In Autumn

Eden Lonsdale Suiseki (2023)

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Simply put, composition is the act of placing sounds in a sequence that one – for whatever reason – finds pleasing. One of the most fundamental problems in this activity is a question of decision making: how many of the countless decisions that need to be made in the course of writing a piece does one really consider deeply and how many does one leave up to automated mechanisms. Without using these kind of mechanisms, composing would quickly become a completely overwhelming task. In music history there have been many different solutions to this problem, ranging from music where every note is considered afresh and intuitively to music where everything is the product of a mathematical process.

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When I started writing this piano piece, I knew I wanted to find a process that somehow encapsulated the harmonic essence of the piano. I wanted to find a way of moving across the keyboard that consistently treated all 12 notes as equals, whilst avoiding the sense of being a purely mathematical construct and maintaining the sensual aspect of harmony, which most 12-tone music does not do. Setting out to find a process that achieves such a specific effect is a long and arduous task, one that required a lot of patience.

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Yohan Kim The Present in Relief (2026)

 

This is a work for solo piano in which the listener, too, becomes a performer. Before the performance begins, four listeners record a short fragment on their phones. As the piano begins, each listener freely replays their recording whenever they choose. When the pianist closes the keyboard lid and leaves the stage, the recordings fall silent as well.

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A composer knows, from the score, where a work begins and ends. A listener never does – whether the first sound was truly a beginning can only be confirmed after the fact. Here, the beginning is marked by an objective act – the act of recording – and the ending by a physical gesture – the closing of the lid.

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This structure exists to bring the present itself into relief. The present may not be something that stands on its own, but something that arises only between a beginning and an end – a view drawn from Martin Heidegger’s account of temporality. When performer and listener share both ends of the work, what emerges between them is no longer mere progression. It is the present itself – a thing we might call music – brought into relief by the tension between sound and sound, between person and person.

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Yuji Itoh Non-Violent Way IV (2026)

 

Sitting in front of the piano, depressing the pedals, striking a key.

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A single sound emerges, expanding and sustaining.

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Utterly beautiful. What more could one wish for?

 

But feeling that I’d like to hear more, the aural perspective changes retrospectively as I strike one key after another. This is because of the vertical and horizontal relationships that result from the combinations of notes. Or perhaps one might express it better by saying that this involves the discovery of one’s own ears as they strive to perceive these relationships, be they intervallic or harmonic in nature.

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Construction of these sonic relationships describes musical composition in the narrow sense, but the individual sound disappears at the moment at which the idea of construction is broached. For instance, the elegant arrangement of several sounds may result in the emergence of an elegant melody. The moment this occurs is the moment when the individual sound vanishes to be replaced by its internal positioning as a single constitutive element of a melodic structure.

　

I’m dreaming of music in which every sound that appears from the start to the finish of a piece can be perceived as a manifestation of such beauty.

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In order to create such music, I need to reject a way of working that abstracts individual sounds into materials and uses them to construct large and complex structures, and instead seek a non-violent way of working.

 

Isn’t the way of making use of materials to construct huge structures and accelerate technology, and the way of speaking of every conflict within political, economic and military frameworks, ultimately a violent way of making the individual faces of the many people who are there disappear from view?

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Paul Newland I met Jo Kondo on Kyobashi bridge (2026)

                                                                       

As I crossed the Kyobashi bridge I looked down at the surface of the water.

 

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Jo Kondo A Dance for Piano ‘Europeans’ (1990)

 

A Dance for Piano ‘Europeans’, an original composition for solo piano, was written for Satoko Inoue when she asked me a new composition for her recital in Tokyo in 1991. The piece was composed very quickly on Christmas Day 1990, almost in an extemporaneous fashion, improvising not on the keyboard but directly on music paper. This is perhaps reflected in the rather capricious character of the music. The subtitle comes from the fact that I was reading Henry James’ Europeans at the time. This is all that relates this piece to the novel, with no further connection either in content or structure. The piece is purely abstract music, with a touch of dance flavor due to its rhythmic character.

 

 

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Jo Kondo Sight Rhythmics (1975)
 

Sight Rhythmics was originally written for five instruments: violin, steel drum, banjo, electric piano and tuba. The work consists of six short movements that sound very much alike. These movements seem almost identical, but careful listening will soon reveal their differences. I call this device pseudo-repetition, and it could be placed somewhere between literal repetition and variation. Literal repetition is in itself static, heading nowhere. Pseudo-repetition is almost as static as literal repetition, but at the same time becomes a vehicle for hidden change and motion. Perhaps the best term to describe this fluid situation, contradictory though they may seem, are the words ‘dynamic stasis’. We could liken the listener’s experience of dynamic stasis to the way we experience our everyday life. Each day seems very similar to the previous one (daily routine), but today is never exactly the same as yesterday.

 

 

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Jo Kondo Interlude (2017)

 

The title Interlude suggests that the music I write (indeed any of my compositions), even if sounding as an autonomous, self-sufficient, independent entity, stands in-between two eternities, the past and the future: the things that have gone, and the things that will come.

 

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Jo Kondo Pomegranate (2020)

 

The form of this work is based on the responsorial plain chant, in which a cantor sings first and then the chorus responds. That is to say, a single melody is played, and then the melody is repeated along with other notes (in other words, with added thickness of sound). This repetition occurs twice (unlike in the case of responsorial chant), and the second repetition is with an even denser texture than the first. However, we cannot necessarily recognize that they are repetitions of the same melody because the original melodic line is buried in the chordal textures (i.e., the chord-colorings to each individual note that constitutes the original melody) which grow thicker with each repetition. Thus, the second repetition may be heard as a transformation of the melody into thicker sound aggregates.

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In any case, after a melody is repeated a total of three times in this way, it is followed by a new melody.

 

The entire form of the piece is based on the repetition of this process of three repetitions of each melody.

 

There is no particular reason why I named this piece Pomegranate. When I finished writing the piece, the name simply came up into my mind – that is the sole reason.

 

Some time after I sent the completed score to Satoko Inoue, whom the piece was written for, I happened to learn that pomegranate is one of her favorite foods. That said, you may imagine that there might have been some unconscious connection. But, of course, it’s only a delusion.