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.