Digital Concert Ensemble NOMAD

Naoki Sakata – Spores II (2019)
for flute, clarinet, two violins, viola, violoncello, double bass, prepared piano and percussion

Yukiko Watanabe — Cities and Memory (2019)
for flute, clarinet, two violins, viola, violoncello, double bass, prepared piano and percussion

Marika Kishino – Oud-(2020)
Double Concerto for marimba, piano and ensemble

Jo Kondo — The Shadow of Shade (2010)
for bass flute, viola, cello and piano

Atsuhiko Gondai — Si ambulem in medio unbrae mortis – shadow of »Si« (2019)
for flute, clarinet, two violins, viola, violoncello, double bass, prepared piano and percussion

Ensemble NOMAD
Formed in 1997, Ensemble NOMAD has been highly acclaimed both nationally and internationally as one of the leading contemporary music ensembles. Led by Norio Sato (guitarist/conductor), the ensemble has revived many 20th and 21st century compositions that are rarely performed. True to its name, the Ensemble NOMAD is flexible and spontaneous in its concert arrangements, and its regular concerts in the Tokyo opera city – almost 70 have now taken place – have a great resonance in the contemporary music scene in Japan. For its unique programming and high-quality performance, Ensemble NOMAD was awarded the KEIZO SAJI Prize in 2003, and The Vienna Philharmonic and Suntory Music Aid Award in 2014.

Ensemble NOMAD’s fields of activity are growing rapidly overseas, starting with the Gaudeamus Week in Amsterdam in 2000. Since, it has made appearances in festivals in Venezuela, Mexico, France, Belgium, Britain, Korea, China, the Netherlands and Estonia, and future invitations include Finland, Switzerland and Mexico. The ensemble also regularly offers community engagement programs, visiting schools, nurseries, hospitals and care homes to share the joy and wonder of music with those who have limited access to concerts.

Ensemble NOMAD has released 18 CDs with works by leading Japanese composers such as Jo Kondo, Hidemi Ishida, Norio Fukushi and Shinichiro Ikebe. Other releases include »Bestiario« and »Pruebas de vida«, two CDs with chamber music works by Mexican composer Hebert Vázquez. The latest releases are part of the »Contemporary Chinese Composers« series of ALM Records.

Naoki Sakata – Spores II (2019)
for flute, clarinet, two violins, viola, violoncello, double bass, prepared piano and percussion

»Every once in a while I find moldy food in my kitchen. It’s disgusting but I also notice the ›beauty‹ in its complex and colorful texture. Moreover, it is very interesting to see the symbiosis between the fungi and the plant. For example, a tree and a fungi that live on its root exchange necessary nutrition. Recently, I pursue the situation of the coexistence of musical materials of different morphology in my composition. As the title represents, I composed ›Spores II‹ using the ecology of the fungi as inspiration.

›Spores II‹ consists of 5 sections. Throughout the piece, the variation by the quivering sound forms the base of the texture. For example, in the 1st section, the string instrument’s ›gettato‹ shares a horizontal line. The tremolo forms the matte texture at the 3rd section. The trill and harmonic trill creates the duration at the 4th and 5th section. At the same time, the movement introduced by the wind instruments in the 2nd section develops a complex and living network.«

– Naoki Sakata

Naoki Sakata (*1981)
Naoki Sakata graduated from Aichi University of the Arts in 2003 at the top of his class. Since 2007 he has been living and studying in France at the Ecole Normale de Musique de Paris with Edith Lejet, and at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris with Stefano Gervasoni. In 2013 Sakata received his degree and attended Cursus I at IRCAM. He is currently working as a composer for the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra in Japan.

Among other prizes, Sakata received the 28th Akutagawa Composition Award and the first prize of the Toru Takemitsu Composition Award as well as the Takefu Composition Prize. He was supported by the Scholarships of the Sacem in 2007 and the Rohm Music Foundation in 2010-2011.

His works have been performed at festivals and projects all over the world, including Music Tomorrow of the NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, the Vienna International Saxophone Festival, the Festival Musica in Strasbourg, Voix Nouvelles in Royaumont and as an invited composer at the Takefu International Music Festival.

Yukiko Watanabe — Cities and Memory (2019)
for flute, clarinet, two violins, viola, violoncello, double bass, prepared piano and percussion

»The work consists of the sounds and memories of people’s invisible journeys. This refers to the concept of ›Mono-ha‹ (School of Things), an art movement that emerged in Japan in the late 1960s. ›Mono‹ means ›thing‹ or ›object‹, and artists in the ›School of Things‹ tend to present mainly found objects, natural materials, or simple, everyday objects. In the current context, it is difficult to physically move the body to some other land. I can only feel transported by reading someone else’s memories of their travels on the internet and enjoying the virtual journey by imagining an unknown land. I composed this piece to combine a moment of something somewhere in a different time and place.

›Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice. Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased. Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or, perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.‹«

– Yukiko Watanabe

(Italo Calvino, »Le città invisibili«)

Yukiko Watanabe (*1983)

Yukiko Watanabe studied composition and piano at the Toho Gakuen School of Music in Japan. In 2008 she moved to Austria and studied with Beat Furrer at the University of Arts in Graz. From 2014 to 2016 she studied with Johannes Schöllhorn at the Cologne University of Music. She has received various international prizes and scholarships and her music is performed worldwide. Watanabe was a fellow of the International Ensemble Modern Academy Scholarship (2016/17) in Frankfurt and the Kunststiftung NRW in the Artists‘ Village Schöppingen 2018. In 2019 she took up a residency for new music at the Goethe Institute Canada. Since 2017 she is artistic director of her own project, which aims to support young musicians by giving them the opportunity to develop their creative abilities.

Marika Kishino – Oud-(2020)
Double Concerto for marimba, piano and ensemble

»›Oud‹ means agarwood. The Japanese call it ›Jinko‹, which literally means ›submerged fragrance‹. The piece begins with a sharp touch on a wooden instrument. Its resonance appears and then gradually disappears in the room as if it were a fragrance of incense woods. It constantly changes its musical states, which include density, timbre and gestures, and forms a fragrant sound, as if the heartwood had been infected to become fragrant.

The scents of incense woods such as agarwood, kyara or sandalwood have long been appreciated in Japanese history and culture. A legend says that agarwood first came to Japan when an incense wood trunk floated ashore. People noticed that the wood smelled wonderful when they placed it near a fire. We can enjoy the fragrant incense wood as a ›hearing scent‹ in music.

Incense woods emit their scent and it spreads throughout the room. The scent changes constantly and will eventually disappear. But it evokes our sensations, memories and emotions. For me this is very similar to what I can experience with certain sounds in music.

Scented woods are created when they are infected with a kind of mould. During the infection process, the light and odourless woods produce a dark aromatic resin and thus transform into a very dense, dark, resinous heartwood. When I am composing I think of this chemical process, which can take ten to several hundred years.«

»Oud« is dedicated to Norio Sato and commissioned by Takako Arakida Fund.

Marika Kishino (*1971)
Marika Kishino studied law in Kyoto and received her law diploma in 1994. She came to France in 1995, where she studied composition at the École Normale de Musique and IRCAM in Paris and at the Conservatoire National Supérieur Musique et Danse in Lyon. She has received scholarships from the major studios for electroacoustic music such as the INA GRM Paris, SWR Experimentalstudio or ZKM | Karlsruhe and has received numerous prizes and awards. She has also received commissions from various radio orchestras (including WDR, BR, Radio France) and performed at the Venice Biennale, Achtbrücken Festival Cologne and the Ultima Festival in Oslo, to name just a few. Her portrait CD »Irisation« was published by the Wergo label and the German Music Council as part of the Edition Zeitgenössische Musik. Her works are published by Edizioni Suvini Zerboni in Milan.

Jo Kondo — The Shadow of Shade (2010)
for bass flute, viola, cello and piano

»›The Shadow of a Shade‹ may represent my recent compositional style. It is shaped in the juxtapositional form of many of my works since the 1980’s, but the constituting sections are now more diverse, and subtler, in musical character. The work involves so to speak a ›drama‹, resulting from the contrasting characters of the sections; but the overall musical discourse is not organized in such a way as to create a goal-oriented directionality. The drama in this music is non-teleological, or static; a contemplative drama that your mind may muse when one stands still under a tree, bathing in the simmering shadows of shivering leaves.«

– Jo Kondo

Jo Kondo (*1947)
Jo Kondo has been active worldwide since graduating from Tokyo University of Arts in 1972. He was Composer in Residence at the Hartt School of Music in Connecticut and taught at the University of Victoria in Canada and the Dartington International Summer School in England. He has held professorships at the Ochanomizu University in Tokyo, the Elisabeth University of Music in Hiroshima and currently at the Showa University of Music.
In addition to his studies and teaching, Kondo founded and directed the Musica Practica Ensemble, a chamber orchestra for contemporary music, from 1980 until its dissolution in 1991. His more than 160 compositions have been performed in Japan, North America and Europe and have been part of international music festivals.
For his orchestral work »In the Woods« Jo Kondo received the Odaka Prize in 1991 and the Nakajima Kenzo Prize in 2005 for his successes in contemporary Japanese music. Since 2012 he has been an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was awarded the 86th Prize of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (Japan) in 2018. Jo Kondo is co-editor of the Contemporary Music Review. He has been a jury member at many international competitions, such as the Gaudeamus International Composer’s Competition, Akutagawa Award and the Kyoto Prize. He is currently chairman of the Japan Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM – Japanese Section).

Atsuhiko Gondai — Si ambulem in medio unbrae mortis – shadow of »Si« (2019)
for flute, clarinet, two violins, viola, violoncello, double bass, prepared piano and percussion

This piece is constructed on just one note »Si« (B). Of course, you hear other notes, but these are just notes derived from »Si«. »Si« in Japanese can be associated with »death« because of the same pronunciation. The note »Si« runs through the whole piece, and accordingly it is determined by the thought of death: its path runs in its shadow, which constantly envelops it; it develops, but in the end it does not escape death – as if it were persistently whispering »memento mori«.

Here and there, one can faintly hear segments of Gregorian Chants. They were placed there as a guiding torch to prevent one from going astray, but when one recalls the hidden text (below), these unexpectedly give a new meaning to this piece, making it almost a music of hope or prayer in this difficult time.

»Si ambulavero in valle umbrae mortis,
non timebo mala,
quoniam tu mecum es.
Virga tua et baculus tuus,
ipsa me consolata sunt.«

»Even though I walk through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me.
Your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.«

(From Psalm 23)

Atsuhiko Gondai (*1965)

Atsuhiko Gondai studied composition at the Toho Gakuen School of Music and attended the University of Music Freiburg on a DAAD scholarship from 1990 to 1992. From 1993 to 1994 he lived in Paris as a researcher in the Japanese government’s overseas study programme for artists. He studied computer music at IRCAM until 1995. His teachers were Yasuo Sueyoshi, Klaus Huber and Salvatore Sciarrino (composition), Philippe Manoury (computer music) and Zsigmond Szathmary (organ). In addition to the 1st place at the Valentino Bucchi Composition Competition in 1991, he won 2nd place at the International Composers‘ Competition Kazimierz Serocki in 1992 and was awarded numerous other prizes at home and abroad. In 1999 he released his first CD with his own works »ritratto rosa«.
Gondai has explored the musical space as a rite rooted in the Catholic religious faith. In recent years, he has worked with the Buddhist priest Shomyo Chanters and has broken new ground through the exchange with Buddhist music. He is currently based in Kanazawa and Paris where he works on composition projects.