Written in 1988 and 1990 / Recorded in 1988, 1990, and 2013
Initially, this tune was written and recorded in the late 1988 and you can hear a shortend edition of the original demo after 4:37 on this video. I could not satisfy with this recording so that, about a year and a half later, I decided to re-record the same tune with a new arrangement and a newly written intro.
I tried to re-organise the whole structure of the tune for making this video, but I still can not satisfy with the result. Some keyboard parts are newly added in 2013 for this video version.
Basically, as far as the music concerns, my conceptual work
titled Music for a Story-Telling is a collection of
re-workings of my past compositions written in 1991; either works I wrote for a
band that couldn’t exist long enough to perform it, and works for a students’
theatrical project that failed to feature the whole works I wrote for it at its
actual performance. This tune consists of a couple of re-workings from the
latter occasion. The main body of this composition – the piano piece – was
originally written as a theme for one of characters of the theatrical
performance. It was literally written on a piece of music sheet but its demo
recording didn’t go well partly for my poor skill on playing the keyboard and
partly for mechanical problems of the recording equipment. In this re-working,
I simply converted the written sheet music into a digital programme run by a
sequencer. As for the noise section in the middle, four layers of synthesizer
parts were taken from the original demo I made for the students’ stuff. The
demo was also used in the actual performance accompanied with an actor’s noise
guitar and performance of the brain-washing execution. In this re-working, I
just replaced the noise guitar part with the one newly played by myself.
In the story of the conceptual work, this tune has a role to introduce
Dr. Tarci to the viewers. Through the Doctor’s monologue, viewers are expected
to grasp what has been going on so far. He will also set the framework for the
story line for the next part, regarding to the treatment of Kelp, the main
character.
Overall arrangement and the basic idea for writing a thing for the guitar and percussion obviously inspired by Marc Bolan’s Tyrannosaurus Rex. I was deeply into their music when I wrote this sometime in late 1988 and was also absorbed in analysing random musical works from a wide range of my favourites. Other sources of inspiration I would like to mention are some acoustic works by Jimmy Page and Robert Fripp, for The Yardbird in their later years and for King Crimson in their relatively early years, respectively.
Basically, as far as the music concerns, my conceptual work
titled Music for a Story-Telling is a collection of
re-workings of my past compositions written in 1991; either works I wrote for a
band that couldn’t exist long enough to perform it, and works for a students’
theatrical project that failed to feature the whole works I wrote for it at its
actual performance. This tune consists of a well-balanced mixture of
re-arranged bits from the both occasions. The intro and verse section for Wella
are both taken from the former, whilst verse section for the Judge and closing
section are from the later. Since I took the arpeggio part by the acoustic
guitar an important element of this tune, I newly wrote a line for the bass
guitar to take a solo in the middle.
As for the function of this tune in the story, this one is assigned to
depict the scene of a criminal trial. Viewers are expected to sympathise for
Wella, the defendant, for being tried unfairly to be found guilty of nothing.
According to the sentence delivered by the Judge, he is now facing to be brain
washed as the punishment for found guilty of, in defendant’s words, ‘having
been realized that he had been deprived of his own freedom.’ Though both Wella
and the Judge are minor characters in the entire story, the author intended to
present a stark contrast between the regime and general interests of its
citizens through this dialogue, which is set in relatively early stage of the
conceptual work for establishing the framework of the story.
When I first started multi-track recording of my original stuff, I didn’t have a synthesiser but a mini keyboard, which had five or six built-in tones. One day during the autumn of 1988, I thought it would be interesting to write a piece of music that could accommodate all of these built-in tones by using my four-track recorder. I didn’t have any motif to be built upon but began the project with programming the rhythm machine from the scratch. Since all I wanted to do was making something odd, I deliberately chose 7/4 time signature at the very beginning of this programming stage.
As for the keyboard parts, I basically wrote each part layer by layer. To prevent things going too far, the chord progression was set to a repetition of only two chords. At the end, for furnishing the atmosphere of the tune, I added my voice being manually modified by the digital delay pedal.
Unlike my usual stuff, I recognised that the resulted work sounds less human nor organic due to the fact that it consists of the tones pronounced by machines and a human voice modified by a digital device. When it came to thinking about how to call this tune, I must have referred to the words I heard at the end of The Spark of Life, an instrumental tune featured on the album Todd by Todd Rundgren, saying ‘No no no no, a little more humanity please.’
Ideas for exploring the possibility of mere 12-bar blues I always had in my mind, ever since I have heard some of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers’ works in the Psychedelic era. I simply thought it would be intriguing to play utterly different kind of music in the form of 12-bar blues, as Mayall pursued Psychedelic / Indian elements in Fly Tomorrow, for instance. When I first discussed this idea to my bass player in the band at that time, he seemingly nodded to the idea but was obviously unwilling to convert the essence of the genre with leaving only its framework. Three years later, I finally tried out the idea in a bit eccentric way; Christmassy music in the framework of 12-bar blues, and here is the result of it.
For making this demo recording, I thought it would be interesting to include a famous Christmas song in the middle to avoid monotony and picked up Jingle Bells by James Lord Pierpont. By switching the tone of synthesizer from Christmassy bells like one to organ, I wanted to pay my tribute to a fantastic cover version of the tune from Booker T. & The MG’s.
Roland D-5 was the first digital synthesizer I bought sometime in the middle of 1990. At that time, I was playing an analogue synthesizer by Roland, which I was borrowing from one of my generous friends, and I wanted to have another supplemental synthesizer for enhancing my performance as a keyboardist in the band. Due to busyness while I was playing in the band, it took a bit longer before I began to explore things available on this modest priced digital synthesizer. Once the time has come, I became quite obsessed with trying out every built-in tone and function enough long to establish the imagination for writing this experimental tune.
There are little more to talk about this tune, which could be better labelled as a demonstration performance of this particular model of Roland synthesizer, accompanied with a properly written Theme section in the intro, outro and a few times in between, which are played in accordance with each section’s demand. As for the outro, I newly added some bits including the guitar because the original demo version was utterly unsuccessful due to the basic scheme stemmed from writing and arranging stage in the first place. Except for these new additions, the original demo was entirely played by the Roland D-5 synthesizer.
Ideas I combined for making this instrumental stuff mostly came from an arrangement I made for solo piano to play You Don’t Miss Your Water Till Your Well Runs Dry, live on stage a couple of years earlier. The song was written by William Bell and I first heard it in an album by Taj Mahal. While I used the chord progression of the arrangement as the key structure of this tune, I also have to admit that inspiration for the main melody owes to the Closing theme featured at the end of Reunion in Central Park album by the (Original) Blues Project.
I was (and am) not satisfied with the way this tune is finally delivered – I think the tune is bit too long and I could have played solos on the guitars to make it better – but I remember the tune represented a special emotion I had at that time; to finish off my life as a student. I thought the tune would fit the funeral ceremony to bury myself as a student but if I could see my younger self, all I would like to tell him is ‘life goes on.’
A home recorded two-chord jam played by myself. Needless to say, this was not a serious composition but a personal recording for my own fun purpose. I partially added the tone of percussions I am unfamiliar with on the programmable rhythm machine to pay my tribute to some of my fellow students then, who were enthusiastic about playing Latin music.
I physically played the bass guitar, acoustic piano, organ-toned keyboard and the lead guitar. For experimental purpose, I also played the trumpet without knowing how to play it. Though it features colourful layers of different instruments, it doesn’t sound much heavy, perhaps due to the effect of Ping-Pong recording, a primitive method used on analogue equipment with a limited number of recordable tracks. Though it was not the ideal method for recording things like this, I felt a certain satisfaction for the result, which sounds like floating in the air as if I am dreaming for some extent.
I guess it took me about a few weeks to write and record this instrumental tune and there were certain time lags during the time of composing. Initially, perhaps ideas emerged through my random piano playing as usual and it seems that, according to a notebook I used at that time, I thought about compiling the ideas to form a piece of Classical music. This initial intent might have been soon interrupted due to the addition of a Swing-like bridging section in the middle and at this point, I decided to write a lyric that goes with the tune. I remember at least I tried out the lyric with my own voice once and the song was about walking on a pleasant autumn day.
One day during such a pleasant autumn, while I was still working on this tune, I went to see a concert held within my college site. It was one of the casual concerts by a mixed choir, which belonged to the students’ musician union of the college, and having a look at such one was a normal activity for members of the union. Through such activities, I took to be familiarised with Classical music and though I didn’t have a particular interest in choir music, I was quite impressed by a female singer’s performance on that stage.
When I got back home to continue finishing my work, I changed my mind to dedicate this tune to the female singer I saw in the concert, by removing my silly voice part and renaming it Serenade to a Singing Princess. Shortly before that, I remember the tune was provisionally titled Underground Hollywood, referring to a chapter from a memoir written by Ultra Violet, a book I was reading then, despite the tune had nothing to do with Andy Warhol’s Superstars.
Death Song was a thing of an outburst of my anger and frustration I held at the time of writing. Before the song was recorded in any form, it was played live for filling the stage time as a solo act of me playing the guitar and singing. One of the reasons why I dared to play it at that occasion was because the anger was caused by the provisional band I had to play with on that day. What surprised me at the most was that the audience’s response was quite good towards the song, which I wrote and played in despair.
The demo recording of the song at home soon followed and in it, I simply played it in the same manner as the prior live take and added rhythm sections for enhancing its (Hard) Rock aspect. But this did not meet my satisfaction so that I fancied to convert the key features of the song into some different style. Inspiration came from Lanky (Part One), an instrumental jam by Syd Barrett, officially released for the first time in 1988, which was yet a hot material at that time for me. I borrowed the idea of a jam consists of rough playing guitar and vibraphone-like keyboard to give a basic structure for the recording as a whole. Then, I added rhythm sections to enhance this basic structure.
Though this second attempt was yet not satisfying, I decided to make this video by cutting off some parts of the long jam section to make the whole material shorter and put it go with the footage taken from the original live performance, which captured the initial raw emotion of myself at the very beginning of this composition.
I bought a compact digital effect designed for the keyboard during the autumn of 1990, to furnish the sound of the digital synthesizer, which I bought shortly prior than that, for playing it with a band. Despite the compact digi-box had many built-in effect programmes, I only used its basic reverb effect while I was playing in the band because I was more packed with practising and playing, rather than sound making. After being liberated from the band and some other stuff, I took time for exploring the built-in programmes on the digi-box, which were mainly consisted of a combination of reverb and delay effects. During the careful examination of each effect programmes, one of them caught my attention. I do not remember how the programme called by the manufacturers, but I found its’ stereo echoing effect not only playful but also useful to cover my low skill at playing the keyboard. You can listen to the result by playing the video above and I hope you like it.
This tune was first performed in October 1990, accompanied by my solo organ with lyrics to be sung by myself. It was shortly after the song was written but I do not remember which came first, I mean, I cannot recall if I wrote the song for the performance or the song was merely a handy new material when I heard about the occasion to play some solo act. Despite the tune itself was rather orientated to Hard / Blues Rock or even a bit Psychedelic, what the lyrics delivered was a fairy tale. Since the fairy was related to water, I called this thing Undine.
In those days, I had a small number of fans based on students’ musician union and this became one of the popular songs among them, largely because of the fairy story, and I played it live for a few times within a short period of time up to January 1991, either as a solo act and accompanied by a provisional band.
The audio track I made for this video consists of following three materials: (1) instrumental remix from the original personal demo from October 1990, (2) live performance with a provisional band from December 1990, and (3) a studio rehearsal take with another band took place sometime in the spring of 1991. To be honest with you, the discovery of the last material encouraged me to make this video because my singing voice was almost inaudible entirely in this studio take whilst it captured the rough aspect of the tune, especially when it was played by a guitar band like this.
The patchwork-like editing was done for enhancing this aspect of the tune.
Apart
from my personal experimental stuff, things I wrote for my band Culotte were
usually supposed to present Pop stuff sophisticated with musical intelligence
mainly gained from the field of Prog Rock. In this view point, this tune might be one of the
finest examples from ours. When I wrote this tune in 1993, I was still obsessed
with the idea to employ digital sequencer as the fourth personnel of the band,
simply because I wanted to be liberated from playing necessary backing part by
the guitar. As we experienced on such attempts, I took to recognise that the idea
was unrealistic, unless we could access to better monitoring system, and
unnatural for a band like us.
It took
us two years to record this tune in studio since the time of writing. By the
time we recorded this demo, the drummer gradually gained confidence for dealing
with this kind of material. Other parts are not much important; acoustic,
electric, and bass guitars are only repeating basic patterns in accordance with
the programmed synthesizer. In addition, I have to admit that the contents of
this tune are pretty poor, especially in terms of chord progression. The decline
in my creativity at that time can be excused by blaming on a lady, to whom this
tune was addressed to.
I do not remember exactly when this tune was written and the demo was recorded. All I can say is, this was the first tune I recorded for a collection of my original works. Making of the collection was finished when a 46-minute cassette tape was mostly filled with those demo recordings in early 1991, and most of the works were written and recorded during the final quarter of 1990. A clear difference between this tune and all the rest featured in the collection is the synthesizer that used. In this demo recording of Got Something to Tell You, an analogue synthesizer was used, which has been borrowed from my friend. Sometime in 1990, again I am not sure when exactly it was, I returned the synthesizer back to its owner and carried on recording new materials by using a digital synthesizer I newly bought shortly after that.
Apart from guessing of when this tune was recorded, there are little things worth to be discussed here of this tune. The main idea for writing this tune was to present an example of a Pop tune played by a Prog minded musicians. This idea gave rooms for tricky rhythm signature and some playful licks for each instrument in the plain sections, whilst the chorus (or bridging) section accommodates sophisticated chord progressions. At the same time, since it was originally designed to be a Pop tune, the degree of tricky stuff is restricted within a modest range. One thing I regret about this recording is, the guitar part is too modest to be neither tricky nor playful, despite the fact that the eloquent guitar solo in the quasi Twist and Shout section clearly implies that I must have been in a good condition as a guitar player back then.
This tune was written a bit hastily at the end of 1990. In those days, I was obsessed with exploring what’s available on my new digital synthesizer, especially in terms of trying out each built-in tones, and this tiny tune was written as a result of countless hours I spent on learning the new equipment. The basic idea for the initial demo recording was to write a typical stuff for a four-piece band and play it exclusively by the synthesizer. This initial attempt, needless to say, didn’t go quite well.
In the meantime, I thought the tune was handy for filling time for a forthcoming live show for a provisional band and I played it by a trio consists of a percussionist, a contrabass player and me on the electric piano.
When I discovered the master tape of the original demo, I could not resist re-recording the tune in a bit more proper way. The attached video above was the result, which also features intro from the original demo and outro from the said live version.
A Tragedy
was an instrumental composition I wrote during the summer of 1990. In those
days, I was working hard for writing an essay about a German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche, as a course work, and was obsessed with ideas and facts I
was absorbing from various books I referred for my essay writing. Along with
his philosophical thoughts, I was also interested in Nietzsche’s private life
and his relationship with relatively modest number of women including, most
famously, Lou Andreas-Salome.
Part III of the
composition is assigned to focus on the philosopher’s love towards a younger
girl of nearly a half of his age, being provided with quotes from his own words
and an account made from objective view point by a researcher.
The tune was
written before the idea of conceptual work emerged, and was played live on
stage as a solo piano thing by myself. Even at that point, I called this tune
as simply Love Theme, because there was a source of inspiration – a muse
like beautiful girl – back then. The original demo recording followed shortly
after that but it was not a satisfactory one. Four years later, I made another
demo recording of this tune with a new arrangement featuring re-arranged string
section and lead guitar. For making the audio track of this video, I tried to use
the best bits from these three different versions to be patched together in
this way.
This tune was originally written for an abandoned conceptual work, which was supposed to deliver a story and its demo recordings were made during the summer of 1989. In that conceptual work, this tune was given a role of Nocturne – a brief inner thought of the main character at night. Though the original demo had been destroyed, the idea of the composition remained in my head and when the season turned to winter, I made up my mind to re-record this tune. I still remember it was a snowy day and I thought that this tune rather fits into the atmosphere of such a cold winter day.
I also wrote a short lyric for this tune but now I recall it was not a good one, partly because it was not written genuinely as a lyric but as a course work for my English class.
Written in 1986 or 1987 / Recorded in 1986 or 1987 and 1989
The audio track of this video consists
of a summary of demo recordings I made in the late 1986 or early 1987 that had
enough amount for filling both sides of a 46-minute-cassette-tape. If my memory
serves well, the original tape contained five or six tracks on its Side One and
other three tracks on the Side Two. It was my second attempt to make a collection of
my original stuff to be recorded in a primitive way – by using a
double-cassette – but while its predecessor, done in 1985, was rather more
about a heap of random original works, this second attempt was more focused on
exploring various musical styles or genres and how I would/could function as a
guitar/bass/keyboard player in each case. For making this video, I picked up
following five pieces to represent the whole:
(1)Blues
Rock (0:00 – 1:19)… Obviously inspired by a cover version of You Don’t Love
Me, featured in Al Kooper’s Super Session album. I changed the main
riff, chord progression for closing the verse section, and added a couple of original bits; tricky intro
and Jazzy bridging section. In other words, this tune was a transitional work
of my young self from his core element, Blues Rock, to a certain kind of
sophistication.
(2)Oldies
(1:19 – 1:48)… Again, this was also another attempt to furnish core elements of
my musical taste with newly acquired knowledge over sophisticated chord
progressions, in this case the basis came from Oldies style, which I had been
keen before I came across with Blues Rock. Originally, both of these tunes had
similar themed lyrics to go with and both were brought into studio to be tried
out by my band called Flowers, briefly in the early 1988. Later, this Oldies
thing was picked up to be properly demo-recorded but the Blues
Rock thing above was never revisited.
(3)Country
Style (1:48 – 3:08)… This was done not for creative purpose but genuinely for
exploring another style. Along with Oldies stuff from the 1950s, Country music
was one of genres I fell in love with in my relatively early years as a music
fan. I do not think this attempt was a successful one, but at least it shows
one of my basic roots as a guitar player and in that sense, I reckon it was a
meaningful recording.
(4)Psychedelic
Jam (3:08 – 4:29)… The running time of the original demo of this tune exceeds over fifteen
minutes, which features written theme for one guitar and a couple of bass
guitars in its beginning and its ending. For this video, I just picked up a
tiny bit from its long jam section that could represent the entire atmosphere
of the tune.
(5)Blues
(4:29 – the end)… This is not a composition but just another 12-bar blues
played in a basic jazz manner. This simply reminds me of a harmonica I occasionally played
in those days was tuned to the key of A and that was the reason why this blues
was played in the key of E. This demo also features me briefly singing La La,
quoting from a song by Fats Domino.
In addition, the
rhythm sections played by the manually operated rhythm machine did not belong
to the original demos but were later added, sometime in 1989.
This tune was originally written for an abandoned conceptual work, which was supposed to deliver a story, in the summer of 1989. In that conceptual work, this tune was given a role to put a twist in the storyline that would cause a bitter split between the main characters. Its original lyrics also referred to a new guitar I actually bought at the time when the story was set, a few years before the writing of the conceptual work and some other trivial things surrounded me back in the days. I do not remember if the original demo already featured the analogue synthesizer played in its arpeggio mode since the abandoned work was entirely destroyed, anyway this might be my first attempt to synchronise programmes made on different machines; the rhythm set for the arpeggio mode on the analogue synthesizer, and a digital programme provided by the rhythm machine. Though this was relatively a primitive attempt that required little accuracy in terms of synchronising, I think the result was not bad for the first attempt at this sort of things.
Another unique ingredient in this tune is an attempt to insert something sounds like Scottish/Celtic theme in the middle and in the end. Again, I do not remember whether this theme was already featured in the original demo or not, but at least I can say that my interests in traditional music might have been linked to a collaboration album by Van Morrison and the Chieftains called Irish Heartbeat, which was originally released in 1988. It was one of my favourite albums back then, along with some Jethro Tull albums that had similar taste and a CD album full of Scottish bagpipe music.
For making this video, I used some photos taken at the Fujiidera Stadium, Osaka, when I went there with my friends for watching a baseball game in the autumn of 1989, in order to make the tune sounds a bit like sport-inspired stuff.
A Tragedy
was an instrumental composition I wrote during the summer of 1990. In those
days, I was working hard for writing an essay about a German philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche, as a course work, and was obsessed with ideas and facts I
was absorbing from various books I referred for my essay writing. Along with
his philosophical thoughts, I was also quite impressed by Nietzsche’s
biographic profile; especially over his fanatically busy writing in his later
life as a sane man that resulted in his dramatic mental collapse on January
1889.
Part V of this
composition is designed to focus on the moment of his mental breakdown. Its
external bizarreness – the incident took place in the street of Turin – is
depicted by rough sound of the analogue synthesizer whilst the protagonist’s
inner world is assumingly reconstructed by the middle sections, which provide victorious harmonies and even an uplifting piano solo that may indicate that his
external insanity might have been a joyous liberation for his inner self. The piano
solo section is written in an unusual time signature of 15/16 because this kind
of joy of liberation should not be treated in a usual manner.
I have written a
handful of saying-goodnight themed tunes and perhaps this one was the latest
stuff so far. These tunes were all associated or furnished with mixture of Jazz
and Blues elements and so was this. When I wrote this tune, I had a particular
place and a person in my mind for saying goodnight. As for the latter, I was
still connected with that person but as for the former, I had just moved out
from that place. But now I recall this kind of tiny details as nothing but
silly things and I have nothing more to talk about this tune, instead I would like to go to bed with saying a very goodnight to you all .
In between 1985 and
2001, I made countless amount of recording materials from my own musical
activities. As far as my original contents concern, I tried to organise them as
well as possible, especially in early years, but there are some exceptions in
any human conducts. While I was working at converting these original materials,
mostly recorded on cassette tapes, to digital mp3 files, I came across with a
very rough sketch recording of this tune. It was found in a tape that contains
other materials from 1990 and some other pieces from 1992, but there was no
mention of this unknown tune on its hand-written label. The tune was played by
a synthesizer with no accompaniment, contained many mistakes and its loose
rhythm keeping was quite horrible. I could not remember on what kind of
occasion I have recorded this thing but I could acknowledge certain elements particular
to my own composing style back in the days. On top of that, actually I thought
it would sound quite cool if only the tune was played in a proper way,
therefore, I decided to make a new demo recording to make sure how it would
sound like.
In this new
recording, conducted on May, 2013, original synthesizer part was converted to
the piano sound and its recording scene was captured to be shown in the video.
I also added a guitar part that was newly written for this occasion. For I felt
something similar to Gustav Holst’s Mars, the Bringer of War, when I listened
to the original sketch demo since its discovery, I put a title referring to the
planet onto this untitled/unknown tune from the past.
This tune
originally had its lyrics, which were not a peaceful depiction of rural scenery
but were full of cynical views on human society ornamented with a metaphor of
human herds; vast majority of conformists inside of the fence, and quite a few
outsiders outside of the fence. To describe my personal position at the time of
writing this tune, in accordance with the said metaphor, I was a born outsider,
who was being held inside of the fence mostly by surrounding ‘others’. The ties
between me and these ‘others’ will be utterly cut off within a few years but
such future was not foreseeable in the early 1993, when the tune was written.
Along with Out
for Walking (in the city), this tune was one of my initial attempts to
feature programmed synthesizer played by the digital sequencer for replacing
the role of the rhythm machine. I wrote several pieces of music in this fashion, especially
in the first half of 1993, some went well and others didn’t – I assess this
tune to be categorised as the former. Use of synthesizer in this way could
reflect my attitude towards the trend in the music scene in those days; I still
retained an ambition for trying to catch up with the latest fashion whilst, as
the piano solo in the middle clearly shows, the core essence of my musical
taste had nothing to do with such sort of ‘scene’ at all. My band mates wisely
rejected to play this tune and no further recording of this tune has ever made.
For making this video, I made the instrumental remix from the original master for
the audio track to be presented with some pictures I took when I visited rural
part of Ireland in the summer of 2001, in order to make the tune more enjoyable
by getting rid of impressions associated with the cynical metaphor in its original
form.
A Tragedy was an instrumental composition I wrote
during the summer of 1990. In those days, I was working hard for writing an
essay about a German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, as a course work, and was
obsessed with ideas and facts I was absorbing from various books I referred for
my essay writing. One of the ideas that impressed me the most from this
research reading was Nietzsche’s famous theory called Eternal Recurrence and it
didn’t take long for me to write this composition by combining the theory with
other elements taken from Nietzsche’s biographic information. Actually, I was
so inspired that I could write this musical work long before completing the
course work.
Part VI of this composition has a function of conclusion in
essay writing, therefore, for those who are familiarised with academic writing
skills it would be obvious though, nothing new to the composition is introduced
in this Part, but it is consists of replays of themes or motifs already appeared in previous Parts. In the previous Part, our protagonist –
Friedrich Nietzsche himself – loses his sanity. Therefore, this entire Part VI
is assigned for Nietzsche’s reflection of his own past life, on his bed in
Weimar being cared by his sister Elizabeth. Following the previous Part, which
depicts his mental collapse, this Part starts with the protagonist’s calm
self-reflection represented by the piano. Then, the Demon, represented by the
ominous organ, comes back to remind him of its knowledge over eternal recurrence.
The Demon plays a role of curator to guide through the protagonist’s past
memories in his own recollection, in which he remembers insulting words thrown
at him from the society surrounded him. Now his Love Theme is accompanied with
ridiculous marching drum – it turns out that what he thought Love was nothing
but a laughable comedy. Then the composition returns to the main Theme, which
signifies a new beginning of another round of the protagonist’s whole life.
Although the music ends with this reprise of the main theme,
the protagonist’s life would never cease to repeat itself exactly in the same
structure infinitely. If the contents one’s life were not worth to live it all through
once again, that life set to the Demon’s revelation – eternal recurrence –
could be described as nothing but a tragedy.
This tune was written for a project of students’ theatrical performance called Zone, to which I was deeply involved during the autumn of 1991. In its initial phase, we started off with gathering random ideas for the project and I wrote some original tunes in accordance with the basic scheme provided by the director, who was my close friend at that time. In its initial phase, the director established a rough sketch of the storyline that involved a scene that shows the execution of convict, by using a kind of sonic weapon. The aim of this execution was not to kill but to brainwash the convict and, we argued, that a doctor who has invented the weapon should be in charge of the ritual of this execution.
I volunteered to work on writing soundtrack music for the project and its demo recording was completed within a few days in late October 1991. For covering the scene of execution, I simply made a brief demo recording of four tracks filled with electronic spontaneous noises generated by a digital synthesizer I possessed at that time. Length of the track was suitable for the performance and the demo was used in the actual performance that took place on December 1991, being played background for an actor’s performance of the Doctor’s execution enhanced by the noise guitar he played.
The audio track of this video consists of my original demo recording and the live performance recorded by a handy video camera, which mainly captured the sound of noise guitar and the actor’s roaring at the end. Its footage is also taken from the original live performance, where I played a state official who places a headset to the poor convict before the execution begins.
A Tragedy was an instrumental composition I wrote during the
summer of 1990. In those days, I was working hard for writing an essay about a
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, as a course work, and was obsessed with
ideas and facts I was absorbing from various books I referred for my essay
writing. One of the ideas that impressed me the most from this research reading
was Nietzsche’s famous theory called Eternal Recurrence and it didn’t take long
for me to write this composition by combining the theory with other elements taken from
Nietzsche’s biographic information. Actually, I was so inspired that I could
write this musical work long before completing the course work.
Part IV of this composition tries to describe a huge gap
between the protagonist’s mind and the society that surrounds him, which could
be summed up in his own words, ‘Human, All Too Human.’
As I have already mentioned in the annotation for Part II of
this composition, we assume Friedrich Nietzsche himself to be the protagonist
here, and the composer ascribes simple slow arpeggio played by the piano and
the acoustic guitar part that associated with the former in a musical way to
describe the pure state of the protagonist’s mind. Other non-musical noises
obviously represent another element; what surrounds the protagonist’s mind
externally. In this video version, I also added some quotes from those who
actually surrounded Nietzsche; Ulrich von Wilamowitz Mollendorf, a senior
classical philologist notably criticising Nietzsche’s first published work from
academic view points; Hans von Bulow, a famous conductor and a close friend of
Richard Wagner criticising Nietzsche’s musical work from an expert’s view
point; and Richard Wagner, the famous composer and a close friend with
Nietzsche at that time, criticising Nietzsche’s private behaviour in a letter addressed
to his doctor. I also added Nietzsche’s potential reply for each criticism, by randomly
choosing from his words.
This tune was written for a project of students’ theatrical performance called Zone, to which I was deeply involved during the autumn of 1991. In its initial phase, we started off with gathering random ideas for the project and I wrote some original tunes in accordance with the basic scheme provided by the director, who was my close friend at that time. In its initial phase, the director established a rough sketch of storyline that involved some characters and one of them was provisionally called ‘the visitor.’ The recording of demos was not conducted under the director’s watch but at my free will and when it came to writing a theme for ‘the visitor’, I simply took the main theme, which I had already written, to be converted to its acoustic variation. In doing so, to connect the theme for ‘the visitor’ and the main theme for the storyline, I had a certain consistency through my understanding of the story, however, the director changed his mind later and decided to use only this variation at a scene of the Visitor’s entry. In the actual performance, it was a brief fragment from the mid-section of this demo recording that was played as background music to enhance the atmosphere of the scene; its footage is presented in the video from the original performance.
Later, I converted this variation, mostly without any modification, to a part of my conceptual work titled Music for a Story-Telling, in which, it was called Somebody to Love (Reprise).
A Tragedy was an instrumental composition I wrote during the
summer of 1990. In those days, I was working hard for writing an essay about a
German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, as a course work, and was obsessed with ideas and facts I
was absorbing from various books I referred for my essay writing. One of the
most impressive pieces from this research reading was a famous quote from The Joyous Science, where Nietzsche
introduced his idea called Eternal Recurrence in a form of asking readers through
the mouth of a knowledgeable demon.
Part II of this composition is allotted for inspiration I obtained from The Demon, who reveals his knowledge on
one’s whole life from its beginning to everything that happened up to the present and would happen in the
future until the death. The Demon’s entry and exeunt are described by simple
but a bit ominous organ solo played in the Phrygian mode. The contents of the
Demon’s revelation – in other words, the key contents of one’s life – are
presented by variations of key motifs from the main body of the composition, arranged for a string quartet. As I have
already mentioned, the inspirations for creating this composition all came from
books written by (and about) Friedrich Nietzsche. Therefore, the composition
assumes the person, to whom The Demon
reveals its knowledge, is Friedrich Nietzsche himself. This follows that the
contents of one’s life mentioned above are all taken from biographic
information of the German philosopher, though it would be confusing a bit.
As I said, the initial demo recording was done in the summer
of 1990. At that time, I was leading a three piece band consists of a drummer,
a bass player who was capable of playing the guitar and keyboard, and me on the
guitar and keyboard and I arranged this composition suitable for the three of
us to play as much as possible. Later, I regretted for this arrangement and
re-recorded some parts of the composition with a new arrangement. The audio
track of this video largely consists of the new arrangement I made in 1994.
This recording was meant to be the closing section of a long
composition called Secret Jewellery Box,
a re-working of my old stuff under the same title I had written in 1991. The
re-working never completed and the preceding section that should directly
concludes to this Ending Piece was never written, because the whole recording scheme was abandoned before it reached
to that point. The reason why I recorded this Ending Piece prior to other sections to be assigned in the middle
was due to technical convenience – sharing the same rhythm programme with the
intro section.
As far as this Ending
Piece concerns, except for a subtle change I made in the very end,
basically nothing new was added to the original work. For other things relating
to this tune, I would like to leave them to be written down for annotations of
the main body of the tune.
Sometimes I compose spontaneously from the scratch, whilst
in other cases I plan before I start writing. This tune was written for a
planned scheme of a conceptual work, which was supposed to begin with Green and end with Red. Actually, I wrote
and recorded a couple of tunes and attempted another, which was later
destroyed, but further composing was abandoned. Perhaps, the failure of the
third composition changed my mind to convert the planned scheme from a
collection of musical works to a literary work – I still remember I used to
talk about a book I was preparing to write to my close friends in those days –
but, after all, even a single word was ever written.
My interest in literature began when I first read Ulysses by James Joyce. It took me about
six months to read it all through in 1988 or 1989 and knowledge I have
familiarised from reading the book naturally turned my interest towards Irish
culture. It didn’t take long before I picked up one of works attributed to W.
B. Yeates, another famous figure in Irish literature, and dipped my imagination
into the world of folklores and fairy tales. In the planned scheme, Green stood
for either a state of naivety and the colour of fairies’ cloak whilst Red stood
for one step before the accomplishment of Alchemy and the colour of fairies’
hat. I don’t remember how it worked with combining things related to fairies
and alchemy any longer but at least, this tune was all about fairies. In this
video version, I made the story that inspired for writing this tune to be shown
in the screen.
Walking Blues was an instrumental piece I wrote as a part of
The D-E-C-D Suite. It was just an idea to integrate a simple motif of the Suite
into the chord progression of 12-bar blues. In the original version I recorded
for the suite, the motif was assigned for the brass section, actually played by
the synthesizer, and harmonica.
When the recording was done, I thought it would be worthwhile
to make another take before deleting the backing track data completely from the
digital multi-track-recorder. Since the original take was made purposefully for
fitting in to the concept of the Suite, it was OK for that specific purpose but
was not satisfying in terms of arrangement and its use of the guitar.
Though I started out playing the guitar being obsessed with
Blues/Rock music, opportunity for me to play genuine 12-bar blues became quite
rarer by that time. As far as my personal demo recordings concern, this was the
first recording of 12-bar blues since the early 1990s. In other words, since
the backing track sounded quite well, as a guitar player, I suddenly felt my
urge for playing the blues without being bounded by crappy self-regulations
such as concept or the Suite. And here’s the result.
As a composer who mainly plays the guitar, I wrote some
instrumental compositions for solo guitar. According to my self-assessment, a
thing simply called ‘For Guitar, No. 1 in
D Minor’, which I wrote in 1989, was the best stuff I wrote in this genre
so far. Three and a half years later, when this tune was written, I thought it
would be plausible to call this tune in the same manner; ‘For Guitar, No. 2 in
D Major.’ The reason why I changed my mind to treat this tune not Absolute
Music but Programme Music under a title of ‘Am
I So Wrong?’ lied on some changes in circumstance where I lived. But I do
not want to go into the detail. Instead, I would rather like to just say that I
was no longer an optimistic student, who could enjoy naming my own composition in
a snobbish way, by that time. One
more thing I want to add to this description about the title of this tune is, that the words are specifically addressed to a girl, who made me measuring the weight of my own
art/music against her value weighed on normal people's day-to-day life.
Finally, I have to confess that I have borrowed some
knowledge I learned by ear and gained from practicing to play Steve Howe’s Mood for a Day for writing this tune.
