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We are always late for the sound we hear.
The sound is the shadow of our hearing.
The sound (as image) always arrives late.
In this work I try to document the intricate ways in which
the ear (hearing), the finger (performing) and the eye (reading)
entangle one another.
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OMBR-0001 CD ¥2,200+tax
 
 
Contents
  
later
for Voice and Prepared Piano
 
Poem
for Mezzo Soprano and Piano
lyrics by Shuntaro Tanikawa
 
Merei-träu
for Piano
 
Performance Studies
for Piano
 
Staff
 
All tracks composed and performed by
Midori Kubota
 
Recorded by  Masuhisa Nakamura
 
Mixed by
Seigen Ono and Takehiko Kamada
 
Mastered by  Seigen Ono
 
Designed by Goshi Uhira
 
Singing on "Poem" by  Ayako Kosaka
 
Produced by
Midori Kubota

 
  Contents
  
later
for Voice and Prepared Piano
 
Poem
for Mezzo Soprano and Piano
lyrics by Shuntaro Tanikawa
 
Merei-träu
for Piano
 
Performance Studies
for Piano
 

 
Staff
 
All tracks composed and performed by
Midori Kubota
 
Recorded by
Masuhisa Nakamura
 
Mixed by
Seigen Ono and Takehiko Kamada
 
Mastered by
Seigen Ono
 
Designed by
Goshi Uhira
 
Singing on "Poem" by
Ayako Kosaka
 
Produced by
Midori Kubota
*
This CD documents my performances of my own pieces.
The live recordings took place between January 6, 2017 and June 22-23, 2019.
*
This CD documents my performances
of my own pieces.
The live recordings took place
between January 6, 2017 and June 22-23, 2019.

"Performance studies 6"


"Merei-träu"

"later"


In 2011, I made a solo concert named SCORES, in which I played several scores of graphic notation by Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Gayle Young and James Tenney, as well as works of altered score readings by Tomomi Adachi and Tomoko Hojo.  The whole two-hour performance was so composed as to be a musical work itself.
 
It was at this concert that I first performed my own series of Performance Studies.  The performer is free to choose the score but should play it following the instructions which vary—placing the score sheet upside-down, deferring the designated part by one bar to the other, playing the right-hand part in the opposite direction to the left-hand part, and so on. Doing each task becomes a work of performing art.
 
Where the semiautomatic flow from score-reading to hand-moving gets disrupted and reestablished anew, the player is bound to create sounds that are totally different from the sound she would normally produce. Devoid of any images that she would normally have pre-loaded by reading the score beforehand, the player is faced with a kind of instantaneous execution, being forced to play each note “on the spot.” The sounds that come out will be filled with inner struggles, hesitations, awaiting, and a sense of emptiness where the process of cognition simply stops.
 
One day, 8 years after I first played the Performance Studies, I had the idea of recording the whole series. When everything was recorded and listened to, I could positively hear and feel the presence of unfamiliar sounds, different kinds of sounds than I would normally expect from listening to music.  It became clear then that, rather than just making music, I had made a documentary of my music performances.
 
The meanings of the pieces I had written long ago was finally revealed to me.
 

Midori Kubota


On belatedness
 
   I no longer spend predetermined hours of the day practicing the piano, the way I used to as a child vaguely hoping to be a concert pianist someday.  At present I keep practicing the instrument only long enough to maintain what skill I have. 
 
    Which means that days can pass without me touching the keys at all.  Unavoidably my fingers will grow dull and my strokes unrefined.  Heavy and uneasy I continue to play.
 
    At such times playing at sight would be disastrous.  The instructions that come through my eyes would hardly be processed. My body would feel as if it were wrapped in a kind of buffer hindering my conscious instructions from emerging as sounds. It would feel as if my body has lost its coordination, though I must add that I don’t dislike this sense of falling to pieces, knowing how fragile my body can be.
 
    I go on practicing.  Before too long I come to have a closer contact with the keyboard. Underneath my fingers the keys will come snuggling up to me, though still a bit hesitantly.  It’s wonderful to press the keys all the way down and hear them hit the bottom at an intimate distance, to feel the sounds of strokes nice and cozy against my palms—it’s such a precious moment!
 
    But as I spend more time playing the same score, my body will acquire the skill to play it almost automatically, and my conscious thoughts will be dim, almost effaced. So before reaching that point, I will stop playing and walk off, in order to prevent the sheet music to seep in and capture me.  I savor the feeling of being on the way, not getting settled. If I pressed forward to go back to a semi-automatic playing, the sound I play would lose its precious hesitation. It is precisely the hesitation, or should I say “belatedness,” that harbors something special and potent.
 

Gazou01

 
Music as documentary
 
      At the start of a stage performance, if you played different notes from the written score and paused for a moment to play again from the beginning, your playing up to that point would be discarded as a failure, or at best as incomplete.  This will reset your performance so that where you began again will be the new beginning. The sounds from your first trial, along with the blanks and hesitations would then be regarded as something “exterior” to your work.
 
  The idea of non-repeatability of music is no doubt premised upon such notions of conventional stage performance, where the artist’s work flow unidirectionally to the audience who sit before her sharing the same time. Once the music starts, there would be no way not to continue to play it to the end. This is a totally different situation from, say, when you play a recorded music, where the listener can replay or skip the already recorded material at will.
 
     But what about the sounds that you first played “mistakenly”? Is your hesitation, the stagnant flow, the fragmented beginning of your performance —— are they merely to be discarded?  The tension that is felt to fill the silence —— is it merely unpleasant and useless?
 
    Sometimes when you are walking down a street, a moment’s expression on a face passing by, or some figure that jump into the peripheral vision may capture your attention. By the same token, the “wrong” sounds you inadvertently made might strike your ear as interesting. Far from being negative, they can be inspirational, just as, when watching a documentary photograph or film, the viewer’s attention can be trapped by an accidental bystander, never intended to be there by the cameraman.
 
    If such is the case, I shouldn’t hesitate to add that a music player is writing a documentary work each time she plays.  The listers are witnessing each note being produced and recorded, so there is always the possibility of one particular note making a great impression, and that can be greater than the impression received from the whole composition. I believe that such a partial way of listening is not improper, that it is a different, possibly productive form of sincerity.
 

Gazou02

 
On being exhausted
 
    My album《later》includes a series of piano solo pieces which I named “Performance Studies.” They were played by the piano, but they are not compositions for the piano.  All I wrote was verbal instructions telling players to choose a music score of staff notation and read and play it in radically and variously different ways from the normal.
 
    Those varying instructions can be quite demanding.  The player may be told to put the score upside down and then proceed “normally” as she reads it from left to right.  Or she may be told to choose a counterpoint pieces and play it with just one part delayed by one bar.  Or she may be told to have her left hand play the bars backwards——from right to left, beginning at bottom line——while her right hand plays the score in normal order.
 
    In other words, my “performance studies” will require a super flexible body—a body always ready to adapt a radically different way of playing the score, freeing itself from what it has long been accustomed to. This is a hopelessly difficult work to perform. While it is certainly possible to make improvements and be more skillful, it is a skill you cannot hope to master.
 
    Thus it is vital to follow the given instructions as faithfully as you can, while accepting mistakes, neglects and moments of hesitation as part of the actually performed work. (In this CD I never edited out unfavorable moments to replace with “better” takes. Such editing is a common practice but I firmly refrain from it.)  Naturally this is a scheme that can wear you out. At every moment the instructions will jerk you out of the fluency that have become yours through years of hard practice, leaving you struggling with a series of tasks none of which you have been able to prepare for.
 
    At the end of it, fatigue will fill the body, and your mind will be depleted. And, just when you think you cannot move on any further, a sound you never knew you could make begins to trickle and spread.
 
    It is a kind of sound that no well-prepared playing can draw, a sound that will refuse to be your own. It is like you’re looking at you whom you’ve never met, as it sometimes happens when you look at a picture somebody took and find you in it. In the similar way, the musical notes coming out of the overtasked body is evidently yours, but still they sound foreign. Your intentions are not there at all.
 
   The notes that follow each other unstably must sound unsettling, but I cannot hear them. While playing I pay all my attention to the immediate tasks and there’s no room in my mind for receiving the “music” that each note combines to make. While playing I make judgement in one moment, which I forget in the next. The end result of such sequences I can hear only later, when the recording is replayed.
 

Gazou03
 
 
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