved the predicament of the colony

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The name of the festival has been, from the first edition in 1976, ISCM World Music Days (ISCM WMD). This is how all festivals are named, as seen in the ISCM website, including the 2020 edition, which is also named ISCM World New Music Days (ISCM, 2019). My emphasis is not on the “new”, but on the “world”, which has been a constant since the first festival, and recognizes or, at least, suggests not just the internationality but also the globality of contemporary music composition.

4 It would be some kind of intellectual inertia to continue to think of composition as a Western art disregarding the fact that composition became global.

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versus the metropolis, often manifesting itself in the form of nationalism. In the globalized world, for both Western and non-Western countries, the preoccupation of being “national” may still exist, but the sense of cultural identity in a globalized world seems to take another shape and depend more on personal history, possibly including intercultural relations with musics from far away from anywhere.

The point is not whether the music or the composer is Western or not, but that the art of music composition has become culturally not limited to, and practically but not completely independent of, its European origins. Art music composition as a global phenomenon has overcome the Western concept of music as its only foundation, and may (and sometime does) integrate, potentially, other musical traditions of the world into a new or many new concepts of music. One example of such integration is the presence of non-Western musical instruments in New Music. Therefore, the term “composer”, with the implication of globalism, reflects this overcoming of its Western biases. This is particularly important in regards to non-Western instruments in composition and the issue of music writing.

There are two aspects of particular interest concerning the presence of non-Western musical instruments in World New Music composition. First, it is the transcultural exchange of instrumental and vocal music between non-Western and Western traditions, and second, the re-signification that non-Western instrumental and vocal practices acquire in the new context: this constitutes a neocultural process taking place within the realm of art music composition.

The first aspect indicates the personal involvement and interest in the original performance tradition of the instrument. Just in the same way as with Western instruments, a composer needs to know something about them, or about some of their traditional repertory before starting to write music for it. The knowledge is variable: hypothetically, a composer could have never seen a piano in their life and, still, would be able to write music for it after studying the repertory and learning about the instrumental possibilities of the piano. However, a composer would acquire a much richer experience, knowledge and understanding of the piano from directly experiencing what it is to play a piano. A personal involvement with the culture of the musical instrument, whether European or not, is of extreme importance for making music with it, even if it is only writing for it. The most common situation still is, nowadays, that non-Western instruments are not part of the composer’s musical culture since an early age. For this reason, the non-Western instrument is usually introduced at a later age and requires some extra effort from the part of the composer/musician to become familiar with its culture and the way it is played traditionally. Non-Western instruments require a transcultural effort, which implies acculturation and des-culturation. The transcultural exchange is a true exchange implying shared cultural practices and reciprocity (BENESSAIEH apud DESCHÊNES, 2018: 277).

The second aspect is that, for the composer/musician, there are two possible non-mutually exclusive ways of getting involved with a non-Western musical instrument: a) to become a performer of its 5

musical tradition and/or b) to make original music with it. For World New Music, this means to create a new musical style that involves the presence of a non-Western instrument. Hence, this new style must not be just a collage or imitation, but rather a neo-cultural phenomenon, i.e., a new cultural phenomenon resulting from transcultural exchange (ORTIZ, 1940: 102) 5.

Therefore, the transcultural exchange of instrumental and vocal music between non-Western and Western traditions and the re-signification they may acquire in the new cultural context are important aspects of the employment of non-Western instruments in contemporary composition. For this reason, this study concerns only World New Music composition that requires advanced performance skills on a non-Western instrument, and is limited to music meant to be performed, not only acoustic music but also electroacoustic music in which there is also the performance, either live or recorded, on a non-Western instrument. It does not include computer music that only makes use of non-Western instruments as sound sources for electronic processing that renders them entirely or practically unrecognizable. Although this is a possible practical option with non-Western instruments, it does not necessarily require of the musicians involved an advanced performance skill, but rather, usually, the ability of merely producing sound samples. Since this procedure by-passes the transcultural exchange with instrumental and vocal practices between Western and non-Western traditions mentioned above, it is not part of this study.

The composer and musical instruments The composer in the Western art music tradition is almost always imagined as being distant from musical instruments, and enjoys a privileged status among musicians. Because of Romantic ideas about the composer as a great genius of artistic creation, the intellectual and artistic work of the composer is considered more elevated than that of the “manual labor” of the performer. Also, musicians have been compared to mythic figures: the composer is usually thought of as a “god”, and, once this is recognized of an individual, such as Beethoven or Stravinsky, the imaginary indulges in all kinds of transcendental attributes and unlimited freedom that account for the genial, superhuman quality of the Great Artist’s inflated ego. Like a “higher creator-god”, the composer is not involved in the “messy” part of physical creation, which is assigned to a “lesser creator-god”, a trickster, the performer. This has been the bottom-line labor division in Western art music making, although, in the 20th- century all that was challenged and, sometimes, even changed. In this labor division, the composer’s training is not the same as that of the performer; the composer is trained to think and to write music, while the performer is trained to play the music written by the composer. In other words, 5

A musical instrument is one of the many possible contents from other cultures that may be present in the composer’s work. I have dealt in length with this subject in another article, “Ancient and Non-Western Contents in 20th- and 21stcentury Composition” (IRLANDINI, 2020).

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the composer is mainly concerned with écriture. Écriture6, a unique feature of Western art music, is not only the notation, but the writing of music as the fusion of musical thought and musical techniques in which the composer operates directly with symbols of sounds, frequently put down on paper, and not directly with sounds themselves. Composition has been a written tradition since its beginnings in the twelfth century. For this reason, composers are not necessarily competent or master performers7 of the instruments they write for, and have been typically released from the performance duty, which became a career in itself.

Often, composers may also be conductors, but it is even conceivable and acceptable that a composer might not play any instrument at all. Usually, a composer plays the piano, but the only expectation is that they know how instruments work and are played, and how to write for them, how to balance different combinations of instruments playing together, and so on. It is not expected of them to be able to play a tune on all, some or any of them. The idea of the composer as a writer has even developed into the “desk composer” stereotype, someone who is imagined to have cultivated an exceptional inner ear and is able to write extremely complex music for any combination of voices and instruments without ever checking the sound on a piano or on the instruments themselves. It is alleviating to remember that Stravinsky did compose at the piano… This is not a rejection of the composer’s desk activity: eventually, every composer sits at a desk to write the music, and while doing this, they use their inner ear to imagine the music to the best of their ability. The degrees of instrumental and inner ear capacity and practice among composers vary from individual to individual.

All this is to say that the composer’s experience has kept them historically away from performing, and closer to writing. It also leads to the fact that there are many ways for a contemporary New Music composer to relate to écriture, and that none of them are right or wrong. The scenario is vast, and compositional poetics are personal.

Certainly, écriture may hold even a hundred per cent of a composer’s attention, but there are those for whom it does not. Through the expansion of instrumental musical sources in New Music, traditional and modern notions of écriture have been challenged and changed. This is the case of electroacoustic and computer music, composition for non-standard instruments, and the fusion of composer and performer into a single individual. Electro-acoustic music composers have dealt directly with sound, even during the years when their methods and techniques used to be exhausting and slow. They have also developed specific methods of using symbols for sounds.

The field of composition involving non-standard instruments is, in fact, a larger field of study

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I keep the use of the term in French not for affectation, but because it implies methods and techniques of creating music through writing as well as the composer’s world-view.

7 By “master performer” I mean someone who masters the art of playing an instrument and its repertoire, and performs at the highest artistic level, someone like Martha Argerich at the piano or Heinz Holliger at the oboe.

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that includes the field of non-Western instruments. “Non-standard” means that the instruments are not those of the classical/romantic European tradition. Non-standard musical instruments may be nonWestern, found or ready-made, and newly invented. Harry Partch in the United States and the Swiss/Czech Walter Smetak8 (1913-1984) in Brazil have developed related approaches to composition mostly concerned with employing non-traditional musical instruments of their own invention, out of the desire of releasing music from Western cultural conformities such as equal temperament and tuning and creating a new universe of sounds. Their work does not include nonWestern instruments, although many of their creations are inspired on existing ones. On its turn, the work of English composer Frank Denyer (b. 1943) expands the composer’s instrumentarium to include not only non-traditional new instruments of his own creation but also traditional non-Western instruments, rare and ancient instruments, conventional Western and other adapted instruments.

Denyer’s approach to musical instruments (standard and non-standard) differs from Partch’s and Smetak’s. It also differs from Cage’s and Lou Harrison’s research for found, ready-made or at-hand instruments. At each new work, Denyer seems to make tabula rasa of the instrumental sources and associated creative potential for new scales, tuning, timbres, and the creative process unfolds each time as if “from scratch”, eventually finding the final form.

Composer/performers are instrumentalists, improvisers, performers, and may even be master performers. Traditionally, composers seen “first” as performers and “then” as composers have been regarded as lesser composers. The reason is that they would allegedly rely on their instrument to create (when they “should be” writing, instead), or did not have enough knowledge of the orchestra (because they spend too much time practicing at the instrument), and so on. Fryderyk Chopin (18101849) is the first example that comes to mind as an example. The term “composer/performer” (which might also constitute one more stereotype…) acquired a new dimension, especially since 20th-century experimental music opened the limits of musical creation beyond those of written composition. This allowed composers to complement or even reject écriture, in several degrees, in favor of a practical knowledge much more related to the disciplines of performance than to, say, the disciplines of writing music9. Many of their poetics are indeed independent from notation. The “composer/performer” is understood here as a musician with both trainings as a composer and as a performer (a [multi]instrumentalist, singer and/or conductor), someone skilled in the compositional techniques of a written musical tradition and in the performing techniques of one or more chosen instruments. There are several ways one can be a composer/performer depending on how much the playing intertwines

Walter Smetak immigrated to Brazil in 1937 and created some 144 new instruments he used to call “plásticas sonoras”, in reference to them being both musical instruments and visual art objects.

9 The “fusion” of composer and performer in a single person is very common outside the realm of art music, such as in jazz and Brazilian “instrumental music” (a genre intersecting international jazz): Egberto Gismonti, Hermeto Paschoal, Chick Corea, Thelonius Monk, etc., are some examples.

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with the written and other compositional processes. Chopin, Franz Liszt (1811-1886), Joan La Barbara (b. 1947), Michael Vetter (1943-2013) are some examples, which go from the full orchestral composer/virtuoso pianist to the performer whose work is unwritten and/or based on improvisation or other mnemonic methods that do not use paper and pen. The composer/performer might be the performer of only some of their compositions, while the other works are meant to be performed by other ensembles and orchestras or someone else. The ISCM call for scores for the 2020 edition of its World New Music Days Festival included the composer/performer category with the following definition: “(the composer/performer submissions category is) Open to composer-performers who work with an expanded approach to composition, artists engaged with the practice of researching and developing new compositional and performative tools which may work in an intersection of the physical, theatrical and visual. This may include performers exploring creation, composer-performer collectives, non-Western instruments, found/built instruments, electronics and extra-musical elements.” (ISCM, 2019)

It seems true that the composer/performer’s expanded approach to composition consists in the inclusion of performance as an integral part of compositional research, instead of only relying on écriture. In addition, as the above definition implies, the composer/performer usually has an attitude that may be qualified as experimental.

The participation of non-Western musical instruments in contemporary composition is one part of this vast scenario of diverse musical practices, this “expanding universe” which is World New Music. It is expanding because, as a global art, a high volume of diversity is assured. It has expanded its own boundaries of where it is made and with what it is made: any sound source is potentially useful for music making, even non-musical objects. Non-Western musical instruments have to offer the sounds, timbres, techniques and principles of temporal and spatial organization of which they are traditionally loaded. They can also animate new musical temporalities when approached with a research attitude that starts with a deep understanding of them in their original cultural context and proceeds to expanding their possibilities within the formative principles of the individual composer’s poetics.

Non-Western musical instruments have been added slowly and sporadically, but increasingly and ever more diligently by an attitude that values compositional artistic research and/or experimentalism. Some composers are personally involved in the performance of non-Western instruments, while others are not, and, it is important to remember that, in both cases, the practical or theoretical knowledge of a non-Western musical instrument by a Western-educated musician cannot be taken for granted as a simple matter: it is actually a predicament.

What is this predicament? It consists in how cultural qualities may limit or support the role assigned to a non-Western instrument in a musical work. By cultural qualities I mean the immediate cultural environment and the musician’s mentality and world view, which are also culturally 9

determined. It is a predicament of acculturation and desculturation. It is fair to say that the choice and inclusion of a non-Western instrument in a composition is not as expected as, for example, that of a Western instrument. It is more “natural� for a composer to use a violin than a sarangi. As there are few sarangi players educated in Western music notation, this particular instrument is still difficult to find outside India, and so on. Besides, the violin and the sarangi are not musically equivalent in any way, although both are bowed string instruments. A composer wishing to make use of a sarangi should rather be able to play it to supply for this lack, or find a sarangi performer to collaborate directly with.

Therefore, the cultural qualities involving the composer and the New Music environment tend to limit rather than support the practice of choosing non-Western instruments. An effort is required from the musicians involved to have the non-Western instrument become just a regular instrument, one mastered for the purposes of the new style.

A brief review of non-Western percussion instruments in the 20th-Century A brief look into the history of non-Western percussion instruments in Western music will provide many examples of such restraining cultural qualities. It is reasonable to start looking for nonWestern musical instruments in the orchestra described by Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908) in his Principles of Orchestration, a book first published in 1913 but written in the last decades of the 19th-century and not with a previous period. As this study’s focus is on 20th-century and contemporary music, his orchestration treatise describes the instruments of the Romantic orchestra which was inherited by, and changed along the 20th-century.

The Romantic orchestra already included instruments that were not originally from Europe and are now, or even then, considered as European, such as, for example, the timpani. The timpani derive from kettle drums that were first introduced in Hungary by Turkish armies and later, in the 15th-century, introduced in Europe by the Hungarians (FACCHIN, 1989: 291). Similarly, the modern xylophone is also the westernized development of an instrument from Asia or Africa taken into Western Europe (Ibid: 192). Although the xylophone was known in Europe since de 16th-century, it only became an orchestral instrument sometime along the 19th-century. In its modern form with two series of wooden keys, the orchestral xylophone dates from 1930 (Ibid: 193).

Percussion instruments seem to have been the first non-Western instruments that found their way into the Western orchestra, and the timpani and xylophone are considered Western instruments because they went through a process of change in Europe along the centuries into their modern form, with the performance techniques accompanying that transformation. The assimilation of each instrument is directly dependent on several factors regarding its sound, original playing techniques, and, perhaps, the degree by which the Western musician/composer is available to explore it.

Since the main elements of Classical and Romantic music were melody and harmony.

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percussion instruments were not considered very useful, and their use was limited to producing a coloristic and dramatic effect. In Rimsky-Korsakov’s Principles of Orchestration, few “percussion instruments producing indefinite sounds” are mentioned, and they are all mallet or stick instruments.

Actually, they are mentioned only briefly, since, according to the author, they “do not take any harmonic or melodic part in the orchestra, and can only be considered as ornamental instruments pure and simple. They have no intrinsic musical meaning, and are just mentioned by the way” (RIMSKYKORSAKOV, 1964: 32). Rimsky-Korsakov is talking about the triangle, castanets and little bells (classified by him as “high”), tambourine, switch or rod (Rute, in German), side or military drum and cymbal (“medium”), bass drum and tam-tam10 (“deep”). Rimsky-Korsakov’s list of determined pitch percussion instruments includes timpani, piano, celesta, glockenspiel, bells and xylophone. This was the state of things in 19-th century art music: it was about melody and harmony, and not about timbre or rhythm11, and percussion instruments had a very limited role in the music.

The modern orchestra, already in the first half of the 20th-century, employs, since at least Alban Berg’s Lulu (1929), the wooden temple blocks now commonly used in contemporary percussion ensembles. They are modern European instruments built from the Chinese mu-yü as a model (Ibid: 166). While the mu-yü is a single wooden block used suspended or resting on a pillow and played with a wooden beater in prayers and rituals at Taoist and Buddhist temples in China, in the orchestra it became a set of five temple blocks, providing an indeterminate pitch pentachord.

Therefore, its use was completely transformed and renewed in the Western context.

Instrumentation and orchestration treatises have been a central reference for Western composers, not only as a source of information and musical education, but also as a conservative force, preserving the results obtained by previous composers as models to be followed. Because they describe a previous musical praxis and attempt to present a categorization of the musical instruments in current use, as well as a description of each one’s potential, techniques, how they have been used, and how to write for them, they are used by composers to study the instruments available and write orchestral, chamber or solo pieces for them. In general, the effect is that composers learnt the tradition but did not risk using instruments that were not mentioned in the instrumentation treatises, unless they had a very particular idea in mind, or had listened to another work in which an unusual instrument was present.

The attitude of exploring new sounds from new instruments (and not only percussion ones) only becomes more common in the first half of the 20th-century, among a very limited number of composers, namely, Edgard Varèse (1883-1965) and the American experimentalists Harry Partch (1901-1974), Henry Cowell (1897-1965), Lou Harrison (1917-2003) and John Cage (1912-1992),

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Chinese gong in the original.

Stravinsky, a pupil of Rimsy-Korsvov’s brought much change in this respect with his 1913 The Rite of Spring.

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who had an interest in non-Western musics as well. However, it was by means of writing for percussion only, or for chamber ensembles including percussion, that these composers were able to develop a new attitude towards the musical instruments acceptable in composition (exception made for Partch, whose methods were focused on the construction of new instruments). The first work for percussion ensemble, separate from the orchestra, was Ionisation, composed by Edgard Varèse in 1930-31 for thirteen percussionists. It was first performed in New York City on 6 March 1933 (WENCHUNG, 1966: 169). The work was an important influence for John Cage, who composed a total of nine works for percussion ensembles, mostly quartets, between 1935 and 1943 (RateYourMusic, 2019) initially, under direct inspired influence by the performance he saw of Varèse’s Ionisation at the Hollywood Bowl in 1933 (CHARLES, 1991: 1). Cage and Lou Harrison shared a percussion ensemble and collaborated intensely in those years writing new music for it. The “contemporary percussion ensemble” seen beginning in the 1960s and flourishing along the next decades more typically as a group of six percussionists (such as the Percussions de Strassbourg ensemble), had its origin in the Cage/Harrison and Varèse initiatives. It is fair to say that this fact has opened the gate for all other non-Western instruments in Western twentieth-century music.

However, it has been very difficult to assimilate hand drums techniques in the context of Western art music. The congas, as well as the bongos, for example, which are both original from Cuba and developed there from African origins, are commonly found in orchestral music12, but there, or in the contemporary percussion ensemble, its use becomes simplified, if compared with its original technique, found in Cuban music and in jazz13. In fact, in art music, the congas are usually used in pairs and are often played with sticks, so they produce two distinct indeterminate pitches. When the congas are played with hands, they are also limited to one sound per instrument. This is the case in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kreuzspiel (1951), a chamber piece for amplified oboe, bass clarinet, piano and three percussionists requiring two tumbas or congas on the pitches B flat314 and D415. However, the original Cuban technique allows at least seven different sounds on a single drum: the bass or “heel”, a closed stroke which uses the palm and the fingers very flat over the skin; the front or “toe”, produced mainly by the fingers and tips; the open stroke, produced by the fingers but not much of the The congas appear in Revueltas’ La Noche de los Mayas, Maderna’s Quadrivium, Orff’s Oedipus der Tyrann, for example.

13 The reason why the conga’s original techniques are found in jazz but not in Western art music is twofold: firstly, there is no écriture between the instrument and the creative act of a jazz musician; secondly, conga players native from Cuba participate directly in jazz performance or teaching jazz musicians.

14 Considering middle C is C4.

15 Since 1992, Stockhausen used the Senegalese bougarabou drums instead of congas or tumbas. According to the composer’s website, “these instruments (bougarabous) sound better and are easier to play than tumbas, which require a special playing technique in order to produce a balanced sound” (STOCKHAUSEN, 2009). As a matter of fact, the bougarabous, as well as their similar djembés, require a very sophisticated hand/finger technique comparable in difficulty to the conga’s or tumba’s. The issue of a “special technique in order to produce a balanced sound” seems a little farfetched, as the congas are not being played with a variety of timbres that would interfere with the other instruments, especially since all of them are supposed to be amplified.

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tips; the dry slap which requires a grip of the instrument’s head; the open slap, produced basically by the tips of fingers; the pressed slap, which is a slap with one hand, possible in several grip nuances, while the other is resting over the drum’s head; the “muffled tone”, played with the fingers not too close to the rim (RALSTON, 2013).

Hand drum percussion is not a Western art music feature, and even today, it is rare to find the traditional use of hand drumming in this context. Hand drums only appear in instrumentation books in the 1970s. Reginald Smith-Brindle’s (1970) Contemporary Percussion and Samuel Adler’s The Study of Orchestration (1982), are among the earliest to include the bongos and congas. SmithBrindle includes also instruments such as the “Indian tabla”, the “Arabic tabla”, the “Chinese drum” and the “African drum” (SMITH-BRINDLE, 1970: 133, 139). Evidently, these seem to be general names for what the author could not really know in more detail (not for his fault, but because precise information about these instruments was not easily available at that time in Europe. However, at least, the author had the intention to attempting to make composers aware of the existence of the djembé (“goblet drum”), the darbuka (“Arabian table”), and the Hindustani tablā (“Indian tabla”).

A brief look at the way Luciano Berio (1925-2003) and Pierre Boulez (1928-2016) have handled the tablā in two of their works exemplify, in the next section, the limiting effects of Western cultural qualities or attitudes regarding non-Western musical instruments in general.

Limiting cultural qualities and attitudes regarding non-Western musical instruments The role of the tablā in Luciano Berio’s Circles (1960), for female voice, harp and two percussionists, and in Pierre Boulez’s Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna (1975), for orchestra, deserve consideration under the light of the following question: for what reason, or fulfilling what necessities, would the tablā – or whatever other non-Western instrument, but here, specifically, the tablā – be included in a composition?

The tablā is in fact a pair of drums: the bāyāń, for the left hand, and, for the right hand, the dāhinā, also called tablā, the same name of the set of two drums. It requires many years to master because of the complex rhythms involved in its traditions, the highly sophisticated performance techniques and the difficult and subtle sound production16. In its original context, that of rāga performance, it is at the same time a solo and accompaniment instrument, for which it is always expected a high level of virtuosity. In Circles, Berio makes use of several percussion instruments, among which the non-Western ones are tablā, Mexican bean, small bongos, large bongos, Chinese

I have studied the tablā with Pandit Taranath Rao (1915-1991) at the California Institute of the Arts for a short period of two years. The instrument features in my work Marriage of Heaven and Earth (1996), for English horn/oboe and tablā concertanti and two guitars.

16

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gongs, tamburo basco17 and two congas. In the drawing depicting the position of the instruments on stage, available in the Circles score, the tablā is drawn as a single drum assigned to each one of the two percussionists. Therefore, each musician has “one tablā”: one percussionist with the bāyāń and the other with the dāhinā, as can be seen clearly on a video of a 2020 performance of Circles by soprano Lucy Shelton and the 21st century Consort18. The percussion in Circles is treated according to sound masses and gestures. The tablā is used during the third movement, entitled “N(O)W”, in basically three types of texture. The first type is made of fast notes in fortissimo mixing bongos, tomtoms, hi-hat, cymbals and the tablā. In the second, the tablā may sound together with other membranophones or isolated, in alternation with the other drums. In both textures the tablā is played with sticks and is not perceived or noticed by the educated listener as a tablā. The third texture occurs on page 27 in the Universal Edition score, where both percussionists play isolated strokes “with the fingers”, as indicated in the score, on the tablā in alternation with other sounds (BERIO, 1960: 27).

Here, the texture is much more transparent and, if the listener is really paying attention and expecting to hear the Hindustani drums in their brief apparition of a few seconds, it is possible to recognize the sound of the tablā.

In this piece, Luciano Berio shows a complete lack of interest for the sounds of the tablā or for its long performance tradition as a solo instrument. Would a major composer use any Western instrument without taking into consideration its performance tradition and how it should sound at that moment of the piece? Why use the tablā just like any drum playable with a stick in a sound mass in which all instruments become undifferentiated? The tablā is not even playable with a stick19. In a piece with thirty percussion instruments (fifteen for each player) such as Circles, it is clear that each instrument is used in a limited way, in this case, as part of larger gestures in which what counts is the overall effect. Moreover, it is a natural consequence of sound masses that the instruments lose their individuality and become submerged in the total sound. However, would it make any difference if another drum replaced the tablā in the whole piece? Certainly not. This is the main objection about the tablā in Circles: it does not make any difference whether it is part of the instrumentarium or not, because it cannot be heard. Other instruments, such as the maracas, bongos, and the marimba do feature prominently at some point, but such a role is not given to the tablā in this piece. It is not a matter of whether or not the tablā is fully used in Circles. For example, the timpani in Circles are not used in their full extent of its possibilities either and get immersed within the sound masses as well,

17

The term tamburo basco appears in the 16th-century for a local (Basque) European form of what is, in essence, a very ancient non-Western instrument (FACCHIN, 1989:239), the tambourine.

18 The video is available https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtxlJKUVBKA 19 Smith-Brindle’s book Contemporary Percussion includes a CD in which the tablā is played with rubber mallets to provide the sound example. An explanation note is provided: “The tone here is hard and forced, and does not represent the instrument’s true sounds” (SMITH-BRINDLE, 1970: 270). This, ten years after the composition of Circles, attests to how difficult it was then for Western musicians generally not familiar with the tablā to deal appropriately with it.

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but the difference is that they are noticed when they intervene: the timpani do have a contribution.

Furthermore, it would not have been easy, in 1960, to come across a tablā in Europe or the United States, because, at that time (and even today, for art music environments), this was a rare-to-find instrument, and Western classical percussionists were not trained in playing it. Thus, the reason why the tablā features in Circles remains puzzling, especially in the case of a composer who has given so much importance to Western instruments and brought them to a new level of performance in the series of Sequenze, solo pieces that resulted from extensive research and collaboration with master performers on instrumental (and vocal) extended techniques. It does not fulfill any instrumental necessity of the work. Perhaps, it would be fulfilling some other necessity or desire of the composer.

The tablā appears also in Boulez’s Rituel. It is used in the beginning of the piece, for eight measures, as an accompaniment to the first oboe solo (BOULEZ, 1975: 1). Here, the Hindustani instrument is recognizable and clearly audible. However, it is assigned a stream of pulses on the same timbre, produced by the open and resonating stroke represented by the bol TUN20. It is possible to argue that the timbre of the tablā with the oboe is unique and irreplaceable, and this is true, so this might constitute a necessity of tablā in Rituel. However, the role of the tablā for eight measures on a monochromatic pulsation in Boulez’s fifty-five-minute Rituel seems to be a role that could have been given to any other drum, and can be qualified as a preciosity or a luxurious choice, and nothing more.

The piece, however, displays a much more interesting use of gongs.

There is no doubt that Circles and Rituel are masterpieces of their respective authors, and that the use of tablā in both of them is such a minor detail that it only becomes an issue for someone who studies the use of non-Western instruments in composition. However, in the context of these studies, such as here, it assumes a large importance, and, shows, at least, a reckless choice in instrumentation, which would not have happened if this were a Western instrument, as it is part of the composer’s artigianato formale (to use a Berio expression) to choose instruments wisely and skillfully. The use of tablā in those pieces shows that the authors are not actively interested in it. In fact, they never wrote again for the tablā and it remained for them an exotic instrument.

Exoticizing is probably the most restraining cultural quality of Western musicians in respect to non-Western musical instruments, as it is founded in ignorance and lack of interest in understanding what the exotic thing is. Exoticization happens when the musicians are convinced of the superiority of Western music and civilization over the “primitive”, “uncivilized” rest of the world. The sense of superiority generates exoticization, which basically consists in perpetuating the foreignness of the TUN is performed on the dāhinā with the fingers flat on the syāhī, a black circle placed at the center of the head. The TUN sound is very characteristic of the tablā and finds its similar only in the other Indian drums of the same kind, such as the pakhawaj, mṛdaṅgam and khol. Boulez does not specify what tablā bol should sound, and I have never been able to speak with a percussionist that played the first percussion part of Rituel. Therefore, my recognition of TUN comes only from listening to the recording of Rituel in the Sony CD Pierre Boulez SK 45839,.

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non-Western thing (in our case, the musical instrument) as a means of exclusion, by emphasizing its strangeness, sense of displacement whenever it appears in Western music, and the unwillingness to understand it21.

When a non-Western musical instrument is outside of its original cultural context, it involutes to the status of a silent object almost to the extent of stopping to be a musical instrument; in fact, it may simply become a decorative object, since no one can play it. It is fully alienated from its music and from the people that can make music with it the way for which it was intended. For the person who finds it, especially a non-native of the culture of that instrument, the non-Western instrument is (some more than others) an intriguing, exotic curiosity. It may become again a musical instrument only in the hands of a person gifted with a musical sensibility, and who is capable of producing good musical sounds on it. More importantly, the person should be someone that has some knowledge of the music that instrument plays. The assumption that musicians would be the kind of people most likely to be able to appreciate it, turns out to be a false assumption when certain musicians are conditioned by a narrow view of music. In those cases, they are the firsts to dismiss it as something musically unimportant.

Some assumptions complicate the reception of non-Western instruments, through exoticization, such as, for example, labeling them as “primitive” in the sense of being technologically under-developed 22. The assumption that non-Western instruments are supposed to be “primitive” is one of the most stubborn forms of Western-centric thought. For as much as one may believe that today this perception or judgment has been ousted from Western mentality, it reappears here and again, even in contemporary scholarly work, as proof that the extensive literature fighting against the idea of “primitive cultures” has not yet fully conquered that prejudice23.

21

The contact with the values of another culture often generates feelings of self-protection, as the other, being different, puts in question the sense of truth one has about their own values. This does not happen only to Western people, it happens to any people, so it is fair to say that this mechanism is typical of the human being in any cultural form. Claude LéviStrauss mentions that “in order for a culture to be really itself and to produce something, the culture and its members must be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority over the others” (LÉVI-STRAUSS, 1978:20). Therefore, the feeling of superiority might even be considered a positive thing for the development of cultural identity, but it may develop from self-protection into exoticization and even xenophobia. Unfortunately, the last five years have shown a worldwide rise of xenophobic feelings and behaviors.

22 “Exotic” and “primitive” are not the same thing. However, to call a thing “primitive” is a way of exoticizing it, i.e., keeping it foreign, as the label indicates a cultural status supposedly inferior to the Western’s own “high culture” condition.

23 It is difficult not to have the impression that the sea shells, didjeridu or animal horns are “primitive” forms of lipvibration instruments after reading, at the beginning of Anthony Baines’ Brass Instruments: their history and development - Chapter 2, Foundations of Tradition, written in 1976, that “but primitive peoples who know ghosts better and hear them everywhere know also that some are friendly (…) and when their participation is needed in a tribal ceremony it may be invited by appropriate sounds made through instruments (…) among such sound-makers are very large and crude tubular instruments which are blown into like a sort of trumpet to produce deep grunting or booming sounds” (BAINES, 1993: 37). Similarly, a more recent description of Maloya music from Reunion Island reads: “Traditional maloya is usually accompanied by berimbau-type bowed instruments, triangles, chants, and a panoply of primitive wooden percussion vessels” (NIDEL, 2005:60). Such small lapses of language denote the persistence of the idea of “primitivism” regarding non-Western cultures.

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The idea that non-Western instruments are “primitive” is not fair to the wide variety of technologies existing among them. For example, the berimbau24 may look “primitive” if compared with a koto, which displays a much “higher” technology in its making. The didjeridu is also commonly seen as technologically primitive because it might appear crooked or unfinished. It may have seemed “primitive” because one cannot produce melodies with it. But didjeridu are most often art musical instruments/objects made of found eucalyptus branches and produce, as drone instruments, many sounds and rich harmonics. Lay people as well as professional musicians often expect non-Western instruments to be like Western instruments. They expect them to look complex in their built, to be made industrially or from other materials that had to be worked to acquire their final shape (wood, silver, copper, gold…), to have as much timbral homogeneity as possible throughout its whole and long extension, to be capable of producing chromatic melodies, to be tuned according to equal temperament, etc… These expectations, when transferred to non-Western instruments, will frequently remain unfulfilled, generating a biased and disapproving judgment and, consequently, the label of “underdevelopment”. Thus the failure to see that the performance on a non-Western instrument in their cultures of origin is the giving concrete reality to a particular musical thought and sensibility, and that their cultures include a performance pedagogy, a performance repertoire, and a performance canon.

A work by Argentinian composer Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) is a fine example of exoticization in New Music. It is rightfully entitled Exotica (1971/2), for six singing instrumentalists performing ten or more non-Western instruments, with ad libitum one or two stereo tape recorders with two to four loudspeakers”. The piece requires each performer to gather a variety of non-Western plucking, wind, string and percussion instruments. Kagel refers to them as “non-European instruments”. It is also dedicated “dem sechsten Sinn” (“to the sixth sense”) (KAGEL, 1972). In fact, the instruments are not specified in the score, their number can raise from the minimum of sixty to two hundred, and are, therefore, never the same, from performance to performance. The composer’s intention, according to Werner Klüppelholz’s program notes for the first performance is “to question the dominance of Western music or ‘culture’ or “go to the primeval origins of music-making, when singing was still at one with making sound out simple, everyday objects” (KLÜPPELHOLZ apud UNIVERSAL, 2019).

The performance of Exotica is always different, as it is an open form in five sections. Only the first section, A, has fixed rhythm, dynamics and articulations (but not pitches or instruments), while all other sections are even more open, being graphically notated and based on improvisation.

24

The berimbau is a Brazilian musical bow originally from Africa, a percussion instrument with a single steel string attached to a wooden bow, and played with a stick. It includes a dry gourd (cabaça) for amplification and resonance, and a shaker (caxixi). A smal stone or coin (dobrão) is pressed to the string, producing tone change.

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The idea of music-theater is an important feature of Kagel’s works. Therefore, Exotica usually takes place on a stage with a scenario decorated with artificial tropical palm trees and/or other props of the kind. Most often, the musicians are usually dressed unremarkably, but might add some exotic accessories or combinations, such as straw hats and tuxedo. The 1972 Deutsche Grammophone LP cover for the first recording shows a shirtless Mauricio Kagel with his face painted green and holding a “primitive” string instrument. Inside the LP cover there is a picture of violoncellist Sigfried Palm (1927-2005) with his face painted and with feline whiskers. Interpreters are expressly required to sing, yell and make guttural and grunting sounds, in addition to performing on instruments “wholly unknown in Europe”, therefore, emphasizing the foreignness of their actions and of the instruments and vocality in use.

As Klüppelholz’s statement and the dedication in the score suggest, the intention of the music seems to be to allow the liberation of the performing Western musicians’ primal music-making impulses and instincts. This liberation would result from a greater access to their “sixth sense” propitiated by their lack of training on such instruments. By using instruments the musicians are not technically proficient, the musicians would end up inventing music out of terror, panic, irony or pleasure, as Kagel puts it25. This implies, in theory, that, with their regular Western instruments of their chosen career and profession, the musicians are not able to liberate the “primitive within them”.

Considering these intentions, a better title would have been “Primitiva”, rather than Exotica, but, perhaps, the two terms are equivalent for the author.

In a very thorough discussion, lecture and analysis of Exotica by musicologist Jörn Peter Hiekel, Ensemble Modern’s pianist Ueli Wiget and percussionist Rainer Römer for the 2014 edition of the Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival26, Römer comments about the performer’s situation of playing instruments they cannot play. Since Kagel also required of them that there be a long time of preparation with those instruments, so that the musician ends up acquiring some personal experience with the instrument to meet the demands of the score, Römer observes that “you become a professional of being non-professional”. In other words, the performer is required not to bring their professional expertise and is required to play an instrument they do not know how to play. Performing on a non-Western instrument would allow the interpreter to suppress their own musical training, thus

25

Kagel writes: (My translation: “I have always wanted to compose a work whose essential condition consists in each performer not playing an instrument for which they have been trained for years, but only an instrument the technique of which they do not possess. (…) the realization of this principle would lead to unimaginable sound effects (…) this would put in question the performer’s competence to a degree that they would invent music out of terror, panic, or maybe also out of irony and pleasure.” In the original: “Yo siempre he tenido el deseo de componer una obra cuya condición esencial resida para cada uno de los ejecutantes en el hecho de no tocar el instrumento para el cual había sido entrenado durante años, sino únicamente un instrumento cuya técnica no posee. (...) la realización de este principio conduciría a efectos sonoros inimaginables (...) pondría en cuestión la competencia de los ejecutantes a tal punto que éstos, por terror y pánico, quizá también por ironía y placer, inventarían música.” (KAGEL: 1972) 26 The lecture is available in video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0Rujgxmlyc.

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opening the room for the “primeval origins of music-making”.

Even if the serious side of Exotica may be to allow the Western musician to reconquer their primordial musical instincts deeply buried in the universal archetypes of their collective unconscious – a rather arguable intention – the ironic and grotesque elements of the performance achieve a far greater predominance. Even if, as stated by Römer in the same video, Kagel “never makes fun of something”, the whole performance results in a mocking and satirizing pantomime of the human being in tribal or hunter/collector conditions and the noises they make, especially in the section in which improvisation allows for the “full” katharsis of the performers.

Exotica is a celebration of exoticism, or rather, of exoticization. How does this “question the dominance of Western music or ‘culture’ ”? On the contrary, all it does is reinforce it, by means of irony and lack of perception of its own discriminatory bias. From the inception, the very idea of composing for a minimum of sixty non-specified instruments “wholly unknown in Europe” reveals a generalized notion of this “non-European” instrumentarium and the composer’s waiving the task of getting involved with them, knowing them and their compositional possibilities in detail and depth.

This task is often waived in the aesthetics of conceptual music, indeterminacy and aleatory, where it is common not to specify what instruments will be used (although it is understood they would be almost exclusively Western instruments). However, in the case of Exotica, regardless its aspect of conceptual music, it is the fact that non-Western instruments are intended that makes it exoticizing not to determine which ones they are. They remain forever “wholly unknown” and identifyable only by the fact that they area exotic (“non-European”) with the excuse that they might help the classically trained Western musician to invent music with their sixth sense. At that point why not do it with Western instruments that are outside the performer’s expertise? In this case, those Western instruments the performer has no technical knowledge about would be, for this very reason, just as exotic as the non-Western and there would be no risk of exocitizing non-Western instruments.

Unfortunately, in the whole discussion during the Ultima Oslo lecture about Exotica, the categories of “exotic” and “exoticism” are never recognized as negative or alienating (of the exotic thing); they are even recognized as not negative. Hiekel poses the question of whether Exotica is a dated or fresh piece in regards to the issue of exoticism. It is his view that the contrast between the first 1972 performance and the first next performance with Ensemble Modern in 199227 consists in the reduced importance given, in the new performances, to the several layers of ironic imitation of non-Western musics present in the piece. One of these layers is in section E, in which the performers are asked to imitate from the non-Western music that is being reproduced on the tape, on whatever instrument they might be playing. The tape is optional and might not be used in a performance. Ironic

27

Acording to Wiget in the video, Ensemble Modern had been working on that piece together with Kagel since 1985.

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imitation seems to be the most problematic part of Exotica, since this is where the performance tends to ridicule the music of “primitive” or “exotic” cultures and gives way to the performing musicians’ biased perceptions of other cultures, resulting in exoticization. Riekel mentions that “you can’t make humor like that of the 1970s in 1992”. Römer, Wiget and Riekel agree upon the observation that the “ironic element is less important today (2014) because hybridization is more common today”. Römer observes that “exotic is a colonialistic word of what happened in the last five hundred years, but that in the twentieth-century it became something else”, whatever that means, and Hiekel adds that the term exotic is not negative and was already used in ancient Greece with the meaning of something that is not from the given place and time. Certainly, one cannot make bigoted humor today as in 1972, but not because the “ironic element is less important today” due to “hybridization being now more common”. It is exactly because hybridization, as a consequence of transculturality, is so much more common today, that the ironic element is more important than it was in 1972, because it became unacceptable and people are searching for meaningful ways of interculturality. “Exotic” is, by nature, a colonialist word, and, if it is used in the 21st century, it is because it did not “become something else”: it is either used by the colonialist frame of mind, or it is not used at all28.

Kagel writes in the score: “A fixed text was waived. The performer may either improvise the choice of his words or word-like sound combinations (e.g., the native language backwards) or specify them during rehearsals. According to the tendency of the piece, it would be appropriate to perform the articulation in imitation of extra-European languages.

Obviously superficial comedy is excluded here (strong nasal and guttural intonation, however, to be preferred!).

The fact that EXOTICA is mostly performed by musicians who stand in contrast to non-Western players due to skin color and gestures serves the core idea of the piece: the conclusion of the rather relative term "exotic". A banal imitation of exotic music would then harm the quality of the interpretation rather than disguise the intentions of the piece.29 (KAGEL, 1972: 7)”

This statement is an evidence that Kagel was aware of the problem of the humor inherent to the piece, and that such humor should not be reduced to or include “superficial comedy”. Concerning the relativity of the term “exotic”, this turns out not to be a proposition of transculturality: to state that the African is exotic for the Western, and, that the Western is exotic for the African, only reinforces the perceived incompatibility of differences, emphasizes the foreignness of each other, and leads to mutual alienation. In my opinion, Exotica’s approach to exoticism and interculturality is dated because it does not envision transculturality.

The same may be said of the term “orientalism”, which alienates the “oriental” thing. Unfortunately, even recent musicological texts about the interface of Western and Eastern musics still treat the subject as “orientalism”.

29 “Auf einen festgelegten Text wurde verzichtet. Der Ausführende kann die Wahl seiner Worte oder wortähnlichen Lautkombinationen (z; B. die Muttersprache rückwärts) entweder frei improvisieren oder während der Proben festlegen.

Der Tendenz des STückes entsprechend wäre es angebracht, die Artikulation in Nachahmung ausseurropäischer Sprachen vorzunehmen. Selbvserständlich ist hier vordergründige Komik auszuschliessen (stark nasale und gutturale Intonation jedoch zu bevorzugen!). Die Tatsache dass EXOTICA meist Musiker vortragen warden, die durch Hautfarbe und Gestik im Gegensatz zu aussereuropäischen Spielern stehen, dient dem Kerngedanken des Stückes: der Blosslegung des recht relative Begriffs “Exotik”. Eine banale Imitation exotischer Musik würde dann der Qualität der Interpretation eher schaden als die Intentionen des Stückes verschleiern”. (KAGEL, 1972: 7) 28

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Some of the pillars of modernism need to have crumbled for the composer to defeat these restraining cultural qualities or attitudes. The first of them is Theodore Adorno’s principle of dialectics of the material, according to which the art object should be formed only by means of what the historically determined material can yield from within. Therefore, in modernism, or at least in the historical musical avant-garde (New Music), the non-Western content (musical instrument, in this case) is exoticized by repetitively emphasizing its foreignness. Exoticizing reinforces that the nonWestern instrument is not a material historically determined or original from within the world of Western art music, and that it is something impossible to integrate, thus keeping it forever alienated, away and strange. Modernism judges any attempt of contact with the difference as imitation, an inferior category in modern art, also called pastiche, “a picture or another work of art that (often with fraudulent purpose) imitates the style of a particular artist by copying and recombining parts of his authentic works” (CHILVERS, 1988: 374).

To resume the restraining cultural qualities mentioned up to here, they are: ignorance of the other musical culture, exoticism/exoticization, estrangement, senses of displacement (the nonWestern instrument would be out of place in Western music) and infection (learning and listening to exotic music would contaminate, corrupt the listener, or corrode a tradition). Once these qualities are overcome, the contact with the non-Western content (or musical instrument) loses its connotation of disease or corrosion and becomes an obtainment and an addition; the sense of “displacement” is cured by a process of learning of what it is in its original context, and of inclusion and integration into a new context. Estrangement becomes connection; exoticism becomes familiarity. All of this takes time, but “time heals everything”.

The leap from the first contact impressions of exoticism with a non-Western instrument to the transcultural decision of embracing it for the creation of some new music depends on several factors, and there is no general rule that can be applied for all of them or for all musicians and composers. In fact, the same instrument may provide different examples of the process by means of which it became a transcultural instrument. However, a primordial condition is the personal sense of identification with the different, not a wish to become similar or alike the different, but a pre-existing connection and recognition of oneself in the other.

A few examples of 20th-century music with non-Western instruments This section discusses examples of music that has been written for interpreters and ensembles playing non-Western instruments under the assumption that such instruments would be played from the score in Western notation just as Western instruments are30, thus indicating their immediate 30

In the sense that they are being incorporated indiscriminately into the notation, since the notation is the means by which 21

availability and the presence of competent musicians that can and know how to use them. Each of the composers mentioned had different reasons for using the non-Western instruments in those specific works, and this aspect is the main interest for the following commentaries. The leading question is: in which context did composers demonstrate an active interest in non-Western musical instruments?

This review is neither complete nor exhaustive. It may be divided in three sections grouping works

by

cultural

region

of

the

origin

of

the

chosen

non-Western

instruments:

1) African percussion instruments, with Okho (1989), for three djembés, by Iannis Xenakis (1922 - 2001) giving a continuation on the subject of hand percussion instruments, 2) Indonesian instruments, with Gending (1975), for Javanese gamelan, by Ton de Leeuw (1926-1996) and the Concerto for Piano with Gamelan (1987), by Lou Harrison (1917-2003) as examples, 3) a discussion about Japanese and non-Japanese composers approaching traditional Japanese instruments, including a discussion of New Seeds of Contemplation (1986), for gagaku orchestra and shōmyō (Buddhist chant), by Toshio Hosokawa (b. 1955), and a detailed study of Hans-Joachim Koellreutter’s Yūgen.

Iannis Xenakis’ long interest in percussion and polyrhythm took his research to compose Okho, a piece for three djembé (one per musician) and a non-specified “large size African skin” (une peau africaine de grande taille), a deep bass performed by the first percussionist (XENAKIS, 1989:1). The fact that Okho brings, into French 20th-century music, drums from Senegal, a country which became independent from France in 1960 (only twenty nine years before Okho’s composition), and that it was commissioned for the French Bicentennial in 1989 raises the question of whether this would have been a celebration of French imperialism or a proposal of acculturation as an antidote to it. The answer is, much more likely, the latter, because Okho not only requires exclusively African instruments but also that the traditional hand technique is used in its performance. This suggests a desired small step into an acculturation process, since the incorporation of djembé traditional hand strokes, rarely displayed by classical percussionists, calls for a deeper or more complete engagement with the drum, rather than just playing it with mallets or a culturally-uninformed hand technique. In fact, for contemporary classical percussionists, the step is not so small as it might seem. It requires from the performer new muscular resistance and a new development of the ear, so that it does distinguish the subtle timbral and indeterminate pitch differences. Okho makes use of six different tone colors chosen from the tradition, played with the hands either on the edge (with the fingertips, with a closed stroke, by keeping the fingers down, or open, allowing the resonance to occur) and on the center (using a flat hand to produce a muffled sound, curling the hand like a shell, and with the

composed music is performed. Non-Western instruments, however, may pose many new questions and solutions about notation that Western instruments do not.

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fingertips in both ways described for the strokes on the edge). In addition, there is a small section in which two timbales sticks are used, and a longer section in which stick-and-hand technique is employed.

Not by accident, a tradition of performing Okho on a different arrangement has developed. In this tradition, each performer has an identical percussion set consisting of a bass drum, two tom-tons, a conga and a pair of bongos, which are played only with mallets and sticks31. The result is a greater volume of sound than on djembé. Pitches are also clearer for the ear unfamiliar with the djembé pitches. This is a comfortable option for musicians who are not willing to deal with the difficulties of hand percussion. However, Xenakis’ original intention for the work was that they be played with traditional technique, and this was only possible thanks to the collaboration with percussionists of the Trio Le Cercle (Willy Coquillat, Jean-Pierre Drouet and Gaston Sylvestre), who had an interest and knowledge of the music of non-Western traditions.

It is important to mention that Okho does not sound like African music, even though it is played only on African instruments with traditional techniques. The piece is a study of a general process from order to disorder, moving from the regular simple rhythms of its beginning to the irregular complexities heard towards the end of the work. While the tone color material is nonWestern, the rhythmic material and the way it is developed has nothing to do with African music, and is in complete integration and consistency with the rest of Xenakis’ oeuvre. The use of non-Western instruments is not a common feature in Xenakis’ music, with the exception of Okho, Nyuyo - Soleil Couchant (1985), for shakuhachi, sangen and two koto, and works for percussion ensemble that include non-Western percussion instruments together with Western.

The Javanese gamelan ensemble and, less frequently, the Balinese, has been probably the only traditional non-Western “orchestra” to become established in Western countries. A consequence of the long-term presence of the Dutch in Indonesia in the 19th- and 20th- centuries was the presence of a large Javanese population in the Netherlands organizing cultural events which included gamelan performances already prior to World War II. Numerous gamelan ensembles were built up in the Netherlands along the 20th-century; weekly gamelan and dance performances took place at the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam starting in 1940, and such cultural events continued to take place ever since in the Netherlands (FELDBRUGGE, SCHREUDER, 2019: 1). All this resulted in the consistent presence of Javanese music culture in the Netherlands, thus facilitating Dutch people to learn how to perform on these instruments.

For Dutch composer Ton de Leeuw, who wrote mostly for Western instruments and electronic music, what provides the context for him writing for the gamelan is his lifelong interest in

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A performance of this arrangement by the Peabody Percussion Trio is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2a47OEee58.

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transculturation and acculturation, as seen by his intense involvement in the twenty editions of the International Composer’s Workshops, an event centered on the interface between Western art music and non-Western musical traditions organized in Amsterdam and Sofia (Bulgaria) between 1974 and 1996. De Leeuw conceived his textural, almost electronic music sounding Gending as an homage to Javanese gamelan, a tradition he had learned from a pioneer on gamelan studies, the ethnomusicologist Jaap Kunst (1891-1960), who travelled to “Nederlands Indië” since 1920 in assignment from the Dutch Government to study Indonesian music. It took a composer who was engaged in ethnomusicological studies and favorable to the idea of acculturation for the gamelan instruments to be called for into the European New Music context in 1975, and Ton de Leeuw was one of the pioneer European composers to make that gesture.

Ethnomusicologist Mantle Hood (1918-2005) established the first Javanese gamelan performance program at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1958. Currently, there are more than one hundred Javanese and Balinese gamelan ensembles in the United States, either as university performance programs, other institutions, community or private groups. Composer Lou Harrison’s oeuvre is an exceptional example of a deep engagement with Asian musical traditions and their instruments and, more specifically, with the Javanese gamelan. One of his major interests was avoiding European temperament and practicing just intonation. This tendency is present since his percussion music of the late 1930s and 1940s, in which new and found instruments were used.

Together with William Colvig (1917-2000), he created an Indonesian-inspired ensemble of instruments made of easy-to-find materials such as aluminum slabs, tin cans, oxygen tanks, conduit tubing, etc., all carefully treated and modified to obtain the desired pitches and sounds. The ensemble was called American Gamelan, and was used in three compositions, the 1971 opera Young Caesar, La Koro Sutro (1972), for choir, small organ, harp and American Gamelan, and the Suite for violin and American Gamelan (1974) (MILLER-LIEBERMAN, 1998: 63). Harrison’s Piano Concerto with Gamelan is one of more than thirty compositions using the Javanese ensemble of metallophones and gongs. He started composing for Javanese gamelan instruments in 1980 with Scenes from Cavafy, for baritone, male choir, harp and Javanese gamelan using both tunings (slendro and pelog). Several pieces for gamelan alone start their title with the word gending, which means composition, such as Gending Alexander (1981) or Gending in Honor of Herakles (1982), for example. When composing for solo instruments and gamelan, Harrison chose instruments that could allow the musician to match the gamelan’s tuning by ear, such as the Double Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Gamelan (1981), or changed the tuning of the tempered instruments, as in the case of the piano in the Piano Concerto with Gamelan.

Harrison follows very closely the traditional music for Javanese gamelan, not only by writing the gamelan part with the notation used for Javanese music, as in the case of the Piano Concerto with 24

Gamelan, but also by keeping the characteristic agogic changes and layered textures, other than the tuning and scales. This makes his music for gamelan and for gamelan with Western instruments seem to belong more to the Javanese than to the Western tradition. In these works, it is not possible to say they are a duplication of Javanese music: it is more appropriate to say that they seem to be a continuation of that tradition. While the Javanese gamelan was a central part of Harrison’s work, he also wrote for Sundanese, Ciberonese and Balinese ensembles as well. Furthermore, several other Asian instruments were consistently employed in many compositions (MILLER-LIEBERMAN: 1998, 267 ff). One statement by Lou Harrison sums up his aesthetics: “This whole round living world of music – the Human Music – rouses and delights me, it stirs me to a “transethnic”, planetary music” (HARRISON apud ALVES: 2017, iv).

The traditional Japanese instruments of the Edo (1603-1868) and earlier periods started to be employed by New Music composers around 197032. Western music had become a strong influence in Japan from the beginning of the Meiji Era (1868-1912). Since then, generations of Japanese musicians had Western music as their first, and frequently only, musical training, giving place to Japanese interpreters of Western music and composers of a Japanese music framed into the Western tradition.

Therefore, Japanese composers trained in Western music were composing in Western styles – if not only for Western instrumental forces – and frequently were not well informed about traditional Japanese styles. As an example of this is Makoto Moroi (1930-2013), who composed the well known Five Pieces for Shakuhachi in 1964. He narrates that he only became acquainted with shakuhachi music in the spring of 1964, through shakuhachi master Sakai Chikuho (1892-1984), and that he “was amazed by the unexpectedly modernistic sense and feeling in the tone and movement of the melodies in this traditional music” (MOROI, 1967: 9). This became his stimulus to start a composition for the shakuhachi right away.

When Japanese composers trained in Western music became interested in the traditional instruments of their own ancient past, they were, initially, spearheaded by a need for establishing cultural identity in confront with a musical praxis entirely imported from Europe. Conversely, at the same time, Japanese composers trained in traditional Japanese music became open to Western influences, allowing the exchange to take place. An exchange from within the honkyoku tradition for shakuhachi solo – a music characteristically without pulsation33 – occurs in the pieces composed in the 20th-century in which rhythm is organized by a beat (one example is Tone no Funa Uta [1927], for two shakuhachi, by Rando Fukuda [1905-1976]). Considering that the first Japanese symphonic 3232

This section reflects a line of my research interests, which is World New Music for traditional Japanese instruments.

Honkyoku pieces in the Kinko ryū (school) do have a pulse, but the tempo changes are not notated and must be learnt by direct contact with the master, thus combining a written and oral tradition. Shakuhachi player Gunnard Jinmei Linder call this “organic pulse”. The most ancient honkyoku pieces, as well as those in Katsuya Yokoyama’s Chikunshinkai school do not have a pulse.

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orchestra was founded in 192434 and that the first New Music ensemble wih traditional Japanese instruments, the Nihon Ongaku Shūdan (Ensemble Pro Musica Nipponia) was founded in 1964, it only took forty years (as compared to the previous fifty-six years of westernization started in 1868) for Japanese composers trained in Western music to rediscover the ancient forms and instruments of Japanese music and choose a path of re-signification of their own musical traditions, now in-formed by 20th-century Western Avant-garde. In fact, the term hōgaku (national music), which in the early 19th-century referred only to modern era nobility music for koto, shamisen and voice, and to nonreligious forms of music for shakuhachi excluding the previous classical genres, start including, in the late 20th-century, “new tendencies for traditional instruments due to the confrontation with yōgaku” (Western music) (GALLIANO, 1998: 295). This rediscovery of their traditions by Japanese composers trained in Western music occurred in a moment of a general sense of social discontent and search for cultural identity, which led to a greater appreciation of traditional music and its instruments (GALLIANO, 1998: 294)35. Since then, compositions by Japanese composers have included music sometimes written solely for traditional Japanese instruments in several formations, or for them combined with the orchestra, usually as soloists. A few examples are the Concerto for Shakuhachi and Orchestra (1976) by Ryōhei Hirose36 (1930 - 2008), Tōru Takemitsu’s In an Autumn Garden (1973), and Convexity (1970), a concerto for three groups of sankyoku and a Japanese drum by Minoru Miki (1930-2011), specifically, fue, 2 shakuhachi, 2 shamizen, biwa, 13-string koto, 20-string koto, bass-koto and J-Drum. Minoru Miki was a major supporter of composition for traditional Japanese instruments. He founded and conducted the Ensemble Pro Musica Nipponia, wrote the book Composing for Japanese Instruments, and composed several pieces for Japanese instruments, many of which for the 20- and 21-string koto.

New Seeds of Contemplation – Mandala, composed in 1986 (and revised in 1995) by Toshio Hosokawa, takes its title from the 1961 book by American Trappist monk and scholar Thomas Merton (1915-1968). The fifty-minute long composition in five movements (I - Preludio , II – Spring, III Summer, IV - Autumn, V – Winter Snow Scapes), commissioned by the Donaueshingen Musiktage 1995 Festival, is scored for shōmyō and gagaku ensemble. The piece is a rare example of music for several performers playing a contemporary composition for gagaku instruments in an European 34

As a matter of fact, the first one was founded in 1915, but did not last ten years. The orchestra founded by Kōsaku Yamada (1886-1965) in 1924 eventually developed in today’s NHK orchestra ((BURT, 2001: 12).

35 Similar to Ensemble Nipponia’s revival of traditional Japanese instruments is the founding of the orchestral group Instrumentos Nativos San Andrés or Orquestra Experimental de Instrumentos Nativos in La Paz, Bolivia. Several composers, such as Cergio Prudencio, Nicolás Suáres, Oscar Garcia, Willy Pozadas and Manuel Monroy write for Andean instruments. Prudencio’s La Ciudad is one such example: the context of the piece, as of his other works in the same type of instrumentation, is partially that of timbral and textural research and innovation using such instruments in the context of New Music, and partially the composer’s political position concerning the desired equality of indigenous, African and European cultures in Latin America. They are encouraging the continuity of native Bolivian culture within the sphere of Latin American concert music as well in other local social and cultural environments.

36 I am not following the Japanese form for names, which places the surname before the given name (Hosokawa Toshio).

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country, in this case, Germany. Hosokawa’s piece was performed by the Ensemble Yusei, a gagaku group formed in 1986 by Imperial House gagaku musician Sukeyasu Shiba (1935-2019) and by shōmyō singer Koshin Ebihara with the goal of promoting gagaku, shōmyō, and new compositions for the ensemble (SETTEMBRE MUSICA, 2019). The occasion is, therefore, very unique, since gagaku musicians were available in Japan, but, due to Hosokawa’s ties with Germany, resulted in a fruitful collaboration between these countries.

Few non-Japanese composers have followed the path of composing for Japanese traditional instruments. They started since relatively the same time period, the late 1960s and early 1970s (Koellreutter’s Yūgen dates from 1970 and has its own combination of instruments. i.e., it is not for the gagaku ensemble). Concerning the gagaku ensemble, the music of which has been a matter of fascination for New Music composers since Olivier Messiaen because of its colorful static temporality, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Der Jahreslauf (1977) is a probably first example: the piece contains a long section for gagaku ensemble, and had its premiere by the Imperial House gagaku orchestra in Japan. Since then, however, all other performances have used Western instruments substitutes. Olivier Messiaen, in his Sept Haikai (1962), composed a fourth movement entitled Gagaku, which consists in a stylized transcription of gagaku music on Western orchestral instruments37. In his turn, Henry Cowell’s Ongaku (1957) is a piece for the Western orchestral instruments which duplicates general materials, gestures and contours of gagaku and other Japanese genres.

It is more common to find music combining a limited number of Japanese instruments, generally only one, among non-Japanese composers, rather than music for the full gagaku orchestra, due to its availability only in Japan. The most common is by far the shakuhachi. In Minoru Miki’s Composing for Japanese Instruments, twenty-six non-Japanese composers are named, and the majority of the seventy-eight works thereby listed is for the shakuhachi, solo or with Western instruments, and few are the works in which the other instruments are Japanese (MIKI, 2008: 239 ff). In his article “The Potential of the Shakuhachi in Contemporary Music”, shakuhachi master Yoshikazu Iwamoto (b. 1945) lists thirty-five pieces for shakuhachi (solo and combined with other instruments) written between 1977 and 1991 by sixteen non-Japanese composers38. From this list, Frank Denyer stands out as the most consistent39 about writing for the shakuhachi (IWAMOTO,

See my article Messiaen’s Gagaku, on Perspectives of New Music, v. 48, 2010, pp. 193-207, available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/23076971 38 The list includes also a seventeenth piece, Japanese composer Jo Kondo’s High Song (1987), because it is not a list of works from non-Japanese composers, but a list of “new works for shakuhachi in recent years”.

39 Iwamoto’s list includes seven works for shakuhachi by Giacinto Scelsi. However, according to Scelsi’s catalogue of works at the Fondazione Isabella Scelsi, he never wrote specifically for the shakuhachi. The works mentioned have been written originally for other instruments. Iwamoto had been interested in playing Scelsi’s music back in the 1970s/1980s, and the fact that he included the pieces in his article’s list of “new works for shakuhachi in recent years” may very likely have resulted from Scelsi’s authorization do to so (from personal communication with Frank Denyer).

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1994:41). Denyer’s seven works for shakuhachi solo and/or percussion in Iwamoto’s list, which does not include the 47-minute-long solo Unnamed (1997), are the result of a fruitful and pioneer collaboration between the English composer and the shakuhachi master. Among his other works with traditional Japanese instruments are A Linear Topography (2015) for small orchestra and shamisen, and Piece for Koto (1975).

Relevant to the subject of traditional Japanese instruments in New Music composition is HansJoachim Koellreutter’s Yūgen40, and what follows is a study of how this author has related to these instruments in this specific work41.

Koellreutter42 lived in India from 1964 to 1969 and in Japan from 1970 to 1974 as director of the Cultural Institute of the Federal Republic of Germany and of the Goethe Institute (KATER, 1997).

During this period of ten years, he had the opportunity to assimilate the traditional music and aesthetics of these two countries as part of a larger process of acculturation43 to which he underwent willingly. He justified acculturation as the only way of “avoiding the path of self-destruction”: he searched for “an understanding of different, strange values, and even those opposed to our ideals” (KOELLREUTTER, 1983: 18, 27). Koellreutter’s positive attitude regarding the inexorable cultural globalization process was enhanced by the visualization of, and engagement on, the construction of a planetary society44 based on tolerance, understanding, and absorption of cultural values from the East by the West and vice-versa. His work Yūgen (1970), for voice and traditional Japanese instruments, sets four haikai by Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694) and was written for, dedicated to, and performed by the Minoru Miki’s Ensemble Nipponia. The only existing recording of the piece is of that performance, available in the 1983 LP Koellreutter in the series Música Nova da América Latina, of the Brazilian label TACAPE. Koellreutter’s program notes for this work in the TACAPE LP explain the meaning of the title: 40

I have studied composition, 20th-century music analysis and aesthetics and counterpoint with Koellreutter from 1985 to 1988, and several of his ideas are connected to my research interests to this day, especially the ideas of circularity, sound-silence, and his example as a composer in relation with Indian and Japanese thought and music.

41 This section is a translated and largely modified version of the short article “O uso de instrumentos tradicionais japoneses em Yūgen, de Hans-Joachim Koellreutter” (IRLANDINI, 2012) published in 2012 at the Anais do XXII Congresso da ANPPOM. 42 Koelleutter was a German composer who taught several generations of Brazilian composers, from Claudio Santoro, Eunice Katunda and César Guerra-Peixe, to Tom Jobim and others who chose popular music. He escaped Nazi Germany and arrived in Brazil in 1937. Here, he quickly became an active music pedagogue and musician. He and composer Claudio Santoro introduced dodecaphony in Brazil in the 1940s. Already in 1938, he founded, together with young Brazilian composers, the Avant-Garde group Música Viva (KATER, 2001: 50). An intense battle with nationalist composers took place in 1950, in which Koellreutter was accused of corrupting young composers by introducing the techniques of “degenerate” music. In 1964, Koellreutter travelled to Asia and only returned to Brasil ten years later, in 1974. Since then he resumed his New Music activities, again teaching new composers, musicians and music teachers, bringing to them a renewed musical thought based on a new cosmovision in-formed by quantum physics and Eastern spirituality.

43 Koellreutter defines acculturation as “the absorption of cultural, spiritual and material goods from alien cultures”: “absorção de bens culturais, espirituais e materiais de culturas alienígenas” (KOELLREUTTER, 1983: 45).

44 The expression “planetary society” is used in the book Estética (KOELLREUTTER, 1983).

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“The word yūgen means depth and is one of the basic concepts of traditional Japanese aesthetics: sound, because of the space produced by silence, unfolds its strength of propagation suggesting an infinite present, however limited... Silence is not just the absence of sound, but also monotony, reverberation, austerity, delineation – in the place of definition —, absence of ostentation, that is, the generator of a space that allows self-realization, serenity, tranquility, intense reflection, concentration, balance and mental and emotional stability. Yūgen is expression without expression, an intimate prayer.” 45 (KOELLREUTTER, 1983)46

Descriptions or definitions of yūgen by other authors may be somewhat different. Daisetz Suzuki (1870-1966), for example, states that “yūgen is a compound word, each part, yū and gen, meaning ‘cloudy impenetrability’, and the combination meaning ‘obscurity’, ‘unknowability’, ‘mystery’, ‘beyond intellectual calculability’, but not ‘utter darkness’ ” (SUZUKI, 1973: 220).

Koellreutter’s explanation of yūgen seems to encompass other aspects of Japanese aesthetics as well.

The equilibrium between sound and silence in Yūgen suggests, indeed, a concentrated, intensely introspective and infinitely present musical time. In a first listening, Yūgen is striking for its punctualist style, characteristic of Koellreutter’s music since 1960, with his chamber composition for winds and percussion Concretion 1960. The term punctualism may be applied to Koellreutter with some reservation because, by referring directly to Webern and 1950s post-Webernianism, it would identify Koellreutter as a late manifestation of that style. However, because Koellreutter’s sounds are most frequently either very long or separated by long silences (post-Webernian music’s sounds are almost always very short), a preferable term is elementarism, proposed by Koellreutter himself, and which refers to an “emerging musical idiom”, which presents itself in an essential, fundamental and simple manner. (KOELLREUTTER, 1990: 51). The style is static, austere, slow and economical47.

For many years I did not have access to the score of this work, the TACAPE recording being the only means to study it. This incomplete contact with Yūgen, exclusively through its sole recording and without the visual and aural supports of a live performance, led me to suspect that the choice of Japanese instruments does not constitute a fundamental aspect of Yūgen’s conception of sound. By listening to the recording, even one who knows Japanese instruments cannot be completely certain of which ones they are. By the way, the instrumentarium consists of: shinobue, nōkan, shakuhachi, biwa, shamisen, koto, bass koto, bin-zasara, godaiko, kotsusumi, nyōbatsu, yotsudake, bells, shimedaiko, daibyōshi (KOELLREUTTER, 1970: 3)

45 Other descriptions or definitions of yūgen by other authors may be somehow different. For Daisetz Suzuki, for example, “yūgen is a compound word, each part, yū and gen, meaning ‘cloudy impenetrability’, and the combination meaning ‘obscurity’, ‘unknowability’, ‘mystery’, ‘beyond intellectual calculability’, but not ‘utter darkness’” (SUZUKI, 1973: 220).

46 “A palavra yūgen significa profundidade e é um dos conceitos básicos da estética tradicional do Japão: o som, devido ao espaço deixado pelo silêncio, desdobra sua força de propagação, sugerindo um presente infinito, mas limitado...

Silêncio não é apenas a ausência de som, mas também monotonia, reverberação, austeridade, delineamento – em lugar de definição –, a ausência de ostentação, ou seja, o gerador de um espaço que permite a auto-realização, serenidade, tranqüilidade, reflexão intensa, concentração, equilíbrio e estabilidade mental e emocional. Yūgen é expressão sem expressão, é uma oração íntima.” (KOELLREUTTER, 1983).

47 I have discussed Koellreutter’s punctualism in more depth in the article Som-silêncio em Concretion 1960 de HansJoachim Koellreutter, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.20504/opus2018b2402

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By “conception of sound” I mean the interdependent relationship between form, content and sound. In fact, form and content are, in music and, ultimately, sound; they are integrated elements that our analytic mind likes to separate. A fundamental instrumentation would be one which cannot dispense with the chosen instruments, and of which signification is tied to them, as in George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children (1970), to remain in the same year of the compositions, which is written for a very specific combination of instruments, some of them unusual in the context of New Music.

However, if form is conceived independently from sound, as in the Contrapuncti of Die Kunst der Fuge by Johann Sebastian Bach, which were written without any specific instrument in mind, a dichotomy between audible music (the physical sound) and “the music itself” takes place. In this way one thing is separated from the other as if they were completely independent and, furthermore, as if form itself were not a manifestation. The Platonic distinction between essence and appearance (or the Aristotelian substance and accident) becomes present when the music may be “dressed up” with different instrumental arrangements, or when its instrumentation is open: structure is the essence or substance, and instrumentation and the resulting physical sound is the appearance or accident48.

Recorded music fossilizes the performance and provides to the listener just a simulacrum of the music in its performance’s spatial dimension, a dimension which also includes the physical sound and the timbre, other than people, location, hall acoustics, etc. Thus, recorded music emphasizes the separation between sound and structure, appearance and essence. However, for the listener who was present at a live performance of a musical work, the recorded performance evolves from the category of a simulacrum to that of a remembrance, a less imperfect copy because this remembrance is informed by the presence of the work (it’s aura, to quote Walter Benjamin) experienced during its live performance... Therefore, the listening experience of the disincarnated sounds of the reproduction of a recording is more abstract, less concrete than that of a live performance. Due to this, the recording of Yūgen indicates and emphasizes the fact that the choice of Japanese instruments is more circumstantial than fundamental for the music itself, even though it was written for a very particular combination of traditional Japanese instruments. But why, exactly? Evidently, this could not be due to the recording alone.

Several listenings of Yūgen’s recording are necessary for someone familiar with the sound of traditional Japanese instruments to discover how many and which instruments exactly are being played. This is not sheer incapacity of the listener: something in the way sounds behave in that music shows the reduced importance of the specific choice of the instruments. The instruments do not impose themselves to the listener in their whole potentiality; they intervene economically,

Likewise Bach’s Die Kunst der Fugue, the open instrumentation of Kagel’s Exotica is evidence of its conceptualism.

Here in Koellreutter’s Yūgen, instrumentation is not open, but, as I am trying to show, theres is a conceptualism about the way traditional Japanese instruments are employed.

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suggestively; they only insinuate their own sound, their own timbre, and do not develop idiomatically.

This is because of the neutral manner by which Koellreutter uses musical instruments in general, not only the Japanese ones. Koellreutter respects the nature of these Japanese instruments, but does not use them in the idiomatic way in which they appear in the music of their original culture. In fact, Koellreutter doesn’t give them a single chance to display the large gamut of tone color variations and gestural potential each one of them shows in traditional Japanese music. Such idiomatic timbres and gestures remain unexplored by Koellreutter, who handles to them only minimally, requiring only their most basic and neutral timbre. Koellreutter’s music already shares a stasis compared to that of gagaku, and he seems to avoid carefully any chance that his music would duplicate traditional Japanese music in the superficiality49 of its sound inflexions. However, although this avoidance was important, for he valued the new and did not tolerate imitation, it was not his central concern.

Koellreutter’s central concern since Concretion 1960 is that of a delineative aesthetics of a static, non-discursive musical time. The composer only delineates and suggests the Japanese instruments because his music, in general, only requires sparse, immovable sound gestures, in their greatest majority, almost always in pianissimo or piano: sound interventions are short and constantly alternate the instruments, resulting in the discontinuous use of each one. Instead of melodies or “living sounds”, it forms Gestalten of sounds. From the point of view of gestures, living sounds are sounds animated by several articulation forms such as vibratos, tremolos, glissandos and ornamentation. This is the way instruments are treated in Japanese music, even though its own non-discursive and delineative aesthetics explores the rich inner life of each sound, with ornaments, changing intensity, pitch and timbre (honkyōku shakuhachi solos, for example, are made of “living sounds”).

Therefore, the initial difficulty in recognizing Japanese instruments by ear in Yūgen is a consequence of this neutralizing treatment, thus revealing that their choice has no essential role for determining the conception of sound of Yūgen. The technical reproduction – as the only available means of accessing this work – and the unavailability of the score – which remains in manuscript until today – were only secondary and circumstantial aspects that ended up emphasizing the neutral treatment given to the Japanese instruments. In one hand, the timbre of each of these instruments is unique and irreplaceable, and live performance, as the only complete manifestation of a composition written to be performed, necessarily includes the visual and sonorous impact of such instruments, sending the listener directly to traditional Japan50. In the other hand, the neutralized sound of Japanese instruments in Yūgen, taken in the disincarnated way in which they manifest by means of the recording, do not produce and do not require this association with Japan, which only becomes obvious Superficiality here relates to the music’s surface, which is what one listens to directly, i.e., the foreground of the music.

Other deeper structural levels have been called the middleground and the background.

50 It is pointless to try to study the total meaning and content of a musical work without considering its performance aspect, since the instrumental or vocal work becomes fully present when it is created at the live performance.

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and visually and sonorously necessary in the performance. The same happens at the abstract level, that of the “music itself”, as the Japanese instruments in Yūgen do not produce, do not require – and even seem to dismiss – this association with Japanese culture. They dismiss it because the instruments are neutralized by a not-just-Japanese musical/aesthetical thought which avoids their traditional inflexions and dilutes them in the austere punctualist/elemental texture. Listening to Yūgen’s recording has the effect of stressing the characteristic neutrality by which Koellreutter treats the Japanese instruments, especially when the listener has never been present to a live performance (as it would be the case, since the piece, to my knowledge, has never been performed since its premiére51).

Once this disassociation with Japanese culture is recognized, it is possible to appreciate the way by which the use of Japanese instruments crowns and completes Koellreutter’s overall creative act for this piece. The visual and sonorous inclusion of traditional Japanese instruments timbres, makes not only a reference to the culture within which the composer found himself living in the year of the composition, but also indicates that he previously already shared the aesthetic ideals he found in Japan. Koellreutter reports that his first contact with gagaku music in 1953 was a moment of decisive influence for his creative activity, “not (an influence) in the sense of a change provoked by this experience, but as a confirmation of aesthetic ideals that have been mine since youth” (KOELLREUTTER, 1983: 17). This creative act consists in a set of elements that are characteristically integrated in Koellreutter’s oeuvre. They are elements which include the Japanese world but are not limited to them: elementarism, silence (seijaku), serial and planimetric organization, gestaltic thought, haiku, the idea of depth (yūgen), as well as other ideas from Zen aesthetics such as datsuzoku (a-rationality52), fukinsei (assimetry), kanso (simplicity), koko (rigorous discipline), and shizen (naturalness). Koellreutter valued these five aesthetic principles as “indicators of a new universal art, environmental art which could spread around the world” (KOELRREUTTER, 1983: 50).

Koellreutter’s oeuvre includes seventy-seven works (KATER: 1997, 17-ff), of which only three require live performance on non-Western instruments: Advaita, concerto for sitar and orchestra (1968); Tanka I, for voice and koto, and Yūgen. Three other works include the sound of Indian instruments recorded on magnetic tape: tanpura in Sunyata (1968), for flute, chamber orchestra and tape, and in Constelações (1982/3), for voice and six instruments; and tablā in the tape that accompanies the solo voice in Mu Dai (1972). The scarcity of pieces with non-Western instruments in Koellreutter’s oeuvre indicates that this did not become a specific interest in his compositional Until the present moment, there is no news about a second performance of Yūgen, not even in relation to the Projeto Yūgen – Tributo a Tomie Ohtake, Haroldo de Campos e Koellreutter, organized by Fundação Japão in São Paulo, year 2000 (RELEASE FUNDAÇÃO JAPÃO, 2000).

52 A-rationality (arracionalidade), in Koellreutter’s thought, is a condition of the new cosmovision that is not the negation of rationality but rather its overcoming. While datsuzoku is frequently translated as freedom from conventions, Koellreutter links it to his concept of a-rationality (KOELLREUTTER, 1983: 50).

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research. In fact, his greatest interest lied on this “elemental poetics”, which consists on austerity, stasis, simplicity, formal clarity, and the identity between sound and silence, something he would call later “the relativistic aesthetics of the imprecise and paradoxal”.

A brief comparison of style, aesthetics and instrumentation between Yūgen and another composition, Issei (1977), reveals that the central issue for the author was the elemental poetics, and not the employment of Japanese instruments.

The term issei has several meanings referring to music in Nō theater: issei may refer to the music played on the nōkan, ōtsuzumi and kotsuzumi right before the entrance of the shite (leading role) either before the first or second acts in a play; or it may refer to a calm song, often shared by shite and tsure or chorus sung after the instrumental music just described (BRAZELL, 1997) (MORITA: 2008). Issei was composed for voice, two clarinets, French horn, trombone, mandolin, double-bass and percussion (cymbals, tam-tam, woodblock or claves, agogô and xylophone) on a text

by Brazilian poet Haroldo de Campos (1929-2003), and published in São Paulo in 1978 (KOELLREUTTER, 1978). In the time interval between Yūgen and Issei Koellreutter composed Mu Dai (mu dai means “without title”) for voice and magnetic tape with tablā sounds, Tankas I, II, III, IV and V, and initiated his cantata O Café. This is a period of intense reference to Japanese aesthetics in the pieces’ titles and in the musical content closely linked to tanka poetry as an aesthetic and morphological regulator of his musical super-signs53. Only Tanka V and Issei were composed after Koellreutter’s return to Brazil, while all the others were written in Tokyo. In the Catálogo de Obras de H. J. Koellreutter, Carlos Kater writes about Issei: “The composer considers the piece as an introductory chant to traditional Japanese theater, the Nō, arhythmic and a-metric. According to his words: ‘Essay about the expressive possibilities of a plane music without dimensions, so to speak, of an elementarist character, without counterpoint or harmony, that is, without perspectival depth, apparently free of the ordering action of pulsation, therefore, acronometric’.” (KATER, 1997: 40)54

These same words apply also to Yūgen, with its austere, a-cronometric, a-rhythmic, a-metric, elemental and a-perspectival55 temporality. In Issei, Western instruments are handled in the same neutral way as the Japanese in Yūgen, and adjusted to their little or completely non-idiomatic and “monosyllabic” interventions of long and immovable sounds which are counterbalanced by shorter ones and organized so as to form Gestalten. The only part in which Issei is substantially different from Yūgen is the last part of section A – number (4) in the score –, which consists of six measures of a dense texture rhythmically notated (KOELLREUTTER, 1978; 2).

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Supersign is one of the terms Kollreutter used to refer to the sound/musical objects/Gestalten in his music.

“O compositor a considera como um canto de introdução do teatro tradicional japonês – o Nō--, arrítmico e amétrico.

Segundo suas palavras: ‘Ensaio sobre as possibilidades expressivas de uma música plana sem dimensões, por assim dizer, de caráter elementarista, sem contraponto nem harmonia, ou seja, sem profundidade perspectívica, aparentemente livre da ação ordenadora da pulsação, portanto, acronométrica’.” (KATER, 1997: 40).

55 A-perspectival means without a tonal center.

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Issei is like the counterweight of Yūgen in Koellreutter’s biographic context. Yūgen, moment of arrival and immersion in Japan’s culture, turns to traditional Japanese instruments accentuating and making visible Koellreutter’s affinity with that culture. Issei, moment of return to Brazil, turns to Western instruments and shows that the affinity has nothing to do with the superficiality of instrumental timbres and gestures, but is rooted more deeply, since the beginning of the compositional creative process. Issei is his first Brazilian work of larger proportions, and it coincides with the moment of his (re)immigration to Brazil, immigration of his music, now deeply engaged in traditional Japanese thought. Because issei also means the first generation of Japanese people immigrant to another country, I wonder if Koellreutter decided to call his piece Issei in reference to his reimmigration to Brazil.

This comparison between Yūgen and Issei confirms the pragmatic attitude in the choice of musical instruments made by Koellreutter in both works, a choice more determined by the circumstantial availability of this or that instrument or instrumental group than the desire or formal necessity of specific instruments. The choice of instruments is associated more to a biographical circumstance and the chance of a live performance of the piece than a specific sound conception related to timbres. However, this does not mean that Koellreutter did not take in consideration the timbre relationships once the he had defined the sound sources: it means that, since 1960, the instrumental forces of his music are submitted to a musical thought that requires a limited and neutralized use of any instrument. His music is indeed conceptual. Because of this circumstantiality of instrumentation choice, a performance with traditional Japanese instruments would have been possible in Japan, but not in Brazil in the 1970s or 1980s (or today…), time in which Japanese instruments were practically unknown in the realm of Brazilian contemporary music 56. This would have been enough reason, in addition to the fact that it would only be natural for the composer to decide using instruments he could easily find in Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo for his “immigrant composition” Issei. Although written for specific instruments, Yūgen and Issei seem to be capable of being “dressed up” by whatever instrumental ensemble without this affecting its structural and philosophical identity, in a similar way to Die Kunst der Fuge.

As for Yūgen, this pragmatism may have been relevant for the choice of instruments. Perhaps it is impossible to discover which circumstances of Koellreutter’s life in 1970 led him to make his decision. However, it is certain that his presence in Japan in the years 1970 to 1974 coincide with a period in which the revitalization movement of traditional Japanese heritage was well underway in Tokyo’s contemporary music scene. For someone personally open for, and desirous of, undergoing acculturation, the opportunity of employing the available traditional Japanese instruments at that time

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As they continue to be, perhaps with the exception of the taiko and, in a much lesser degree, the shakuhachi.

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must have been an achievement not to be missed.

The non-Western instrument and the composer/performer The “composer/performer” is known for their “expanded approach to composition”, usually experimentalism, improvisation, and several other perhaps unorthodox means of making music or making a form of art that is no longer just music. There are many ways and no fixed rules for being a composer/performer; the same artist may practice several forms of relationship between composition and performance from work to work, sometimes improvising, sometimes writing a closed form composition to be performed by interpreters, etc. Each compositional process may be different from the other: the piece may be entirely written at first and later interpreted by the author or, in other cases, the compositional process may incorporate what the composer has played, either as improvisation or as reading of written material subsequently transformed after “trying it out” at the instrument. Sometimes, the compositional process may join a set of rules that will be created in a live performance free improvisation, “free” according to those rules. In any case, when it takes to the performance, the bottom-line is simple: whoever will play the music, either composer or someone else, that person needs to have enough skill for doing that, needs to master the way of producing what the piece requires.

However, a greater emphasis on performance is implicit in the composer/performer’s poetics.

Use of instruments may take place at any moment of the compositional process, which is no longer conceived exclusively as a desk activity. As mentioned before, the composer’s relationship with écriture has changed along the twentieth-century with electronic music and with experimental music that involves a direct contact with the instrument and its sound. This returns to the issue of material, a concept that “has its origin and its justification in the practice and cult of notation” (MÂCHE, 1992: 25), and which took on a high level of intellectualism during the avant-garde. With the composer/performer’s integration of performance and instrumental playing into the compositional process, a second pillar of modernism (and of Modernity), that of écriture, with its separation of form and material, crumbles. In many cases, it crumbles completely; in others, it may only loose its centralizing power.

The composer/performer path might be a privileged position for the successful employment of non-Western musical instruments. This practice is “experimental” because it is an artistic research based on the experience of the praxis with these instruments. It is by means of experimentation with the instrument that the research advances to its results; the more uniquely the music depends on the practical experience with the instrument, the more experimental the music. I am using the term “experimentalism” in two ways: 1) as close as possible to John Cage’s intention, i.e., that experimental “is simply an action the outcome of which is not foreseen” (CAGE, 1973: 69), but not 35

as a synonym with indeterminacy, chance and aleatory music57; and 2) as the experience and consequent practical knowledge developed by the composer/performer researching on that musical instrument. The experimentalism with non-Western musical instruments might even lead to aleatory music, but might result in determinate music just as well; this is a possible orientation given by the individual composer or the individual piece. “Experimental” is an ephemeral quality referring to the creative practices, that only exists while the results of the action are still not foreseen. With the ongoing practice with the non-Western instrument, actions and their results become more familiar and the experimental activity grow into a practical knowledge accumulated through experience and experimentation. It is also through this process that the non-Western instrument stops being exotic.

Experimentalism with non-Western instruments takes place whenever there is no access to information about it, and may consist in the composer/performer being self-taught in that instrument, creating, as if “from scratch”, their own peculiar and unique performing technique regardless of the instrument’s tradition. Although this would be an act based on the ignorance of a musical culture, it would also be an act based on experience and research of a creative situation taking place here and now. The “collateral damage” of that act is its isolation as a creative act, and the loss of opportunity resulting from not looking for the missing information. This can only be changed by a conscious transcultural effort.

I would like to bring a personal example of this process, as it is indeed an individual and personal issue; each composer/performer would have a different story to tell. The first non-Western instrument I decided to invest time on was the Chinese suona. As almost every shawm, the suona’s timbre is exalted and Dionysian. It is similar to that of the Greek aulos, the South Indian nāgaswaran, the Tibetan Buddhist rgya gling or the Moroccan rhaita, among many others. All of these are temple instruments used in ritual music, but not only. The suona is a perfect instrument to use in a street performance because of its loudness and pungency, and it is traditionally used outdoors for this very reason. I have employed as a member of the Qá Bal o Quá experimental theatre group street performances in Italy in the early 1990s. An acquaintance of mine went to China and kindly brought me a suona upon my request in 1985. Once in my hands in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, it became an instrument deeply removed from its own tradition, as there was no way at that time and place for me to get instruction on its music or on how to play it. At that time there was no internet; it was very difficult to find recordings, much less videos, of traditional Chinese music in Brazil. Furthermore, although I was studying traditional musics from Asia in my lessons with Koellreutter, the Chinese traditions were not among them. Therefore, being entirely ignorant of the original Chinese repertoire for suona, all my experience with the instrument consisted in the music I was making on it with a

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Experimentalism as a synonym of open form developed historically, but also from the fact that Cage himself pointed to this identity. Because of this, the experiential aspect of the compositional process in experimentalism was forgotten.

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Western oboe reed, by improvising.

To my advantage, I had previously studied the basics of the European oboe technique as a composition student at the Conservatorio Luigi Cherubini in Florence, Italy, and this turned out to be very helpful, although the only thing in common between the oboe and the suona is that both are double-reed instruments. The original tiny reed of the suona was impossible for me to play; I was never able to get any sound from it. The problem was solved by using the oboe reed in the place of the original one. This changed the timbre considerably, making the suona sound less strident.

In 1986, that practice was fruitful for my composition Numen, which featured several world instruments: the suona, a Brazilian berrante (an ox horn used to gather cattle in farms), a Latin American clay ocarina, and Andean tarkas and trutrucas58 together with several drums and other percussion, plus some Western instruments (piano, flute, folk guitar, recorders, mandolin, digital keyboards) and the voice. The general conception of the piece is to seek a primordial feeling of the sacred through music and the musical expression (or analogy) of certain human experiences of the mysterium tremendum: meditation, litany and trance, each one corresponding to one movement of the piece. Therefore, just as in its sound sources Numen is a piece without nationality, it is also a piece of sacred music without religion. Instruments from traditional and tribal cultures are especially adequate in this piece because the quality of their sound immediately invokes the natural elements they are made of and an ancient sense of spirituality. Numen summarizes the reason why non-Western musical instruments are important to me, but at the time of its composition I was far from conscious of that reason.

The practice of free improvisation on the suona led me to perform well the simple suona lines of Numen. Somehow, the ecstatic music I had listened from several temple musics using shawms contributed for the somewhat idiomatic use I was able to obtain from the suona, and I never intended to imitate any of those traditions. Structurally speaking, the suona lines in Numen do not differ much from the vocal lines, except for taking advantage from two aspects readily available in the instrument: the possibility of microtonal intonation, and the production of wide glissandi. Quarter-tones are easily obtained because the regular fingerings do not produce a “in tune” scale, and may be further obtained by half-covering the holes and varying lip pressure on the reed. These are the differences of the suona lines in respect to the vocal ones in Numen. The suona never became my second instrument (the first being the piano), although I continued using it in my collaborations with experimental theater groups in Brazil and in Italy until 1994, and much later, in 2013, again in Brazil. Therefore, in my experience with the suona, I have not learned the original Chinese music nor the use of the original reed.

The best way for the process of complete incorporation and assimilation of a non-Western In the recording of Numen in my CD Ākāśa the trutrucas are replaced by didjeridus. The recording is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv3RmhAOUjU 58

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instrument to take place in a whole and culturally responsible way is for the performance tradition of the instrument, “contained” or “latent” in it, to be honored by the composer/performer. This doesn’t mean simply not ignoring or just acknowledging the instrument’s tradition but, in the contrary, it means it will be studied, known and assimilated. Acculturation. Therefore, it is not only important that the composer has the conditions to acquire first-hand experience with a chosen non-Western instrument, but it is also fundamental for the development of a composition based on instrumental research. The “collateral advantage” of this acquisition and assimilation is that the acculturated musician will be giving continuation to and expanding the musical culture of the instrument in a conscious and new way, made possible by becoming an active member of that instrument’s cultural history. Although not necessarily helping its original culture to survive and continue, as this would be done by becoming a performer of its traditional repertoire, this cultural expansion does contribute for its continuing existence and transformation, instead of to its heading towards extinction. This is true even if that musician’s main concern is only to make new music – and not the traditional music – with that instrument.

For a composer/performer, and the composer in general, once the exoticizing is extinguished, the problems of using a non-Western instrument turn out to be basically the same as those with any other one. From the moment of deciding to compose for/with it, the usual problems appear: what is this instrument capable of? What is possible to do with it and what is not? Which tones does it produce? What is its total extension? How many sounds can be produced at the same time? What about its timbre? What are the extended techniques possible with it? What dialogue may be created with its past traditions? A study of instrumentation is required.

In the same way as composers must know how to use a piano or a violin, if they are going to write music for them, this must be knowledge of what has already been done in such an instrument, i.e., in a word, its tradition. In the same way, composers must know how to use the non-Western instruments they are writing music for, and this is knowledge of their own tradition, for there is no other in existence, unless the instruments fit right away in the “host” music without much more work needing to be done59.

The composer must devise a way to obtain some knowledge about the instrument, Western or non-Western. This may be done by first-hand experience, some proficiency on it, or second-hand knowledge, acquired by collaboration with a performer or by somehow developing the skills that will allow the composer’s inner ear and mind to imagine the sound of the composed part and to obtain the

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An example of this is the European violin, when it became an instrument in South Indian music. The violin was easily assimilated and accepted there, as if it were a regular Carnatic instrument, because it simply responds naturally to that music. For it is just as capable as any other melodic Indian instrument of producing śruti, ornamentations and the subtle dynamics of the rāga. Carnatic musicians did not need to learn the Western technique nor to play Bach’s and Beethoven’s violin music to assimilate the violin into their own music.

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desired musical result in the best way possible. Luciano Berio’s research on Western instruments for his works entitled Sequenza took place as a collaboration with performers in which they explored techniques that, at the time, were new and frequently extended, but that were completely integrated with Berio’s musical thought. There is experimentalism in the compositional process of those pieces, as the results of new techniques, which were not entirely foreseen by the composer, were acquired through the practical knowledge of the instrumental possibilities and alternatives his music could choose by means of the experience with collaborators.

Traditional knowledge is of the essence.

A third modernist pillar to crumble, at least in part, is that of the “New”. This does not mean that the new is no longer important, or that the avant-garde is dead, on the contrary, the new is still very important to avoid the imitation of the original music of a non-Western instrument. It would be just enough that the idea of “new” should be disentangled from Adorno’s conception of material.

However, there is no refuge in either modernist or post-modernist extremes, as both are materialistic world views. While the interaction with non-Western musics had been aesthetically criticized and rejected in modernism, the opposite attitude in post-modernism seems to allow for the indiscriminate production of hybrids just for the sake of producing “hybrids”, the odder, the better. In one hand, the post-modernist composer would engage in the production of crossover styles just because it is possible to copy & paste them; they would indulge in being eclectic, poly-stylistic, and purposely ignorant of the avant-garde and experimental music achievements as if they had never existed (as pointed out by Mahnkopf, 2009: 6). In the other hand, a modernist composer would avoid not only “extra-musical” and non-Western contents but also anything that does not belong to a structural system closed in itself, and to the historically determined material as conceived by Adorno.

The idea that one “cannot express original ideas by recycling old material; new thoughts need formulated with new materials” (MURAIL, 2000: 6) still brings back Adorno’s dogma that the material should be contemporary for the music to be new. And this is only partially true. In fact, it would be important to know what exactly is meant by “recycling old material” other than the inference that old material is trash. While post-modernism might have become the area where “recycling old material” seems to be all that’s left for artists to do, the creation of new poetic relationships with “old material” – and here I would prefer to say “the past”, or “traditions” – seems a truly effective way to find the “new” in music composition. Non-Western musical contents (of which musical instruments are just one example) are hardly simply “materials” to be taken from Home Depot or the trash for building our original little projects. They might end up being just that, i.e., being “recycled old material”, if the musician’s attitude is purely utilitarian and is simply duplicating superficial musical structures, and not in search of a meaningful, new and original result in which the specific nonWestern content takes an active part. When the non-Western musical instrument finds re-significance 39

in a piece of new music, it is because the music in its whole is new, as in the case of the previously mentioned compositions by Xenakis, Harrison, etc.

The need to honor the original tradition of a non-Western instrument has more to do with a love for that tradition in itself than with what original music will be made with the instrument. A second and last example from my personal experience is the shakuhachi, which became my second instrument. I have listened with fascination to honkyoku music as well as maintained a strong interest in traditional Japanese culture since the 1980s. But it was only in 2006 that, while living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I became aware that several Western musicians had been studying and performing shakuhachi music professionally for more than ten years. The Shakuhachi Summer Camp of the Rockies offered lessons for beginners and advanced shakuhachi players in the state of Colorado, not far from where I was living. My initiation on the shakuhachi took place at the Shakucamp 2006 and 2007 editions, which gave me the basic knowledge to blow the instrument, to read some Japanese notation, perform easy songs, and compose the solo piece Metagon, in 2008. The composition of Hooo (Bestiarium, vol. I no. 1) for shakuhachi, guitar and string quartet60 followed immediately after in the same year.

For several reasons, it was not possible for me to continue taking shakuhachi lessons.

However, my intention was to make the shakuhachi my second musical instrument, so I developed the practice of improvising and playing Celtic, Brazilian and popular tunes, as well as performing the musical lines of Metagon, with the hope that, one day, I would be able to play them. In fact, it took me four years to learn how to play Metagon and perform it in public for the first time in my recital “Mantra e Espiral” in 2012. In December 2013 I started taking lessons on Skype with shakuhachi master Kaoru Kakizakai (b. 1959), of the Dokyoku/Chikushinkai lineage of Watasumi Doso (19111992) and Katsuya Yokoyama (1934-2010)61. I had met Kakizakai at Shakucamp. Since then, I have learned a few honkyoku pieces with the intention of deepening my knowledge of the shakuhachi and for the pleasure and challenge of performing those beautiful pieces. I intend to continue performing honkyoku music and the music I write for the shakuhachi, such as the electroacoustic work Ākāśa, for shakuhachi and fixed media, composed in 201862, as well as others currently in-progree. Now that I have become very familiar with the shakuhachi, I enjoy the knowledge that keeps my playing technique in-formed by the konkyoku traditions and, at the same time, my compositions in a nonimitative and meaningful dialogue with traditional Japanese music.

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The ho-oo, a mythological bird, is usually identified as the Japanese phoenix.

Yokoyama collaborated with Tōru Takemitsu’s compositions for shakuhachi.

62 Recording available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts2AB_mezhs.

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