Fantasy
幻想曲
| [Genre] | Modern |
| [Composed] | Matsumura Teizo - Koto - 1980 |
Fantasy appears on the following albums
| Album | Artist | |
 | Iris of Time |
Koto : Sawai Tadao |
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Teizo Matsumura didn’t try his hand at composing with traditional instruments for a long time, though he must have been affected by his teacher Akira Ifukube, and must have been interested in traditional music or traditional music or traditional instruments considering his own musical conception. It was in 1969, when modern Japanese music had already reached the climax, that he composed for koto and Shakuhachi (a bamboo clarinet) for the first time. The first composition, "shi-kyoku" impressed as a song in praise of traditional music by a koto and a shakuhachi. Teizo Matsumura, however, has his own logic, which seems to be unchanged basically in this Fantasy. In a commentary on this Fantasy, Teizo Matsumura said as follows; "A koto mainly consists of tones full of life and relatively in the high register among instruments which produce sounds by plucking, and it was pretty difficult for me to materialize the maintenance of one composition only by those tones. Though every one of the tones has fassinating beautiful echoes and expression, there exists no self-sufficiency by one tone as an idea of "Ichion-Jobutsu (each tone attains Buddhahood)" in a biwa or a shakuhachi. One tone always necessarily needs a following tone, and moreover, when such a line of tones is uplifted to make many sounds move separately, there is a danger of losing the original charming expression and running idle in shrill garrulity. It is a matter of performance to avoid it, but it is also a matter depending more on composition". Due to such a basic attitude of Teizo Matsumura, the koto is naturally tuned in a traditional Miyakobushi scale in this composition, but that's like him to omit "g" sound at the lowest register where it should go as "d-es-g, a-b-d." In the Miyakobushi scale, the core-sound's function of the fourth is far weaker compared to the fifth. Moreover, many patterns and methods of classics appear naturally if it is a melody in the Miyakobushi scale. His modern way of developing, however, is reckoned quite minutely, and elaborately pondered over. For example, even the length of each sound's echo or a way of varying those echoes seems to be delicately pondered over. He has learned functions or melody patterns of the koto as an instrument very well. [Yoshiko Kojima] | ||
| Poeme du Bambou |
Shakuhachi : Marco Lienhard | |
| Teizo Matsumura - Selected Works Vol II |
Koto : Sawai Tadao | |
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"Fantasy" was commissioned by Tadao Sawai in 1980 and premiered by him in the same year. Let me quote what Matsumura says about this work. It was fairly difficult for me to realize the continuity of a piece, since koto, among plucked stringed instruments, has relatively bright high sounds. While koto has enchanting and beautiful reverberations and expressions, its notes are never self sufficient as notes of biwa or shakuhachi are. Notes of koto inevitably need the next ones, but once the chain of notes becomes excited and moves busily, there is a danger that its original charms tend to be lost and music turns to be a noisy talkativeness which goes round and round and gets nowhere. Of course the players are responsible to avoid the situation and composition is even more responsible to avoid it." Tuning of strings is almost the same as "Poem I." This work can be written only by those who experienced the world of classic, and the greatness of Matsumura lies in his success in establishing his own new ground beyond the classic world without relying on 'Te" or technique of the classic while applying the traditional tuning of strings.
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