Hiro Yokose

Written in 2018 for piano and violin (14 minutes)

Original Program Note

Considering the notation and the performance of the piece, I think of something Antoine Beuger told me: “The question of notation, I think, really is a question about communication: how does a composer communicate his/her ideas to people, friends, who are interested to play it, e.g. to enter a musical world the composer invites them into. A score can approach musicians as friends, or rather as employees; invite them rather than tell them what their job is; lure them instead of giving them instructions. Scores can often be very intimidating. to me that is a form of bad behavior, very much reflecting the way we are supposed to deal with each other under capitalist conditions. In my experience it is always possible to find more gentle, more inspiring ways to notate, that show more trust and understanding for the players.”

With this piece, I’m more interested in creating a space, or a place for two to be together rather than providing a strict hierarchical relationship.

Hiro Yokose (b. 1951) is a Japanese painter.

“Yokose’s lyrical depictions of nature feature big, pale skies floating over silvery lakes or rivers lined with trees. Rendered in a subtle palette that captures the quietude of dawn or dusk, his minimal landscapes have a dream-like quality. Each canvas consists of as many as six layers of oil paint and beeswax; in describing his process, Yokose says he never begins with a particular image in mind: “It's like air or a cloud—there is no shape. If I were to chase my imagination, I would probably never finish, never even start a painting.” His work has been said to hover “between a Zen-like minimalist abstraction and a traditional landscape.” -Artsy.net

Thoughts on the Piece

I wrote this piece before I had a good understanding of most of the philosophical and artistic context that would later become extremely important to me and my work. It’s interesting to think about what the priority is with this piece, what is the preoccupation: so much of what I think about has a underpinning of philosophy or politics, but a piece like this which doesn’t have that underpinning yet is aesthetically extremely similar to the other work is a curious thing. Perhaps a work of pure aesthetics. What I mean is: in fall of 2019 I drove really far into understanding philosophy, political theory, learning about art theory, critical theory, etc. which I now say it’s really important to my work; this piece pre-dates that, but it still has all the aesthetics of the work that I say has philosophical grounding. So is this piece of work of pure aesthetic? Maybe. Hard to say, and it’s hard to say how much it actually matters either way.

When I wrote this, I was interested in the same things that I’m interested in now, or at least there’s enough of an overlap there that is that piece definitely feels like a precursor to a lot of people I came later. You can see this at least in the notation: there’s a similar methodology for the pieces that I would later called my “voids series” pieces like “we are done for the most remarkable ways” etc. – you can read all about that stuff in the dissertation – but maybe I didn’t have the pretension or knowledge to talk about it yet. I know I was still interested in the comparisons and mimetic devices with visual arts; hence the title and this piece is contemporaneous with my Lighter Shades and Miya Ando. Much like Miya Ando, I found this artist on artsy, and immediately felt connected to the world of his paintings, or at least I knew that there was something there that I found resonating with what I was thinking. Like I said, I hadn’t read anything like In Praise of Blandness, yet, but my aesthetic interest in the affectation of this work was already there.

I wrote the piece rather quickly, not really knowing what I was going to do with it.

The piece was never actually performed live by the time it came out on the Edition Wandelweiser album but has since gone on to be played quite a bit, and I think it actually pairs really well with a much later piece there’s no such thing as death in miniature. It’s really part of the new foundation of work that I started when I moved to Texas, and one that it seem to have grown into a little bit of a life of its own as far as it relates to other pieces in my mind and other philosophical ideas it will become extremely important future.