Mirror Image Around the World

Sarah had played me (on piano, not recording) a Fujieda piece called Patterns of Plants, and it turns out the Patterns of Plants series is an enormous cycle, comprising the bulk of Mamoru's ouput. As he explains it,

This makes the piece sound rather complicated, or at least mechanical and objective, and it's truly anything but that. It's consummately simple, gentle music, somewhere between Chinese folk music, 13th-century motets, Greek bouzoukee, Virgil Thomson, and Peter Garland. Its simplicity is deceptive, and I find that as I listen to it more and more I increasingly hear embedded patterns and subtleties. One of the CDs he gave me (Tzadik) is imaginatively scored for violin, sho (kind of an Asian mouth organ), and two kotos, the other (on a Japanese label, Milestone Art Works) is for clavichord. Very calming music, and I've put up both CDs for your enjoyment on PostClassic Radio. Mamoru and I were also born the same year, though I thought he looked considerably younger; and we both studied briefly with Feldman, which happened for him when he was getting his doctorate at UC San Diego. He teaches acoustic design at Kyushu University in southern Japan. 

Some of you will recognize the environs as being Elephant and Castle in New York.

While I'm mentioning PostClassic Radio, after the big copyright brouhaha of a couple of years ago, the fees they charge me to run the station got raised 50 percent without much fanfare. But then - and I just figured this out recently - somehow they also doubled my disc space to 1000 MB, so I'm going to be gradually expanding the playlist from 17 hours to 34. Along with a couple of hours of Fujieda, I put up Robert Ashley's entire opera Improvement: Don Leaves Linda, a couple of installments of David Borden's The Continuing Story of Counterpoint, quite a bit of Alvin Curran's multi-hour piano piece Inner Cities, and Steve Peters's hour-long In Memory of the Four Winds. I'm a little more tempted to put up huge works in their entirety now. Soon the station will be rotating more than a day's worth of music, and will hopefully take a little longer to get sated with.