PRESS RELEASE: Jürg Frey - 120 Pieces of Sound (elsewhere 003)

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Jürg Frey’s unique compositional approach places him at the cutting edge of contemporary classical music while simultaneously maintaining a touch of impressionistic/romantic aesthetics in its roots. Since the late 90's, Frey started to work with 'lists' as a basis of his compositions, sometimes words, sometimes chords, from which he developed and organized the musical materials. In recent years, Frey's focus on 'lists' has extended more toward the connections of items with each other, forming melodies.

Frey composed 60 Pieces of Sound in 2009, for an indefinite number of musicians; with two instruments that play the pitches as written in the score forming a two-part melody, and an open instrumentation part for any instrument(s) or sound maker(s) as 'the third voice.' Each of the 60 chords played by the ensemble is followed by a similar duration of silence. In November 2017, Frey and the Boston-based ensemble Ordinary Affects (Laura Cetilia, Morgan Evans-Weiler, J.P.A. Falzone, Luke Martin) performed '60 Pieces of Sound' as a part of their concert series in New England, and made a recording of this piece at Wesleyan University.

In this recording, Frey's clarinet and Cetilia's cello played the pitches in the two-part melody while the rest played the open instrumentation part with undetermined sounds. The resulting music was a unique series of harmonies created by open instrumental sounds with a faintly recognizable melody hidden in the core of the ensemble's evenly tempered sounds. The impressions of the chords move along at the edge of consonance and dissonance with the afterglows of each chord in the subsequent silence, hovering somewhere between meditative calmness and disquieting shadow, while bringing an organic warmth and a feeling of breathable open air into a minimal musical structure.

L’âme est sans retenue II was composed by Frey in 1997-2000, edited by him from the field recordings that Frey made in Berlin in 1997 with the addition of his bass clarinet sounds. It is the second piece of the series with the same title, after ‘L’âme est sans retenue I’ (ErstClass 002-5, 2017) and before ‘L’âme est sans retenue III’ (b-boim, 2008). Frey composed this series based on his list of ‘words’. The title of this composition series L’âme est sans retenue (“The soul is unrestrained”) is a quotation of a sentence from French poet and writer Edmond Jabès’s book ‘Désir d’un commencement, Angoisse d’une seule fin’ (Desire for a Beginning, Dread of One Single End).

In this 40-minute piece 'L’âme est sans retenue II', the similar duration of the sounds and silences alternate with each other like in '60 Pieces of Sound’. For this piece, Frey first edited the field recording parts and later added his bass clarinet sound with a certain pitch to every part as an underlying tone that would blend with the field recordings. Frey's bass clarinet is discreet and almost unrecognizable here, often hidden under the complex layers of the field recordings, and yet clarifying the harmonization of the field recordings from inside. These two pieces were not actually directly connected to each other, but presenting these two pieces '60 Pieces of Sound' and 'L’âme est sans retenue II' back to back on this album brings out the fundamental aesthetic of Frey's compositions in regards to how he approaches the ‘harmonization’ and ‘openness’ of the music.

(Release date: October 10, 2018) 

 

FACTS / TRACKLIST / CREDITS

Jürg Frey was born in Aarau in 1953. After studying at the Conservatoire de Musique de Geneve in Thomas Friedli’s solo class, he began a career as a clarinettist, but his activities as composer soon came to the foreground. He developed his own language as a composer and sound artist with the creation of wide, quiet sound spaces. His work is marked by an elementary non-extravagence of sound, a sensibility for the qualities of the material, and precision of compositional approach. Sometimes his compositions bypass instrumentation and duration altogether and touch on aspects of sound art. He has worked with compositional series, as well as with language and text. Some of these activities appear in small editions or as artist’s books as individual items and small editions. (Edition Howeg, Zurich; weiss kunstbewegung, Berlin; complice, Berlin). His music and recordings are published by Edition Wandelweiser. He has been invited to workshops as visiting composer and for composer portraits at the Universität der Künste Berlin, the Universität Dortmund and several times at Northwestern University and CalArts.

Jürg Frey is a member of the Wandelweiser Komponisten Ensemble which has presented concerts for more than 15 years in Europe, North America and Japan. Frey lives with his family in Aarau (Switzerland), teaches clarinet, and organizes the concert series moments musicaux aarau as a forum for contemporary music.

Ordinary Affects is an experimental music ensemble based in Boston. Experimental composers and performers J.P.A. Falzone, Laura Cetilia, Luke Martin, and Morgan Evans-Weiler make-up the ensemble, performing on piano/organ, cello, violin, and no-input mixer/objects (respectively). The ensemble was formed as a group of musicians seeking to workshop, explore, commission, and perform experimental music. While the group often focuses on the performance of written compositions, it also serves as a laboratory for improvisation and the compositions of its members. The collaborative nature of the mission ensures a group that is always in flux; instrumentation is open, always changing, and dependent on the project, concert, and membership.

Ordinary Affects has commissioned and premiered pieces by Michael Pisaro, Antoine Beuger, Sarah Hughes, Eva-Maria Houben, and Ryoko Akama, in addition to performing a number of other composers’ works including those by Joseph Kurdika, John Lely, and all members of the ensemble (Cetilia, Martin, Evans-Weiler, and Falzone).

 

 

Jürg Frey - 120 Pieces of Sound (elsewhere 003)

1. 60 Pieces of Sound (2009) 32:00

Ordinary Affects:
Luke Martin - electric guitar
Laura Cetilia - cello
J.P.A. Falzone - keyboard
Morgan Evans-Weiler - violin

Jürg Frey - clarinet

recorded by Luke Damrosch at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT on November 10, 2017
mixed by Luke Damrosch and Jürg Frey
mastered by Luke Damrosch

 

2. L’âme est sans retenue II (1997-2000) 40:03
for field recordings and bass clarinet

Jürg Frey - field recordings, bass clarinet

recorded by Fabio Oehrli at Tonlabor Bern, Bern, Switzerland on December 2012
mixed and mastered by Fabio Oehrli (Tonlabor Bern)

 

cover artwork by Jürg Frey - Stück (1974) #29
design by Yuko Zama
produced by Jürg Frey and Yuko Zama

p+c 2018 elsewhere music
www.elsewheremusic.net

 

Upcoming releases on elsewhere for October 1, 2018

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We are happy to announce new releases for October 1, 2018:

Jürg Frey - 120 Pieces of Sound (elsewhere 003)
(60 Pieces of Sound - performed by Laura Cetilia / Morgan Evans-Weiler / J.P.A. Falzone / Luke Martin / Jürg Frey)
(L'âme est sans retenue II - field recordings and bass clarinet, composed by Jürg Frey)

Clara de Asís - Without (elsewhere 004)
(performed by Erik Carlson / Greg Stuart)

Stefan Thut - about (elsewhere 005)
(performed by Ryoko Akama / Stephen Chase / Eleanor Cully / Patrick Farmer / Stefan Thut / Lo Wie)

------------------------------------------

(Reinier van Houdt - Bruno Duplant - Lettres et Replis is scheduled to be recorded late this year for 2019 release.)

photo © Jill Steinberg (Erik Carlson)
photo © Stephen Harvey (Stefan Thut, Ryoko Akama, lo wie)
photo © Susanna Bolle (Jürg Frey, Ordinary Affects)

PRESS RELEASE: Biliana Voutchkova / Michael Thieke - Blurred Music (elsewhere 001-3)

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The Berlin-based Bulgarian violinist Biliana Voutchkova and German clarinetist Michael Thieke have worked together intensely within both compositional and improvisational duo and group projects in Berlin since 2011. In their current project “Blurred Music”, the duo works with musical structures that create a blur; improvised parts alternate with fields of pre-structured material in which digital recordings of the duo are duplicated by live performance. Virtually identical fragments of the live performance synchronize simultaneously with the playback, unavoidably giving rise to blur in the temporal dimension, in the rhythmic, timbral, and motivic variations, and in the microtonal interpretation of individual pitches. The live portion of the duplicated material is still improvised, but within a framework purposefully restricted by the pre-recorded material, the intervals between which are indeterminate. To perception, what is being composed in real time blurs into what has been structured in advance; the difference can be registered only after an interval, if at all.

The triple CD 'Blurred Music' features three of the duo's live performances, recorded in Chicago, Philadelphia and New York during their USA tour in December 2016. These three live recordings are all differently structured, factoring in the conditions and the atmosphere of each venue as well as the musicians' own perspective and mindset. This series of three concerts, all occurring within a nine day period, showcase the very wide range of this duo, so all three recordings combine to form a saga of their peak. Using their highly trained virtuosic skills and intense concentration, the duo carefully deconstructs the conventional tones of instruments into fine particles in an organic flow, to create a completely new world of music on their own, somewhere between tonality and atonality, and will hopefully be recognized as one of the most mature accomplishments of improvisational/compositional works of this era.

 

Co-produced by David Sylvian and Yuko Zama, artwork by David Sylvian. The three CD set is a limited edition of 500. Besides CD format, digital HD FLAC 24/96 files are available on the label's website, as well as CDs and lossless files on Bandcamp.

(Release Date: July 14, 2018) 

TRACK LIST

CD 1: Chicago (50:18) - recorded live on December 7, 2016 at Carr Chapel, Chicago

CD 2: Philadelphia (40:09) - recorded live on December 14, 2016 at Aux Performance Space, Philadelphia

CD 3: New York (1:09:59) - recorded live on December 15, 2016 at Experimental Intermedia, NYC


CREDITS

Biliana Voutchkova - violin/voice
Michael Thieke - clarinet
all compositions by Biliana Voutchkova and Michael Thieke
recorded live by Michael Thieke
mixed and mastered by Taku Unami
artworks by David Sylvian
design by Yuko Zama
liner notes by Michael Thieke and Biliana Voutchkova
produced by David Sylvian and Yuko Zama
executive produced by Jon Abbey
p+c 2018 elsewhere
www.elsewheremusic.net

 

PRESS RELEASE: Melaine Dalibert - Musique pour le lever du jour (elsewhere 002)

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Melaine Dalibert (born 1979), a French composer/pianist, has been increasingly recognized for his compositional piano works as well as his interpretations of works by Gérard Pesson, Giuliano D’Angiolini, Tom Johnson, Peter Garland and many others. Trained as a classical pianist in Rennes (where he teaches now), Dalibert studied a large repertoire of contemporary composers' works at the Paris Conservatories. Being involved with experimental music at a young age, Dalibert found a way to compose music through mathematical concepts.

Fascinated by natural phenomena which are both expected and unpredictable, and also inspired by the work of the Hungarian-born French media artist Véra Molnar, Dalibert has developed his own algorithmic procedures of composition which contain the notion of stretched time evoking Morton Feldman, minimal and introspective, adopting a unique concept of fractal series. His piano music has been released on two recordings to date: Quatre pièces pour piano, self-released in 2015, and Ressac, issued by Another Timbre in 2017.

'Musique pour le lever du jour' (the title meaning 'Music for The Daybreak') was composed by Dalibert over two years and completed in 2017, with the concept being an ‘endless piece’ with no beginning or no end. This one-hour piece adopts slow tempi, leaving meditative space for long resonances in which pentatonic coloring gradually modulate in all tones, resulting in complex layers of direct tones, overtones, and prolonged reverberation, all organically subliming into rich sonorities with incredible harmonic clarity.

 

PRODUCER'S NOTE 

I first came to know Melaine Dalibert’s compositions and piano performances when I listened to his recital at Daniel Goode's Loft in SoHo NYC in January 2018, when he played piano pieces by Peter Garland, Michael Vincent Waller and Dalibert, including his 2017 piece 'Musique pour le lever du jour' which is featured on this album.  

When Dalibert opened the recital with Garland’s 1971 piece ‘The Days Run Away’, I was astonished by his distinct, vibrant piano tones which brought out the fullness of the music with an incredible depth of concentration and introspective serenity. Each individual note of the piano felt so vital and substantial, with profound dimensions created by the afterglow of each note, opening outward and inward simultaneously, rejuvenating Garland’s meditative masterpiece. 

In his 'Musique pour le lever du jour', Dalibert used sustained pedals to create complex layers of resonances, which was mesmerizingly well composed - as if I were watching a mirage of a minimal abstract watercolor work gradually emerging in the room. Despite that there were numerous sounds occurring in resonances, blending together in the harmonies, there was no hint of cloudiness - the clarity was striking. I also loved the touch of human warmth I felt in his piano tones, which felt like it was faintly emanating out of the frame of clean minimalism. After I posted my review on the concert, Dalibert contacted me and told me that he was looking for a label to put out his 'Musique pour le lever du jour' - the very piece I loved during the concert and was hoping to hear again. It was coincidentally around the same time when I discovered Biliana Voutchkova and Michael Thieke’s ‘Blurred Music’ and was considering to start my own label, so I almost instantly agreed to include this piece, which has captivated my mind hauntingly, as the second release from my label. 

Dalibert recorded this piece at his home studio. I particularly love the warm, woody tones of his YAMAHA piano, in which I can feel the intimacy between the pianist and the piano that he developed during his career as a pianist and composer for the last twenty years, which seemed to add a special human touch and an organic feel to the sound here. We newly recorded the piece in this March for this album at a 24-bit rate with my engineer Taku Unami’s advice. The recording was fantastic, with the 24bits/96kHz master bringing out the subtle nuances of the translucent harmonies of the rich reverbs/overtones and the warmth of Dalibert’s piano fully, which feels close to what I heard and was amazed by during his live concert in NYC. (Yuko Zama)

Produced and design by Yuko Zama, artwork by David Sylvian. The single CD is a limited edition of 500. Besides CD format, digital HD FLAC 24/96 files are available on the label's website, as well as CDs and lossless files on Bandcamp.

Release Date: July 9, 2018

 

TRACK LIST

Musique pour le lever du jour (2017)  1:01:33

 

CREDITS

To Stéphane Ginsburgh

Melaine Dalibert - piano and composition

recorded by Melaine Dalibert in Rennes, France in March 2018

mixed and mastered by Taku Unami

artwork by David Sylvian

design by Yuko Zama

produced by Yuko Zama

executive produced by Jon Abbey

www.elsewheremusic.net

℗ © 2018 elsewhere

 

REVIEW

Best of Bandcamp Contemporary Classical: June 2018

https://daily.bandcamp.com/2018/07/06/best-of-bandcamp-contemporary-classical-june-2018/

French pianist and composer Melaine Dalibert has gained attention for his performances of works by melodically oriented minimalists like Peter Garland and Michael Vincent Waller, but in the last couple of years his own compositions have been reaching a wider audience through his dazzling 2017 album on the British imprint Another Timbre, Ressac. Musique pour le lever du jour is his eagerly anticipated followup to Ressac, and like the pieces on that previous album, the hour-long titular work deploys algorithms as a structural tool, building what Dalibert calls “space-time blocks” to suggest the stretching and compression of time. The music also draws upon the unpredictability of the natural world, such as the way a drop of water triggers surprising ripples when it strikes a larger liquid body. This gorgeous epic unfolds slowly, with ringing overtones fusing but never muddying the foreground of the single-note patterns Dalibert continually spreads out. He considers it an “endless piece,” with no obvious beginning or end. Instead, the focus is placed upon how each delicate phrase follows the next, with lots of repetition and subtle phrase modifications producing a Morton Feldman-like splendor: restrained, ineffable, and gorgeous. In fact, it’s almost advisable to treat the performance as an immersive experience, savoring the unhurried melodic patterns and allowing the rich harmonic effects to wash over oneself as a kind of meditative bath. 

- Peter Margasak (June 6, 2018)

 


www.elsewheremusic.net

introducing 'elsewhere'

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After being involved with music production first as a photographer, then as a designer and co-producer for Erstwhile Records for 15 years and Gravity Wave for 8 years, I decided to start my own label. The label's name is 'elsewhere', curated by me as a producer, and Jon Abbey as an executive producer.

My label will feature mainly contemporary work which has classical music aesthetics at its roots, but it may not have to strictly belong to the area of contemporary classical music. The essential goal for my label is to find and release good music which touches my heart deeply with its lasting value, created by earnest devotion from the artist’s pure soul, which I believe I will want to listen to repeatedly for a very long time - just like I love to return to Schubert or Mahler or Monteverdi, or any past classics that move me over the course of many years. This label may also feature some music outside classical aesthetics - as long as it feels real and genuine, or something that seems as if I were hearing it in the wind or from elsewhere, far away from the noise of the real world.

The first and the second releases from the label will be:

elsewhere 001-3:  

Biliana Voutchkova / Michael Thieke Blurred Music (*triple CD set of three live recordings of the violin/clarinet duo’s compositions called ‘Blurred Music’)

elsewhere 002:

Melaine Dalibert - Musique pour le lever du jour (*Dalibert's recording of his own latest piano piece) 

We are hoping to release this first pair in the second half of 2018. After putting out this pair, our plan is to release about two titles per year. Also, we are hoping to release hi-res audio files for download in the future, in addition to the regular CD format and lossless digital.

Deep thanks to all of you who have been devoted listeners of our Erstwhile Records and Gravity Wave for giving us tremendous support for many years until today. We sincerely hope that we will be able to keep going with this new label as well as Jon Abbey's Erstwhile and Michael Pisaro's Gravity Wave label for many years, and your continuous love and support will be deeply appreciated.

- Yuko Zama (2/12/2018) 

 

 

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Official FB page of elsewhere 

 

Two years ago today ...

Two years ago today, a local newspaper in Matsumoto City, Nagano (my father’s hometown) featured a retrospective article on my late father, who was once a painter and art teacher and later became a designer. It was a very nice article, written by Nagaaki Ootake, art scholar and Director of Administration Office of Matsumoto-jo Castle.

My father has led a rather unfortunate life career-wise when he was young. The first misfortune happened when he won the first prize at the International Drawing Competition held in France when he was a college student, and awarded one million yen in the 1940's. But his intermediate agent, who was supposed to deliver the award to him, took all the money and disappeared. My father did not know what had happened for months, waiting for the contact from the agent until he realized the shocking fact later.

Another misfortune happened when my father’s former art student came to our house one day to desperately ask his creative advice. The student spent some time at our house, and eventually stole my father’s work-in-progress design from his desk and submitted it as his own graphic design to his boss at one of the largest ad agencies. The design became a big hit, the young designer became famous, but my father did not receive any credit. Similar things happened several times after that, like his long-time client (one of the most famous, long-established green tea companies in Japan) was stolen by the same major ad agency (they still use the same logo and package designs that my father originally designed, with no credit or copyright for him), but my father had never claimed his deserved credit or tried to make lawsuits. He was a reserved, quiet person and did not like causing any fuss in public, so he just held all the anger and disappointment inside, and kept silent. I never saw or heard him yelling or crying over those incidents. When something like that happened, he just sat at his work desk and kept silent in contemplation. When I was a kid, I could not understand why he did not try to take actions against those ill-willed people who took advantage of him. They knew that my father was not a kind of person who would make a fuss about it. I was furious about the injustice when I was a kid. But I kind of understand now - my father wanted to lead a peaceful life, holding onto his pride even if it was not publicly rewarded, swallowing all the sorrow and angers of being betrayed by his friends and acquaintances, and perhaps he still wanted to keep an inner peace and lived an innocent life, staying away from worldly impurity as far as possible. Also, on the other hand, not every design work of his was uncredited. Some of the store layout of a large shopping mall in the Kichijoji station, the graphic illustrations in a major publisher's elementary to high school textbooks (chemistry, mathematics, domestic science, etc.), they credited my father’s name as a designer. I learned how to cut vegetables or how to proceed a chemistry experiment by looking at my father’s precise illustrations, and hang out at some stores in the shopping mall which he designed. His artworks were not radical or cutting-edge, rather conservative and old-school, but the lines he had drawn were different from any other designers in school textbooks. While most designers used just one or two kinds of thick line to outline an object, my father used a variety of thickness of lines from a very thin line to a very thick line, which gave more realistic feel of dimensions and perspective to the object on paper. The extremely thin, delicate line was his signature, so it was always easy for me to distinguish his illustrations from others when I opened my new school textbooks.

Still now, when I visit Japan once in a while, sometime I come across some of my father’s design works in public places; in a wrapping paper of a major department store, in a logo and packages of the green tea company, in a logo of a newspaper .... My father’s name may not be credited to many of them, but when I see them, I feel proud and happy rather than feeling mad at those who stole the designs from him in the past. The fact that his designs have been widely appreciated and have survived over many generations means more than anything, and even though no one may know his name as the original designer of those logos and packages, his works remain here and now, and that is perhaps the greatest thing.

Since I remember my father as having such unfortunate luck in his design career, it was a great pleasure and a big surprise when I received a copy of this local newspaper article about him two years ago. It was a story about my father when he was still young, perhaps when he was holding onto an innocent belief for the future, and knowing that he had such optimistic days in his youth far before I was born was a sort of relief to me.

When I woke up this morning, somehow this article popped up in my mind, and when I looked at it again, I realized that the issued date was today from two years ago. I thought that is an interesting coincidence, so I translated the article to English and posted it here.

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Invaluable oil paintings from a phantom local artist

(from an article by Nagaaki Ootake on Matsumoto Citizen Times, January 31, 2016)

When I look into the local history of art, sometimes I come across the artist's name Toshio Zama.      

Toshio Zama's name appears in Hakutei Ishii's essay 'Sanga Ari' (Yet Mountains and Rivers Remain), in the chapter of Shinshu Local Artists Exhibition which was held at the Sanrin Sanpo Hall in Asama Hot Spring just before the end of World War II.

"(…) It is worth specially mentioning that a peculiar fellow named Zama, wearing a dark blue tight-sleeved short coat with white splash patterns and work pants, was lingering around the exhibition room for a very long time, standing up and sitting down in front of paintings. Zama kept mentioning Van Gogh's name, commenting that my paintings reminded him of Van Gogh's works, so I told him that I think my style is quite different from Van Gogh's. He also said a bizarre thing like that my painting of 'Matsumoto-jo Castle' had a similar flavor of Millet's 'The Angelus'. He pointed to a poplar tree in the painting and said, "Here is the primary object, which is a bit ghastly. In fact, this castle has a mysterious folklore …"

Toshio Zama was 25 years old at that time. Since Hakutei had adhered to moderate realism throughout his life, his style was quite different from that of expressionism painters like Van Gogh, but it is a pleasant episode that shows Toshio Zama's passion to pursue the new trend in his youth.  

Although I have these small fragmented details on the painter, I could not gather enough data to get the full picture of him, and Toshio Zama had long been a phantom local artist to me.

In the autumn of 2013, our 30 year old house began to have problems and our lighting fixtures broke down, so we needed to replace them with new lighting fixtures, but did not know anyone in that business. When I was at a loss, my coworker told me that he had a friend who worked at an electronics shop, so I asked the electrician to come to our house. The electrician saw a huge amount of art-related books and materials stacked in our house, and told me that he knew a person whose uncle was a painter who had worked as a designer in Tokyo and also had taught Yayoi Kusama art a long time ago when she was very young. Surprisingly, that person was Toshio Zama. A clue to know about this artist, which I had been looking for a long time but could not get any hint, was suddenly presented to me with a mere coincidence. Through the electrician, I was able to get in touch with Toshio Zama's relatives who gave me a profile of the artist.

Zama's first name Toshio (敏生) was originally Toshio (敏夫) in Kanji character, but he used Toshio (敏生) as a painter/designer. He studied oil painting and sculpture at the Tokyo Fine Arts School (now the Tokyo University of Arts), and came back to his hometown to become an art teacher at the Matsusho Gakuen High School. Around the same time, perhaps after hearing that there was a new art teacher who graduated from an art college (which was rare in a countryside town then), Yayoi Kusama came to visit Zama to take private lessons to learn art. It was when Kusama was still in the Matsumoto Girls' High School (current Matsumoto Arigasaki High School), somewhere between 12 - 16 years old. Zama started to exhibit his paintings at the second All Shinshu Art Exhibition in 1946 until the third Nagano Exhibition in 1950, and quit his art teacher job in 1951 to move to Tokyo.     

In Tokyo, he placed himself in the field of commercial design; he first worked at the Semba Corporation as a designer, and became a freelance designer around 1960. He co-authored a book 'Commercial Design - How To Conceive and Create Store Design' which became a must-read guidebook for commercial design beyond generations. The logo design of the sport newspaper Daily Sports was also a work by Toshio Zama.

It was difficult for me to find the oil paintings of Zama, but I found one small piece at Shizuka, an old Japanese-style pub (izakaya) run by the same family for generations. Shizuka has been a place where local artists and cultural figures hang out from old times, with the owners' family members who have also been art lovers, so that must be why this painting was kept by them until today. Since then, I received news from Zama's family who found another painting of his, which I posted here. These paintings seem to indicate his solid attitude as a painter who graduated from an art college.   

(Nagaaki Ootake, Art Scholor and Director of Administration Office of Matsumoto-jo Castle)

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続・ふるさと美の風景 ~物故作家のメッセージ22~

(松本市民タイムス 2016年1月31日掲載)

「幻の郷土作家 貴重な油絵」  

 郷土の美術史を調べていると、時折、座間敏生(ざまとしお)の名前を見かけることがある。

 石井柏亭の随筆『山河あり』の、終戦間際に浅間温泉の三鱗産報会館で開催された「在信州有志油絵展覧会」の項に座間敏生が登場する。

 「(前略)座間某(なにがし)と云う変り者が筒袖の紺絣(こんがすり)にもんぺ穿きで立ったり坐ったりして長く会場に頑張ったことを特筆するに足りる。座間はゴッホゴッホと云い、私の画をゴッホに似て居ると云うから、私は大分傾向が違うと告げた。彼はまた私の『松本城』にミレの『晩鐘』の趣があるなどと奇抜なことを云い、ポプラの樹を指して『ここが眼目だ、妖怪的なところがある、この城には一寸伝説もある…』などと云った。」

 この時、座間敏生は25歳。柏亭は生涯を通して穏健な写実を貫いた人だから、ゴッホのような表現主義的な画法とはまったく異なるが、若かりし座間敏生の新しい傾向を追い求めようとする情熱が感じられて微笑ましい。

 こうした断片的な資料はあっても作家の全貌を知るだけのものはなく、わたしにとって座間敏生はずっと幻の作家だった。 

 平成25年秋、筑後30年が経過した自宅の照明器具が駄目になり、交換したいが気軽に頼める業者がなく困っていたら、職場の同僚が縁者に電気屋さんがいると言うのでお願いしてきてもらった。その折、我が家に美術関係の書籍や資料が沢山置いてあったのを見て、電気屋さんは茶飲み話に、知人の叔父に若かりし頃の草間彌生に絵を教えたり、東京でデザイナーとして活躍した人がいるという話をしてくれた。何とその人物が座間敏生だったのである。長らく不明だった座間敏生を知る糸口が、偶然にもわたしの前に現れた。その電気屋さんを通じて、座間敏生の身内の方々に作家の行歴を教えていただいた。

 座間敏生の本名は座間敏夫と書き、作家としては敏生と称した。東京美術学校(東京芸術大学の前身)の油画科と彫刻科に学び、帰郷して松商学園の美術教師となった。その頃、田舎では珍しい美校出身の教師がいると聞いて草間彌生は訪ねてきたのだろう。草間彌生がまだ松本高等女学校(現在の松本蟻ヶ崎高校)の学生だった頃のことである。座間は昭和21(1946)年の第2回全信州美術展から昭和25年の第3回長野県展まで出品し、昭和26年に教師を辞して上京した。

 東京では一貫して商業デザインの世界に身を置き、株式会社「船場」に勤め、昭和35年頃に退職してフリーのデザイナーとなった。昭和41年に共著で出版した『コマーシャルデザイン 商店図案の考え方・作り方』は、後々まで商業デザインの手引書として利用された。スポーツ新聞デイリースポーツのロゴデザインも座間敏生のものである。 

 油絵がなかなか見つからず、老舗居酒屋「しづか」に小品が1点あるのを、やっと探し出した。「しづか」には昔から多くの文化人が集まり、芸術に理解があったからこの絵も残ったのだろう。その後、ご遺族から1点見つかったという知らせがあり、その絵も載せる。美校出身の画家らしい堅実な画風である。

(松本城管理事務所長、美術研究家・大竹永明=松本市)

 

 

 

 

Melaine Dalibert performed Peter Garland, Michael Vincent Waller, Melaine Dalibert (NYC)

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Last night, the French composer and pianist Melaine Dalibert performed works of Peter Garland, Michael Vincent Waller, and Melaine Dalibert at Daniel Goode's Loft, NYC.

The concert opened with Peter Garland’s 1971 piece ‘The Days Run Away’. Melaine Dalibert’s piano touch is distinct and vibrant, bringing out the fullness of the music with an incredible depth of introspective concentration and calmness. Each individual note of the piano felt vital and substantial, with profound dimensions created by the afterglow of each sound, rejuvenating Garland’s meditative masterpiece.

Next piece was Michael Vincent Waller's 2017 composition 'Bounding'. This piece has a warmth and melancholy which faintly echoes that of Schubert, while the atmospheric, shadowy tones evoked the silent landscapes of Béla Tarr's black and white films. While having the straightforward aesthetics of Romantic music in his roots, Waller seems to pursue his own landscapes of music via his unique narrative and evocative soundings. Dalibert played this piece plainly but compellingly with a keen, insightful interpretation.  

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The last piece of the first half was Melaine Dalibert performing Waller’s 2018 piece 'Cyclone' written for alto saxophone and piano, featuring special guest Elie Dalibert. This composition was subtly layered with the piano part and the saxophone part overlapping organically. The result was a fantastic unity of the two different instruments, performed in perfect chemistry by the Dalibert brothers.  

The last half opened with Melaine Dalibert performing four more of Waller's compositions written in 2017-18;  the first three of which were dedicated to the late Pauline Oliveros, Waller's late father and his late grandfather (both of them passed away in 2017), each conveying blissful moments of lights and happiness in memory of the loved ones, rather than shadows and sorrow. The innocent peacefulness of these pieces was touching, much more compelling than an intense expression of sadness of loss.

The next piece - Waller's 2018 composition 'Return from L.A.', consisting of four movements - was vibrant. The first movement began with high-pitched tones sparkling like Ravel's piano pieces. The dynamics were clear and sharp, organically changing rhythms and tempos, brightness and shadows, throughout the four movements.

The last pieces were Dalibert's 2017 compositions 'Musique pour le lever du jour' and 'Etude II'. In these pieces, Dalibert delivered complex layers of direct tones, overtones and prolonged reverberation using sustained pedals, to create incredibly rich sonorities. Despite that there were numerous sounds blending together, there was no hint of cloudiness - the clarity was striking. I bought his 2017 album ‘Ressac’ (another timbre) after the concert, which contains another breathtaking piece ‘Ressac’ composed by Dalibert in 2015 (highly recommended).

The acoustics of this room were fantastic, too. With some fabrics effectively placed in the corners of the space, the sound of the piano was not too bright or too muffled, a really nice, cozy and open atmosphere.  

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The Budapest Festival Orchestra performed Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninoff under Iván Fischer w/ Dénes Várjon

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Last night, I saw the Budapest Festival Orchestra under Iván Fischer performing Bach: Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor, Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, and Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2 in E minor. It was magnificent.  

I love the cloudless sounds, clear-cut precision and perfectly timed rhythms of Iván Fischer's conducting. (I am a big fan of his Mahler recordings.) Last night at the Lincoln Center, the Budapest Festival Orchestra responded to Fischer with a superb sensitivity and a stunningly wide dynamic range of expressions, from the extremely soft, quiet pianissimo to the dynamic outburst of tutti (both of which I think are crucial to play Rachmaninoff). The orchestra's sounds are straightforward and clean with no excessive colors, evoking the clear water of an unspoiled lake deep in the forest. The clarity of the sounds and the rich, deep reverb of the strings reminded me of the masterful skills of the Cleveland Orchestra, and each section of instruments closely communicated with each other with the intimacy of a chamber ensemble, which reminded me of the perfect chemistry among musicians of the Munich Philharmonic. (These are two of my favorite orchestras in the world.)

The first piece, Bach: Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor, began with a rather quiet, reserved manner, performed by an ensemble of seven musicians under Fischer. I liked the understated expressions of the ensemble - it felt like a clean wind quietly blowing through the hall, with no heaviness attached. The lightness of the ensemble’s sounds gradually developed into a more vivid, brisk, clearer sounds toward the end. The gradual transition of the sound texture was refreshing, creating a narrative flow of the music in a very subtle manner.

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The next piece was Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor, performed by Hungarian pianist Dénes Várjon. I have not heard his name before this concert, but his piano on this Beethoven piece was exquisite. While maintaining crystal-clear tones and confident touch throughout the piece, Várjon showed a wide range of expression with keen attention to the sounds, especially to the pianissimo in the slow movement. The chemistry between Várjon and the orchestra was so natural and perfect that the sounds of the piano blended into the orchestra flawlessly in every moment when they merged.

The last piece was Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2 in E minor performed by the full orchestra. It is rare to see Rachmaninoff pieces listed in concert programs these days, and in fact, it was the first time I listened to Rachmaninoff in a live concert. I am so glad that it was performed by this orchestra, since they have a perfect balance between rustic earthiness and clear, refined sounds, both of which are (to me) very important for Rachmaninoff's pieces, blending two contradictory natures.

But the most remarkable thing about the Budapest Festival Orchestra was the organic flow of music which Fischer created carefully and unpretentiously, to make the music move as naturally as the wind. The tempo of each piece was rather slow, not accentuating highlights so dramatically (and some audience members might have felt it was too plain), but I found the naturalness of this flow beautifully tasteful.

For an encore, they played Rachmaninoff's Vocalise No.14, Op.34, with half of the string musicians standing and singing vocalise while the rest were playing their instruments. Their voices were not as refined as real singers, but the simple, earthy voices filled the hall with a rustic tranquility. I have almost never seen a big-name orchestra like them revealing such fragile moments on stage, but it was refreshing, as if we were hearing their inner voices telling us how much they genuinely love music, just like we do.

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