When John Cage first encountered Zen Buddhism, through the teachings of Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, he found in it a justification for the music he was already writing, and an encouragement to keep pursuing its journey into chance and silence. When the Japanese composer Jo Kondo met Cage in 1977, on a John D Rockefeller III scholarship to the US, the same thing happened to him, only in reverse. “Very few people in Japan recognised that my music had any value”, he tells me by video call. “But when I went to America, Cage and Feldman immediately showed their interest and supported me greatly. My meeting with them didn’t change my music, but it gave me great confidence.”
Kondo’s reputation in Japan, and around the world, has climbed considerably since then, leading to his being named the recipient of the 55th Suntory Music Award. The occasion is being marked with a commemorative concert at Suntory Hall, Tokyo, on 28th August. Two works by Kondo will be performed: the ritualistic Three Songs of the Elderberry Tree for violin and percussion (1995) and Kondo’s only opera, the Noh-inspired Hagoromo (1994), conducted by Pierre-André Valade with mezzo-soprano Etsuko Kanoh, dancer Mia Atsugi and narrator Tomoko Shiota.
When Kondo met Cage and Feldman in the 1970s, they were placing great emphasis on listening to sounds ‘as they are’: in Cage’s case employing chance procedures to dispel the composer’s ego from the compositional process. Kondo suggests that he is taking this philosophy one step further: “What I am interested in is not sound itself but the interrelationships. I don’t intend to express anything through the construction, but just present a possible network of relationships. And the audience can find the grouping or structures in that constellation.”
The way he went about this in the 1970s was to develop what he called ‘linear music’, and it has remained the basis of his aesthetic and technique ever since. Inspired by the structuralist intellectual current of the time, he began an inquiry into the fundamental principles of music. “I tried to raise a question to myself”, he says. “What is the difference between mere sound and music? What is the difference between melody and a mere succession of tones?”
To answer this question, he conducted a series of small experiments. Choosing from a limited set of pitches, he would create long streams of notes in random order. When played back, he assumed, this would appear as a “mere succession of tones”. But when he listened, he found that while some sections of the row did sound random and uninteresting, other sections sounded like deliberate melody. This, he realised, was something to do with how his ear intuitively responded to the stream of sounds. “What makes melody is the structural grouping. This grouping is not set by any rule, but somehow I perceived it in that way. And that means that who makes the melody is not the random choice, but myself.”
This intuition allowed Kondo to place the listener at the heart of his music, as a collaborative partner in its creation. And composing, in turn, became a matter of constructing (or, better, finding), those sequences of notes that seemed to group together. By refining his own ear – he reminds me that the composer is always the first listener to their music – he was able to create fragile, ambiguous musical structures in which the sounds could be heard both as isolated units – the sounds ‘as they are’ – and as melodic shapes. Like clouds or the night sky, Kondo’s music presents forms and landscapes of interest; but he leaves the listener free to discern shapes and meanings within them.
Kondo’s first essays in linear music, such as Orient Orientation for two instruments (1973) or Standing for three instruments (1973), are fascinating and charming. Thanks to the underlying note-stream method, they are essentially monodic, using hockets or echo effects to create textural variety, but their obvious modesty flies in the face of much of the bombastic new music being written in Europe and North America at the time. Rather than grand political or aesthetic statements, assertions of the composer’s will and vision, these are small gifts, invitations to partake – or not – and to enjoy whatever you might find.
In time, Kondo’s method developed, but the fundamental humility of his music has remained. “Linear music is an attitude of composing rather than a style”, he says. Adopting an intuitive practice based on listening closely from one note to the next, Kondo would carefully discern what should follow what: “Constantly avoiding fixing the structure, but somehow avoiding the structure from disappearing. Something in between.” And he also expanded his method to durations – finding an analogous space between rhythm and undifferentiated pulse – and harmonies, reasoning that a chord is simply another type of sound and that, for his purposes, it can be organised and apprehended in the same as a solitary pitch. In time, his oeuvre expanded to include works for large ensembles and orchestra (although the first of these, the remarkable Birdphone Functions, 1975, is still very much in the linear music mould).
The philosophy of lightness and connection that underpins the linear music method has also made Kondo a highly regarded teacher. He has taught in Canada, at the University of Victoria, British Columbia; in England, at the Dartington Summer School; and in the United States, at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, Connecticut, as well as in Tokyo and Kawasaki in his home country. “I try to find out what he or she is trying to do”, he says, when explaining his teaching method. “And then if I try to do what he or she is trying to do, I would do this. That is my suggestion.” It is, he says, a matter of “walking beside”, trying to listen in the same way as his students do.
“I treasure the times I’ve been able to be with him”, says Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith, who studied traditional and contemporary Japanese music with Kondo at the University of Victoria. “With his gentle yet sharp sense of humour, a deep and abiding sense of music history, and refined sense of listening, all of which are an underpinning to his highly original music”. The British composer Paul Newland agrees. “He has a razor-sharp intellect, a creative, questioning, playful curiosity, and a very individual attitude as a composer. In lessons, he would always ask surprising questions, make highly individual suggestions creatively, and give really insightful, rather unpredictable responses to any questions you might ask him – at times causing the class to suddenly laugh with surprise or delight at what he might say.”
Kondo’s fluency as a composer – the catalogue at his publisher, University of York Music Press, lists over 150 works, and there are more besides – suggests that he is onto something with his method. For all its apparent emphasis on precision and restriction, he obviously hasn’t been limited creatively. How does he continue to write music that sounds new and fresh each time? It depends, he says, on what kind of place he makes the work in. Not literally – he typically works at home, in front of his piano – but metaphorically. “Any composing is more finding than building or constructing. Finding is: when you go to a beach, you find nice shells, nice things on the beach; that makes a beach piece. But if you go to the mountain trail, what you find is different and it becomes a mountain trail piece.”
Establishing that ‘place’ becomes a matter of tuning in to the piece. Say his next commission is for a string quartet. For two or three months before writing a note, he says, he tries to live “in string quartet world… It’s not the concrete string quartet sounds or any specific piece, but somehow just string quartet. So when I sit down at the piano and wait for any sound to come, the sound of a string quartet comes.” And say, a year or two later, he is asked to write another quartet. The process will be the same, but it will include all the experiences that have happened in between, and so the music will be different. In this way, he concludes, “Composing is integrated into my own life.”
Kondo, then, views music not as a way to assert or construct a vision but a way to invite other to walk beside him, to listen together, with the same ears. As the world is fractured by the impacts of wars, pandemics and political shocks, Kondo’s fragile spaces for shared connection and meaning-making are increasingly precious. “He also has extremely good taste in hats”, adds Smith.
The commemorative concert for Jo Kondo’s Suntory Music Award is at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall on 28th August, including a screening of documentary A Shape of Time.
More information on Jo Kondo.
This article was sponsored by Suntory Foundation for the Arts.
