(Original posted on January 4, 2009)
While releasing distinctive works through his unique compositional practice of “Music of Lines,” composer Jo Kondo also continuously directs a fundamental questioning gaze toward music. This book is a collection of his critical essays written over a period of twenty years.
For a collection of essays spanning such a long period, one might expect to find a certain breadth or inconsistency in its content and arguments, but this book feels surprisingly coherent. This could be said to be because the author’s standpoint for his critical inquiries is firmly established.
By “standpoint,” I don’t mean that he is narrowly confined, but rather that one feels an intention to survey far and wide from that point. For example, in “1. Sound and Music,” he takes up John Cage’s musical theory, but ultimately extends his discussion to communication theory, pointing to “the malady of the impossibility of inter-subjective communication,” while touching upon what Cage’s music symbolizes.
Then, in “7. Emulating Music,” the author begins with his decision to pursue composition as a high school student and recounts episodes from when he studied under the composer Yoshio Hasegawa. Here, he writes with honest prose about acquiring composition skills and gaining expressive power, from an educational perspective and in light of his own experiences.
There is a charming episode where the high school-aged author was asked by Mr. Hasegawa, “So you want to compose? Then, show me some pieces you’ve written,” to which he could only flusteredly reply, “I don’t have anything I can show you,” as he had never written a piece before. While charming, it also feels like an entrance to a “big question” that is deeply rooted as a problem-posing about composition and education.
The discussion then moves on to the difference between “learning” (習う, narau) and “emulating” (倣う, narau) composition, and the meaning of emulation. This content naturally brings to mind the Japanese maxim, “To learn (manabu) is to imitate (manebu).”
At the end of this chapter, the author states, “Composition can neither be taught nor learned. It is only by emulating that one can come to know composition.” I hope you will read the book yourself to grasp the meaning of these words from their full context.
In this way, this book is a record of the trajectory of Mr. Kondo’s critical inquiries and a document of his consistent gaze.
Table of Contents for “Throwing Sounds: The Range of Compositional Thought”
- Part I: Sound, Music, Words
- 1. Sound, Music
- 2. Music as Language
- 3. An Ear for the Transcendent—Mysticism and Mysticist Music
- 4. Words, Structure, and Meaning in Music—Toward Overcoming 18th-Century Thought
- Part II: The Form of Time
- 5. The Discourse of Music—An Attempt at Definition
- 6. The World as a Vessel—The Mode of Spacetime in Cage’s Music
- Part III: Tradition, Education
- 7. Emulating Music
- 8. On Tradition
- 9. The Contemporary Composer and “Tradition” (Lecture)
- Part IV: Two Miscellaneous Topics
- 10. The Decline of “Writing”
- 11. The Role of Music Criticism
About the Author
Jo Kondo (Kondo Jo)
Composer. Born in 1947. Graduated from the composition department of Tokyo University of the Arts. He has stayed in New York, London, and other cities by invitation of the JDR 3rd Fund, the British Council, etc. He has been invited as a theme composer to many international music festivals both in Japan and abroad, and has received composition commissions from various major institutions and performance groups in Europe and the United States. After serving as a professor at Elisabeth University of Music, he is a professor at the Faculty of Letters and Education, Ochanomizu University. (Quoted from this book)
