HAIKU IN THE WIDE WORLD
tim hodgkinson & atsuko kamura
The Haiku in The Wide World project is a 64 minute long CD
containing 37 musical settings of Haiku poems,
translated from the Japanese by poet Harry Gilonis,
spoken in English by Tim Hodgkinson
and sung in Japanese by Atsuko Kamura.
Purchase or download at https://www.rermegacorp.com/
from early March
Composed for voice, piano, percussion, harp, violin, viola, clarinets, french horn, acoustic and electric guitars, electronic and concrète sounds, this 37-part sonic renga is the strongest statement yet of a compositional approach that makes listening itself the focus of aesthetic action.
Customer reviews:
I love the Nature concept. So much space, even in the shock parts...Noh theater?
Still surprised with the sudden injections and transitions
Striking & wonderful music...
Tim Hodgkinson:
NOTES ON HOW I WROTE THE MUSIC
In general I was concerned with doubleness. I had been struck years before by Keiji Haino's performance at the Grenoble 102 when he did a short set, dressed in black, on feedback guitar and screaming, followed by a short set dressed in white on quiet gongs with the space now candle-lit. This made me think about how listeners might superimpose sections of music as part of a larger listening experience and about how contrasted these sections could be. Bringing this to bear on the haiku project, I thought of the sung text as happening within a larger piece in which other (instrumental or sound-based) sections were not preludes or postludes but autonomous episodes to be mentally superimposed as part of a listening experience.
1. ara tōto
how estimable!
the green leaves the new young leaves
brilliant in sunlight!
The axis here runs between high and low modes of expression. A starting sound that opens for a song of solo ecstacy: then, immediately, a synthetic gospel choir, redolent of evangelical fakery, but here used for extended tone-clusters and itself transfigured by joyful ethnic clarinet and disorderly piano. Giant percussion either supports or parodies the actorly English.
2. haru tatsu ya
spring is beginning
unhurriedly as a crane's
one step at a time
To give the idea of the bird's pace, I made a time-scheme with lengthening durations and shrinking pitch intervals. Then I left this scheme flapping about on its own and superimposed a different interplay between two voices doing the text in the two languages.
3. hito inete
everyone's asleep
nothing's left to come between
myself and the moon
A diagrammatic poem. My outline plan was for some empty nocturnal time, which I took from a minimalist improvisation found on a minidisk. The slowed down clarinets give a feeling of hollowness.
4. tsukuzuku to
if you stare at them
sufficiently intently
cherry-blossoms fall
Here I represent obsession by simply repeating a piano figure to which Kamura's voice has little or no connection.
5. wakaba fuku
the young leaves moving
murmur... murmur... murmur... more
rain at the same time
Interweaving of voices in a tied up time-pattern. The text hinting at this. Repeating the "murmur"s in manner both slightly bored and loving.
6. ume saite
the plum has flowered
there'd be no sign, here, of spring
were it not for that
I'd had at the back of my mind to do one setting that would be literally as long as the haiku itself. Harry's translation has a delicately poised architecture.
7. yo o kōte
loving the wide world
yet in dread of humankind
winter cold lingers
Almost impossible to settle on the right way to utter these words. The English language cries out for some definition of agency that the Japanese holds back from. The sound I use for "cold" is a vibrating acoustic system involving a knitting-needle and piano strings: it lingers admirably. The semantic opposition love/dread becomes the sonic opposition forwards/backwards. What has occurred returns, but in reverse and asemic order. I put in some fragments of old recordings of street life in Japan (in fact Kyoto, 1929): the subject is haunted by remembered gleams of sociability but they don't collate into a self-sufficent whole.
8. shoku no hi wo
light from one candle
moved to another candle
an evening in spring
The music here is all about this movement, the tune getting passed around. But there's a concluding phase that takes us beyond this. The sequence then repeats in a condensed form, drawing attention to itself. So it goes in music.
9. sakanu ma mo
hardly visible
as they're not yet in flower
the wild violets
I imagined this one as a love song delivered late at night in a cocktail bar. Serious stuff.
10. musubō to
perhaps knot it up,
perhaps disentangle it,
wind in the willow
Perhaps a meditation on random motion: does it produce order or chaos? But perhaps a meditation on thought's capacity to knot itself or disentangle itself? In any case a wonderful lack of agency: does this describe something going on in the world, or does it describe how we might have knowledge of it?
11. assari to
straightforwardly, then,
spring has finally arrived
with luminous skies
That word "straightforwardly" did it for me. I imagined Kamura as a prophetess delivering from a high place at first light.
12. kōjo nō
From the factory
come the noises of its expansion
brought on today's westerly
Here I made a sequence of 3 parts, 3 musics, each of which aspires to stand on its own. The industrial drone and the hymn to socialist construction are held apart by the discrete kireji of the boudoir strings, into which the engish text inserts itself. (The Japanese word kireji denotes the word in a haiku that splits its sense in half. )
13. kumo ni aru
up there in the clouds
there is brightness, but down
here
in the reeds, darkness
I'd known for a while that I was going to use pulse at some point soon, and here I seized the opportunity to drop the sound into the bass for the "down here" dimension. (Rimbaud's Ici-bas ?). Everything grew from the imagined sound of a swanee whistle which you hear over the bass at the start. The coda with virtuosic guitar part was added for reasons of musical disproportion.
14. tada no gomi
it's starting to turn
into just some old rubbish,
the petal debris
Blossom, who needs it? The elaborate patterns of the petals don't save them from death.
15. tori tōshi
a bird far, far off
moving into distant cloud
its underparts white
Clarinet multiphonics are fed through an obviously inaccurate audio-to-midi converter: the result becomes two parts for Bridget Carey's viola: distance as flatness: I attempt to represent the feeling.
16. idobata no
the edge of the well
by the cherry has perils
for the saké-drunk
I found a recording on which I'd been experimenting on my own voice with different kinds of modulation to produce the sensation of an altered state of mind. The song wobbles on its edge like an anxious drunk.
17. iwa no oto
noises in the rocks
cherry-blossom in moonlight
all there without us
I wanted those noises, so we went recording on the Thames, picking up the chunky rhythm of water sloshing under piers and pontoons. The non-coincidence in the song-part is also the without us, as if we only inhabited the interstices of experience. By a process of inversion I wanted to follow this with a recording in which nothing much happened but that insisted that you were listening to it, and I used my attempt to record an owl that frequents a bare old tree in my local park. The owl was not there with us that evening, and almost certainly prefers being without us.
18. haru no hi ya
it's a lovely day
people are doing nothing
in all the small towns
This began with me playing around with the sevens and fives of haiku form. I had gotten into a tight spot with a pattern that lasted not seventeen beats, but twenty and a half, when I suddenly decided to throw a simple vocal melody over the top to be sung in what I imagined as a care-free rustic style, careless too of the off-weave of the instrumental backing.
19. suisen no
the narcissus has
flowers which are quite the height
of their own shadows
These words took me by the shoulder and shook me. I made a pitch lay-out approximating to the sequence of the fifth to the eleventh steps in the natural harmonic series and added its mirror or shadow image, descending by symmetrical steps from the fundamental. We then recorded individual syllables of the Japanese text using the resulting fourteen pitches, of which four are quarter tones. I tuned my lap steel guitar accordingly. At quieter points tremolo strings perform the first four harmonics and their shadows. Towards the end Kamura sings the text as a vocal line, with a quarter tone in the melody.
20. kane kiete
the bell vanishing
just as the blossom-fragrance strikes
suddenly evening
The suddenness reminded me of a zen hand-clap. The song builds quickly and precisely towards its abrupt ending. I believe I used a combined whole-tone and octatonic scale.
21. kodama shite
the echoing call
lesser-cuckoo in the hills
is as it wills ... wills ...
The repetition here led me to recording itself as the content of the music. I used a delightful plug-in called "cassette transport" as well as vari-speeding. The bird you hear is actually the lesser-cuckoo (hototogisu in Japanese, a word adopted as the title of the official haiku organization): it's just that it's mostly being played back at the wrong speed. Perversely I wanted to combine a Schaefferian sound world with a chamber-group one, allowing each to point up the qualities of the other, and with Kamura inhabiting both.
22. morobito ya
all sorts of people
heading into the blossom
out from the blossom
A hectic and crowded hanami blossom-viewing day in the park: we go to town on the first line. Once again the composer had intended to knot together a subtle and complex rhythm and once again he gave up half way.
23. uguisu ni
that's a bush-warbler
close at hand best take a break
from the kitchen sink
Drudgery jostles against the magic moment. I set off from downloaded recordings of the bird itself with its characteristic long bending note followed by a rapid cluster of high notes. Transcribed and gave to viola, french horn and piano. Then spent time recording washing-up noises in the kitchen with various materials to get the right sound to combine with percussion. But the warbler is then dropped several octaves and becomes a menacing dinosaur. In the end a break is only a break.
24. yuku haru ya
the spring is going
leaving in indecision
late-blooming cherries
The idea of indecision was the hinge for this one. It is spoken derisively, the cherries derided for blooming late, but it turns out after all that indecision is the crux of haiku's aesthetic proposal, the indecision of the late cherries a glorious contagion to be hymned.
25. hata utsu ya
working in the field
the person who asked the way
is no longer in sight
My approach takes off from the fact that the Japanese word for "working" used here is closely linked to the idea of physically beating the ground. I had previously sketched an algorithmic exercise that had that kind of feel to it brought on by the fact that the music does little else than asseverate the asynchrony of its repetitious elements. The disappearance of the stranger after what seems like a short moment of ground-beating seems to fit the surprising brevity of this rather massive piece. Or was it the poet who asked the way?
26. minazoko ni
on the riverbed
those glittering patterns
are warming up too
If patterns could warm up, then music could be warm. So this is a song-like song, but though it's simple, it's complex in rhythm, and the tune changes unexpectedly.
27. nashi saku ya
pears are in flower
left after the campaigning
the ruined houses
A rare reference to war, and war has been swarming around and through us throughout the process of making this music. Broke a number of flower-pots in the bathroom and processed the results to get the ruins. My setting maintains the simple divergence of pear trees blossoming alongside the wrecked houses filled with the sorrow of loss.
28. hito-no me no-naka-no
in a person's field of vision
an ant an ant an ant an ant an ant
This was either going to have to be very small and quiet or very large and loud, and I chose the latter and set it for an imaginary post-punk rock band. I knew Kamura could do this. And isn't there a connection between punk and haiku? Economy of means, for a start.
29. hashigeta ya
girders of the bridge
the sunshine through and on them
in the evening mist
I was facing the problem of what could come after such a radically different sound-world and I decided to do some spectral thinking. I could see what I might do with the bridge and its girders (or "legs" as the Japanese goes), but I needed to handle the light that radiated both through and onto this image. At some point the idea of holes in noise came up, perhaps in distant allusion to Utsunomiya's lecture that I'd attended a couple of years previously in Osaka. Holes in noise are made by filters, and I wondered if the earth's atmosphere doesn't filter the light energy arriving from the sun. Using an absorption chart for light frequencies in earth's atmosphere I found five peaks where less light was absorbed, and applied parametric equalization to white noise to get five sound frequencies giving me an interval structure which could then be applied more or less accurately, given that it matched the peaks in a continuous curve with plenty of neighbouring frequencies only slightly less present. In fact the inaccuracy of the frequencies could be accurately mapped by using adjacent frequencies for the second iteration, then adjacent-but-one frequencies for the third, and so on. Meanwhile the legs of the bridge occurred at intervals as vertical patterns and people crossing the bridge gave horizontal motion to the vocal line.
30. mizu satto
quick off the water
those birds lightly-buoyantly
Two different movements demanded my attention here. The quick decisive taking off from the water and the softly floating motion of the birds in air. I decided to interpret the occurrence of onomatopoeia - which in Japanese can refer to any sensation, not just sound - as an excuse to get Kamura to improvise over the end. Layered syncopations for an ambiguous result, with a hint of McCoy Tyner erupting under Kamura's flight.
31. tatami o aruku suzume no
it must be a sparrow on the straw matting
coming to understand those are footsteps
Does a sparrow make sound in a silent house, or is this about the visual trace? The syllables become footsteps.
32. hanagami no
inside the hankie
folded, wilted and faded
those wild violets
Frankly nostalgic whilst discretely stuctural. An initially hidden melody (clarinet behind harmonic squeaks on piano strings) emerges like something being unwrapped and then, fully outed, acquires its own percussion.
33. hae no fun
a dot of fly-shit
on the calligraphied verse
changes its meaning
Representational, perhaps. Air-pipe as both fly's flight and gesture of calligrapher's hand. Brief sound of arrow fired in archery competition followed by hitting target (the dot, the shit). The piano chord repeated 6 times as kireji. Vocal in expressionist mode.
34. ketsuron no
so, a conclusion
crouches down low on the ground
rather like a toad
A mysterious haiku, treated without solving the mystery. I thought long and hard about expressing the idea of a logical "conclusion" as a musical resolution of some kind, but dropped it. If "conclusion" does appear it's in the form of the strange thumps: charismatic but not specially loud. Crouching low becomes basso-profundo in the winds. There is a possible representation of the voice of the toad as prophetic speech.
35. ryūsei ya
summer meteors!
unworried by an outcome
those who are in love
A double instrumental section acts as a non-prelude to a double vocal section. Using algorithms, I generated material that intercuts sustained and staccato sounds: in the instrumental section this is divided between violin and viola: in the vocal section the staccatos come with the electronic bursts of the meteors, with the sustained sounds forming mini-arias in between. So each line of the poem is sung twice, once fast and once slow. These calculated moves are intended to produce a collision of feelings of grace and reckless energy.
36. no no ame wa
across the plain rain
has arrived, making no sound;
a summer thistle
Here I again use self-negation of method, forming a 12-tone pitch row from the pattern of vowel sounds in the first 12 syllables of the Japanese text. Then I make a set of chords from the variants of the row. Then I negate the atonality by aligning all the chords so that the upper note of each is a C natural. This gives the flatness of the plain. I see bands of rain on the fields in the distance, as in Tarkovsky. The voice starts from and eventually drops down from the C natural. The rain suggested sustained sounds. The summer thistle suggests lightness and dryness, and I made a diamond shape of the tone-rows to mark the end, now in pure dry form.
37. kasho haisho
amidst a jumble -
tanka, haiku books -
an afternoon nap
It seemed obvious to use this haiku last, to complete the feedback loop by which all the previous poems would be referred to and contained in this single one which leads deftly to a prolonged "kana" before slipping into a terminal snooze. PS: According to Haruo Shirane, a "kana" at the end of a Haiku "draws the reader back to the beginning, initiating a circular pattern." (Haruo Shirane. Traces of Dreams, Landscape, Cultural Memory, and the poetry of Bashō. Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8047-3099-7 (pbk, p.100)