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| | | Kojiro Umezaki performing a processional to open a Silk Road Ensemble concert broadcast on "Live From Lincoln Center"
| © JENNIFER TAYLOR
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While shuttling between teaching at the University of California, Irvine, and family in New York City, Kojiro Umezaki took a few moments to catch up with us. Ko grew up in Japan, where he began studying Western flute and the Japanese shakuhachi.
His multinational heritage (his father is Japanese, his mother Danish)
has led him to approach the instrument outside of its traditional
meditative context. Ko recently took part in a brief program at the Silk Road Project's new office in Boston that focused on mono no aware, a concept roughly translated from the Japanese as an awareness of the impermanent, bittersweet nature of life. Aware, as Ko told us, means pathos.
SRP: Were you familiar with the concept of mono no aware growing up in Japan?
KU: It's something you might come across in an art history course in college, or even on a field trip to a museum, but you probably wouldn't get the concept as a youngster. It does feel like a uniquely Japanese aesthetic concept. And it's part of the shakuhachi tradition, of course; impermanence is a sort of favorite subject of Zen Buddhism.
SRP: There's a connection with the way the shakuhachi is played, too, isn't there? In an awareness of breathing.
KU: Definitely, though all of us in the Ensemble think and talk about breathing, even those of us who play string instruments. With woodwinds that's more a part of it, and the shakuhachi is intimately coupled with meditation, so that connection is explicit—when playing, there is no fixed moment. Without breathing there is no life.
SRP: With its distinctive sound and religious associations, how does the shakuhachi fit with the other instruments played in the Silk Road Ensemble?
KU: There are a lot of ways to think about that question. The first is sonically, how the instrument works in such a rich timbral environment. Amplifying the sound makes such a huge dynamic range possible, thanks to a lot of help from our sound engineer Jody Elff! On a philosophical level, considering how the instruments integrate, it's very tricky. We have several true tradition bearers in the Ensemble from other cultures, but in my case what feels more honest, and truer to what I represent and my background, is maintaining a sense of no location. I have a Japanese passport, but with every year my identity is less tied to that. So maybe my role with the shakuhachi, with the Ensemble and in general, is to approach the instrument without some fixed sense of location.
SRP: Can you give an example of how that carries over into your compositions? KU: Well, I visited Joe Gramley at the University of Michigan just last month for a concert with a percussion ensemble of a piece that he commissioned from me, "For Zero." It was the third performance, officially the world premiere. It's now written for vibraphone, concert bass drum, cymbals and iPhones. Actually, the mono no aware concept is embedded in that piece: it's about reversing the process of accumulation as we move forward in our lives, giving us the opportunity to pass on the torch. There are elements of music onstage, and the sound is transmitted wirelessly to iPhones, which carry the music out.
SRP: Why use iPhones?
KU: I'm interested in how mobile technology might allow us to examine community music making from a different angle, with the goal of trying to reduce the time it takes to learn an instrument. This is despite the fact that someone recently pointed out to me the irony that all this is in opposition to the tradition of my acoustic instrument, which takes a very long time to learn. It may be a utopian idea, but I'm giving it a crack. Ko has been playing with the Silk Road Ensemble since 2001. Recently he has written for and performed with Brooklyn Rider, a string quartet formed by fellow Ensemble members, and has been exploring collaborations with Korean percussionist Dong-Won Kim. To learn more about Ko and his work, visit his website. |