Brian Inglis

Japanese Pictures for clarinet/bass clarinet, viola and piano

Score

1994

ce-bi1jp2-dl-s

SCORE

BRIAN INGLIS

JAPANESE PICTURES

(Homage to Robert Schumann)

for clarinet/bass clarinet, viola and piano

First complete performance:

St. Mary-le-Strand, London WC2, 9th May 1997 (movements I and III were previously performed at City University)

Alessandro Bondonno, clarinet Deborah Kemp, viola Ciàran Conroy, piano

I Tanka (5’30”) p. 1

II Scherzo (3’) p. 11

III Passacaglia (8’30”) p. 21

Total duration: 18’

Dedicated to Angela and Takanori Fujihara and their family

PERFORMANCE NOTES

1/4 tone flat 1/4 tone sharp 3/4 tone sharp

Noteless stems denote repetition. Unaccented grace notes are played before the beat; accented grace notes on the beat.

Multiphonics in the clarinet part – the fingerings for which are taken from Philip Rehfeldt, New Directions for Clarinet (Berkeley, California, 1977) – are intended as approximations; bass notes and fingerings are guidelines for the production of chordal sonorities.

The notation at the end of the third movement (from rehearsal figure 6) is proportional. Each bar lasts approximately 10" (unless otherwise specified), in relation to which the placing of notes and chords should be judged.

COMPOSER'S NOTES

Japanese Pictures is inspired by aspects of Japanese arts and culture, mainly music and poetry (the title is intended somewhat in the sense of Schuman''s Bilder aus Osten rather than evocation of visual images) - especially gagaku court music and haiku poetry, with its precursors tanka (also known as waka) and its extended form, renga. Each movement is inspired by three separate elements: a Japanese poetic or musical form; a Western correspondence; and a season of the year.

The autumnal first andante movement's title refers to the tanka - one of the earliest forms of Japanese literature (dating from the eighth century) and the ancestor of the haiku (which dates from the fourteenth):

...This form ... is by far the most common and persistent of the three that had developed by the time of the Manyoshu1; it still survives - by no means precariously - today. It is the tanka, 'short poem', or waka, 'Japanese poem', form.2

The rhythmic structure of the first part of the movement alludes to the form of the tanka - 5-7-5-7- 7 onji (Japanese syllables) - together with that of renga, a multi-stanza form which combines the syllable patterns of haiku (5-7-5) and tanka.

The second movement's Italian title corresponds to the ha of the Japanese musical form jo-ha-kyū (with jo being a prelude and kyū a finale); its seasonal connotation is spring.

The form of the Passacaglia finale (corresponding to winter) has no exact equivalent in Japanese music - although a repeated core melody is the basis of pieces in gagaku court music, and in the gagaku orchestra the sho mouth organ plays a series of chords recycled throughout the piece. This movement is a harmonic rather than a melodic passacaglia; the texture is stratified in a similar way to gagaku music, with the piano providing the harmonic and rhythmic background (representing the sho, koto, biwa, drums and gongs) and the clarinet and viola the melodic elements - although the viola also employs some of the techniques of the koto, biwa and shamisen, while the clarinet's multiphonics evoke both the shawm-like hichirki (in their timbral stridency) and the sho (in their harmonic complexes).

Brian Inglis

1 the first known collection of Japanese poetry, dating from the late 8th century AD. The title translates as 'The Collection of Myriad Leaves'.

2 Introduction to The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse (ed Geoffrey Bownas), Middlesex, 1964, p.xlvii.