Dai Fujikura

Thursday, March 5, 2020, 8 p.m. COMPOSER PORTRAITS Dai Fujikura 2019-20 SEASON About the Program This season Miller Theatre celebrates the 20th Anniversary of Composer Portraits. Writer Lara Pellegrinelli has been commissioned to create a snapshot of each composer in words through an exploration of their experiences of community, viewed through the prism of new music. “I thought it sounded like melting abstraction of what can be sensed by the chocolates,” the composer Dai Fujikura body. As a composer, Fujikura typically says during an animated phone develops works through his experiences conversation from his home in South of synesthesia, defined loosely as a East London. “Or melting cheese. There’s “coming together of the senses” (from something quite universal about an image the Greek syn: “together” and aesthesis: like that, which is also very sensual. And I “sensation”), in which two or more of don’t even like chocolate all that much.” the body’s senses are automatically Fujikura has been describing an linked. Perhaps the best known musical effect in his ensemble worksecret forest synesthete is the Russian composer (2008), the closing piece on tonight’s Alexander Scriabin (1871-1915), whose program. Through experiments with clavier à lumières projected colored the physicality of bowing, Fujikura lights during his symphonic poem created against-the-grain patterns for “Prometheus: Poem of Fire.” Although the strings separately from the pitch some experts have raised doubts about sonorities that they play—and which Scriabin’s associations because of his systematically wind down, like a cassette particular visual vocabulary, numerous in a player whose battery is dying. This other figures—including Rimsky- phase transition, from solid to warm and Korsakov, Liszt, Duke Ellington, and viscous, opens a work in which a grove of Pharrell—have all detailed experiences sounds is explored from many angles: the of synesthesia, which is likely to be much string section occupies the stage, while more common than previously thought. its wind and brass counterparts tender “Often my associations are tactile,” throughout the audience. The bassoon, a says Fujikura. “The touch of fingertips is solitary passer-by, meets with a sudden extremely important; my orchestrations downpour brought on by pizzicato tremolo are very much based on that. A harmony (percussively plucked, “trembling” can be like putting your cheek on a cold strings) and a bevy of rainsticks. concrete surface in hot summer. As I secret forest is less programmatic compose, I might think, If you eat this in orientation than kinesthetic: an sound, what would happen in your mouth? millertheatre.com Maybe it’s crispy on the outside and there’s Director of the Tokyo Metropolitan something warm on the inside. Does Theater’s Born Creative Festival. something ooze out of it? The music of A hunger for tactile discovery may be some composers leaves me with a very what drives Fujikura to keep composing bad aftertaste, and therefore I cannot like for individual instruments, uncovering it. Or it might smell bad.” their untapped potential systematically In fact, Fujikura once effectively even while he is at work developing larger ended a panel discussion in which he was projects like A Dream of Armageddon participating by disclosing that to him, (2018-19), his third opera, which awaits the music of Brahms its premiere at the smelled like a second- New National Tokyo hand bookshop. The Sensory exploration is Theater in November. audience roared with a connective thread in Fujikura has written laughter. “I’m not saying Fujikura’s compositional solos and concertos I don’t like this kind of process, providing him with for contrabass flute, bookshop,” he asserts an intuitive framework bassoon, recorder, now, with what might that grounds his guitar, trombone, bass be a hint of irreverence musical language. clarinet, shakuhachi, in his voice. “I do. It has double bass, and books that are brown at tuba—an unusual the edges. You know, it’s a little damp, a array. His Flute Concerto won the 2019 little moldy.” Ivors Composer Award for chamber music, and his Shamisen Concerto has received nine performances since its Sensory exploration is a connective premiere last summer at Lincoln Center’s thread in Fujikura’s compositional Mostly Mozart Festival. He is currently process, providing him with an intuitive composing a viola concerto for Anne framework that grounds his musical Leilehua Lanzilotti as part of her language. What he develops from that 20/19 Project. foundation feels actively inquisitive in Rebekah Heller, bassoonist and nature, with Fujikura maintaining his co-artistic director of the International sense of wonder—and a sense of humor Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), credits —into his third decade as an artist. His Fujikura with “rethinking instruments innate curiosity has been rewarded with from the inside out.” The ensemble has numerous honors and accolades: in 2017, been working with him since 2003, when he received the Silver Lion Award from the he was one of the first winners of their Venice Biennale for innovation in music, Young Composers Call for Scores. His the same year he was named the Artistic contributions became part of the ground Miller Theatre at Columbia University from which that dynamic musicians’ captures the memory of a teenaged boy’s collective was launched, helping to aspiration to play the electric guitar (and transform a bunch of recent conservatory impress girls)—more precisely, the kind graduates into the commissioners and of electric guitar heard in bands like Van collaborators who reshaped the entire Halen, Iron Maiden, or Fujikura’s then- new music scene. favorite, Guns & Roses. “The Use Your Dan Lippel, ICE’s guitarist, says that Illusion albums were really big when I Fujikura has “an almost scientific way was a teenager,” he confirms. “I even had of approaching how different types of a T-shirt.” musical gestures lie on an instrument, Lippel, who will perform that whether they’re based on effects or composition tonight, sees it as a milestone extended techniques. He is able to build in the 40-year history of the electric whole sonic phenomena out of those guitar’s integration into new music. “With textures.” Fujikura’s label Minabel is an abandoned time, there’s an impressive imprint of and distributed by Lippel’s New synthesis between a guitar part from a Focus Recordings. rock vernacular point of view, and the Fujikura’s explorations often map ensemble’s musical language, which onto natural phenomena, evident from comes from a modernist, Boulez-ian the works on tonight’s program, including aesthetic perspective,” he says. “There’s secret forest. Minina (2013), one in a series also a Carlos Santana moment at the end, of pieces dedicated to his now eight-year- where I get to play these wailing bends.” old daughter, uses a quintet to explore the As a relative newcomer to arrival of a newborn baby, as well as her contemporary music, the electric guitar mysterious, fleeting expressions.silence does not warrant Fujikura’s reinvention. seeking solace, written in collaboration Instead, he plays with abandoned time’s with poet Harry Ross, Fujikura’s librettist overall sound design, closely miking all for A Dream of Armageddon, abstracts of the individual acoustic instruments. vocal utterances—whispers, percussive Through his use of amplification, consonants, and elongated vowels—into Fujikura blends the ensemble’s tonal a language for the singer’s accompanying palette with the electric guitar’s, which strings. Gliding Wings, featuring a pair becomes distorted in a sound world of clarinets with ensemble, evokes the rendered hyperreal. fluidity of collective bird flight, with the players sonically tethered to each other in a single but elastic body. Though Fujikura pursued his formal The earliest work on the program, training in the United Kingdom, he abandoned time (2003), is perhaps was born in Japan and began his music less probative, but for good reason. It education as a child in Osaka. He learned millertheatre.com Bach, Beethoven, and the other heroes of In his early teens, Fujikura had the classical canon at the direction of a been enamored with the music of strict piano teacher. Chastised when he David Sylvian, leader of the New Wave altered bits of the repertoire he deemed band Japan, and electronic pioneer boring, Fujikura discovered that he could Ryuichi Sakamoto; eventually he would side-step such criticism by playing his collaborate with both of them. He also own music. (Apparently, he disliked loved the immersive world of film scoring, Kabalevsky so much that he referred him especially the soundtracks for horror as “Baka-levsky”; baka is the Japanese films likeAlien 3 and Interview with a word for idiot.) Although Fujikura’s Vampire by Elliot Goldenthal. But his mother still insisted on his disciplined engagement with the music of György practice of the masters, she also Ligeti (1923-2006), Tōru Takemitsu encouraged her son’s newfound interest (1930-1996), and Pierre Boulez (1925- by reading him a set of 2016) while he was composer biographies at Trinity ultimately for children. “I realized, “The music I want to make determined his They’re all German- is like the world I want to course. In his second speaking,” Fujikura live in: a utopian world.” year there, Fujikura remembers. “I thought, —Dai Fujikura became the youngest- If I go to Germany, I will ever winner of the be a composer.” Serocki International His parents reasoned that it would be Composers’ Competition (1998). As a more practical for him to learn English foreigner who could not work legally, he first and, at 15, sent him to be a music depended on such winnings simply to pay scholar at Dover College in Kent, which his rent in the years to come.

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