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122 4 Claiming the New, Reclaiming the Old in “Music From Japan” “In Japan we were for a long time influenced by the West,” Mr. [Hiroyuki] Iwaki, the conductor [of the NHK Symphony] said. “But now America will be more influenced by Japan.”1 “Today, the number of Oriental music students in this country has multiplied manyfold, and there has been a notable increase in soloists and orchestra players from Japan and South Korea (and, so far, a few from China). Orientals have placed high in or won all of the recent major music competitions. Their seemingly sudden appearance on our concert stages has been so remarkable that it has prompted tongue wagging in lay circles as to whether performers from the Far East can really understand or play Western music.”2 Although it seems as if these words had to have been written in a much more distant time, the year was 1980 and the publication was the New York Times Sunday magazine. The subject of this chapter is Music From Japan, an institution started in 1975 by Naoyuki Miura. Miura unequivocally challenged the kind of cultural ethnocentrism so manifest in the Times piece by creating a new kind of cultural exchange in the field of music—one that puts the focus on acquainting American audiences with the broad range of important new work being written by composers from Japan. Arriving in the United States in 1966 on a Fulbright grant, he studied at the Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard. He then went on to forge a successful career in the American music establishment as a double bass player with the American Symphony Orchestra and the New York City Opera orchestra. Miura left active performance in the late 1980s for a dual, binational career as president and director of Music From Japan in New York and as a professor at—and, for a time, president of—Fukushima College in Japan. Claiming the New, Reclaiming the Old in “Music From Japan” 123 As an independent producer of concerts, Miura has used a variety of stages over the years—most frequently at Lincoln Center, Japan Society, Carnegie Hall, Asia Society, and Merkin Concert Hall. He also arranges performance tours to other US and, occasionally, international locations. In his annual programs of music by Japanese composers, which regularly attract the attention of critics, he has engaged many US- and Japan-based ensembles, orchestras, and soloists—such as Tashi, the Kronos Quartet, the Manhattan String Quartet, Pro Musica Nipponia, Reigakusha, the Junko Tahara Biwa Ensemble, the American Symphony Orchestra, the Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, Aki Takahashi, Elizabeth Brown, Mari Kimura, and Mayumi Miyata. Whereas Ellen Stewart at La MaMa brought “Japan” downtown, Miura took new music from Japan into New York’s uptown, establishment spaces—in which he already had attained a place as a performer . “There was a good deal of creativity [in Japan] that wasn’t much recognized in Europe or America,” Thomas R. H. Havens has pointed out in reference to Japanese musicians, dancers, and visual artists working in the 1950s.3 When Music From Japan got under way, the works by the composers presented under its umbrella illustrated Havens’s observation that in the postwar period there was a critical mass of musicians and other artists in Japan who sought to create a new culture that was neither imperially Japanese, as in the 1930s and early 1940s, nor postimperially American, as during 1945– 1952. . . . A number of [artists] ended up producing non-Western or even post-Western contemporary art, although some of it was neutrally nonnational or even transnational in direction. Other avant-garde figures were more mimetic. Many of the most innovative works exceeded syntheses of domestic and Western idioms to develop radically new stances on the relationship between the spatial (Japan) and the temporal (the contemporary ). In doing so, some of these works repositioned themselves as transcultural : now deterritorialized as place-specific to Japan and instead engaged in a dynamic, interactive process of cultural creolization that began early in the century and accelerated among artists around the world after World War Two.4 In documenting the history of Music From Japan, I identify several overlapping phases that have unfolded over the span of thirty-five years. During its first decade, it was in a way an iteration of what Yoshio Sugimoto has referred to as the “waves of ‘learn-from-Japan’ campaigns” that came to the fore at a time when US corporations were struggling to com...

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