“Mai” by Ryo Noda Part II

In the first part of my post on Mai, I wrote about the influence of traditional Japanese music on the piece and the techniques a saxophonist uses to imitate the shakuhachi flute. Now I’m looking at the western influences on Mai and why they represent an important development in Noda’s music.

During the mid 1970s, Noda studied with the great Jean-Marie Londeix at the Bordeaux Conservatory.  Londeix was a vital pioneer for classical saxophone; he comissioned many new works, securing for the saxophone the place in contemporary classical music that earlier composers had reserved for traditional orchestral instruments.  He is also largely responsible for the widespread use of extended techniques.  These include the microtones and pitch bending from the opening passages of Mai, as well as circular breathing, multiphonics, slap tongue and bisbigliando. While some of these are great party tricks, they also allow composers to expand their palette of sounds and create something unique and wonderful, if used responsibly.  In this piece you’ll hear a section of all multiphonics- I use special fingerings to produce two or more notes at a time, and they generally don’t sound pretty together. Along with the rapid arpeggiated passage where I’m circular breathing, it’s where you can hear Noda blend western techniques into his soundworld.

From an outside perspective, it’s tempting to look at this integration of extended techniques as composers just throwing in all the weird sounds we can make and calling it original.  While that certainly happens, I believe they add expressive range and emotional depth to Mai. The shakuhachi sound world is meditative, static. In bringing in western harmonies and dissonant multiphonics, Noda is able to create tension that can be resolved . . . Or not. This motion from tension to resolution is the basis of almost all western music and can give the music a narrative feeling.

Printed in the front of the sheet music is a passage in French which Noda read to Londeix before he premiered Mai.  I’ve translated it into English:

On an autumn night at twilight, as the moon reflected its silver light on the surface of the waves, General Kiyotsun Taira played the flute.
Standing at the prow of the ship, he seized his knife and sliced off a lock of hair which coiled at his feet and then disappeared into the waves.
At the threshold of his house, the ghost of the Samurai appeared. Turning to face him, his wife asked: “Why did you leave?”
“To save my army,” he replied, “because I knew the battle was lost already and so I spared the lives of my men and their families.”
“And me?” she said. “Did you think of me?”

Noda doesn’t give an exact outline of how the text lines up with the music he’s written, but I’ve added the text into my video to show how I feel the text is reflected in the music.  As we move on from the more shakuhachi based section and hear more western sounds, that signals a move away from the General’s meditation and into an emotional conflict between his duty to his army and to his wife.  Using the full range of techniques available on the saxophone, Noda is able to convey the different experiences expressed in the text.  And although he pulls from ideas that western composers were using at the time, Mai really doesn’t sound like the rest of our repertoire and that’s what makes it so much fun to play.  It gives me a reason to look into the music of another culture; gives me an opportunity to make funny noises; and it tells a beautiful, if sad, story.

“Mai” by Ryo Noda

Last month I was still on my unaccompanied saxophone kick, so I decided to learn a new piece by a composer I hadn’t touched on for several years. Ryo Noda is a Japanese composer who studied saxophone and composition in the US and then in France at the Bordeaux conservatory, where Mai was written.  His unique perspective on the avant-garde western music that was dominating saxophone repertoire, particularly in the Bordeaux school, at that time is what makes his music, and Mai in particular, a staple of our repertoire.  While other Japanese composers -most famously Toru Takemitsu- have engaged with Western music to create a blended sound world, Noda is unusual in directly referencing a specific Japanese instrument and style of playing.

Most of Noda’s music for saxophone imitates the sound of the shakuhachi, a traditional Japanese flute dating back to the middle ages.  It is used in folk music and Zen Buddhist meditation.  The flutes’ tone holes make a pentatonic scale (think the most stereotypical “Asian-sounding” music you’ve heard) and the player bends the pitch to produce virtually any pitch, including microtones, the notes in between the steps of the chromatic scale. Some western composers’ ears were caught by the microtonal capabilities of the shakuhachi and used it in their compositions; Noda instead uses the saxophone to imitate the sounds of a shakuhachi.

Since a saxophone is built quite differently from a shakuhachi, we have to use a variety of extended techniques to realize what Noda wrote.  In the opening passages of Mai, you can hear the most direct imitation of shakuhachi.  The saxophonist uses pitch bending, microtones and grace notes to imitate the Zen style idiomatic for shakuhachi flute.  This echoes Noda’s earlier music from when he was studying in the United States.  Those pieces, the most famous of which are Improvisations I, II and III, are firmly rooted in his idea of imitating shakuhachi on the saxophone.

If contemporary music isn’t your usual fare, it can be helpful to listen to some actual shakuhachi before Mai so that you can listen for the similarities.

 

Joan Tower’s “Wings”

For my first post, I revisited a piece with a lot of personal significance for me.  During my first semester of grad school, Joan Tower was doing a residency at my University, including a master class and performance of her solo and chamber works.  Remembering her works Petroushskates and Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman that I studied in my undergraduate work, I was so excited to tackle the solo saxophone piece Wings.

Studying twentieth century music involved a lot of what some of us refer to as “bleep bloop” music.  While I genuinely enjoy a lot of this music, it refers to the kind of experimental music without audible melodies or motifs, making for difficult listening.  When we got around to studying Petroushskates, Tower’s tribute to Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Petroushka, the driving rhythms and folk inspired melodies were a welcome flashback to Stravinsky’s prime in the early 1900’s, but with a lushness of harmonies and a whimsical attitude all her own.

As a solo piece, Wings is a completely different animal.  Writing convincing solo music for wind instruments is not easy, but Tower is one of those who can pull it off. Wings is a difficult piece, but it plays to the saxophone’s strengths.  The image that inspired this piece is one of a hawk flying, sometimes soaring peacefully, sometimes flapping its wings powerfully, and she takes advantage of the instrument’s flexibility to portray that.  We see long, lyrical phrases alongside lightning fast arpeggios spanning the range of the instrument.  Still, the greatest challenge for me was not the technical aspect, but to use my air.  Tower’s main wish for my interpretation was that I take more time, stretch out those phrases as much as possible.  Slowing down some of the passages really brought my performance to the next level, but it took all of my lung power to make it work. Since then, I have mastered circular breathing, a technique where a wind player takes in air through their nose while continuing to produce sound.  This allowed me to slow down those phrases and keep the sound quality that I want throughout the piece.

This was the first solo piece that I performed for the composer.  The fact that she is such a talented and accomplished composer as well as a barrier smashing woman made it even more of an honor.