Word: mayuzumi
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...than an unfamiliar art form. They gave him a novel idea: Why not apply the technique of the classic Western ballet to the spirit and music of Bugaku, the Japanese court dance? Bugaku's 1,200-year-old tradition of "noble music" left Balanchine unawed, and Composer Toshiro Mayuzumi was asked to write "some Japanese-flavored music" that Balanchine could set to dancing. Last week, with the New York City Ballet's premiere of the new Bugaku, Balanchine proved how right he could be by daring to go wildly wrong...
Balanchine's notion of the Orient is clearly more erotic than Mayuzumi's. The music is fragmented and ethereal, with no hint of sensuality in rhythm or dynamics. The dance, though, is something else again. The lovers stalk each other with expressionless hunger, and the postures they strike between movements are clear imitations of love. Balanchine did not intend to copy the traditional Bugaku, in which only men appear, but those who are misled by the borrowed title are likely to think that if such goings on are traditional in the Imperial Household, never mind the Ginza...
...Spirit. Mayuzumi, 34, has already written some highly admired symphonic music (The Nirvana Symphony, Bacchanale) and some chamber work, but Bugaku is his first ballet score. His music, which retains Oriental overtones in an instrumentation for Western musicians (who don't play the hichiriki or the sho), slips in and out of tonality, but Mayuzumi is uncertain about the effect on Western ears. "I cannot say that my music is really Japanese-flavored," he says. "But I am a Buddhist and very interested in Zen philosophy, so I hope some kind of Japanese spirit reflects in my music...
...Mayuzumi arrived in New York from his home in Tokyo barely in time to see Bugaku's final rehearsal. He had never seen Balanchine's interpretation of his music before. He smiled enigmatically when asked if he had intended his music for a wedding scene, but said that everything was "just as I expected-only much better...
...Toshiro Mayuzumi: Nirvana Symphonie (Time Records). A 1958 composition in which avant-garde Japanese Composer Mayuzumi mixes orchestra and male chorus with purely electronic beeps, whistles and growls as a means of "creating my own musical Nirvana." Whatever he created (he also refers to the piece as "a sort of Buddhistic cantata"), the music is fascinating-full of swelling sonorities and eerie spatial sounds...