Program Notes: EO9066

Two compositions presented in this weekend’s concerts mark the 80th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which federally authorized the incarceration of thousands of Japanese Americans in internment camps during the Second World War. Despite reparations made in the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, the reality of American internments is one of several historical and contemporary practices that show how unsuccessful the nation has been in upholding its founding edicts, and how indigenous nations, immigrants and people of color have pushed on and through these violent hypocrisies.

Composers Paul Chihara and Kaoru Ishibashi contribute their artistic reflections on Japanese American internment; the former, a Seattle Symphony commission, is rooted in personal experience; the latter, an acceptance of a responsibility to engage with this major yet under-referenced event in America’s history — the effects of which are still felt today.

PAUL CHIHARA
Beyond the Hills
BORN: July 9, 1938
WORK COMPOSED: 2021
WORLD PREMIERE: January 27, 2022, in Seattle with Seattle Symphony conducted by Norman Huynh.

Paul Chihara’s career has rested squarely in the worlds of concert music and film scores. In 1965, he received a doctorate in music from Cornell University and counts Nadia Boulanger, Gunther Schuller and Ernst Pepping among his mentors. He has held residencies with the San Francisco Ballet, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Marlboro Festival, with work in film and Broadway that include Amy Irving’s Crossing Delancy, Duke Ellington’s Sophisticated Ladies and additional music for the Disney English dub of Kiki’s Delivery Service.

Beyond the Hills is a Seattle Symphony Commission — a direct reference to the Dick Haymes song, “Idaho.” It is a short song, peppy and care-free, one that Chihara immediately connects with his childhood — one of fear and hope. After the arrest of his father the evening of the Pearl Harbor attack, Chihara was forcibly removed with his mother and siblings from their Seattle home to the internment camp at Minidoka, Idaho. They would remain there until the summer of 1945.

Chihara recalls the overlap of culture during his interment years: hearing conversations and learning songs in English and Japanese, which he would perform for internees on Saturday nights. “I can’t imagine what I sounded like (!), but I know that even as a child, I adored the attention of performing before a ‘captive audience’ … Five years later, I was in a USO troupe … entertaining U.S. soldiers on their way to Korea to fight in another Asian war … The emotions I remember from those early years were of dread and terrible insecurity. Growing up, I had nightmares often, and only felt somewhat secure when I was near my family members. But music and movies (mostly old Japanese films), which we occasionally were shown, always gave me an escape and fun that I treasured (and still do).

“Beyond the Hills is the embodiment of my identity as a Japanese American: conflict, culture, and reconciliation. The piece is as if it were from a dream of the music from my childhood before, during and after Minidoka. The music uses the orchestra to reminisce on the gestalt of popular tunes from my childhood in the 1940s.

“The orchestra flows between the sounds of a big band, a film score, and a traditional orchestra. The music expresses themes of loneliness and fear that I experienced while living in a country where I was considered the enemy. However, it also expresses the joys of childhood and all the beauty that comes from cultures clashing and merging. If you listen closely, you may be able to hear music fragments floating through the piece, such as the Japanese national anthem, ‘America the Beautiful,’ and songs from the 1940s-’50s ‘Hit Parade.’”

KAORU ISHIBASHI
Improvisations on EO9066
BORN: November 4, 1975
WORK COMPOSED: 2017
WORLD PREMIERE: April 20, 2018, in Miami with Nu Deco Ensemble

Kaoru Ishibashi is a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist known for his infectious, idiosyncratic works in the indie music scene. Born in Seattle, raised in Norfolk, Virginia, and based in Athens, Georgia, Ishibashi studied film scoring at Berklee College of Music, and has recorded and toured as a violinist with major indie pop/rock figures, among them, Regina Spektor, Sondre Lerche and the band of Montreal. Ishibashi is founder of the group Jupiter One and has been recording and performing as a solo artist under the moniker Kishi Bashi since 2011.

Ishibashi’s Improvisations on EO9066 began as a commission for Nu Deco Ensemble and has blossomed to serve as inspiration for his 2019 album Omoiyari and upcoming songfilm on the history and legacy of the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans.

Following an interview with Brown PhD candidate Julian Saporiti for his No-No Boy Project, Ishibashi joined Saporiti and his Brown colleagues on a research trip to the internment camp sites in 2017. Music was played, film was taken and ideas solidified. Saporiti notes, “K [Ishibashi] stresses that he wants audiences to understand that the root of the incarceration was ‘economic jealousy and lobbying from agricultural groups, as well as the press’ fanning the flames of deep rooted anti-Asian racism and prejudice.”

Improvisations on EO9066 collapses the boundaries between symphony, song and film. It takes place over six movements (or in this case “chapters,” with a prologue), and is performed against projected imagery that combines footage of Ishibashi improvising at several sites of forced relocation and internment, film and photos of Japanese American families before and during removal, and the Pearl Harbor attack.

In Introduction (Manzanar Improvisation 2) — Prologue: War (A Song for You), Ishibashi intones a lovely “song for you” that clashes against President Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbor radio broadcast. Chapter 1: Removal (Bainbridge Island) builds with glassy held notes in the strings, growing in intensity and dynamic as a piano enters the texture with morose jazz harmonies, a nod to the popular music of the period. Chapter 2: Horse Stables and Desert Barracks (Portland Assembly Center) merges pizzicato, wind and chimes. The thickening texture and pentatonicism accompany footage of the internment camps, intensity that may be read two ways: the determination of the U.S. government and American society to justify this clear injustice; or the determination of those interned to not let this injustice break them. Chapter 3: Forgotten Words (Theme for Jerome) contains many layers through an unspooling melody inspired by Japanese melody and harmony, with lyrics in English and Japanese that emphasize how language makes culture, makes meaning, makes the self. “I struggle to keep my daughter speaking Japanese,” Ishibashi shared with Saporiti, “so, that erasure of one’s culture because of racism and what happened during this time really affected me, deeply … all the children who never spoke Japanese after the camps.”

Chapter 4: Jail Within a Jail turns its focus to the Tule Lake Camp, the most heavily fortified of the internment camps. Through dissonance, minor mode and brittle timbres in the strings, the dehumanizing conditions are expressed, the camera footage moving through the remaining buildings of the prison. Chapter 5: Omoiyari (Manzanar Improvisation 1) works off the title (‘omoiyari’ means to have empathy) in how the improvisations and orchestral parts move in support of each other. The abrupt conclusion suggests that unity is not a matter of sameness and that the end goal is still elusive. Chapter 6: Summer of 42 is cautiously optimistic and sincerely gorgeous. Projected images feature family portraits; two friends getting ice cream; children smiling interspersed among shots of hilly landscapes. The music is repetitive, anticipatory, hopeful as Ishibashi’s voice, both singing and speaking, grounds and moves beyond the orchestral texture. People lived, laughed and loved. Traditions continued and resumed. The past is remembered to make a better present and secure a just future.

PIOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY
Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36
BORN: May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Russia
DIED: November 6, 1893, in Saint Petersburg, Russia
WORK COMPOSED: 1877–1878
WORLD PREMIERE: February 22, 1878, with Russian Musical Society conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein

In its title alone, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony does not suggest a programmatic piece: a work accompanying a set story in the vein of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique or Florence Price’s Ethiopia’s Shadow in America. Instead, this symphony straddles the boundary of abstract and programmatic instrumental music, representing to Tchaikovsky a battle between fate, hopelessness and triumph.

Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in F minor, Op. 36 was dedicated to his patron and friend, Nadezhda von Meck, a Russian businesswoman whose financial support allowed him to focus his creative energies on composition. The two never met in person; but their rich correspondence reveals a relationship built on a love and passion for music and the creative process.

Von Meck was particularly interested in the latter, which Tchaikovsky eagerly obliged. In one letter, Tchaikovsky takes her through the motivic inspiration and narrative purpose of the Op. 36:

“You asked me whether there is a definite programme to this symphony? Usually when this question is put to me about a symphonic work my answer is: none! ... In our symphony, there is a programme, i.e., it is possible to express in words what it is trying to say, and to you, and only to you, I am able and willing to explain the meaning both of the whole and of the separate movements.”

The horn fanfare that opens the Andante sostenuto—Moderato con anima is, in Tchaikovsky’s words, “…the seed of the whole symphony … this is Fate: this is that fateful force which prevents the impulse to happiness from attaining its goal.” The tension builds, wanes and builds again through sonata-allegro form, Tchaikovsky’s vision of “fleeting dreams,” where “no haven exists” for the one who struggles against fate. The Andantino in modo di canzona continues this melancholy resignation as a sorrowful oboe unfurls the main theme. Tchaikovsky takes full advantage of his skill with ear-catching melodies. New melodies introduce new sections. Re-statements of main and secondary themes are eagerly welcomed back, reflecting a confident turn towards hope. Tchaikovsky writes that the third movement, Scherzo: Pizzicato ostinato, full of exuberant pizzicato and whimsical woodwind passages, “expresses no specific feeling,” before going on to describe “a picture of drunken peasants and a street song … Then, somewhere in the distance, a military procession passes.” The Fourth’s Finale: Allegro con fuoco is a blast of optimism and triumph. Ferocious string passages move underneath lyrical brass and woodwinds before combining in bombastic declarations. It seems fate has been escaped, until the horn fanfare of the first movement makes a brutal interjection. But it doesn’t win. As Tchaikovsky explained to von Meck: “If within yourself you find no reason for joy, then look at others. Go out among the people … Joy is a simple but powerful force. Rejoice in the rejoicing of others. To live is still possible.”

© 2021 A. Kori Hill