While every nation has its own set of popular artists at any given period, few can withstand the test of time, and those who do are considered the best of the best. With that in mind, this page will be used to discuss musicians, both classical and more modern within Japan, and their more famous works. This will also lead into the cultural impact their music had on the culture of Japan and other musicians.
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Kosaku Yamada (1886-1965)
A pioneer of composition in Japan, and a member of the first group of full-fledged composers of Japan. At the end of the 250 year isolation of Japan from the rest of the world, Japan began to reestablish contact with Western civilization, causing a surge in popularity of everything western, including musical composition. A large amount of resources were put towards allowing Japan to "catch up" musically with the West, even going so far as the creation of a "Western Music Research Center", which later became the Tokyo Music School.
Kosaku was born into this movement for musical modernization, surrounded by military marching bands, hymns of the church (the Yamada's had that influence due to their Protestant mother) and the sounds of a harmonium (which they allegedly owned). These were all key elements in Yamada's early love of music, which would prove to become a driven ambition that would continue throughout his young life. After losing his house to a fire, his father to cancer as well as some health problems of his own due to high amounts of work-related stress, Yamada entered the Tokyo Music School in 1904 in hopes of becoming a composer. However, since Japan's focus at the time was playing western music, not creating new compositions, there were no courses for composing music for Yamada to take. He majored in theory and chello instead, under two German teachers, which eventually led to him leaving Japan to study abroad in Berlin in 1910. Yamada went on to pioneer the music scene we see today in Japan, creating pieces such as Overture in D Major, Symphony in Major F "Triumph and Piece" and the Symphonic Poem "The Dark Gate". He is known throughout Japan as one of the founding fathers of their music industry, and started to create the more modern style of Japanese music we see today, away from the very traditional songs Geisha would dance to. Yamada was also the first Japanese person to write a symphony. |
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Toru Takemitsu (1930-1996)
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Arguable one of the most important musicians in modern Japanese history, Toru Takemitsu grew up in the midst of WWII, and was introduced to the idea of war at a very young age. Shortly after his birth (Oct. 8, 1930) his family left Japan for Dalian, located in the Chinese province of Liaoning. His return to Japan to take his elementary schooling was cut short due to military conscription in 1944, causing Takemitsu to grow up despising the Japanese nationalist government. This period of time, however, is when he also began listening to western music in secret, as it was banned at that time in Japan due to the war. Specifically, his love of French music in particular began to flourish, which remained a huge influence throughout his career.
Around the age of sixteen, Takemitsu felt he could "clarify (his) identity" with music, and later studied with Yasuji Kyose briefly before becoming self-sufficient within the same year (1948). In 1951, Takemitsu became one of the founding members of Jikken Kobo, and anti-academic group creating artistic collaborations across multiple mediums, all while attempting to fully differentiate from traditional Japanese arts. During this time, Takemistsu wrote several very different pieces, including (Uninterrupted Rest 1), a piano piece with no bar lines and an irregular rhythmic pulse), and began using electronic tape recordings for pieces by the mid 50's. However, it was near the end of the decade that one of his most infamous pieces (Requiem) for string orchestra was written, and was heard by none other than Igor Stravinsky, one of the most influential composers of the 20th century, who had a major had in making Toru Takemitsu so predominant. After hearing the piece, Stravinsky publicly praised the passion and sincerity of the piece, and inquired if Takemitsu could meet for lunch, an event that the Japanese composer called "unforgettable". Takemitsu, throughout his entire career thereafter continued to fuse the concepts of Japanese instrumentation with Western technique, one of the most blatant of such pieces being (November Steps)[1967], a piece that, while filled with traditional Japanese instruments, was by all intents and purposes a Western orchestra. Another piece that merged the concepts of the two areas was (A Flock Descends Into the Pentagonal Garden) [1980], a piece gaining popularity in both Western culture (including North America) as well as in the East. Toru Takemitsu is still regarded today as an avant garde visionary, and was a key to the incredible leaps and bounds of progression in the Japanese music industry. |