Sunday, 9:00–10:30
am, W. L. Harkness 207
While numerous instances may be cited wherein Western composers borrow from non-Western sources and styles, less studied is the opposite case, wherein Western Art music is adapted and transformed for a non-Western culture and audience. Thus, this paper examines an early twentieth-century piano suite, Kare to Kanojo, by the Japanese composer Yamada Kósçak (1886-1965). Although he would later become famous for children’s songs such as Akatombo, Yamada experimented early in his career with combining multiple styles within single compositions, a technique he referred to as counterpoint (taiihô). As will be shown, stylistic counterpoint creates dislocations that often serve to foi lWestern modes of structure and expression. Placed now within such a stylistic network, Western Art music functions in a new manner, one dependent upon the allegorical constructions prominent in traditional Japanese theater.
In this piano miniature “Self-Parody on a Street Song” (1912), composer Josef Suk caricatures a style of composition associated with him: the pedal-point ostinato composition. Several movements of his most famous works, including the andante of the Asrael Symphony (1904-07), the second movement of the Summer’s Tale (subtitled “Noon,” 1909) and two pieces from About Mother (“How Mother Sang” as well as the disturbing portrait “About Mother’s Heart”), are composed around an ostinato pitch. In these movements, some for piano and others for orchestra, Suk’s use of harmony and melody, usually densely chromatic and turgid, becomes particularly lucid. In several of these works, the pitch level of the ostinato moves temporarily a tone or semitone away to fulfill both a musical and dramatic purpose: this is the “non-obstinate” aspect of the works. The paper presents analyses of these movements, and investigates harmonic characteristics such as Suk’s brand of extended tertian harmony, chromatic mediant and doubly chromatic mediant harmonies, floating and suspended tonality, and equal division of the octave different musical levels. Graphic reductions of passages of Suk’s music reveal a talent for employing a central motive at varying levels of composition.