Newer Than the Sum of Its Parts

For musicians who can harness the seemingly divergent energies of preservation and innovation, the crossroads where cultural traditions and personal inspiration meet has proved particularly fertile in the waning years of this century. Few composers have been more active in this area than Minoru Miki, who has written prolifically in every genre from film scores to opera, including a large body of original music for traditional Japanese instruments.

“Both Japanese and European cultures are standing on the wall now,” says Miki, 68. “They cannot continue to develop in their independent ways. I believe that a new culture must be created by the collision of different preceding cultures. So I have never refused either Japanese or European elements in my music, although I am always trying to establish my own identity.”

Some of that identity will be established for local audiences when the 12-member Pro Musica Nipponia touring ensemble takes the stage tonight at Marsee Auditorium of El Camino College. Founded by Miki in 1964, Pro Musica Nipponia is a chamber orchestra of Japanese instruments, its kimono-clad musicians now conducted by Takuo Tamura.

“The Japanese name that I gave the ensemble is Nihon Ongaku Shudan, which has a double meaning,” Miki reports. “One meaning is a group of Japanese traditional instruments; the other is a music ensemble representing Japan. At the beginning, one of my teachers gave us the name Ensemble Nipponia for foreign use, but I didn’t like that name. When my ‘Symphony for Two Worlds’ had its world premiere in Leipzig with the Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1981, Kurt Masur presented us as Pro Musica Nipponia, which we have kept.”

Although the instruments are traditional--shakuhachi and fue (flutes), shamisen and biwa (lutes), kotos (zithers) and many types of drums--their combination in an orchestra is not. Bringing them together was Miki’s first innovation, from which his own style evolved naturally.

“At first, when I organized Pro Musica Nipponia, I thought only that I had a duty to create a sort of musical plaza where all our traditional instruments could gather together. Historically, they never had a chance to play as a total ensemble, which was a shame.”

In Japan as elsewhere, the 1960s were a decade of extraordinary cultural ferment and opportunity. It was then, for example, that the late composer Toru Takemitsu renewed his interest in traditional Japanese instruments and that drum-based taiko ensembles, such as the Kodo drummers, embarked on the road to their current international popularity.

“My music and Pro Musica Nipponia have no relationship with other movements from that time, and precede that of other composers and groups by several years,” Miki says. “But I certainly respect Takemitsu and Kodo. I think all our movements were fortunate to emerge in the Japan of the ‘60s.”

Raised in a family in which Japanese instruments were played, Miki first encountered European music in a high school glee club. He studied piano and composition in the Western style at the National University of Fine Arts and Music in Tokyo, and after graduation supported himself writing for films. Most of these were documentaries, although his best-known feature film was the controversially explicit “In the Realm of the Senses” from 1976.

Miki also composed choral music, joining the Tokyo Liedertafel in 1961 and taking that group to Europe in 1968. All of this music combines European and Japanese elements to some degree, but it was the creation of Pro Musica Nipponia that concentrated his energies on the traditional music of his homeland.

“It was only in 1968, four years after I founded Pro Musica Nipponia, that I perceived the true beauties of Japanese traditional music through listening to the playing of a koto genius. Then I studied Japanese classical music seriously, and I suppose my music changed to a new direction.”

Miki took Pro Musica Nipponia on its first European tour in 1972. The ensemble was last in Los Angeles in 1988, although it made a brief tour of the U.S. in 1994, including performances of Miki’s “Symphony for Two Worlds” with Masur and the New York Philharmonic.

In addition to several earlier pieces by Miki and some Japanese folk and classical music, tonight’s program features the local premiere of Miki’s “Requiem 99,” a piece created specially for this tour--which began Tuesday in Columbus, Ohio, and included a concert in the Great Performances series at Lincoln Center in New York--and soloist Evelyn Glennie. This piece is a reworking of Miki’s “Concerto Requiem,” which was dedicated to the victims of World War II and had the 21-string koto as the solo instrument.

“When the organizers of this tour asked me for a new piece, I had no time to compose a completely new work,” Miki says. “However, I thought that 1999 is just the end of the past century and that a new version of my Requiem with marimba solo could look back at those cruel years and calm the souls of all the victims of inhumanity. So the name of this new work is ‘Requiem 99.’ I hope the new century has no such wars.”

The reworked piece begins with members of the ensemble out among the audience, clapping stones together. The rhythm that emerges becomes the basis for the composition. “Harmony is brewed mainly by heterophony [the simultaneous use of different versions of a single basic melodic line], without the usual sort of chords. The music aims toward the awakening of spirits, and after the second marimba cadenza, calmness returns with the stones. For this piece, the conductor cannot perform in the standard Western style as in my other pieces for Pro Musica Nipponia. He should play percussion instruments and guide the other musicians to produce a strong total impression.”

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Miki began composing for marimba 30 years ago, inspired by Japanese virtuoso Keiko Abe. He says that his “Marimba Spiritual” has been played more than 2000 times, including recorded and televised performances by Glennie that he found quite moving. The Scottish percussionist, who was here recently playing a new concerto by Roberto Sierra with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, has long had a keen interest in world music. On this program she will also be the soloist in an arrangement of Abe’s “Prism Rhapsody.”

“I discovered Miki’s music in my late teens, early 20s, when I began playing the marimba literature,” Glennie says. “His marimba pieces are standards for percussionists. I love space and silence, both aurally and visually, and Eastern philosophy deals so naturally with this.

“I’ve collaborated with individual taiko drummers and I had a major concert collaboration with Kodo last year in London. However, this will be my first time working with Japanese instruments other than percussion. There will be sound colors and expressions that I have never experienced, so I’m thankful we have several concerts together in order to digest and learn and experiment.”

Though a composer of music for stones and instruments many centuries old, Miki is also clearly a man of the Computer Age. He notes that many of his CDs, otherwise available only in Japan, can be purchased off the Internet from sources such as CDNow. He has his own Web site (https://www2u.biglobe.ne.jp/~m-miki/en/) chronicling his far-flung activities, and he conducted this interview through an exchange of e-mail as he was preparing to depart Japan for the final tour rehearsals in Ohio.

Having lived through World War II as a teenager in Japan, Miki has written many pieces dealing with the horror of war, and others addressing environmental issues. Retired from the active leadership of Pro Musica Nipponia since 1984, he is now most interested in expanding his fusion scope with a new ensemble called Orchestra Asia, for which he has composed pieces for Japanese-Chinese and Japanese-Korean orchestras of ethnic instruments, and in opera and musical theater.

“I believe that only by having chances to talk together can we guarantee peace,” he says. “That is the highest reason for founding Orchestra Asia in 1993. Orchestra Asia will appear on the last night concert of this year’s Proms in London, playing my Pipa Concerto with the excellent pipa [Chinese lute] soloist, Yang Jing. She will also be an important soloist in my seventh opera, ‘The Tale of Genji,’ which will be premiered by the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in June of 2000.

“My life works now are opera and Asia.”

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PRO MUSICA NIPPONIA, El Camino College Center for the Arts, Marsee Auditorium, 16007 Crenshaw Blvd., Torrance. Date: Today, 7 p.m. Prices: $18-$21. Phone: (310) 329-5345.