Program Notes: Joe Hisaishi Presents Music Future

By Vanessa Ague

Minimalism in music takes on many forms. It can feature long, stretched-out tones that seem to expand for miles; notes that ring with the pensiveness of a hymnal; or phrases that loop and interweave with each other. But in all of this music, there’s a sense of patience and the desire to hear the ways in which music gradually changes.  

Today, minimalism is one of the most well-known styles of modern composition. It first cropped up in the mid-1960s; at the time, many composers were exploring atonality and serialism, which remained popular at universities. Minimalism offered a different perspective — it asked what you could do with very little, weaving tiny phrases, simple harmonies and rhythmic patterns into expansive pieces that showed how even the slightest change, over time, could be transformative. In many of these early minimalist works, composers would write short, repeating phrases that rhythmically interlocked in perfect step with each other. As these melodies reappeared, they changed ever so slightly, morphing from one phase to the next. In this music, composers explored process — it was about patiently watching where each sound would end up as time elapsed. 

With Joe Hisaishi’s Music Future program, the patience and varied history of minimalism is brought to life. The concert series stems from Hisaishi’s long love of minimalist composition. Though the 73-year-old Japanese composer and conductor is widely known for his fantastical film scores that have accompanied beloved Studio Ghibli classics such as Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle, he’s found joy and inspiration in minimalist composition since his high school days. He’s often touted his love of works like Terry Riley’s technicolor piece, A Rainbow In Curved Air, and the process-based output of pioneering composers Steve Reich and Philip Glass. For his Music Future concerts, which have taken place since 2014, Hisaishi celebrates this history, curating programs of minimalist classics alongside his own work to offer a glimpse at the past, present and future of composition. 

Hisaishi’s program drops us near the dawn of minimalism, opening with Steve Reich’s Clapping Music, a landmark work written in 1972. One of the pioneers of minimalist composition, Reich often explores the technique of phasing, in which he highlights all the little shifts that arise as melodies are reiterated at different intervals of time, eventually flowing together. Clapping Music employs phasing, process and repetition. Instead of using musical instruments to create patterns, he looks to the body, with the performers themselves becoming the music. To play the piece, one performer claps the same rhythm throughout while the other claps interjecting rhythms. Each clapping pattern intersects in different ways, falling apart and then coming back together again. In practice, it shows the bare bones of Reich’s minimalist ideas, zeroing in on the gradual processes that have come to define his work. 

Arvo Pärt’s Summa for String Quartet showcases a different side of minimalism: spellbinding, long-held harmonies that slowly evolve. Pärt’s minimalist music, while decidedly modern, draws on the Medieval and Renaissance periods. He is known for developing what he calls “tintinnabuli,” a method of composition in which one part moves along a scale while the other jumps along a triad. Using “tintinnabuli,” Pärt writes meditative music that gradually unfurls and takes on the sound of polyphony and chant. Summa, originally composed for voices in the late-1970s and later arranged for strings, shows both the humanness and stunning simplicity of Pärt’s minimalism, gliding through sweet tones that float with ease and sprawl out into lush swaths of sound. 

With Wojciech Kilar’s Quintet for Wind Instruments, composed in 1952, we get a glimpse at the Polish composer’s richly woven neoclassicism. Throughout his career, Kilar’s compositional practice took twists and turns between the more academic style of Darmstädter Ferienkurse, a festival in Darmstadt, Germany that he attended, and other more melodic forms of music. His wind quintet emphasizes his passion for melody: the piece delicately marries the folk melodies of his Polish heritage with Western classical elements. It jumps between moments of staccato, stormy rhythms, pensive wandering tones and airy tunes, painting cinematic pictures with each phrase. 

All of these influences come together in the program’s two works by Hisaishi, 2 pieces - for Strange Ensemble and MKWAJU for MFB. Both underscore the ways the composer blends his interests — including repetition, meditation and elements of electronic music — into spritely and soaring works. From the beginning, Hisaishi’s compositional practice has drawn on elements of jazz, minimalism and the dreamy music of groups like Yellow Magic Orchestra (of which fellow film composer Ryuishi Sakamoto was famously a part). These pieces diverge from his film scores, offering a lens into the minimalist music he composes outside of the movies. With 2 pieces, for example, he builds sprawling webs out of punchy phrases, threading them together like the textiles of a colorful quilt. MKWAJU, initially released in 1981 as one of Hisaishi’s first solo albums, recently reimagined for a live ensemble performance, has a clear minimalist bent, too, as it branches out from just a few interlocking rhythmic patterns that become a bit different each time they’re played. 

Since its onset, minimalism has become one of the most prominent styles of contemporary classical composition. In looking at its forebears, Hisaishi has curated both a celebration of and a guide to the future, examining where we came from and looking ahead to where we may go next.