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drplaceboIt's not Friday, but I did say I'd repost my past Forgotten Masterpiece Friday posts from Facebook, and Monday seems like a good time for it seeing as a bunch of other people post music on Mondays. So I'm starting from the beginning, with my first FMF post, appearing on Facebook on December 9, 2016.
Kunihiko Hashimoto (1904-1949) was probably Japan's leading composer in the 1930s and 1940s. His reputation has perhaps suffered because he spent much of the Second World War composing and conducting for Imperial Japanese propaganda films. However, he appears to have been apolitical and likely a reluctant nationalist, reverting to a conservative tonal idiom after previously studying under Egon Wellesz and Arnold Schoenberg and both composing and enthusiastically promoting serial, atonal, and microtonal music. (He eventually went on to compose music for a concert commemorating the adoption of Japan's postwar constitution in 1947.) Despite the severe restrictions placed on his artistic vision by the government that commissioned many of his works, he showed some real invention in fusing Japanese themes with the Western symphonic idiom -- "keeping the powers-that-be happy without selling himself out," as one reviewer noted. He has sometimes been described as a Japanese Kodály for his efforts to record and re-purpose folk songs.
Hashimoto's 1st Symphony, composed in 1940 to commemorate the 2600th year of the Japanese monarchy, offers a sharp contrast to both his Japanese predecessors and to Western composers' orientalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unlike earlier Japanese symphonists who purely emulated Western models, and European composers whose use of Asian elements was limited to plugging in the occasional Asian melody or using a few Asian percussion instruments, Hashimoto made his symphony pervasively Japanese from beginning to end. The first movement is both programmatic and written in a form inspired by Japanese emakimono scroll paintings, beginning and ending impressionistically, and in between, depicting Japan's entire history in music. Perhaps the brief, slightly jarring Sousa-like march in the middle represents Commodore Perry's fleet? The second movement might be described as a sort of Japanese Bolero that builds up a folk tune from solo woodwinds to full orchestra and taiko drums, though it differs from Ravel's Bolero in having a contrasting middle section based on a work song the composer heard in his travels through rural Japan. The third and final movement is a series of variations and a fugue on a gagaku (traditional Imperial court music) ceremonial song.
Here's the full Naxos recording (on YouTube) by the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Ryusuke Numajiri.
Movement 1: 0:00
Movement 2: 16:20
Movement 3: 27:30
Kunihiko Hashimoto (1904-1949) was probably Japan's leading composer in the 1930s and 1940s. His reputation has perhaps suffered because he spent much of the Second World War composing and conducting for Imperial Japanese propaganda films. However, he appears to have been apolitical and likely a reluctant nationalist, reverting to a conservative tonal idiom after previously studying under Egon Wellesz and Arnold Schoenberg and both composing and enthusiastically promoting serial, atonal, and microtonal music. (He eventually went on to compose music for a concert commemorating the adoption of Japan's postwar constitution in 1947.) Despite the severe restrictions placed on his artistic vision by the government that commissioned many of his works, he showed some real invention in fusing Japanese themes with the Western symphonic idiom -- "keeping the powers-that-be happy without selling himself out," as one reviewer noted. He has sometimes been described as a Japanese Kodály for his efforts to record and re-purpose folk songs.
Hashimoto's 1st Symphony, composed in 1940 to commemorate the 2600th year of the Japanese monarchy, offers a sharp contrast to both his Japanese predecessors and to Western composers' orientalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Unlike earlier Japanese symphonists who purely emulated Western models, and European composers whose use of Asian elements was limited to plugging in the occasional Asian melody or using a few Asian percussion instruments, Hashimoto made his symphony pervasively Japanese from beginning to end. The first movement is both programmatic and written in a form inspired by Japanese emakimono scroll paintings, beginning and ending impressionistically, and in between, depicting Japan's entire history in music. Perhaps the brief, slightly jarring Sousa-like march in the middle represents Commodore Perry's fleet? The second movement might be described as a sort of Japanese Bolero that builds up a folk tune from solo woodwinds to full orchestra and taiko drums, though it differs from Ravel's Bolero in having a contrasting middle section based on a work song the composer heard in his travels through rural Japan. The third and final movement is a series of variations and a fugue on a gagaku (traditional Imperial court music) ceremonial song.
Here's the full Naxos recording (on YouTube) by the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Ryusuke Numajiri.
Movement 1: 0:00
Movement 2: 16:20
Movement 3: 27:30
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Date: 2017-02-18 11:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2017-02-18 11:44 pm (UTC)Here's an example of Hashimoto's modernist side, his art song "Oroku musume" composed in 1929: