Aioi: leaves laden with words – Pines, Liminality and Reflection
On Saturday 3 July, Quiet Music Ensemble will give the premiere of my piece Aioi: leaves laden with words, written for the ensemble as part of my Noh Research Project 2019-21, Tokyo, Japan. About the concert.
There are a lot of aesthetic and philosophical ideas that are similar in noh and in the music that QME play – most obviously, the emphasis on stillness, slowness and reflection. The noh principle of ‘yugen’, often translated as ‘hidden, mysterious beauty’, is as good a description of QME as noh. More than that though is the the emphasis of experience over technicality, the use of sound and image to connect with bigger ideas, and most of all, an engagement with collective experience. [Read more about QME here]
Having worked for a long time with QME as manager, it’s hard to overestimate the influence of their work on my own. My research period in Japan gave me a chance to reflect on this influence, while absorbing Noh; the result of the cross of these aesthetic principles is Aioi: leaves laden with words.
About Aioi: leaves laden with words
Aioi: leaves laden with words is based on the Japanese Noh play Takasago, the imagery of the pine and the space between worlds. The pine is a symbol of longevity and for liminality, for the rocking back and forth between the imagined and the real.
The score for Aioi: leaves laden with words is a set of 6 unique paintings, one for each performer - versions of the pine tree found at the back of the Noh stage. The performers improvise in response to their painting, to the story of Takasago, and the sound of wind in the pines.
Aioi: leaves laden with words also features an additional utai (Noh chant) part. The utai text is taken from early Irish poetry from a roughly equivalent time to the writing of Takasago, particularly a passage from Buile Suibhne (‘Mad Sweeney’) where the eponymous character praises the nature of various trees.
About the pine and kakegoe
The pine tree is the symbol of Noh. Every Noh stage – otherwise devoid of props or scenery – is adorned only by a large pine painted on its back ‘wall’. This panel is known as a 鏡板 – kagami-ita, or ‘mirror-board’. The performance, a reflection of the real world, manifests in front of this pine.
Though it is not generally known how the pine became associated so strongly with Noh, it is believed it is a representation of the Yogo no Matsu (Yogo Pine) at the Kasuga Taisha temple in Nara, where a Shinto god incarnated and danced for onlookers. The pine was where the kami (gods) could manifest in this world. The Noh actors too are the conduits of the stories of the gods for the audience.
The pine, evergreen and said to live for a long time (and is often referred to in Japanese poetry as Chitose, thousand years), gathered further symbolic meaning, primarily representing longevity, both of life and art. It also represents duality – or more properly, liminality, the space between a number of dualities. It is the point between the eternal and spiritual, where the gods manifest in the world. It is evergreen – constant and unchanging, representing long life; but the ever-present carpet of fallen needles embodies change, mutability and death. It is both sentient and insentient; its sounds are external, those of the wind in its leaves, but also the communication of kami. Its longevity links the past and present.
The sounds of the two drums (called kotsuzumi and otsuzumi) in the music of Noh represent a similar liminality. Between the beats of these drums the players emit 掛け声 – kakegoe, shouts or calls. These shouts are part of the rhythmic texture, always occurring on specific beats within the rhythmic cells that constitute the music of Noh; but more than this, they echo the emotional content of the play. They can be a simple sigh in a moment of stillness, the drawn-out moan of quiet anguish, or the fast, rousing cries of battle.
These calls are punctuated by the sharp, loud, echoing hits of the drums. In the relationship created with these shot-like drum beats, the kakegoe too take on a symbolic role (sometimes likened to the katsu calls of Zen practice): the contrast between the unearthly calls and the sudden drum hits emphasise the empty space between, the echoing silences. The kakegoe are an expression of the absent, and of yugen – the hidden beauty of what lies beneath the surface, the unseen world. They invite us to the consideration of that other world, while the shock of the drum beat returns us to the tangible universe in a constant back and forth.