Makoto
Shinohara

Before Shinohara Makoto (b. 1931 in Osaka) began his DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP) fellowship in December 1966, he had already spent time in Europe in conjunction with his training as a composer. After initial years of study in Tokyo, he enrolled at the Conservatoire in Paris to study with Olivier Messiaen, and then continued his education in Cologne with Gottfried Michael Koenig and Karlheinz Stockhausen; he was also the latter’s assistant between 1964 and 1966. Shinohara expanded the interest in electronic music that Stockhausen had ignited in him while working at the Siemens studio in Munich and at the Institute of Sonology in the Dutch city of Utrecht. Koenig became director of the institute in 1964 and Shinohara was involved in a research project there before starting his Berlin fellowship. Shinohara’s four-channel electronic composition Visions I, which consists exclusively of sine tones, and his work Mémoires, which combines synthetic sound material produced by tone generators with electronically processed vocal sounds, were both written in Utrecht.

Like his fellow Japanese composers Ichiyanagi Toshi, Yuasa Joji, Ishii Maki, and others, Shinohara Makoto was interested in the instruments and aesthetics of the traditional music of his native country, which are typically situated within a ceremonial or cultic context. In the early 1970s, he began creating chamber music works composed for Japanese instruments such as the koto, shakuhachi, and shamisen. In addition, Shinohara worked on fusing Western and Japanese instruments as well as their associated aesthetic approaches.

Near the end of his residency in Berlin, while working on the composition Fragments for Tenor Recorder, Shinohara decided to remain in the city for a while. On October 9, 1968, three months after the end of his extended fellowship, Shinohara’s tape/performance work Personnage—based solely on vocal and body sounds, and produced at the electronic studio of the Audimax at the Technische Universität (TU)—premiered during the second Berlin International Week for Experimental Music. The BKP contributed to the production costs of the piece.

Shinohara’s performance at the first Metamusik Festival was also memorable. For this festival, which was sponsored by the BKP, radio director Walter Bachauer organized a multidisciplinary program featuring the post-serial avant-garde from Europe and the U.S. as well as the electronic rock music of the Berlin School and world music from Asia, Africa, and the Orient. Shinohara performed on October 6, 1974, as part of a concert program presenting both traditional ceremonial shakuhachi music and contemporary compositions—scored for the Japanese bamboo flute and the koto, a thirteen-string, half-tube zither used in gagaku imperial court music. Shinohara personally interpreted his koto piece Tayutai, in which he enlivened and augmented the traditional instrument’s tonal identity with extended playing techniques and selective vocal expressions. Another of his compositions heard at this concert was Kyudo A, a 1973 solo piece for shakuhachi which, like Tayutai, expands the instrument’s sonic possibilities via Western avant-garde playing techniques as well as scenic elements. This was performed by Tatsuya Sano, who, among other things, incorporated vocalizations, specific movement patterns, and stamping feet.

Text: Thomas Groetz

Translation: Erik Smith