Role: Research Fellow | Organization: Scripps College
“Creativity has its own gravity. Everything will fall into place.” —Koji Nakano
When I began my undergraduate career, I thought that I would declare as a music major and continue my training as a lyric soprano in graduate school. I even dreamed of performing baroque arias and Philippine kundiman art songs in far-off concert halls. But the universe had very different plans for me — and I'm grateful for that. I slowly realized that my passion for creating art through multiple disciplines outweighed my love of performing music. The Imagined Sceneries project in 2016 cemented this for me.
Background
As a Mellon Undergraduate Research Fellow at Scripps College, I commissioned, produced, and premiered composer Koji Nakano's Imagined Sceneries, a chamber work with texts from Murasaki Shikibu's Heian era novel The Tale of Genji, electronically manipulated soundscapes recorded in Kyoto, Japan in 2015, and digital projections of artist Ebina Masao’s 1953 print series Tale of Genji. This project synthesized my musical background, the knowledge of Japanese art history that I had accumulated as an art history major, and my professional experience in arts administration and marketing. As the chamber work's producer, I designed the image used in Imagined Sceneries' marketing collateral for its Southern California tour.
Imagining Imagined Sceneries
An image like this doesn't have the sole purpose of just hyping an event. An image representing a new work of music bears an almost synesthetic responsibility. The work of music must be heard in the image itself. It's an experience of the work's performance in an image. But at the time, I had never seen Imagined Sceneries' full score or heard the work in its entirety, as Koji Nakano was still finalizing the work.
I instinctively latched on to Ebina's Tale of Genji prints, which Nakano and I had chosen together from Scripps College's collection to be digitally projected alongside the work's performance. And Nakano knew he wanted the series' print depicting Chapter 45 of Genji in this image. But I wasn't satisfied with using the print as the image's sole visual element. The multilayered work encompassed more than Ebina's reimagining of this tale. I needed to deep dive into Nakano's compositional process and Imagined Sceneries itself.
Ver. 1: What is living composition?
After exchanging emails with Nakano and reading his published papers, I learned more about his own unique approach to composition. He writes what he calls living composition, a musical composition that begins with an idea and an open framework. When performed, a living composition is informed by the individual musical personalities and musical cultures of its performers. Mindful of the wide range of his collaborators' musical backgrounds, he understands that music cannot be composed in only one way, and combines Western and Asian styles of music in his compositions.
Inspired by this concept, I juxtaposed Ebina's imagining of Heian era Japan with a photograph of Scripps College's lush, green campus, the site of the work's premiere and where many of the works' performers attended college. I lowered the opacity of the Scripps photo and gave it a sepia-like treatment to make the Ebina print the star of the image. (It would be the brightest thing in the dimly lit Scripps Clark Humanities Museum while projected on the museum's wall on the day of Imagined Sceneries' premiere after all.)
Once I composited and edited the images, I realized that it was difficult to identify the photo on the left as one of Scripps. I solicited the feedback of both Nakano and my fellowship advisor (and co-producer and co-commissioner) Scripps Professor Anne Harley. Both suggested replacing the Scripps photo with a more modern-looking one to strengthen the contrast of the two images. During these conversations, I learned more about Nakano's vision for Imagined Sceneries, as a bridge between the present and the Heian era of the past. And that such a contrast would help convey this vision.
Ver. 2: And the lyrics?
While designing this image, I was concurrently finalizing Imagined Sceneries' libretto with Nakano. So, for version 2 of the Imagined Sceneries image, I let the chamber work's lyrics and its relationship to Ebina's Chapter 45 print guide my selection of the new image on the left. I knew that the following lines from Chapter 45 of The Tale would be sung by the work's two soprano soloists, both representing the two sisters depicted in Ebina's print, at the same moment that the print itself would be projected in performance. Here are the lyrics with Royall Tyler's English translation:
橋姫の心をくみて高瀬さす棹の雫にそでぞ濡れぬる
What drops wet these sleeves, when the river boatman’s oar, skimming the shallows,
sounds out the most secret heart of the Maiden of the Bridge!
The "Bridge" in the text alludes to Uji Bridge, which links the ancient Japanese capitals of Nara and Kyoto, and plays an important role in Chapter 45 of The Tale. I found a photo of Uji Bridge in the modern-day and placed it into the image. I positioned Uji Bridge in such a way that suggested it was not only a literal bridge, but also a figurative one from the present to the Heian era.
In my conversation with Nakano about version 2, he said that the image of Uji Bridge was too far removed from the specific sites in modern-day Kyoto that inspired Imagined Sceneries. I learned that Nakano had never recorded any of Imagined Sceneries' soundscapes there, as well as about how site-specific his work was. Nakano then shared photos that he took to document his soundscape recordings to use as suggested replacements.
Ver. 3: I hear it.
After testing the image's look and swapping out some of Nakano's photos, I found his picture of Karasuma Gate Bus Terminal near Kyoto Station, which seemed like the most modern-looking image in the deck. I went with it — flipping it and adjusting its placement in the Imagined Sceneries image until I got this.
Compositionally, the terminal and the print's two figures seem to confront each other. The bus terminal's roof casts a shadow on the verandah of Ebina's scene. The buildings bleed into Ebina's print. The two figures observe this modern landscape. Together, these images represent the meeting of worlds and times that Nakano talked about. The station’s plasma screen monitor and buildings undeniably set the left image in the present day, in ways that the past two photos could not. This faded modern scene in contrast with the vibrant colors of Ebina's print does more than stage the print as the image's star, as I initially intended. This contrast seemed to capture an important idea in Nakano's Imagined Sceneries — that the past is deserving of being examined and celebrated in our present.
I heard Imagined Sceneries then. This was it. Nakano and Prof. Harley thought so too.
Wanna learn more about Koji Nakano's Imagined Sceneries?
Here's a Scalar book I published in 2016 with the support of the Digital Humanities Initiative at The Claremont Colleges and presented at ASIANetwork's conference "Digital and Beyond: Ways of Knowing Asia." It documents the Imagined Sceneries production and presents a virtual version of the exhibition that I curated with Scripps' collection to set the stage for the work's premiere at the Scripps Clark Humanities Museum. The book also includes my photo essay inspired by Koji Nakano's composition.
For a talk on Imagined Sceneries I gave as part of Scripps College's Presidential Inauguration Academic Showcase, watch this video.
If you want to read about Imagined Sceneries' reimagining and "re-sounding" of Heian Kyoto through the framework of philosopher Michel de Certeau’s concepts of the city, read my honors senior art history thesis.
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