yes-yes_english

On Pieces

#0 very first time

All the kinds of yes　(2005)
How many ‘No’s have we said, to reach our goal of liberated music? Or should we as often say ‘Yes’? But the more optimistic ‘Yes’s would only stir the more chaotic musical crucible.
What, then, if we just utter, ‘Oh, yeah!’ looking beyond the vain crucible, the chaotic flow, at the other shore?
Forgetting musical jargons, for getting musical joys? - Yee,es!!
The ‘yes!’ in the piece doesn’t just mean affirmation and contra-negation, but more essentially, an exclamation coming out of everybody’s body.

#1 James Tiptree Jr

The women men don't see　(2009)
Written in 1973, ‘The Women Men Don’t See’ by James Tiptree, Jr. is a novel in which the main character, an American man, narrates everything from beginning to end. The more or less typical inner self of an intelligent, but all too masculine American male, will ever succeed, in failing to meet the paths of the two women’s inner pathos. The women, having affected indifference toward anything, will eventually succeed, in failing in falling victim, to the foolish men of the earth, the bad system, and saying good-bye, take off and leave, with aliens from far broader universe.
I intended my present piano-duo piece to be ‘a duet with no ensemble whatsoever’. The primo part consists of notes that are a dodecaphonic translation of braille points (for people visually impaired), while the secondo flirts about as if with no end. Though sharing the same clock, one side can never make good what the other can, the losers always losing, lost, alienated, never any no side.
The novel confirms;- the whole manmade system is men-made, and will continue for bad for good.

Tuning with John　(2000)
’John who? Cage? Lennon?’ says an American critic.
With a smile say I, ‘”John” Sebastian Bach!’

This piece I wrote in the year 2000, the 250 anniversary of Bach’s death. Paying homage to The Well-Tempered Clavier, the left hand starts with perfect intervals, and follows the way piano tuners proceed, hence stopping with the twelfth octave. The right hand in the meantime produces all the grace notes shown on the table written by Bach himself, modulating to and fro over tonalities momentarily suggested in lower registers.

The only neat thing to do　(2009)
The title immediately attracts one, one that has never felt sure, that something ( or anything ) is the only neat thing to do.
Now, have you ever?

A girl travels. Across space. Waking up, she finds ‘another being’, a parasite in her own brain. Becoming literally united with ‘her’, the girl chooses to fly into the Sun, committing a reciprocal suicide for the interest of each other, saying,
‘This’s the only neat thing to do.’

Tiptree, Jr. shot her husband suffering Alzheimer dementia, and then killed herself on the same bed. On hearing this, all her readers around the world must have thought of that title of her work.

The girl who was plugged in　(2000/2009)
A sad story: plugged in to a perfect humanoid, an ugly girl falls in love, in a remote-controlled cabinet. The novel, awarded many prizes, is highly acclaimed as cyberpunk years ahead.

Ne me quitte pas（Jacques Brel=Mica Nozawa　2009）
Separation for good, and perfect serenity once you accept it....

Based on a French chanson ‘ne me quitte pas’, my piece dreams of a human being far away from home, renouncing the hope of ever going back to the Earth. It is not us who are going away, it is our green planet that is.

The sweet dream of honeymoon, where we could dream of our future, might have been dreamt about far before, when the Earth was youthful. Beautiful is the spring that will end in time. So will the spring of love.


#2 Exoticism
Toward Elsewhere....
‘Across the Border / A New Exoticism’

And then last ship is going　(2010)
What would you think every day, if you had nowhere to return?
If you had nowhere to resort, what in the universe could you turn to?
Actually, do you think you have at this very moment anywhere, anything to turn to?
Can you be really sure, of your bed at home, of your logic at music?

‘This is not my home.’
So I say whenever I turn my back to the society I belong to.It may be this percent of discomfort, however, which makes that 99 percent of comfort more comfortable.

The ship, whenever it launches wherever, not just leaves the shore, but she leaves this tiny spit of discomfort, in the heart of those on her deck, those who couldn’t make it, or those that are seeing her off.



Brazil　(Ary Barroso＝Mica Nozawa　2010)
Not in the least do I know the Latin-American music. The more I listen, the more I know I don’t know. The provocative, quasi-decadent, overripe Latin music I know not, I declare. Nor do I want to. Never will.

A ‘folk’ music is to be understood only through a vast amount of experience, commonly shared by one particular ‘folk’, and so I just want to keep dreaming that I can dream that there is some dream.

Will I ever travel for an answer, to the other end of this planet?
Brazil.