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Japanese Art, 1960s |
Japanese Art, 1960s | ART | MUSIC | DRAMA
Active since the 1960s, Mr. Takehisa KOSUGI once served as music director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Troupe. He now engages himself in the composing and performance of impromptu music and electronic multimedia music. Mr. KOSUGI gives us a music and film performance focusing on the theme of waves. |
 Drawing by Takehisa KOSUGI "Catch-Wave '97" |
The fall of 1961 marked the dawn of Japan's era of experimental music., during which people explored the true significance and purpose of music. Some thought that music should be freed from its status as a human possession, trying to make it music of "all the universe." Others tried to make musical expression transcend the level of the ego.
While recreating a performance of the 1960s, this concert takes us on a modern trip of exploration of the meaning of music.
A pre-performance talk in Japanese will be given from 1:15 to 1:45 p.m. by Toshi ICHIYANAGI, Takehisa KOSUGI and Akimichi TAKEDA.
Essay by Toshi ICHIYANAGI
The 1960s were an epoch-making period for the Japanese art world, as at least two things happened that had not existed previously.
The first was the emergence of an overflowing experimental spirit. In the field of music, several experimental performances were performed one after another in late 1961. For that reason, I feel that year should be considered the first year of experimental music in Japan. That is because a modern music festival was held in August of that year, organized by the 20th Century Music Institute, led by Mr. Hidekazu YOSHIDA. At that festival, experimental avant-garde music by such composers as John Cage, Morton
Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff, and Stefan Wolpe was performed, as well as one of my works, as I had come back to Japan expressly for the purpose of the festival.
The festival created a sensation, as it was the first encounter by Japanese audiences with accidental or indeterminate music. On September 15, 1961, then, the first impromptu performance of modern music ever to take place in Japan was held, at a concert of "Group Music" featuring the works of such composers as Takehisa KOSUGI, Yasuhisa TONE, Akimichi TAKEDA, Mieko SHIOMI, and Nobutaka MIZUNO. The following month, on October 30, 1961, Yuji Takahashi gave a 90-minute recital playing John Cage's entire "Winter Music," the first time that it had been performed in Japan. One month later, on November 30, 1961, I gave a performance of his works, which was Japan's first concert or "happening" of live electronic music. Soon after those performances, Kuniharu AKIYAMA, Yuji TAKAHASHI and I got together and created "New Direction," a group of experimental performers.
The second thing that differentiated the 1960s from earlier decades was the cross- disciplinary cooperation between artists from different fields, from architects on one hand to fashion designers on the other. In the late 1960s, a highly successful exhibition was held entitled "From Space to the Environment," which epitomized that coming together of different types of artists. Another representative event was the "Cross-Talk Intermedia" concert of modern music held in the Olympic Gymnasium in Yoyogi, Tokyo.
In the United States at the same time, the Bell Labs sponsored the "Nine Evenings of Art and Technology" in 1966, renting an entire armory building for the purpose, at which performances were given by artists making heavy use ofelectronic technology. Similarly, the two events that took place in Japan -"Space to the Environment" and "Cross-Talk Intermedia" - allowed artists to interact and cooperate with technology-related people to put on all-inclusive performances of modern art.
Unlike the experimental art of the 1960s, which celebrated the free spirit of creativity, the decade of the 1990s is characterized by saturation, closure, stagnation, and conservatism. Hopefully that era can serve as a better indicator of where art should move in the future than present times.
