Just how does the world sound?
It’s a question that goes back to the early days of national musical styles.
Even the Netherlanders of the Renaissance enriched their madrigals and instrumental pieces
with exotic natural sounds from distant Mediterranean Europe.
Josquin’s "La Spagna" is a glittering mixture of heard and invented characteristics.
Mozart peppered the score of the "Entführung aus dem Serail" with saucy janissary fanfares,
as he did in the famous "Alla turca" for piano.
Brahms imitated the sounds of the Puszta region in his arrangements of Hungarian dances.
Debussy wrote gamelan music, without having been to Indonesia.
Albe´niz danced the tango at the piano － but never went to Argentina.
What one hears in all these works is the musician’s longing for ubiquity:
to be everywhere at the same time, and to be understood the same way everywhere.
But despite the modern trend of "World Music", this desire often remains a dream.
It’s surely no accident that this term "World Music" arose in the jet age,
where planes made distances a purely technical affair.
Today, in record shops across the world, it’s primarily a way of ordering things: Anything Sounds.
And what has happened to the term is just the way it was with many other words
that one spoke as a child, so often that they lost any meaning
－ they just became pure sound.
Just becoming sound: there aren’t many musicians who attempt that.
That’s not hard to understand.
Who would seriously want to disappear behind the work, dissolving, as it were, in their own music.
The pianist and composer Fumio Yasuda has gone down this path with remarkable consistency
－ and with unique results.
By letting his personality recede, he was able to take his
sonic invention into the clear heights and thin air lying above concepts of style and genre.
He once described his basic impulse as an attempt to find something new.
He had felt at home neither with pop or the classics.
So who is Fumio Yasuda?
You don’t learn much from the facts.
Born 1953 in Tokyo, he graduated from the Kunitachi Conservatory,
whereas he was trained as a pianist in the European mould.
As a teenager, he began to compose and improvise.
He played jazz, worked as a studio musician, brought out an album of his own piano pieces
early in the nineties, in Japan, and experimented with a symphony orchestra.
In his debut for Winter & Winter, "Kakyoku" (2000), he was the man who loves flowers.
The music on this album was created together with the photographer Nobuyoshi Araki,
as an audio-visual art of mirrors.
In eighteen compositions and an improvisation, Yasuda illustrates Araki’s fleshy,
voluptuous blossom images with music that flows like lava.
It has debts to German romanticism, as well as American minimalism,
Pärt‘s melancholy, and Debussy’s oriental inclinations.
But unmistakably, these have all passed through a very personal filter.
For the production of "Charmed with Verdi", Winter & Winter’s contribution
to the Verdi centenary in 2001, Yasuda slipped into the role of the fictitious pianist Alexander Schiffgen.
In this play with the idea of playing music, he has supposedly gained a post as a musician
at a sanatorium high up in the Swiss Alps, just before the turn of the previous century.
Schiffgen alias Yasuda plays the great Verdi operas on the piano
－ and with each variation he moves further away from the original,
into his own imaginary dreams of sonic spaces.
In passing, he gently acquaints the Master with some of the kinds of music that came after him:
jazz and blues, but especially the music of Fumio Yasuda.
On the album "Schumann’s Bar Music" (2002), Yasuda is the equally fictitious
bar-room pianist at the most famous bar in Munich, in Germany, perhaps in the whole world.
In reality, there would be no room at Schumann’s for a bar-room pianist.
Glasses clink, the mixer mixes, and waiters and customers discuss the serious side of drinking.
And there’s always music. Close up, but far away
－ as if it was coming through the sore-headed blur of the following dawn.
Yasuda plays film music, quotes jazz, and flirts with pop hits.
You would never find such a universal bar pianist anywhere else.
The production of "Heavenly Blue" marks another step forward into newly designed sonic spaces,
apparently made to measure for himself, but quite unintentionally.
It was recorded with the virtuoso accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti and
the Basle Chamber Orchestra conducted by Bernd Ruf.
The arch over the seven compositions spans the whole world, going back many centuries
－ how far it will resonate into the future is something for each listener to decide.
The title gives hints, nothing more.
Everything else is music.
One hears a tango, a film runs in the observer’s imagination, an accordion flails and wails,
and the finale drifts off into the deep blue sky.
A piano’s notes, groping into the infinite. But the pianist has disappeared.
- Andreas Obst (Translation: Richard Toop)
Japan and the Western world used to be complete strangers
(the photographies in this album are taken from the book:
Japan - Barbarians pulled away the veil from the land of the rising sun),
today in the 21st century the aggravating cultural differences seem to be overcome and the world converges.
Sophia Coppola's amusing film "Lost in Translation" narrates a story of understanding and misunderstanding,
but the young american director is not focused on a direct relationship between East and West,
her Western protagonists are only for a short visit in Tokyo.
In contrast "Hiroshima Mon Amour", masterpiece of Alain Resnais after Marguerite Duras' s novel,
which tells the love story of a French woman and a Japanese man
in the time of horror after the explosion of the American atomic bomb.
Alain Resnais describes in a new aesthetic way, yet unknown at that time,
the intimate story of two human beings in a field of conflict of different cultures.
The beautiful charm of an artistic analysis between Japanese and European culture inspired
Winter & Winter, to ask Fumio Yasuda for a commission work
for accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti and the Basel Chamber Orchestra.
Fumio Yasuda studied music with a preference for Karl Amadeus Hartmann,
he grew up with Western pop and jazz music and is neverthelss rooted in the tradition of his country.
His inspiration for the Accordion Concerto were the extraordinary skills of
Teodoro Anzellotti on this instrument, Fumio Yasuda derives benefit from
Anzellotti's impressive variety of sounds and his virtuosity on the accordion
in combination with a string orchestra, omitting wind instruments,
and he builds up an individual musical expression and sound sphere that can be familiar
and strange at the same time, in a way that the string quartet "Rain Choral" reminds
one of the tintinnabulum of christian church bells or of the bells of a Buddhist shrine.
The album "Heavenly Blue" includes the piano concerto
"Imaginary Films for Piano and String Orchestra", also this composition is available on cd for the firsttime.
Fumio Yasuda wants to create pictures - cinema for closed eyes -
his pictures come from a different world, which we believe to know and don't.
- Stefan Winter
Since a long time I had a longing for films.
This CD is my imaginary film, and I could say that it is a fictious film soundtrack.
Although we are in the 21st century, in the real life the world of "night and mist" is still continuing.
The flow of the sound awakens the image.
And it also awakens the nostalgia from the soul.
I found this to be very important.
In the midst of the string instrument chaos, I built an epitaph under the afloating pale white melody.
An accordion is playing the choral of an epoch, and a solo violin is singing the song of the oppressed queen.
Piano and string orchestra is heading towards "nothing".
"Heavenly Blue" means the piece of the flower which fell from the heaven.
This flower is the blue from the bluest sky itself.
- Fumio Yasuda (Translation: Mariko Takahashi)