>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC.
>> Good afternoon!
I'm Sue Vita, the Chief of the Music Division.
It's my great pleasure to welcome you to this lecture,
which is the sixth in a series,
cosponsored with the American Musicological Society.
We began these talks in 2008 with a lecture on Ruth Crawford Seeger.
Subsequent programs have highlighted Irving Berlin, Arnold Schoenberg,
William Schuman, and even one
of my predecessors former Music Division Chief Harold Spivacke.
Both the music division and the society are pleased
with the success of this series.
Statistics demonstrate that the library's web casts
of these talks have a worldwide virtual audience
and are even used in University curricula.
Not only do they demonstrate the robust scholarship
in American Musicology but they offer an enticing glimpse
into the riches of the music division's unique holdings.
We invite AMS scholars to present their work twice a year,
here in our historic Coolidge Auditorium.
But also through these talks, we invite young scholars
to consider investigating our collections for, I assure you,
they still hold myriad untapped treasures and research topics.
This afternoon's talk by Anthony Sheppard highlights an intriguing
link in works by American modernist composers whose compositions are
housed at the Library and the influence of Japan
on their musical expression.   Before introducing Anthony, however,
I would like to introduce a frequent visitor
to the performing arts reading room Professor Laura Youens
of the Department of Music at the George Washington University,
who brings greetings from the American Musicological Society.
Laura.   [ Applause ]
>> Laura Youens: Good afternoon!
I am honored to represent the American Musicological Society
in what it rightfully regards as an important research initiative
with the Library of Congress.
As a long time resident of this area, I have had ample opportunity
to enjoy the wonderful resources of this library
as has today's speaker Dr. Anthony Sheppard.
He earned his BA degree at Amherst College and both MFA
and PhD degrees from Princeton.
Since 1996, he has taught at Williams College in Williamstown,
Massachusetts where he is currently Professor of Music.
He has received numerous grants
and awards including an ASCAP Deems Taylor Award
and Alfred Einstein Award,
an American Philosophical Society Fellowship,
and the Kurt Weill Book Prize among others.
His book Revealing Masks: Exotic Influences
and Ritualized Performance
in Modernist Music Theater was published by the University
of California Press in 2001.
In numerous articles, papers, and public lectures, he has addressed
such topic as Tan Dun's The First Emperor, Harry Partch,
various aspects of Japonisme, Philip Glass, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus,
and representations of Japan in Hollywood films.
By the research he has carried out here,
he will soon publish another book Extreme Exoticism:
Japan in the American Musical Imagination.
Please join me in welcoming Tony Sheppard.
[ Applause ]
>> Dr. Sheppard: Thank you for that introduction.
I'm honored to represent the many members
of the American Musicological Society who have pursued research
in the Music Division of the Library of Congress.
I am also grateful for this opportunity to thank the librarians
who have made our work possible.
Many of my research projects over the years have led me to the library
for this is the place
where countless projects are launched and culminated.
It is also the place that sparks ideas leading us to travel
to other archives across the nation and the world.
The vastness of the music division's collections sets the stage
for dramatic moments of scholarly serendipity.
During several research trips to the library over the past 15 years,
I found myself encountering new topics
that I had been unaware of before my visit.
In fact, on a trip to canvas the music division's collection
of Tin Pan Alley era sheet music for songs with Japan as their subject,
I stumbled upon an opera entitled Sakura,
which you will hear about later on.
I am currently completing a historical study of the relationship
between Japan and the United States as echoed and shaped by music.
A good deal of this book is devoted to the impact of Japanese music
and culture on the careers of specific American composers.
The profound Japanese influence on the development
of American modern architecture, painting, theater, design,
gardening, and literature, has long been documented and celebrated
in numerous publications and exhibitions.
Less well known is the impact of Japanese traditional music
in shaping American musical modernism.
As early as 1882, the celebrated zoologist
and japanophile Edward Sylvester Morse went into Japanese music
as offering ideas that could take the 'Power
of music in a new direction'.   Morse's statement proved prophetic
for numerous American composers have turned to Japan for inspiration
as they sought to make music new over the past hundred years.
The history of this cross-cultural musical interaction is documented
in unpublished and published scores, manuscripts, photographs,
and correspondence held often uniquely in the Music Division
of the Library of Congress.
Numerous American composers have responded in their music to the art
and poetry of Japan as well as to the timbres, rhythms, and forms of,
for example, the Japanese shakuhachi flute and Gagaku -
the Ancient Court Ensemble Music.
The works of these composers have repeatedly spurred me
to investigate the relationship between cross-cultural influence
and exotic representations.
This music likewise challenges us to reconsider our understanding
of modernism and to ask which styles and techniques might qualify
in different periods as forms of modern American music.
Today, I will focus on but four composers representing divergent
periods, styles, and artistic outlooks who each traveled to Japan
and whose approaches to creating modern music were shaped
by this experience.
The first, Henry Eichheim was one of the earliest American composers
to pursue Asian music studies and was active in the teens and 1920's.
The career of the prolific jazz band arranger
and songwriter Claude Lapham was redirected toward Japan
through one specific commission in 1933.
The major American composer
and educator Henry Cowell heard Japanese folk music as a child early
in the century and travelled to Japan
as a Cold War Cultural Ambassador later in life.
And finally, Roger Reynolds lived in Japan between 1966 and 1969
and has maintained a deep personal connection to Japan ever since,
collaborating with Japanese artistes and writing about the music
of modern Japanese composers.
These four American composers of the same gender and race,
but from very different backgrounds one a classical violinist,
the second a jazz band arranger,
the third a home-schooled musical protg, and the fourth,
initially trained as an engineer were each based
in California during formative periods in their careers.
Each of these composers is also well represented in the collections
of the Library of Congress, which include the recent deposit
of the Reynolds Collection offering a timely opportunity
to explore the impact of Japan and Japanese culture on the work
and musical thought of this major contemporary figure.
I will consider each of these composers in turn
and will offer some comparative reflections in the end.
Following 21 years as a violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra,
Henry Eichheim retired in 1912 to devote himself
to composition and travel.
During his second trip to East Asia in 1920,
in a letter to his friend Carl Engel, who was then Chief
of the Music Division of the Library of Congress and later served
as President of the American Musicological Society,
Eichheim declared that Japan 'has a mysterious charm,
a poetry no other country seems to posses for me.'
Eichheim appears to have enjoyed the pretense
of temporarily collapsing the space between self and exotic other.
In a 1928 letter, from Japan to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge,
the great music patron and donor of this very auditorium,
Eichheim relates that he is staying in a mountain resort
and living 'in a semi-Japanese manner, so that I eat raw fish
with chopsticks and do many other Japanese things all
for the sake of local color.'
Musically, he believed that he had strayed far from the domestic,
'Can you imagine the amount and kinds
of music I shall hear during this time?
I am sure a plain C major triad will sound
like a strange exotic thing to me when I return.'
Eichheim journeyed to Japan and other East Asian nations repeatedly
between 1915 and 1937 and approached these trips as a collector,
amassing an impressive set of musical instruments,
taking numerous photographs of performers,
and transcribing over two thousand tunes.
Eichheim's ultimate goal was
to present these exotic cultural artifacts to American audiences.
Writing from Japan to Coolidge, Eichheim is explicit,
'We hope to hear some of the music that will be used at the Coronation
of the Japanese Emperor, and as this is chiefly for small orchestra,
I hope to find some priceless old imperial music that I may use
in a piece I hope I may write for you.'
In addressing her as Lady Coolidge in this hopeful letter,
Eichheim appears to be assuming the role of an imperial explorer
in the age of discovery or perhaps is serving as her art collector,
playing the part of a musical Bernard Berenson
to her Isabella Stewart Gardner.
In addition to offering a mysterious charm,
Eichheim felt that Japanese music could help direct Euro-American art
music out of what he perceived to be its late romantic impasse.
In 1923, Eichheim complained that he could no longer work with the 'stiff
and antiquated patterns of European forms' and he predicted
that the music of the Orient 'will make our music ever more free
and flexible in expression.'
Claiming in 1928 that 'the future of European music can be enhanced
and enriched by the finer sense of line and proportion
and greater rhythmic scope of some of the music of the Orient.'
More immediately, he hoped that his own study of Asian music would help
to separate his music from the conservative strand
of current American composition.
Writing again to Carl Engel, Eichheim enthused,
'Japanese church festivals are fertile fields for strange sights
and sounds, crowded streets, costumes and floats, always designed
from traditional subjects, and the rhythms of the drums, Oh my,
how you would enjoy these broken china effects
that make the wildest ragtime sound like the safe and respectable 4-4
so dear to the heart of Arthur Foote.'
For Eichheim, Japan's strange sights
and sounds offered a promising path toward modern music.
Eichheim's reputation as a composer rests a large part on a set
of short pieces, each inspired by his travels
to a specific East-Asian nation.
The movements of Oriental Sketches including Japanese Sketch
and Japanese Nocturne were arranged by Eichheim for chamber orchestra
in 1921 as Oriental Impressions.
The manuscript copy of the piano version of Japanese sketch as well
as the manuscript copies of the chamber versions of Japanese Sketch
and Japanese Nocturne commissioned by Coolidge are held here
at the Library of Congress.
In each of these pieces, Eichheim attempted
to evoke the sound of being there.   In the Japanese sketch of 1918,
Eichheim presented four exotic finds: The boom of the big bell
at the Chion-in Temple in Kyoto, the chant of a Buddhist priest,
a Shakuhachi tune, and a country boy's song.
They are presented with the utmost clarity
with even greater melodic profile than heard, for example,
in Stravinsky's treatment of Russian folk songs in Petrushka.
Unlike Stravinsky, Eichheim most always identified his borrowed
material in his scores and program notes.
The implication of this score is that we are hearing a collage
of the actual sounds of Japan one formed of juxtapositions
that we might encounter if we could but travel
to the exotic land ourselves.
Eichheim came closest to transporting his audience to Japan
in his orchestral version of Japanese nocturne 1922.
Here the cherished sounds of Japan heard from his bedroom window,
the shrill piping of food vendors, the plucking of a koto,
and the chanted prayer of an old man beating a wooden bell float
through a non-harmonic drone of tolling octaves and fifths
and a lulling pulse of arpeggiated triplets befitting a nocturne.
The most striking feature of this piece occurs near the end
as the old man's prayer played by the oboe is accompanied
by his constant beating of a Japanese fish-head wooden slit drum
or temple block a mokugyo.
The instrument specified by Eiccheimian score.
Eichheim's historical significance is credited largely
to his early incorporation
of numerous East-Asian percussion instruments in his orchestral works.
Many of which he made available from his own collection for performances.
At the moment the fish-head drum enters, the representational system
of the piece has been breached,
rather than translating the old man's drum, Eichheim purports
to place the actual exotic musical object before his audience.
Of course such bids for authenticity often prove difficult to realize
in performance and Eichheim allowed for exotic substitutes
in his manuscript score, 'If no fish-head drum,
a smaller Japanese wood bell or drum used
in Buddhist prayers is available,
kindly use a small Chinese woodblock made by Deegan in Chicago.'
Here is the conclusion of Japanese Nocturne in a 1929 recording
by Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra.
[ Music ]
>> Dr. Sheppard: In assessing, cross-cultural influence,
it may seem natural to search for evidence of integration
and a deeper engagement with the fundamental elements
of exotic artistic traditions
of true influence rather than mere imitation.
The evidence for such engagement in Eichheim's works is relatively slim,
which perhaps partly explains his current obscurity.
Eichheim appears to have been most struck by the floating pulse
and ambiguous meter of some forms of Japanese traditional music
and this interest is manifested in several
of his Japanese inspired works, not to mention in remarks
such as the sarcastic reference to safe
and respectable meters I quoted earlier.
A note pasted on to the second page of the manuscript score
of Japanese Sketch that he presented to Coolidge states that,
'Extreme legato is to be observed throughout the piece.
I would like it to sound as if there were no bar lines.'
In the score of the original piano version of Japanese Nocturne,
Eichheim went one step further by abandoning bar lines altogether
for the final melody and noting that 'The left hand
and the right hand are to be played without time relation.'
An even more striking feature
in these pieces is the occasional occurrence of pitch clusters,
for example, in measure 19 of the Japanese Sketch,
we hear the following isolated seven pitch cluster lasting two beats.
[ Music ]
>> Dr. Sheppard: In the Japanese Nocturne,
a five-pitch cluster sustained
for several measures near the opening of the piece.
[ Music ]
>> Dr. Sheppard: And other clusters appeared later in that work.
I tend to assume that any pitch cluster
in a Japanese inspired work is a sign of the composer's knowledge
of the Japanese sho - a mouth organ that sustains clusters of five
to six pitches used in Gagaku - the Ancient Court Orchestral Music.
In Eichheim's case, such knowledge is a real possibility and some
of his clusters resemble sho clusters
in interval content quite closely
and since he was likely the first Euro-American composer
to hear Gagaku, as we will see, he certainly was not the last.
In a response typical of modernists after encountering ancient material,
Eichheim and numerous other later composers looked upon the elite
Gagaku as an ideal source for the creation of modern music.
In fact, Gagaku itself could be claimed
for the modernist flag according to Eichheim.
'Here we have music fourteen hundred years old and yet so modern
that if I had been told that the composition was
by a radical ultramodern European, I would have believed it.'
Eichheim's influence on later American composers
and on other artists interested
in non-western cultures has been underestimated.
He served as a persuasive proselytizer for Asian music
in the US through his letters, concerts, recitals, and articles.
For example, in a 1928 letter held in the Library of Congress
to the eminent conductor Serge Koussevitzky, Eichheim reported
that he had heard Gagaku 'In Tokyo,
I heard the Emperor's Orchestra play the ancient music that was used
at yesterday's coronation and found it very noble.
I have written an article for a Japanese magazine about it
which you shall have when it is printed.'
His extensive collection of exotic instruments attracted significant
attention throughout his career.
Here we see Eichheim with Martha Graham and he frequently lectured
on Asian music often in conjunction with performances of this works.
In addition to highlighting the didactic motivation behind these
pieces, Eichheim's lectures shaped his audiences aural experiences
and responses.   His wife performed the Piano Version
of Oriental Sketches throughout Asia and the United States.
The Chamber Version of these pieces was first performed just
down the road from Williams College at Coolidge's Berkshire festival
in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1921 and the full orchestral version
of three of the movements was performed
by multiple leading orchestras in the US and Europe.
The chamber version was also performed in a recital sponsored
by Coolidge and the Library of Congress held in February 1924 just
down the National Mall from here at the Freer Gallery.
Eichheim's travels to Japan and musical travelogues set the stage
for a century of American composers embarking on such exotic journeys.
On June 24, 1933 far from this auditorium,
over ten thousand spectators witnessed some two thousand
performers in the premiere of Sakura - a Japanese opera-pageant
at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
This production was likely the most significant musical event
for the Los Angeles Japanese-American community
in the decade before World War II.
Hundreds of children from all the Japanese schools
in the area participated
and the Japanese-American newspaper Rafu Shimpo covered the production
in intense detail.
Both US and Japanese government officials proclaimed their support
for this even and even President Roosevelt expressed interest
in Sakura.   The Japanese Chamber of Commerce
of Southern California had sponsored the production intending 'To promote
a better understanding between Japanese and other racial groups
in Los Angeles and surrounding communities' a timely intervention
given the rampant anti-Japanese sentiment of the day.
Although Sakura has vanished from the history of American music,
the work was revived in LA in August 1933, was performed four times
in June 1936 in Portland, Oregon and was apparently scheduled
for production in San Francisco.   An editor of the Rafu Shimpo,
Gamitsu Tzukamaki [Phonetic] wrote the Japanese libretto,
which perhaps explains
that publication's incessant promotion of the production.
The plot of the opera might call to mind
that of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoore,
a tragic heroine Sakura, also the name
of Japan's most famous folksong,
is in love with a young priest named Zen, believe it or not,
but their love meets with her father's disapproval.
The father owes money to an uncouth lender who demands
that heroine's hand in marriage as compensation
when the father is unable to repay.
The young priest and the moneylender later struggle violently
and the priest is stabbed to death.
The heroine goes mad and in the final scene murders the moneylender
and then wanders off alone into the forest.
Attending Sakura at the Hollywood Bowl, the general public was able
to experience something of the same sensation of being transported
to old Japan that some wealthier Angelino's achieved daily
in their domestic Japanese style gardens.
The set, which extended to the back of the shell and spread to the sides
and in front, featured a large statue of Buddha,
a waterfall with a viewing bridge, a small pavilion, and a Torii Gate.
While the model of the set displayed on the screen is held
at the Japanese American National Museum in LA,
the only surviving copy of the score that I have been able
to locate is here at the Library of Congress.
The composer commissioned to write the score
for this Japanese-American extravaganza was a prolific white
jazz band arranger and songwriter Claude Lapham.
Despite appearing 'in native costume'
in this later publicity photo from Japan, Lapham was an unlikely figure
to be tapped for the composition of a work trumpeted inaccurately
by both the composer and the press as the world's first Japanese opera.
Born in Fort Scott, Kansas,
Lapham attended both Washington University and Juilliard.
He served as an arranger for Irving Berlin and Paul Whiteman,
as a silent film organist, as a music staff member
for Hollywood Studios, and as a conductor for Broadway reviews.
He was a virtuosic pianist, who apparently was the first soloist
to perform Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on the radio.
Lapham also published some 250 works including popular songs,
collections of dance music,
and a book on scoring for dance orchestras.
Prior to his work on Sakura, Lapham appears to have had no experience
of Japanese traditional music.
The Los Angeles Times declared Lapham's score for Sakura
to be 'The first notable amalgamation of the two races
in an art' and reported that in preparation
for this work Lapham had 'made an extensive study of Japanese music
and customs in the Japanese homes
in Los Angeles during a six-month period.'
General reviews of the premiere were quite positive
with a more mixed response to Lapham's strange score.
Sakura calls for a range of Japanese traditional instruments including
the shamisen - a stringed instrument somewhat
like the banjo and tsutsumi a drum.
Lapham employed several Japanese folk tunes that he labeled
in his score, thereby suggesting that his other folk
like melodies were original.
At several points, instrumental lines mimic the gradual achererandos
speeding up of the kakkos drum rolls in Gagaku court music
or the hyoshigi hyoshigi clappers of Kabuki Theater.
The vocal lines remain almost entirely syllabic and try
to in the intervals frequently appear for dramatic expression.
At several points, the accompanying harmony is marked by pitch clusters
that likely were inspired by the clusters
of the sho, the Japanese mouthorgan.
In the press coverage and in his later writings, Lapham claimed
to enjoy the challenges posed by the commission.
In fact, Sakura marked only the beginning
of Lapham's extensive engagement with Japan and Japanese music.
Lapham became devoted to Japanese music following his work on Sakura
and his career focus changed dramatically
as he followed Henry Eichheim's example by traveling to Japan
and becoming a proselytizer back in the US
for this exotic musical culture.
Seven months after the premiere of Sakura,
Lapham accepted an invitation from the Columbia Record Company to work
in Japan on jazz recordings.
He remained in Japan for a couple of years
and his compositional output accelerated markedly.
During this period, he composed numerous Japanese influenced works
including Mihara Yama, a Japanese tone poem
for Grand Orchestra premiered by the Tokyo Symphony
and the Japanese Concerto in C minor for piano and orchestra,
which was commissioned by the Victor Record Company of Japan premiered
in Tokyo by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra with Lapham as soloist
and awarded a silver medal by the Takarazuka Film Company.
The scores of both of these works
from 1935 are held here at the Library.
Lapham's Japanese inspired works range broadly in their relation
to Japanese traditional music.
His six-minute tone poem Mihara Yama is devoid
of any Japanese musical influence
and features instead a rather generic dramatic style
that would not seem out of place as the main title music
for Hollywood gangster movie.
One of the work's major themes recalls a tune
from the New World Symphony of Dvorak.
The most substantial of Lapham's Japanese influenced works following
Sakura was his Japanese Piano Concerto.
Lapham's Concerto was extraordinary and extends the style and materials
of his earlier Japanese inspired works.
In this piece, Lapham includes a banjo part in shamisen style
and calls for tsutsumi and taiko drums
and a brass bowl imitating a small metal gong.
The Concerto lunges through stylistic shifts recalling
in turn the music of Rachmaninoff and Gershwin
and the interlocking percussive rhythms
of Japanese Matsuri Bayashi the street religious celebrations
featuring flute and percussion as well
as European musical evocations of the gypsy.
In an attempt to capture the essence of this piece,
I will offer an extended montage of excerpts from the three movements
in a performance with Lapham at the piano.
[ Music ]
>> Dr. Sheppard: Bid from movement two.
[ Music ]
>> Dr. Sheppard: And part of the third one there.
[ Music ]
>> Dr. Sheppard: Between 1937 and 1940, Lapham gave a series
of lecture recitals on Japanese music
that featured his Japanese inspired works at such venues
as the Hotel Astor and the Ritz-Carlton in New York City.
Typical of these events is one in July 1936
at the International House in Chicago.
The Chicago Daily Tribune announcement referred to Lapham
as 'An authority on Japanese music and a pioneer in the efforts
to adapt something of its peculiar idiom to the demands
of accepted western forms,
thus forgetting its own native son Henry Eichheim.
Lapham's presentation in Japan, in, excuse me, in Chicago,
included excerpts from Sakura,
the Japanese Piano Concerto, and Mihara Yama.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Lapham, not surprisingly,
ceased his Japanese musicales and instead delivered lectures
on Balinese music and composed works such as Iphigenia and Torres
and the Opera Montezuma both in 1942.
Following the war, Lapham along with multiple other American composers,
resumed his focus on Japan.
Lapham's extraordinary career illustrates how suddenly
and thoroughly a composer may change direction through an encounter
with an exotic musical tradition.
Lapham also wrote on Japanese music and its history.
In 1936, he declared that Japan was 'an endless source of inspiration
for him' and that 'Japanese music is not easy to understand, in fact,
it is subtle, complex, elusive but withal extremely colorful
and exciting to a serious student.'
In his works, he 'sought to blend the two viewpoints'
by producing a new type of musical idiom in which at least 75%
of the music would be of Japanese texture with the remainder European.
In 1941, he stated that Oriental music loses much
of its original flavor when transcribed for piano and orchestra
and he prophesized that 'in time the beauty of both the Oriental
and Occidental music will be merged
into a transcendental form representing a truly universal
medium of expression.'
In 1937, he recounted his own nocturnal experiences
of a Japanese soundscape.
But rather than echoing Eichheim's enthusiasm,
Lapham lamented Japan's rapid musical modernization,
'I shall never forget how when wandering
out into a Tokyo suburb one twilight
and mounting a beautiful curved bridge over a tiny stream to look
over the thatched roofs, my meditations
and illusions were shattered, with a startling suddenness
by the raucous strains of Saint [inaudible] Blues'.
Some two decades after Henry Eichheim's trips to Japan
and two decades before Henry Cowell's,
we have found another American composer equally fascinated
by Japanese music and repeating many of the same claims and aspirations
Japanese music and culture were
of central importance throughout much of Henry Cowell's live.
The influence of Japanese music is evident in one
of his earliest works the Oriental Movement of Adventures in Harmony
from 1912 and in one of his last the Second Concerto
for Koto and Orchestra in 1965.
Like Eichheim and Lapham, Cowell was instrumental
in introducing Japanese music to other composers.
In this image, we see him demonstrating the shakuhachi
to the composer Edgar Varese.
At the risk of accusations of myopia,
I claim that Japanese musical culture was the most persistent
exotic influence on Cowell - a composer who famously attempted
to 'live in the whole world of music.'
Cowell encountered Japanese folk songs and perhaps even koto music
as a child in San Francisco.
But it is unlikely that he would have heard Gagaku the Japanese
traditional music that had the strongest influence
on his mature works.   In fact, Cowell's earliest pieces
on Japanese subjects revealed little knowledge of Japanese music.
For example, in the 1915 monodrama Red Silence,
Cowell-still a teenager-relied primarily on a nave pentatonicism
and open fifth and fourth intervals to signal the exotic.
The manuscript score is held here at the Library of Congress.
The work is for a sole little female character Red Silence
who is waiting for her lover to return.
She receives a sign of his death and then as a good samarized daughter
in the Euro-American Japonisme tradition commits suicide on stage.
In setting her song Fresh Flowery Sprays,
Cowell employed the black notes of the piano for the vocal line.
[ Music ]
>> Dr. Sheppard: And he employed mostly parallel forced black notes
for the piano accompaniment.   [ Music ]
>> Dr. Sheppard: This form
of musical exoticism did not require contact with Asian music.
Cowell's serious study of Japanese music did not begin until age 37
when he met the shakuhachi performer and teacher Kitaro Tamada.
Immigration records reveal that Tamada was born in 1894
and first arrived in the United States in 1918.
He met Eichheim in the early 1920's, was Cowell's most crucial connection
to Japan for three decades,
and inspired several other American composers to study Japanese music.
Tamada taught Cowell shakuhachi for a period
of four years continuing his lessons during Cowell's imprisonment
for homosexual acts.
Within two years of Cowell's release,
Tamada himself was behind barbed wire
in the Manzanar Japanese-American Internment Camp.
He would spend the next three years and eight months attempting
to continue his shakuhachi performance
and teaching while worrying about the future
of Japanese culture in America.
A most eloquent response in expression of gratitude
to Tamada can be heard in the 1946 solo
for shakuhachi the universal flute, which Cowell dedicated to him.
This work is one of the earliest by a Euro-American composer
for an Asian solo instrument.
The piece is an ABA structure typical of shakuhachi music
and Cowell calls for a great deal of the pitch bending
and sliding tones central to shakuhachi idioms.
For a composer who wished to live in the whole world of music,
Cowell spent relatively little time outside the United States.
Unlike Eichheim who traveled to East Asia five times
and for extended periods, Cowell visited East Asia only twice.
He spent approximately two months in Japan in 1957 and one month in 1961.
Cowell's first trip to Japan was part of a larger tour funded
by the Rockefeller Foundation and sponsored by the Department
of State US Information Agency.
In 1961, Cowell served as President Kennedy's representative
to the Tokyo East-West Music Encounter Conference.
Cowell, along with numerous other prominent musicians
and composers proved an important participant
in Cold War Cultural Diplomacy.
His universalism and attempts to synthesize East and West
in his music, however, benign in motivation, worked hand-in-hand
with US Cold War efforts to form political bonds
with Asian nations particularly with Japan, much in the same way
as did State sponsored radio broadcasts, lectures,
and concerts of American music abroad.
Cowell's cross-cultural music and works
of this period repeatedly present a somewhat formulaic dialectic.
The most obviously exotic material appears first,
then a more recognizably Euro-American style is presented
and ultimately an attempt is made to integrate the two.
Cowell's major Japanese influenced works of the 1950's
and 1960's include Ongaku of 1957, The Concerto for Koto and Orchestra
of 1962, The Concerto for Harmonica of the same year,
and The Concerto Number 2 for Koto and Orchestra of 1965.
Cowell repeatedly addressed the relationship between these pieces
and Japanese music in a way that emphasized originality,
creative synthesis, and the use of foreign compositional procedures.
In his program notes for Ongaku, for example,
Cowell stated that the piece, 'Is not an imitation of Japanese music,
but an integration of some of its usages with related aspects
of western music' and he declared
that 'all the thematic material is my own,
there are actually no Japanese themes in the work.'
The two traditional Japanese genres shaping Cowell's material works were
Gagaku and Sankyoku - a form of chamber music for koto, shamisen,
and shakuhachi in the realm of public entertainment.
Cowell's long-term devotion to the solo shakuhachi is also evident
in the melodic style of several of these pieces.
The degree to which Cowell imitated Gagaku and Sankyoku
in his Ongaku is suggested by details
in his manuscript short score, held here in the Cowell Collection.
He labeled the various orchestral parts with a Gagaku instrument names
and transcribed koto scales at the bottom of the first page
of the second movement presumably as a compositional aid.
Several melodic gestures in Ongaku, including the flute introduction
and the initial melody for trumpets in imitation of the ryuteki
and hichiriki parts appear derived from the most famous
of Gagaku pieces Etenraku.
The most striking Gagaku feature in Cowell's Japanese influenced works
of this period is his use of sho style pitch clusters.
Here is the high erratic opening of Ongaku from a recording made in 1959
by the Louisville Orchestra conducted by Robert Whitney.
[ Music ]
>> Dr. Sheppard: Similarly, The Concerto for Harmonica opens
with sho inspired clusters in the winds and then in the violins.
The harmonica part, surprisingly, avoids any suggestion of the sho
and contains no chords and only two dyads in the entire piece.
Here is the opening of The Concerto for Harmonica, and I am grateful
to Robert Bonfiglio who premiered the Concerto for Harmonica
with Lucas Foss and the Brooklyn Philharmonic in 1986
for providing me with a recording of that performance.
[ Music ]
>> Dr. Sheppard: Cowell's works from the Cold War period might
at first appear far removed from the musical Japonisme of Eichheim;
however, evidence from Cowell's sketches
in the music division suggest a closer correspondence
to Eichheim's poetic impressions.
To what extent does a composition's title shape our experience
of the work and our understanding of the composer's artistic stance?
Cowell's original title for the 1962 Concerto for Harmonica was Haiku:
Spirit of Japan, which is crossed out on his manuscript score perhaps
to steer listeners clear of poetic evocations of old Japan in the piece
and toward an appreciation of a skillful modernist abstraction
of fundamental Japanese musical features.
Likewise, Cowell's original title for Ongaku was Impressions
of Court Music and he initially subtitled the work's first movement
An American in Japan.
Unlike Eichheim, however, Cowell composed impressions
of a musical style rather than of an exotic soundscape.
In multiple ways, Eichheim and Cowell differed greatly
in their interactions with Japan and Japanese music.
Whereas Cowell heard fundamental similarities across all cultures
and claimed to identify with the other.
Eichheim spoke of fundamental differences between the domestic
and the exotic, yet in spite of their different approaches,
we have little grounds for privileging one composer's form
of cross-cultural music over the other.
American musical responses to Japan have always been profoundly shaped
by both personal motivations and broader social factors as well
as by current conceptions of compositional prowess.
My final composer Roger Reynolds has had the most extensive engagement
with Japan, even though traces of Japanese musical influence
in this works may be the least immediately audible.
Reynolds lived in Japan from 1966 to 1969, returned for seven months
in 1977, and has travelled to Japan on multiple other occasions.
In addition, his decade long relationships
with several major Japanese composers resulted in their travels
to and residencies at the University of California, San Diego,
Reynolds's academic base.
In this image, Reynolds is seen in California
with composers Toru Takemitsu and Joji Yuasa.
Although his experience of Japanese music
and culture before 1966 was minimal, I note that in an early vocal work
from 61 Reynolds said Haiku poetry
and that his Japanese colleagues felt some
of his pre-1966 pieces displayed a Japanese sensibility.
Clearly Reynolds was open to the world of Japanese aesthetics
and to both the traditional and contemporary arts.
Unlike many of the American composers I have considered
for this project, Reynolds not only studied Japanese traditional music
and theater but learned the language and engaged substantially
with contemporary composers, musicians,
theater directors, and artists.
Rather than serving primarily as a proselytizer
for traditional Japanese music,
Reynolds has played a significant role in promoting the music
of such modern Japanese composers as Takemitsu in this country.
In Japan, he organized numerous concerts, sponsored in part
by the US Information Agency and many
of his works have been performed and premiered there.
Reynolds has set and been inspired by Japanese literary texts,
has composed for specific Japanese performers and has responded
to specific Japanese settings and aesthetic concepts in his music.
In a 1982 interview, Reynolds was asked,
Whether his 'non-theological approach to articulating
or structuring time was influenced
by contemporary developments in European music.'
The composer answered emphatically in the negative and pointed instead
to the profound impact on him of 'Japanese theater The Noh and more
than anything else Bunraku.'
Also, I would have to say sumo wrestling,
same kind of thing extraordinary sensitivity to the capacity of one
to wait in the proper context.
Reynolds's landmark 1975 book Mind Models begins with a quotation
from Zeami, the seminal figure in the history of Japanese Noh Theater.
In this book, Reynolds points to differences in time perception
between Japan and the west describes the unique approach
to ensemble performance that he heard in Gagaku
and celebrates the 'timbric heterogeneity' of shakuhachi music.
Reynolds has also pointed to the wide range of vocal styles employed
in Bunraku theater as an influence on his Voicespace series.
The 1990 orchestral piece Symphony Myths offers a particularly
pertinent example.
The work was dedicated to Takemitsu and premiered
by the Tokyo Philharmonic.
The first movement entitled Futami ga ura was inspired
by a famous rock formation off the coast of Honshu.
Here we see a drawing by Reynolds of the two main rocks
with the three ropes linking them.   This is Reynolds's first sketch.
This first movement consists of three main sections.
Reynolds has aptly described the outer two sections
as 'massive pyramids of sound, tonely aesthetic,
but densely figured with inner detail.'
The middle section represents the ropes in the formation
as three musical lines intertwine and a counterpoint
that resembles hierophany
or what the ethnomusicologist William Malm once termed 'the
sliding doors effect' prevalent in the texture
of Japanese traditional music.   The second sketch seen here begins
to document the creative process Reynolds employed
to translate the visual image into musical architecture.
There is nothing exceptional or indicative of Japanese music
in the instrumentation beyond a few prominent gong strokes
and a marimba part that suggests the woodblock sounds of mokugyo,
but Reynolds does call for playing techniques
that create a rapid irregular iteration and pitch
and a smooth achererando that might, at least visually in the score,
prompt a comparison with the accelerating kakko drum rolls
in Gagaku.
Once again, the most suggestive feature of this music is the use
of sustained pitch clusters.
In this opening movement, we experience a sense
of stasis punctuated by lines of intense activity spiraling within.
The pitch clusters heard in the first and third sections
of this movement consist primarily of 5 and 6 pitches
as do the clusters of the sho.
In fact, the interval content of these clusters is quite close
to a couple of the sho clusters and the dynamic swelling and ebbing
of these clusters resembles the breathing rhythms
of the sho even though the register
and timbre do not highlight this similarity.
Here are the opening minutes of this major work in a performance
by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Kotara Sata.
[ Music ]
>> Dr. Sheppard: My research on the music of Roger Reynolds
at the Library of Congress like the expansion
of the Reynolds' Collection itself will continue
into the immediate future.
As I proceed, I am faced with a host of questions:
Which work should I focus on?
Those that point to Japan in their titles?
Those created for specific Japanese performers?
Or only those works that to my ear suggest a direct influence
of Japanese traditional or contemporary music?
Influence is a notoriously difficult concept to pin down
and phenomenon to document.
For example, which instances of expressive silence or sonic space
in his music are indications of Reynolds's appreciation
of the Japanese aesthetic of ma and which can be traced
to the pointillistic works of such European composers as Anton Webern?
Should my research pathways be set primarily through conversations
with the composer himself?   Or should I first plunge more deeply
into the collective materials housed here?
To what extent am I predisposed to hear
and see Japanese influence everywhere in his works?
After studying the video recording of Reynolds's opera Justice
as produced here in the Jefferson building upstairs in 2001
and now available on the library's website,
I identified Japanese influence in the wide range of vocal sounds,
the lack of stage sets, the limited number of actors,
and the active role of the percussionist
who accentuates the character's speech at specific moments.
When I asked Reynolds about this, he replied, 'I had not thought
about it, but perhaps so.'
The influence of Japanese music on the works of Reynolds is not
as audible as it is in the works of Eichheim, Lapham,
and Cowell that I discussed earlier.   However, from other perspectives,
we might notice some fundamental continuity
in such cross-cultural music over the past century.
As I move toward my conclusion of this project, and yes,
of this lecture, I will need to consider the common ground
between Eichheim's evocations of a Japanese nocturnal soundscape
and Reynolds's construction of a piece inspired in structural detail
by a Japanese rock formation and its legend.
Much of Eichheim's approach to Japan was shaped by the writings
of the American Japanophile Lafcadio Hearn including Hearn's 1896 book
Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life.
Reynolds composed a work for solo violin directly shaped
by the discussion of the term Kokoro
in Daisetz Suzuki's 1970 landmark book Zen and Japanese Culture.
In an interview with Takemitsu, Reynolds stated, 'It's the making
of seemingly remote associations that's the most essential part
of exciting art.'
By considering the music of Eichheim, Lapham, Cowell,
and Reynolds today, I have aimed to suggest
such seemingly remote associations
and to reveal both the significant differences and clear strands
of continuity between all four composers
in their engagements with Japan.
Ultimately, I hope to have offered some indication
of the fundamental role that Japanese music,
either directly experienced or imagined,
has played for a wide variety of American composers,
negotiating routes to musical modernism.
>> I look forward to may own research projects
that undoubtedly will route me back repeatedly to the Music Division
of the Library of Congress.   Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress.