Network For New Music: Debussy meets Japan

Network for New Music shaped its April concert to the Philadelphia International Festival of the Arts format by focusing on the encounter with Asian culture that influenced French composers like Debussy and Ravel. The Network has examined East-West crosscurrents all season anyway, so it followed the same strategy that most Philadelphia musical organizations have adapted for the Festival: It did the kind of thing it does all the time.

The program opened with solid performances of Debussy's Sonata for flute, viola, and harp (my second this week— see my review of Dolce Suono) and Toro Takemitsu's 1989 work, Toward the Sea III, with both pieces accompanied by a video. I didn't feel the video added anything important to either work.

Thurber's theory

Let me put it this way: James Thurber once divided writers into "putterinners" like Charles Dickens and "takerouters" like Ernest Hemingway (and Thurber himself). The two types of writers exist, in my opinion, because they appeal to two different types of readers.

If you favor the takerouters, you probably form images in response to a small amount of information from the author, and find the putterinners wordy. If you favor the putterinners, you probably need the extra information and think the takerouters create thin, shallow scenes.

I've been a takerouter ever since I started reading fiction when I was a child, and I respond to music the same way I respond to words. I don't need any external help when I hear the Debussy sonata.

True multimedia works are a different matter. In pieces like the Maurice Wright multimedia Darwiniana, which Network for New Music premiered last season, the music is supposed to complement and reinforce the images. The visuals are part of a unified whole. They aren't afterthoughts that interfere with the images the music naturally creates in my mind.

Where's the melody?

The program's second half dropped the visuals and presented two pieces by Dai Fujikura that continue the fruitful encounter between Asian and Western musical traditions.

Fujikura was born in Japan but received his musical education in London and various places in Europe. He became fascinated by traditional Japanese instruments as a 20-year-old when he encountered them at a summer school in Germany.

Fujikura's Okeanos combines the oboe, the clarinet and the viola with two Japanese instruments, the koto (a plucked instrument that resembles a zither, albeit bigger, more complicated, and better looking) and the sho (a three-reed wind instrument with several pipes).

Fujikura's second piece, Halcyon, teamed the clarinet with the string trio. In both pieces, Fujikura is primarily interested in the blends and contrasts he can create with his instrumental combinations. They're both effective pieces with some striking passages.

Debussy would have understood Fujikura's interest in novel sounds, and he would have applauded the mingling of Eastern and Western traditions. But he might have wished the composer had included a bit more melody.