A premier performance by mezzo soprano and a computer. In order to create a music experience that goes beyond live performances, I commissioned a piece to Jun Kawasaki, a long-time co-star and a superior in contemporary music and improvisation. The music has a very big impact and a high density. In the first half, you will hear a song depicting the footsteps of a girl who is returning home, sung in various ways such as children songs-like or even a French rock! The text is from haiku (Japanese traditional poem consisting of three short lines) and Chinese-like poems by Yosa Buson. In the second half, the text is from a sentence based on this poetry, reconstructed by Haruo Sato (a Japanese novelist and poet active during 1892– 1964) as a movie scenario.

Exaggerate to say, among my inner life, I was always connected with something unworldly, or more, integrating my various consciousness and unconsciousness by performing music. Therefore, it was a shock that I wasn't able to make a performance due to the infectious disease problem. An aspiration of "No singing, no life" made me thoughtful little by little. Strangely, I was pretty calm in away. I began to put into practice what I couldn't have done in my life before.

Inconvenience was...okay, but I couldn’t bear my freedom deprived. From a lyric, "It is now inconvenient, but inconvenience is much better than convenience."-Kouji Ishikawa "Machiawase", I borrowed his words and performed in a live streaming entitled "Meeting at 2:15 midnight". Solemnly desperate was I. Nevertheless, I have regained myself and might even have offered a bit of healing to the people.

Many people say, "Now in this situation, I realized that it was not an ordinary thing that we could hold one simple concert '', but even before I've been in this situation, every time the curtain opens on stage, I would say to my self " Thank God, again, the first tone sounded without an incident. What could I ask more for?" For the time being, the first tone won’t sound “live”. But it’s a pity to give up anything else. I want to make an outrageous experience for the audience so that the experience will survive even after the real sound comes back in life. All of this work couldn’t be done all by my self. I wonder how I could make something with someone at home even when I'm not with some one?

It was pretty much in a same timing when I was thinking of asking Mr. Jun Kawasaki for a new piece, and when I received the request of the auditorium. "Feel free to do anything that I would have never thought of", I said. There was no idea if we could co-op without seeing each other's face, but we launched foward anyways. Mr. Kawasaki's work was completed like a monster and progressed in no time, to the point where my tiny thing I was worring about has almost disappeared. I have no idea if I had captured the freedom, but I always have desired for this view. I want the audience to be surprised at Music, once again. (Ayako Kosaka)

The text of this work is based on the anthology of Haiku "Shumpu-batei-kyoku", which is printed in a "Yahanraku" (a epic poetry cycle) by YosaBuson (1716-1784), a haiku poet of the mid-Edo period.

This poet consists of 18 poems depicting a mental scenary of a girl on the way home from her apprenticeship in Osaka, on a spring afternoon. Buson called himself "Yahantei." as a pen name. "Yahanraku" is originally a music that derives from old Chinese music, and is based on "Hira-choshi" (a scale), also used in well-known Japanese Gagaku music "Etenraku".

Haruo Sato (1892-1964), who a modern poet and novelist, made this poem into a scenario of a silent movie ("Shunpu-batei-zufu") in the Taisho and Showa eras. This is about the time of the birth of the talkies. A dreamy night scene that is not found in the original is also drawn in this scenario. A scene where the girl who slept overnight in her countryside next to her mother, goes back to the apprenticeship service in Osaka the next day, and sees her boyfriend again. But this scenario, actually, like a fantastic and poetic experimental movie, wasn't reproduced as a movie.

A little while ago, in 2011, I tried to compose a piece with Buson's text from "Shumpu-batei-kyoku". The composition was formed by a narration, Satsuma Biwa (lute), twenty string koto, and violin.

It was a project where I and Alexei Aigi, a Russian composer and violinist who were visiting Japan, premiered new compositions using a same instrumentation. Aigi's late father, Gennadi Aigi, was a poet. He was from a minority ethnic group, "Chuvash", who lived in the basin of the Volga river. During the Soviet Union era, it was not allowed to write poetry in there own native language, Chuvash, so he wrote it in Russian. But it was never recognized as a lineage of "orthodox" Russian poetry, rather known more in western europian countries. The poetic style that depicts the serenity and silence of the rural villages and forests of Tatar was sometimes called "Mallarmé of Volga ".
He also co-wrote with Sofia Gubaidulina, a female composer from the Tatar people of the Volga basin.

His son Alexei made a composition based on the collected poems “Song Greetings”. which Gennadi had dedicated to his daughter (i.e. Alexei’s little sister). The old folk song depicting the Chuvash's customs was dared to be applied to the Russian rhyme four-line poem. Gennadi Aigi was known for his difficult poetry, but here, he adapted it rather in a plain style. On the other hand, I thought about what I should choose as a text and came up with the poetry of YosaBuson, which is said to be the first colloquial free verse in Japan that is formed of Chinese poem, haiku, and free poems. Japan has no historical experience of having restricted or lost its native language or characters, but there are various narratives and styles in Japanese language, including honorifics. I felt the reality of language activities in the divisive situation of three styles of language activity; Chinese poetry, Japanese rhyme, and prose.

At the time when Buson lived, even with the isolation system, it was the era turning from early modern period to the late modern period. Due to the prosperity of the “Chōnin (townsman's)” culture, while being in the feudal system led by the samurai, it can be said that it was , an era where the traffic between urban cities and the rural areas became busier than before. A girl living in a poor rural village has been sent to apprenticeship, but there she experience a romance in advanced townsman culture and also customs and urban life. Though Haruo Sato later portrayed it as "romance" from a modern perspective, it might actually have been a prostitute-like experience. What was the song like, with various language expressions in this poet, which sometimes crossing the border or sometimes being disruptive and chaotic?

By the way, the day of spring 2011, a few days before his arrival to Japan, the gigantic earthquake happened and the concert was cancelled. It became "a song without voice" with only the score remaining.

Whether it is a human disaster or a natural disaster, due to the spread of virus infection, many concerts and other events have been canceled and forced to postpone, and fortunately or unfortunately I myself also suspended my activities. At the midnight in the spring I was taking a walk with a can of beer in my hand, recollecting the "public planned power outages" right after the 2011 earthquake; When I could catch even the sound of a empty can, echoing away from an desolate alley to the ultimate silence of town. And then, suddenly, I received an E-mail.

It was a commission request for a composition from Ayako Kosaka, old friend of mine, and a classical vocalist. Come to think of it, the so-called "classical vocal music" is where you sing an Europian music in a Europian language. I know it’s beyond my imagination, but I think there is always a linguistic conflict. At the same time, the sound of different language always continues to provide a "new world" to singers and listeners.

A song of an old haiku poet; who made a full use of various styles of writing, and who had finished his life without returning to his hometown. A song of an innocent girl; who just learned the behavior of the urban life during her apprenticeship and returns to a poor peasant home. A soundscape imagined by modern poets, accepting the western culture through the colloquial style. And a “nightmare song” that transcends and jumbles in a dream, leaving all those things disorganized. Even the memories of the peasant songs of "Chuvash" which the poet Gennadi wrote, are ringing out in my mind.Ayako Kosaka would be an eligible person who have been facing various languages through singing. She would embody such delusions and obsessions of the poets and composers (like me), and would transform herself to a life of a girl who blows through them.

With these feelings, nine years after the spring, when many lives were swallowed in a tsunami wave, we made up a completely new creation. Inspired by 18 unvoiced poems and unscreened silent movie scenarios that portrayed them, a song like the breath of spring was born from a stagnant world where the infections have been spreading. I am so grateful to vocalconsort initium for giving me the opportunity to create this music, during such time. (Jun Kawasaki)

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Jun Kawasaki Composer・ double bass player・theater director Jun Kawasaki. He is a Japanese double bass player and composer.he studied contrabass under Tetsu Saito and Motoharu Yoshizawa while in university. He has joined as an active member in several projects of contemporary music, improvisational performance, and dance in many countries especially Turkey and Russia. Through those activities, he acquired new perspectives to create new international works that reconsider Asia from the view point on the border between Asia and Europe. Since 2015 he was invited and start to organize Music and Poetic Drama Laboratory at Theater X, Tokyo.
2015 June, Jun kawasaki composed and Music and Poetic Drama Laboratory performed “ORPHANS AND STARS” and collaborated with Israel pianist. In this performance, musicians and actors perform 20 songs. Original texts of each song are mainly from Jewish poet Paul Celan’s pieces and Bertolt Brecht’s pieces. “The end does not end” was premiere for the 100th anniversary project of the birth of Tadeusz Kantor in 2015 at Theater X, Tokyo. They are making Music and Poetic Drama — new kind of theatre music combining songs, body, and voice — directed and composed by Jun Kawasaki.
Since 2016, he has had collaborative performances with various artists from Armenia, Russia, Buryatia, Turkey, and Ukraine. Based on traditional arts and folklore from all over the world including Japan, we invent and use our unique choral system without relying on any ethnic or religious or classic music. The theatre music is said to be ‘Asian Magic Realism’ relating to creations of Latin American artist Gabriel García Márquez or Spanish poet Federico García Lorca and so on. Our members have diverse backgrounds such as Butoh, Japanese traditional Noh, contemporary dance, contemporary drama, noise, improvisation, western classical music and so on.
Kawasaki has has also composed and performed extensively for theater, dance and Buto about 90 pieces,as a musical director. His major works include music for Camille Claudel, Kenji Miyazawa and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (dance pieces conceived and choreographed by Senrei Nishikawa, a traditional Japanese dancer), About 1hr. 20min. on Oct. 1&2 in Brecht Festival (Japanese theatre company, Port B / Akira Takayama), Hamlet Machine (Heiner Müller)by Adults and Children (produced by SPAC Shizuoka Performing Arts Center in Japan), Madame Edwarda (George Bataille by Japanese traditional Marionette Theater Edo Ito Ayatsuri).
2012, 2013, Kawasaki collaborated with Turkish choreographer Aydin Teker, and made “db-ll-bass” sound, body, and instrument “db-ll-bass” is an attempt to construct a new creative sphere of performance, by reexamining the historical relationship between the body and a musical instrument — the contrabass — and extending both performance possibilities to the other. The piece was premiered in Istanbul, Turkey (Akbank Jazz festival), in October 2012. 2013 was played in Performing Arts Meeting in Yokohama. His representative participation work was “sound migration” which is a contemporary music collaboration between Japan and Turkey by Japan Foundation. The performance in Istanbul was held as the opening in the Istanbul International Contemporary Dance & Performance Festival (iDANS). It will be an original act of creation that cuts off a slice of ‘now’, the present moment, where the migration of peoples is occurring on a global scale.

Also, he was invited as a soloist of Dresdner Sinfoniker’s brand-new musical theater of the epic of Central Asia with composer Marc Sinan, and worked with traditional Central Asian musician from Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan etc. He has joined as an active member in several projects of contemporary music, improvisational performance, and dance in many countries He has performed in many countries and international music and dance festival, including the US, Russia, France, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania,Taiwan,Korea, Egypt, Hungry, Germany, Swiss Liechtenstein Kazakhstan, and Armenia.