East Will Meet West During Orchestra’s El Camino College Concert

To musicians in Japan, there’s nothing incompatible about a distinctively Asian instrument like the samisen in a symphony orchestra solidly rooted in Western musical tradition.

Thousands of young composers in Japan write music in the symphonic style, says Gardena conductor Akira Kikukawa, who is founder and music director of the Japanese Philharmonic Orchestra of Los Angeles. Japanese instruments and melodies are used in original compositions as well as traditional Japanese music scored for a symphony orchestra, he said.

Because it frequently uses Japanese music and instruments, his group is considered a Japanese philharmonic orchestra--the only one outside Japan, according to the New Grove Dictionary of American Music. About half of the orchestra’s members are of Japanese descent.

“Our motto is to perform Japanese music at each concert,” said Kikukawa, adding with a laugh, “except when we do Beethoven’s Ninth. That is a whole evening.” The orchestra has performed about 150 Japanese pieces since its founding in 1961.

But it has not performed in the South Bay in the last 15 years. Kikukawa plans to remedy that situation, not only with a concert this Saturday evening at El Camino College, but with yearly concerts at the Torrance campus afterward. The orchestra normally plays at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Los Angeles Music Center and the Japan America Theater in Little Tokyo.

The orchestra’s mingling of East and West will be very apparent at a family concert Saturday at 7:30 p.m. in the Marsee Auditorium. The traditional sound of stringed, banjo-like samisens will blend with symphonic orchestrations in “Echigo-Jishi,” an 1811 lion dance.

The lion dance is usually done by two or three young girls costumed like lions, Kikukawa said, but the audience Saturday will have to use its imagination.

The long, three-stringed samisen was developed around 1550 in China, later making its way to Japan, where it became an accompanying instrument for Kabuki, a formal drama combining pantomime, dance and song that originated in the 17th Century.

Joining the orchestra will be a samisen group trained by Kichisaburo Kineya, who has a studio in Gardena and was a leading player in Kabuki theaters in Japan before coming to the United States.

Player Mary Ikebasu of Tarzana said most of the group have been with Kineya for more than 15 years. She said it takes three years to master the instrument, on which scales are played by plucking the strings with a large ivory pick called a bachi.

In the purely Western vein, the orchestra will offer movements from Dvorak’s symphony “From the New World” and two Beethoven symphonies, including the familiar Fifth. Jenna Morita, a drama student at Lynn Middle School in Torrance, will narrate the familiar musical tale, “Peter and the Wolf,” by Prokofiev.

The sound will change drastically when the children of the Tozai Gakuen Rhythm Group from the East-West Language School in Gardena performs two songs on such instruments as harmonicas, triangles, drums, gongs and castanets.

Kikukawa, 56, was a cellist in Japan and came to the United States to study with cellist Gabor Rejto at USC. He also studied conducting there with Ingolf Dahl. After Japanese organizations said there was a need for a Japanese symphony orchestra in Los Angeles, Kikukawa said, he formed the orchestra 27 years ago with 31 players.

Although it was initially an all-Japanese ensemble of young players, Kikukawa said that as the orchestra undertook more serious and difficult music--especially works by 20th-Century composers such as Richard Strauss and Igor Stravinsky--it grew into an orchestra of older players, many of them studio professionals.

But like all community orchestras, the Philharmonic also has its share of what Kikukawa calls “teachers and housewives” who are good musicians. There will be 55 players on stage at El Camino, Kikukawa said.

In scheduling the El Camino concert, he said he wanted to do a program for children and families in the South Bay Japanese community.

Kikukawa has supplied 160 complimentary tickets to the concert for Torrance music students, said Lucille Le Mieux, music and fine arts coordinator for the Torrance Unified School District. Under an arrangement between the orchestra and the district, which has a large Japanese enrollment, Torrance students will participate in future South Bay concerts by the orchestra, and some musicians will give musical demonstrations in the schools, Le Mieux said.

The school district is helping to sponsor the concert, along with the City of Torrance and the South Bay Division of the Japan Business Assn. of Southern California.

The business association has encouraged members to buy ads in the concert program and donate to the orchestra, according to Gardena importer Ken Ogawa, a former president of the association who is now an adviser.