Noh Reimagined & New Music
New commissions and new handbook for composers
In collaboration with Kings Place and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group (BCMG), Noh Reimagined commissioned two new works to two young composers Ben Nobuto and Hollie Harding, which will premiere at Kings Place on 22nd June(tbc), followed by a performances at CBSO Centre in Birmingham on 23rd June, both featuring musicians from BCMG.
Link to New Music performaces at Noh Reimagined 2024, Kings Place, London.
Ben Nobuto and Hollie Harding Noh residency December 2023, Tokyo
Noh Reimagined has been developing this project since 2021, and in 2023, we complied a 44 pages -handbook, “Noh Reimagined: Unveiling the Music of Noh through Kinuta” The handbook was designed to explain the strategy of the music of Noh, written by Tatsushi Narita, an eminent kotsuzumi ( shoulder drum) player, and the award-winning Canadian composer Daryl Jamieson, whose works are deeply influenced by the aesthetics of Noh. The handbook was very useful for the composition process for the commissioned composers and will be used for more workshops in the future.
“Noh has been inspiring composers trained in the western tradition (including many Japanese-born composers – Japanese people will not in general learn about or experience Noh in school or even in music college) for more than a century, across a wide variety of styles, from experimentalists like Harry Partch, more conservative composers like Benjamin Britten, to the avant-garde (Karlheinz Stockhausen and Iannis Xenakis). Pierre Boulez said – in multiple essays included in the collection Orientations (trans. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, 1990) – that ‘the Noh remains the peak of Oriental art’, valorising in particular the ‘stylistic and technical’ ways in which Noh – and only Noh, in his opinion – had ‘solved’ the problem of how to transcend the binary of spoken and sung (overcoming the limitations of Baroque recitative and Schoenberg’s Sprechstimme).”
Daryl Jamieson
Comments from commissioned composers
“Working with noh musicians and actors from Japan has been a hugely positive experience for me. I found the workshops very thought-provoking as they introduced me to ideas about Japanese aesthetics and philosophy that I hadn’t come across before, especially new ways of thinking about time and musical structure. I found it deeply inspiring and relevant to my own compositional practice. I am excited to combine Japanese aesthetics with western instrumental techniques and electronics as I feel this is a new area of exploration in contemporary music. In my own work, I often draw ideas from digital media and internet aesthetics to create saturated, playful and high-intensity environments. On the surface, this seems quite far removed from the sound-world of noh, which deals with slow, studied movements over long spans of time. But studying noh and watching the plays, I felt moments of resonance between my own musical thinking and noh’s, as if I was seeing some of my own ideas reflected back to me from a different angle. For example, the concept of jo-ha-kyū, which states that all actions should start slow, speed up, then end swiftly, a structure of constant, gradual acceleration, finds analogy in the modern idea of cultural acceleration, the ever-accelerating rate of technology and the explosion of digital information, the pervasive sense that life is much faster than it used to be (and is only getting faster). I am deeply influenced by these ideas when writing music, so I find these parallels fascinating. For me, they open up new ways of thinking about music, new possibilities for sound, and new relationships between different points in history. Due to the open nature of the collaboration, I feel encouraged to take creative risks and explore different ways of incorporating noh aesthetics into a Western musical practice. The in-depth, hands-on experiences with noh experts has given me a nuanced appreciation of various aspects of noh, and I feel inspired to apply these to my composition in a way that isn’t superficial or imitative, but somehow communicates the essence of the artform whilst being fresh, forward-thinking and relevant to today. I think this project has the potential to be very influential for the British contemporary music scene, as it could introduce many composers to a whole era and style of music that is rarely discussed. Given how stimulating noh has been for previous generations of composers, from Benjamin Britten to Stockhausen, I feel that this project has the power to invigorate many younger composers today and inspire them towards new directions. Noh Reimagined holds significant potential to influence British contemporary artists by introducing them to a rarely discussed era and style, potentially invigorating younger generations and guiding them toward new creative paths, akin to the historical influence of Noh on composers such as Britten and Stockhausen.”
Ben Nobuto
“The project offers a rich and fertile opportunity for the expansion of composers’ creative practice through engaging with techniques, sounds, and philosophical approaches that reach beyond Western traditions and ways of working. For me personality, it has enabled me to work in new ways and expand my thinking and creative work in new previously un-explored directions.”
Hollie Harding