Enka I

We'll play a piece by Susumu Yoshida because it beautifully represents the Japanese attitude toward silence.

Completed in 1978, Enka I (an Enka II also exists), for soprano and nine instruments, is inspired by the spirit (not the style) of a certain type of Japanese folk song. Enka, in Japan, is a popular musical genre that could be compared to the dramatic songs of Gilbert Bécaud or Edith Piaf in France.

Here, Susumu Yoshida seeks to analyze, extract, and reconstruct the dramatic essence of enka, but he does so with gestures that, to us Westerners, appear extremely measured, in the tradition of Japanese theater in which even the simple position of a hand has a precise meaning.

giardino di pietre e sabbia What the composer says about the silence that abounds in this work is beautiful and disconcerting:

My music is based on silence. It is music conceived "in the negative," in that the notes exist only to create and condition this silence. Silence is not Nothingness, it is not just the moment when you no longer hear anything, it is a form of existence in itself, hidden behind the notes.

These silences are not Cagean and they are not expressive. One cannot help but think of the stone and sand garden of the Ryoanji temple in Kyoto, or the voids in oriental paintings.

Susumu Yoshida – Enka I (1078), for soprano and nine instruments – mp3

Yumi Nara soprano – Orchestra Colonne, Hikotaro Yazaki conductor, video with score

You can download the song in FLAC format from the AGP website

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