Ever since Japan’s reopening of foreign trade in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Western artists have often expressed a fascination in Japan’s aesthetics and artistic culture. Starting with the popularity of Japonisme in both the visual arts and the performing arts, Japan’s art has continued to influence music to this day. Here are five pieces of music inspired by Japanese art.
By Rhea Hagiwara
Claude Debussy: Poissons d’or, from Images, Book II
With the reopening of Japan’s ports came the exportation of Japanese decorative arts such as pottery and lacquerware. Debussy’s suite of six piano pieces, Images, contains a piece influenced by such exports. The third work from the second book, Poissons d’or, is said to have been influenced by a Japanese lacquer depicting gold-coloured koi carp fish owned by Debussy himself. Caught amid the popularity of Japonisme, Debussy has often indicated his affinity for Japanese arts, most notably through the use of Katsushika Hokusai’s iconic woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa on the cover of the first editions of his orchestral work La Mer.
Olivier Messiaen: Sept haïkaï – esquisses japonaises
Inspired by his trip to Japan, Messiaen composed this piece (consisting of seven movements, each titled in regard to different depictions of views from Japan) for piano and a small orchestra. The piece was influenced by the music of Noh theatre and traditional Japanese court music known as Gagaku, which the fourth movement is directly named after. Incorporating his fascination for birds, Messiaen recorded highly recognisable birdsong such as the Japanese bush warbler and the lesser cuckoo – birds often referenced in Japanese literature and poetry – in Karuizawa, which became a direct motivic element in the sixth movement Les Oiseaux de Karuizawa.
Alexander Rosenblatt: Fantasy on Japanese Themes
Next on our list of music inspired by Japanese art: described as ‘Japan meets Jazz’, this piece is written for two pianos and eight hands and directly references three famous Japanese songs: Hamabe no Uta (‘Song of the Seashore’), composed by Tamezo Narita in 1918; Sakura, Sakura (‘Cherry blossoms, cherry blossoms’), an urban melody thought to have originated in the late Edo period; and Akatombo (‘Red Dragonfly’), a children’s song composed by Kosaku Yamada in 1927. Stylistically, the Fantasy refers to multiple styles of jazz such as swing, big band, and Dixieland.
Liza Lim: Burning House
This 10-minute piece of music inspired by Japanese art for voice and koto was written for the koto and shamisen player Satsuki Odamura. Although Lim has composed several works involving the koto, this piece is unique in that it goes a step further into the exploration of the originality and performance history of the instrument: it is written in the traditional calligraphic koto notation. Burning House also alludes to Japanese traditional art by deriving its text from the ancient poet Izumi Shikibu, set to love poems that also refer to parables from the Lotus Sutra.
John Cage’s Ryoan-ji
After visiting the Ryoan-ji Temple in Kyoto in 1962, Cage began a series of drawings and compositions in 1983, each inspired by the temple’s rock garden, a collection of 15 rocks placed somewhat seemingly randomly in a landscape of raked sand. The piece is notated using a graphic score in which Cage traced parts of the perimeters of 15 different stones, also used in his drawings entitled Where R = Ryoanji, in which he drew around the individual stones. The instrumentation is set for any solo from or combination of voice, flute, oboe, trombone, double bass ad libitum with tape, and obbligato percussionist or any 20 instruments; the soloists represent the rocks in the garden, while the accompaniment represents the raked sand.
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