Aikawa Yumi - Kagura Uta to Ifukube Akira Unveiled-music of Akira Ifukube - Japan CD Digipak

Credits:

Aikawa Yumi

Description:

A centenary tribute: tracing the roots of Akira Ifukube "Yours is not a soprano voice - your real strength lies in the lower register." So Akira Ifukube told Yumi Aikawa when she was a soprano student in the graduate school of the Tokyo University of the Arts. At first she could not understand the words of the composer who was both her teacher in the Ainu language and the master she looked to in music, but they became the starting point of her journey into ancient Japanese song. "A people's sense of beauty does not change in one or two thousand years", and "without passing through the sense of beauty of one's own people, one can never arrive at anything truly international" - for the teacher who impressed these ideas upon her over a quarter of a century, was that "sense of beauty" the Ainu music he had known intimately during his years in Hokkaido? Yet he also said that "a composer must speak his lineage and his origins through his music". This album sets out to uncover what Japan meant to Ifukube, who was not himself Ainu, and what kind of music could express his own lineage and origins. Aikawa completed the doctoral course at the Tokyo University of the Arts in 1986. The following year her dissertation, "A Study of the Scores of Kósçak Yamada's Songs from the Performer's Standpoint", earned her the first doctorate in music ever awarded in Japan in the field of voice (soprano). In 1992 her "Yumi Aikawa Recital" won the Agency for Cultural Affairs National Arts Festival Award. She toured the United States in 1985 and 1991, giving concerts in many cities. Her solo singing at the 1985 Carnegie Hall concert marking the 25th anniversary of the sister-city relationship between Tokyo and New York City was highly praised in the New York Times and elsewhere. In 1994 she sang Japanese shoka and children's songs before the Emperor at the celebration of His Majesty's 60th birthday (Imperial Household Agency Auditorium), and in 1999 she sang the national anthem solo at the ceremony marking the tenth anniversary of His Majesty's accession (the plaza before the Imperial Palace). Her television and radio appearances include NHK's ETV8, Songs of Japan Chosen by Families and BS Nihon no Uta, TV Asahi's Untitled Concert, and Shanghai Television's International Music Festival and Bridge Between China and Japan. Her books - Is This Really Good Enough for Japanese Song? (Bunshun Shinsho 14, 20 November 1998) and In Praise of Enka (Bunshun Shinsho 282, 21 October 2002) - argue for the importance of understanding one's own culture. In 2007 she published The Aikawa Method (Kawai Publishing), setting out breathing and singing techniques for beautiful Japanese pronunciation, a book that has also attracted attention from the field of preventive medicine. She has studied ancient Japanese song and the wagon (six-string zither) with Shigeru Iwanami, former chief court musician of the Music Department of the Imperial Household Agency, and has given wagon self-accompanied singing recitals at the Higashiyama Kaii Setouchi Museum (2009), Yu Plaza Utazu and Tokyo Bunka Kaikan (2010) and elsewhere. Camerata Tokyo