The Creation and Future of Japanese Traditional Music

Yuka Takechi has forged a unique career as a composer at the highest level. She has composed for orchestras, chamber ensembles and choirs with western musical instruments and has also been commissioned by first-class Japanese traditional music players. She works on creating new classical music for Japanese traditional music and its instruments. Her works incorporating Japanese traditional instruments have been performed by leading Japanese exponents such as Mayumi Miyata (sho), Sukeyasu Shiba (ryuteki), and Yoko Nishi (koto). Her works transform elements within genres of Japanese traditional music such as Shomyo and Gagaku, and are highly acclaimed on account of their refined and sonorous colour palette.

Her work has been performed throughout Europe, Japan, the USA and Russia, and on occasions such as the International Zagreb Music Biennale and the Tanglewood Music Festival of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Her compositions have been performed by leading orchestras such as the New Japan Philharmonic, and the Tokyo City Philharmonic Orchestra, and selected members of the London Sinfonietta, the Royal Scottish Orchestra. In 2012, Indra’s Net for Koto and Flute premiered at Carnegie Hall in New York. In 2016, her large-scale commissioned work for traditional instruments, A piece based on Shakespeare, premiered at the National Theatre in Tokyo.

In this talk, Takechi introduced her works by using video and audio materials and considered the potential of Japanese traditional music, its creativity and its future. Takechi was joined by award-winning violinist Midori Komachi, who performed a selection of Takechi’s original pieces for violin.

A video of Takechi’s talk and Komachi’s performance can be found here:

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