THIS PAGE IS UNDER CONSTRUCTION: WILL BE READY FOR RELEASE OF RECORDED PROJECT IN FEBRUARY 2025
HAIKU IN THE WIDE WORLD is a sequence of 37 settings of haiku poems available to hear on CD on the ReR label,
cat no ReRTH5. There is also a Japanese edition on EMRecords, Osaka, released on both CD and double vinyl formats.
These notes are not about the poems themselves but only on how they were submitted to the barbarous intentions of my 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. A starting sound that's meant as a pure punctuation of silence by spirit: the unaccompanied song of praise and then, immediately, the synthetic gospel choir, redolent of spiritual fakery, but here used for extended tone-clusters and itself transfigured by ethnic clarinet and disorderly piano.
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.