Program #85, December 27 2001: Asian voices/Dialogues with Asia series, part IV.

This program turned out to be first and foremost about textural connections, I think. It started off with a piece ("Sum #1" is really just a few seconds' worth of intro to the main piece itself) by local composer James Whetzel, a reinterpretation/extension of forms from Hindustani classical music. For the rest of the first hour, the playlist incorporated some fairly trad (though quite sonically interesting) material, as it segued both by texture and by geography (roughly north and east, as regards point-of-origin for the music and/or the musicians: Gujarat, Tibet, Korea) back toward the more experimental works clustered around the top of the next hour (Kim, Kim, and Mori). For the remainder of the second hour, we heard a cluster of pieces by Japanese composers, each sharing some elements with the others -- the Mayazumi piece serving somewhat as a capstone to tie them all together, despite being the earliest-composed piece of the four.

And, during the last hour, I profoundly enjoyed the opportunity to share the latest release by Otomo Yoshihide, someone whose work and career I admire greatly. Although "Anode" did not bear direct connection to the other pieces I played, those other pieces did to large degree work as a kind of textural preparation for listening to Otomo's work. Much like the constrained-improvisation strategy Otomo used to give rise to "Anode", the elements of this playlist ended up informing one another without being tightly bound, or reducible to one another -- an experience I enjoyed crafting very much.