Toshi
Ichiyanagi

Ichiyanagi Toshi (b. 1933 in Kobe; lives and works in Tokyo) was not able to start his DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP) fellowship until April 1976, two years after he had been invited, and could only stay in Berlin for six months. This delay can be attributed primarily to the Japanese composer’s myriad activities: Alongside his own composing, he donned hats as a concert organizer for electronic and electroacoustic music and as a curator of visual art exhibitions, and above all sound installations, that were mainly presented at the Seibu Museum or Seibu Theater in Tokyo. Ichiyanagi was also involved as a music curator with Expo ’70 in Osaka, which featured intermedial events by Gutai, an artist group Ichiyanagi had worked with previously.

In the early 1970s, Ichiyanagi’s body of work proved to be as varied as his cultural engagements. Solo and chamber music pieces were conceived for Western instruments as well as for traditional Japanese instruments; hybrid forms were created featuring contrasts and connections between Eastern musical traditions and the Western post-serial avant-garde. At the same time, Ichiyanagi was involved in electronic and electroacoustic music, and was also active in the realms of improvisation, music theater, and music for film.

Moreover, in the first half of the 1970s, Ichiyanagi created pieces for piano in which the influence or specific adaptations of 1960s American minimal music played a role. Following Piano Media from 1972, he composed the similarly conceived Time Sequence during his residency year in Berlin. The highly demanding, technical work by the trained pianist featured repetitive, fast sequences and machine-like qualities reminiscent of György Ligeti’s Continuum, a piece for harpsichord from 1968. Another keyboard-instrument composition created in 1976 is the piece for organ, Multiple Spaces, which was premiered by Gerd Zacher on May 25, 1976, at the Pro Musica Nova Festival in Bremen.

During Ichiyanagi’s stay in Berlin, individual works of his were also performed at two concerts in the city. On October 3, 1976, the Tokk Ensemble from Tokyo premiered his work Music for Living Process, composed three years earlier, during the second Metamusik Festival at the Neue Nationalgalerie. Created for two dancers and five instrumentalists, the piece combined the sound of the shakuhachi with random and improvised impulses produced by harp and violin. The title of the piece references a topos of John Cage, with whom Ichiyanagi Toshi studied in New York in the late 1950s: Music for Living Process utilizes a graphic score in its quest to give sounds greater autonomy, and understands the composer less as a controlling authority than as the initiator of a living process.

Ichiyanagi’s 1972 composition Arrangements, presented by Japanese percussionist Sumire Yoshihara at another Metamusik concert on October 12, 1976, is composed in a similarly variable way. Ichiyanagi also participated in the final edition of the Metamusik Festival, where his music-theatrical piece Perspectives was performed in October 1978.

Text: Thomas Groetz

Translation: Erik Smith