“John Cage Shock” and Its Aftermath in Japan

By

SERENA YANG
DISSERTATION

Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in

Music

in the

OFFICE OF GRADUATE STUDIES

of the

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

DAVIS

Approved:

Beth E. Levy, Chair

Katherine In-Young Lee

Carol A. Hess

Committee in Charge

2020

i
Copyright © 2020 by Serena Yang
All rights reserved
To my parents

ii
 Abstract

This dissertation studies the reception of John Cage and his music in Japan from the end

of World War II to the present. Although English-speaking Cage scholars have discussed

extensively the way that Cage drew inspiration from Japanese Zen, most famously from his

teacher D. T. Suzuki, none has studied the encounters between Cage and Japan as a two-sided

cultural exchange. By probing in detail the trajectories of Japanese groups and individuals who

had direct contact with Cage and have ongoing relations with Cage’s musical practices, this

dissertation explores the diverse reactions of different generations of Japanese composers and

artists to Cage’s music and ideas. Research methods for this dissertation combine ethnographic

interviews, music analysis, and archival research conducted in Japan and the United States.

The first half of the dissertation presents the long chronicle of Cage’s Japanese reception

from 1948 to the present. Early contact between Cage and Japan verifies that the Japanese avant-

garde was thriving before Cage’s first visit to Japan and had prepared the Japanese audience to

receive Cage and David Tudor’s Japanese debut in 1962. I then document in detail the cultural

exchange between Cage and Japan in the 1960s and the formation of the term “John Cage

Shock”—which many have used to describe the structural changes in the Japanese music scene

caused by Cage and Tudor’s debut. The Japanese reception of Cage from 1970 to the present

shows new perspectives on Cage, specifically, by the later generations who did not experience

“Cage Shock” firsthand. Based on the diverse generational viewpoints on Cage revealed in my

interviews, I argue that the term “Cage Shock” oversimplifies the reception of Cage’s debut in

Japan and functioned largely as a media buzzword to enhance the visibility of Cage in Japan.

The second part of the dissertation treats two groups of Japanese composers, musicians,

and artists who continuously felt drawn to Cage’s music and philosophy even after the waves of

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“Cage Shock” had dispersed. One is Japanese composers who united indeterminacy and other

Cagean techniques with traditional Japanese instruments and aesthetics for the purpose of

establishing their own music language. The other is Japanese sound artists who interact and

disseminate Cage’s ideas—such as exploring the nature of sound in everyday objects and

acoustic spaces—outside the conventional venues for classical music.

To envisage my work in a global context, I draw upon Reiko Tomii’s concept of

international contemporaneity to illuminate the modes of connectedness between Cage and Japan

as well as between Cage’s reception in Japan and his reception in other countries, for which this

dissertation helps lay the groundwork. By focusing on the perspective of Japanese composers

and artists, this dissertation aims to decentralize Euro-American research on Cage, to provide an

alternative narrative of avant-garde music, and to introduce non-western musical voices that have

not been properly valued by western musicologists.

iv
 Contents

Abstract iii
Contents v
List of Illustrations viii
Note on Romanization, Names, and Translation x
Acknowledgements xi

Introduction 1
Literature Review 4
Research Methodology 9
Chapter Descriptions 12

Chapter 1
The Early Contact between Cage and Japan (1948–62) 16
Japan’s Early Contact with Cage from the late 1940s: Kuniharu Akiyama and Jikken Kōbō 16
Through the European Perspective 22
Contacting Cage in New York 27
The 4th Contemporary Music Festival in Osaka 30
Group Ongaku’s Debut Concert 38
Yūji Takahashi’s Winter Music 42
The First Happenings in Japan 47
Japanese Adventures in Graphic Notation 53

Chapter 2
The Cultural Exchange between Cage and Japan in the 1960s 65
Cage and Tudor’s First Visit to Japan 65
Cage and Tudor’s Debut Concerts in Japan 71
Cage’s Impression of Japanese Composers 81
Japanese Criticism on Cage’s Debut in Japan 89
Works and Performances after Cage and Tudor’s First Visit to Japan 93
Cage and Tudor’s Second Visit to Japan: Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 1964 103
Cagean Repercussions 108

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Chapter 3
Japanese Reception of Cage from 1970 to the 21st Century 126
The Decline of the Avant-garde 126
Japanese Reception of Cage in the 1970s 132
Jō Kondō (1947–) 134
Aki Takahashi (1944–) 139
Japanese Reception of Cage in the 1980s 143
Mamoru Fujieda (1955–) 150
Japanese Reception of Cage after 1990 153
Motoharu Kawashima (1972–) 154
“John Cage Shock” Is Not Shocking 158

Chapter 4
Bridging Traditional Japanese and Western Musics via Cagean Experimentalism 164
Toshi Ichiyanagi 167
Tōru Takemitsu 173
Makoto Moroi 178
Maki Ishii 182
Cage and Japanese Traditional Musicians 185
Conclusion 190

Chapter 5
From Concert Hall to Museum: Cage and Japanese Sound Art 193
Takehisa Kosugi 195
Yasunao Tone 204
Akio Suzuki 212
Keijirō Satō 217
Cage beyond the Concert Hall 221
Conclusion 224

Conclusion 227

Bibliography 232
Archival Collections 232
Discography 232

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Published Sources 233

Appendix A—List of Formal Interviews by the Author 250

Appendix B—List of the Main Japanese Persons 251
Appendix C—Cage and Tudor’s 1962 Performances in Japan 253
Appendix D—Cage’s Performances in Japan (1964–89) 255
Appendix E—Translation of the Titles of Japanese Journals 256

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 List of Illustrations

Figures

1.1 Score for Matsudaira’s Orbits for flute, clarinet, and piano. Photograph by 27
the author, 2017.
1.2 The premiere of Ichiyanagi’s IBM—Happening and Musique Concrète at 49
the SAC. Photographer unknown.
1.3 Score for Tone’s Anagram for Strings. 53
1.4 Score for Takemitsu’s Corona for pianist(s) (grey). 55
1.5 Score for Takahashi’s Ekstasis for pianos (part 1). 57
1.6 Score for Takahashi’s Ekstasis for pianos (part 2). 58
1.7 Score for Mayuzumi’s Mobile Music. Photographer unknown. 60
1.8 Score for Mayuzumi’s Tadpoles-Music. Photographer unknown. 60
2.1 Cage and Tudor at Tōkei-ji, Kamakura. Photograph by Kunitoshi 69
Matsuzaki.
2.2 Tudor, Cage, Ono, and Mayuzumi performed Cage’s Music Walk at the 73
Tokyo Bunka Kaikan on October 9, 1962. Photographer unknown.
2.3 Cage premiered 0'00" at the SAC on October 24, 1962. Photograph by 75
Yasuhiro Yoshioka.
2.4 The premiere of Ichiyanagi’s Sapporo at the Sapporo Contemporary 79
Music Festival. Photograph by Yasuhiro Yoshioka.
2.5 Score for Ichiyanagi’s Pratyahara Event. 99
2.6 Score for Matsudaira’s Transient '64 for electronic sounds. 119
4.1 Score for Ichiyanagi’s Kaiki (1960). 169
4.2 Score for Eclipse (biwa). 176
4.3 Score for Eclipse (shakuhachi). 176
4.4 Score for Moroi’s Five Dialogues for Two Shakuhachi. 181
4.5 Ishii’s Shikyō for gagaku. 185
5.1 Kosugi’s 2003 drawing of the premiere of Mano-Dharma, Electronic 199
“Catch-Wave” at the “Mano Dharma Concert.”
5.2 Akio Suzuki and Space in the Sun, September 23, 1988. Photograph by 215
Junko Wada.
5.3 The symbol Suzuki used for Oto-date. Photograph by the author, taken at 217
the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo on July 21, 2019.
5.4 Gifu Susuki Clump '99. Photograph by Kunio Miyagawa. 221

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Tables

2.1 New Direction Concerts at the SAC 96

3.1 Cage’s Visits to Japan 134

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 Note on Romanization, Names, and Translation

Transliterations of Japanese words and names in this dissertation are based on the

Hepburn system with macrons (e.g., ō) indicating long vowels, except in those Japanese words

that are widely accepted in English (e.g., Tokyo). Japanese terms are italicized in the text.

Japanese names are written in western name order, i.e. given name followed by family name.

Unless otherwise noted, all translations in this dissertation are my own.

x
 Acknowledgements

This dissertation could not have been accomplished without the help of many people.

First, I owe a debt of gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Beth E. Levy, who guided me through the

dissertation process with valuable suggestions, knowledge of fieldwork and archival research,

and rigorous critical thinking. During the entire process of writing, I was inspired by her

remarkable perspectives and benefited from her careful reading of my chapter drafts. I could not

have completed this project without her unrelenting encouragement and advice. I would also like

to acknowledge the support from the other members of my dissertation committee, who I began

working with in my first year at UC Davis. Dr. Katherine In-Young Lee has provided invaluable

professional guidance throughout my time as a PhD student from securing funding in moments

of need, and establishing a research network, to developing my career plan. Dr. Carol A. Hess

has long encouraged me to be a better writer. Her expert editorial guidance has improved this

project beyond measure. Thank you also to the two other members of my qualifying exam

committee Dr. Henry Spiller and Dr. Joseph Sorensen, who helped me start out on this

intellectual journey.

Research for this dissertation has been supported by a NEAC Japan Studies U.S.

Research Travel Grant Award, Nippon Foundation Fellows Scholarship, Japan Foundation

Japanese Studies Doctoral Fellowship, American Musicological Society Howard Mayer Brown

Dissertation Fellowship, UC Davis Humanities Institute Dean’s Graduate Fellowship, and

Graduate Student Travel Award and Graduate Student Association Travel Award at the

University of California, Davis.

I sincerely appreciate many people and institutions that helped me throughout my

research journeys in Japan. I own much thanks to Dr. Toshie Kakinuma (Kyoto City University

xi
of Arts), who generously introduced me to leading composers in Japan and guided me through

the academic culture of the Japanese music world. I would also like to thank Dr. Alison Tokita

for introducing Dr. Kakinuma and Dr. Masaaki Ueno to me.

This dissertation could not have been completed without the amazing teachers at the

Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies (IUC) in Yokohama. I wish especially to

thank my teacher Kiyomi Kushida, who was sympathetic and encouraging throughout the ten

months I spent at IUC. Her patience and skillful instruction in Japanese language enabled me to

gain the degree of language proficiency necessary to read archival sources, reach out to potential

interviewees via email, and conduct extensive interviews in Japanese. Resident Director of IUC

Dr. Bruce Batten also steadfastly supported my research, connecting me to his friends, such as

composer Yoshihiro Kanno.

I am immensely grateful to all of my interviewees for taking many hours out of their

days, kindly and patiently sharing their experiences with Cage and their perspectives on the

general reception of Cage in Japan. I was deeply moved that these major composers, performers,

artists, and scholars with extremely busy schedules were willing to spend time to meet with me.

Even though my Japanese hindered smooth conversation from time to time, none of them gave

up on sharing their experiences or explaining any complex musical concepts to me. Their

generosity to a young, foreign researcher has been a major driving force of inspiration for this

dissertation. I would also like to extend thanks to the following scholars and friends that I met in

Japan who kindly shared their connections, assisted me in my interviews, and/or supported my

research and life in Japan: Dr. Fuyuko Fukunaka (Tokyo University of the Arts), Itsuro

Nakahara, Dr. Hanako Yamamoto, Chatori Shimizu, Katherine Whatley, Dr. Christophe Charles,

xii
Joshua Gordon Trichilo, Elico Suzuki, Ayumi Takita (Japan Foundation), and Makoto

Nishimura.

Many libraries and archives enriched my understanding of Cage’s reception in Japan,

including Northwestern University’s Music Library, the Getty Research Institute, the Museum of

Modern Art in New York, Wesleyan University’s Special Collections & Archives, the Keio

University Art Center, the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, the National Diet Library, and the Interlibrary

Loan Service at UC Davis. I am particularly grateful to have received a waiver of all

reproduction fees from Northwestern University’s Music Library as runner up for the John Cage

Research Grant. I would also like to thank my friend Gene Lai and his family for hosting me at

their house during my visit to Wesleyan.

Many scholars and friends in the US have supported me throughout this project. For

crucial assistance in my departure from the US and landing in Japan, I would like to thank Dr.

Bonnie C. Wade for connecting me to my first interviewee, Mieko Shiomi, in Japan. Dr. Wade’s

student Dr. Miki Kaneda has also kindly offered her insights into Japanese experimental and

avant-garde music and introduced me to Yasunao Tone. Thank you to Dr. Robert Garfias for

being encouraging and supportive of my research in Japan.

Over the course of my graduate studies, I have been very fortunate to be surrounded by

brilliant and engaging colleagues and classmates at the University of California, Davis: Melita

Denny, Yu-Hsin Chang, Fang-Wei Luo, Claire Thompson, Michael Accinno, and Gretchen Jude,

among others. Outside the UC Davis community, I would like to thank Tyler Kinnear for sharing

various aspects of life on our musicological journeys.

xiii
 Last, but certainly not least, my most profound thanks are to my family: my parents and

my older brother, Louis, for their love, care, and support of my study and the pursuit of my

interests.

xiv
 Introduction

Reflecting on his first concerts with David Tudor in Japan in 1962 and 1964, John Cage

told Daniel Charles in an interview in the late 1960s: “I think that what we played for them

[Japanese composers] gave them the chance to discover a music that was their own—rather than

a twelve-tone music. Before our arrival, they had no alternative other than dodecaphony. . . . In

fact, our music, that is, the music David Tudor played for them, was the only music that could

afford them an appreciation analogous to their appreciation of traditional Japanese music,

something they couldn’t find in the different modern musics.”1 Cage’s insight into the problems

that Japanese composers were facing is no doubt the result of his contact with Japanese

contemporary music circles since 1952. Thinking further about his words, we might wonder: to

what extent did Cage’s presence in Japan actually compel Japanese composers to reassess the

value of their own tradition? How well did Cage’s statement predict trends in contemporary

Japanese music after his visits to Japan? Using these questions as a starting point of inquiry, this

dissertation explores the ways in which Cage’s musical and intellectual presence in Japan has

accrued a range of meanings over the past six decades. Although English-language scholars have

written vaguely of “Asian influence” in Cage’s music, none has studied these influences from a

cross-cultural perspective by exploring the reception of Cage’s music in Japan. Most discuss

Cage’s relation with Japan solely in terms of his learning of Zen from his teacher D. T. Suzuki.

The few scholars who have tackled Cage’s reception in Japan only discuss the topic in the 1950s

and 60s (Ueno) or as an anecdote in the history of Japanese avant-garde art (Everett; Galliano).2

1
John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds (New York: M. Boyars, 1981), 200.
2
Masaaki Ueno, “Cage to Nihon: Sengo gendai ongaku no fuchi [Cage and Japan: The modern music in
the postwar era]” (PhD diss., Osaka University, 1999); Yayoi Uno Everett, “‘Scream Against the Sky’: Japanese

1
My dissertation aims to fill these gaps by shedding light on both sides of the exchange between

Cage and Japan.

I have analyzed Cage’s connections with Japan by interviewing Japanese composers

from the postwar to the present generation, drawing on archival documents, reviews, and

secondary literature on the postwar history of music in Japan. By probing composers’ diverse

experiences with Cage and aesthetic trajectories in Japan, this project seeks to introduce Japanese

scholarship on Cage to the western, non-Japanese-speaking world. Reception history is central to

my analysis, as Cage’s music, concepts, and aesthetics took hold in Japan throughout the second

half of the twentieth century. By examining musical works, art events, and narratives of Japanese

people’s experiences with Cage, this project illuminates the phenomenon of gyaku-yunyū (逆輸

入), or “reverse importation.” I argue that Japanese intellectuals saw Cage’s use of Japanese

philosophy as an important cross-cultural recognition of Japanese traditional values.

Over the decades, Japanese reception of Cage has been inflected by the availability of

information on Cage and exposure to his music. A key concept in this discussion is “John Cage

Shock” (Jon Kēji shokku) a term Hidekazu Yoshida coined in 1969 to suggest the structural

disruption of the Japanese music scene caused by Cage’s 1962 visit. In fact, the term

mischaracterized the reception of Cage’s music there for decades thereafter. When introducing

the term “Cage Shock,” for example, surveys of Japanese music in the twentieth century often

fail to clarify that it only applies to the mental states of some conservative composers, composers

Avant-garde Music in the Sixties,” in Sound Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Robert
Adlington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 187–208; Luciana Galliano, Yōgaku: Japanese Music in the
Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002).

2
of the European avant-garde style, and the general public who were not familiar with Cage.3

Indeed, Japanese composers’ musical and verbal responses demonstrate that the Japanese avant-

garde was thriving before Cage visited Japan in 1962, and that the term “Cage Shock” functioned

largely as a media buzzword to enhance the visibility of Cage and his hosts in Japan. Rather than

shock, contact with Cage represented a turning point for some Japanese composers, inviting

them to stop following in the footsteps of European composers, which they had been doing since

the Meiji period (1868–1912), and to explore alternative paths in a cross-national music context.

In the 1970s, those Japanese avant-garde composers who felt close to Cage’s counter-

cultural perspective in the 1960s became the central figures of contemporary music circles in

Japan. Having left the eccentric avant-garde and becoming mainstream, they started to think

more broadly about their social roles and the musical paths that they could travel. For instance,

Toshi Ichiyanagi felt a new responsibility to keep the tradition of Japanese music alive.

Therefore, he composed new repertoire for Japanese traditional genres using Cage’s concept of

indeterminacy and graphic scores, which reflected Cage’s prediction that Cage and Tudor’s

performances would help Japanese discover a music that was their own. Conversely, Takehisa

Kosugi rejected Japanese traditional elements and instead explored the reality of space through

multisensory improvisation, extending the emphasis on actions and processes in Cage’s 1960s

music.

Beyond music, Cage’s conceptual presence in Japan is pervasive in the fields of visual

and sound arts. For example, in the 1970s, Cage inspired the composer Keijirō Satō to stop

composing and to delve into the creation of sound objects. When more and more museums and

3
Ongaku no Tomosha, ed., Nihon no sakkyoku 20-seiki [Japanese compositions in the twentieth century]
(Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha, 1999); Nihon Sengo Ongakushi Kenkyūkai, Nihon sengo ongakushi jō [History of
postwar Japanese music, I] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2007).

3
art galleries threw open their doors to artwork involving sound, in the 1990s, Cage-related events

held outside of traditional classical music venues, such as P3 Art and Environment (Tokyo) and

the Mito Art Museum (Ibaraki), became the new places where Japanese musicians gathered to

discuss Cage. More important, it was not the classically trained composers and musicians but a

new generation of sound artists who became active in responding to Cage’s principles through

various cross-disciplinary artistic forms.

Literature Review

By focusing on the perspective of Japanese composers, this dissertation aims to

decentralize Euro-American research on Cage, providing an alternative narrative of avant-garde

music and introducing a non-western musical view that has not been properly valued by western

musicologists. For example, Kay Larson, in Where the Heart Beats, unfolds the story of how Zen

Buddhism saved Cage from himself but mentions only a few Japanese figures, such as D. T.

Suzuki, Ichiyanagi, Isamu Noguchi, and Aki Takahashi—those who were active in the US. Even

when discussing Cage’s premiere of 0'00" in Tokyo, she recounts Cage’s performance and

perspective but omits the reaction of the Japanese audience or the historical context of the event

in postwar Japan.4 Likewise, in his biography of Cage, Kenneth Silverman mentioned very few

details about Cage’s interaction with the Japanese avant-garde scene, and downplayed Cage’s

great fascination with Japan.5

4
Kay Larson, Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists (New York:
Penguin Press, 2012), 378–83.
5
Kenneth Silverman, Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

4
 Recent studies on Cage’s reception in Japan mostly focus on Cage’s Japanese debut and

its impact on the Japanese musical scene in the 1960s. Masaaki Ueno’s “Cage and Japan:

Modern Music in the Postwar Era,” written in Japanese, is currently the most extensive survey of

this topic.6 Ueno chronicles Cage-related events that illustrate how Cage’s musical thoughts were

imported, reacted to, and disseminated in the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of the multiple

trends of modern music introduced in Japan since 1950. Both Luciana Galliano and Yayoi Uno

Everett mention “Cage Shock” in passing in their surveys of Japanese avant-garde and postwar

music histories, granting to Cage the dominant role in changing the musical styles of 1960s

Japan. Specifically, Everett concludes that it was Cage and Tudor, along with Ichiyanagi and

Yoko Ono, who introduced Happenings, Events, and Fluxus, and that such events shifted the

aesthetic orientation from high modernism to the experimental avant-garde.7 Outside of musical

scholarship, art historian Midori Yoshimoto discusses Cage’s visit in light of performance art

history, mentioning Cage’s role in liberating Japanese avant-garde artists from institutionalized

schools of arts.8

Both William Marotti and Miki Kaneda, however, challenge the unilateral view that

“Cage influenced Japan,” arguing that the encounters between Cage and Japan were indeed a

two-sided exchange; Cage was perhaps more influenced by his encounters with the Japanese

avant-garde than they were by him.9 Moreover, Kaneda subverts Cage’s supposed role as

6
Ueno, “Cage to Nihon.”
7
Galliano, Yōgaku, 221–38; Everett, “‘Scream Against the Sky’,” 194–95.
8
Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2005), 31‒32.
9
William Marotti, “Challenge to Music: The Music Group’s Sonic Politics,” in Tomorrow Is the Question:
New Directions in Experimental Music Studies, ed. Benjamin Piekut (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

5
nurturer of the Japanese postwar avant-garde by acknowledging that the “anti-music”

improvisation of the Japanese collective Group Ongaku in the early 1960s had already prepared

the audiences to be open to Cage’s liberation of sound.

My dissertation supplements Ueno’s work by extending the reception of Cage until the

twenty-first century and by examining in greater detail the trajectories of selected Japanese

groups and individuals who had direct contact with Cage and have ongoing relations with Cage’s

musical practices—supporting them, contesting them, or keeping them at a distance. Rather than

disputing who is more influential in this two-sided exchange, I focus on deconstructing the

power of the term “Cage Shock” which has had a deep influence, seriously oversimplifying the

reception of Cage’s debut in Japan.

Although some Japanese composers and artists who had life-long interactions with

Cage’s musical concepts, such as Ichiyanagi, Kosugi, and Yasunao Tone, are famous enough to

be covered in English-language music and art historical scholarship, most scholars discuss these

men in the context of western musical practices. Michael Nyman, for example, considers

Kosugi’s and Ichiyanagi’s action-based performances as examples of New York experimental

music.10 Douglas Kahn discusses Kosugi in light of the Fluxus movement in New York.11 Only a

handful of biographical studies discuss these composers’ relation to Cage in the context of

2014), 130; Miki Kaneda, “The Unexpected Collectives: Intermedia Art in Postwar Japan” (PhD diss., University of
California, Berkeley, 2012), 25‒26.
10
Michael Nyman, Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond (New York: Schirmer Books, 1974).
11
Douglas Kahn, “The Latest: Fluxus and Music,” in Sound, ed. Caleb Kelly (London: Whitechapel
Gallery, 2011), 28‒42.

6
Japanese music history and trace Japanese reactions to Cage’s musical aesthetics after 1970

(Suenobu 1996; Everett 2009).12

Within the field of sound art studies, several articles compare the musical practices of

Cage and Japanese avant-garde composers/artists outside the context of western musical

practices. Klaus Ebbeke positions Kosugi’s artistic concepts among those of Cage, European

composers, and Fluxus visual artists.13 Federico Marulanda distinguishes Tone’s use of

indeterminacy, which “introduces randomness by means of controlled equipment failure,” from

Cage’s aleatoric methods, which aimed to renounce the composer’s control.14 Brandon LaBelle

considers the sonic practice of Group Ongaku—who used bodily actions to derive a rich array of

“natural” sounds from existing objects—as an alternative strand of postwar sonic exploration,

whose history is usually dominated by “Cage, and a subsequent New York-centeredness, or

musique concrète, and the specifics of French acousmatics.”15 These authors discuss the

distinctness of Japanese composers/musicians without leaving them in Cage’s shadow. Though

they do not touch on the direct contact between Cage and the Japanese composers/musicians,

their works are ideal models for me to discuss individuals and groups without assuming the

“belated” or “derivative” nature of avant-garde practices outside of Euro-American contexts.

12
Yoshiharu Suenobu, Kaisō no John Cage: Dōjidai o ikita 8 nin e no intabyū [Reminiscences of John
Cage: Interviews with eight people living in the same age] (Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha, 1996); Everett, “‘Scream
Against the Sky’,” 187–208.
13
Klaus Ebbeke, “Takehisa Kosugi’s Acoustic Work” in Takehisa Kosugi, Interspersions 18. Januar—16.
Februar 1992, Daadgalerie, ed. Takehisa Kosugi and René Block (Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD,
1992), 31–37.
14
Federico Marulanda, “From Logogram to Noise,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language, ed. Yasunao
Tone and Robert Ashley (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies Press, 2007), 79–92.
15
Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum International,
2006), 35–45.

7
 My work also draws upon larger studies on the issue of “Japaneseness,” often applied to

concerns over contacts, conflicts, and prospects for change in Japanese culture. In fact,

Japaneseness is a phantasm reflected through the mirror of other cultures. Considering the cross-

cultural, cross-genre efforts of postwar composers, music theorist Steven Nuss believes that the

collective image of “Japaneseness” is not one monolithic, exclusive site, but a fractured and

continually fracturing complex of behaviors and differences contributed by the participants of

both (or multiple) sides of the cultures.16 In conversation with existing theories of Japaneseness,

my work explores how there might be multiple “Japans” that simultaneously co-existed for

postwar composers, considering that, after contact with Cage’s musical philosophy, some

composers and artists (e.g. Ichiyanagi, Tōru Takemitsu, and Makoto Moroi) emphasized the

historical and traditional elements of Japan, while others (e.g. Kosugi and Tone) rejected any

sound or sense of aesthetics associated with the past and chose instead to address a Japan of the

present.

A few recent studies of Cage’s reception outside the United States (other than Japan)

have helped me envisage my work in a global context. Amy Beal’s book New Music, New Allies:

American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (2006)

documents the activities of American composers, including Cage, in West Germany between

1945 and 1990.17 Effectively, Beal enables us to piece together the initial contact between Cage

and Japanese taking place in West Germany and its impact on Cage’s early reception in Japan. In

addition, both Ana Alonso-Minutti’s and Carmen Pardo Salgado’s studies reveal a surprising

16
Steven Nuss, “Hearing ‘Japanese,’ Hearing Takemitsu,” Contemporary Music Review 21, no. 4 (2002):
44.
17
Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero
Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

8
similarity of Cage’s reception in very different countries. Alonso-Minutti, for example, argues

that although many Mexicans dismissed Cage, his influence on Mexican avant-garde music was

undeniable.18 Salgado, on the other hand, observes that in Spain, Cage’s musical and conceptual

presences did not result in any specific school or style but opened up the musical field with a

sense of creative freedom—a phenomenon also found in Japan (and perhaps other countries).19

In Japan, as we will see, the sense of creative freedom that surrounded Cage led many Japanese

composers to reevaluate traditional Japanese music and instruments.

To explain the similarities between these scattered local histories, I draw upon art

historian Reiko Tomii’s concept of international contemporaneity, which suggests how local

practices may be linked to global narratives without assuming that the local derives from the

global.20 By connecting the studies of Cage’s reception outside the United States with Tomii’s

theory, we can recognize that the story between Cage and Japan is not only part of Japanese

postwar history but also of the global history of musical mobility in the second half of the

twentieth century.

Research Methodology

Archival research and ethnographic interviews are my primary research methods and are

the result of fifteen months of research in Japan (mostly in the Greater Tokyo Area) and archival

work in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York, undertaken between 2016 and 2020.

18
A. R. Alonso-Minutti, “Resonances of Sound, Text, and Image in the Music of Mario Lavista” (PhD
diss., University of California, Davis, 2008), 57.
19
Carmen Pardo Salgado, “The Influence of John Cage on Spanish Experimental Music,” Contemporary
Music Review 38, no. 1–2 (2019): 44–75.
20
Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 16.

9
 1) Archival Research: In the US and Japan, I drew on newspaper and magazine articles,

correspondence, photographs, musical scores, recordings, concert/event fliers, program notes,

and exhibition catalogs. The John Cage Collection at the Northwestern University Music Library

contains substantial correspondence between Cage and Japanese figures, which made it possible

to trace Cage’s itineraries and activities in Japan, the personal contacts between Cage and

individual Japanese musicians and scholars, and the genesis of their collaborative works. I

viewed scores and archival materials related to Japanese composers and artists such as

Ichiyanagi, Kosugi, Kuniharu Akiyama, Tone, Yoriaki Matsudaira, Yūji Takahashi, Toshirō

Mayuzumi, and Mieko Shiomi and two albums of photographs taken by photographer Yasuhiro

Yoshioka, an invaluable visual record of Cage and Tudor’s 1962 visit to Japan, at the David

Tudor Papers (Getty Collection) and the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection (Museum

of Modern Art in New York) respectively.

In Japan, I examined the complete collection of the SAC Journal and the documents

related to Cage’s 1960s performances in Japan from the Sogetsu Art Center archival collection at

the Keio University Art Center.21 At the National Diet Library, which collects copies of all

publications published in Japan, houses most of the books, newspapers, and magazine articles

that describe responses by Japanese composers and critics to Cage’s music and philosophy,

whereas the Music Library at the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan contains musical responses, in the form

of scores and recordings. I would like to thank Aki Takahashi for welcoming me to her home and

inviting me to study her late husband Akiyama’s personal collection of Cage-related newspaper

articles from the 1960s, along with correspondence between Akiyama and Cage not stored

elsewhere.

21
The Sogetsu Art Center published the periodical SAC, later renamed SAC Journal, from 1960 to 1964.

10
 2) Ethnographic Interviews: I conducted twenty-one interviews with Cage-related

Japanese composers, musicians, artists, scholars, and gallery owners from the postwar to the

present generations, contacts for which I have to thank Professor Emeritus Bonnie Wade at the

University of California, Berkeley and Professor Toshie Kakinuma at Kyoto City University of

Arts; subsequently my interviewees kindly introduced me to friends whom I also interviewed.

Through each interviewee, I sought their personal perspective on Cage as well as their thinking

about Cage’s reception in Japan. Ultimately, I realized that the Japanese experiences of Cage

actually diverged between generations. Most of the young composers raised no objection to the

term “Cage Shock” and feel no right to question the term since they did not experience “Cage

Shock” firsthand. The position against the “Cage Shock” narrative is only common among some

composers of the first postwar generation, the witnesses of the 1960s Japanese music scene.

During my interviews, I became aware of my position as an author of a reconstructed

history. Since the accuracy of one’s memory declines over time, it seems to be unavoidable that

my interviewees’ recounting of the history would often be mixed with memory lapses and

unintentional embellishments, just as any perspective on Cage (or on history in general) changes

over time. Clearly my interviewees spoke from their point of view in the present, occasionally

resulting in discrepancies, which I cross-check with documents. For example, when talking about

the term “Cage Shock,” many composers of the first postwar generation did not reveal their own

objections to the “Cage Shock” narrative until the time of our interviews.

Last but not least, I also learned from my interviewees the challenge of asking about

influence. Because not everyone accepts the premise that creation must be influenced by external

factors, the choice to reveal or conceal one’s influences will be shaped by personal

circumstances such as one’s artistic philosophy, life experience, or socioeconomic status. Some

11
composers or artists, oftentimes senior and well-established, would deny any influence from

others as a strategy to emphasize their artistic originality. One representative figure of this type

among my interviewees is Jōji Yuasa. Although some of his works of the early 1960s, such as

Projection Esemplastic for piano(s) (1961), as Galliano observed, is “principally aleatoric” and

bears “the influence of Cage,” Yuasa stated consistently throughout our interview that none of

his pieces was directly influenced by Cage.22 Other composers (usually younger), such as Jō

Kondō and Motoharu Kawashima, were open to talking about the influences they received and

which strengthened their connections with specific individuals or artistic styles. As they were of

a younger generation, they may have been less worried about such things or it may have been

advantageous to be attached to a more famous name.

Chapter Descriptions

My dissertation begins with a history of Cage’s engagement in Japanese society. Chapter

1 considers the early contact between Cage and Japan, from 1948 to 1962. By examining the

artistic encounter of domestic avant-gardists with American experimentalism, this chapter

demonstrates that the Japanese avant-garde was thriving before Cage’s first visit to Japan and

had, by that time, prepared the Japanese audience to receive Cage and Tudor’s performances in

1962. Chapter 2 documents in detail the cultural exchange between Cage and Japan in the 1960s,

in particular the rise of the term “Cage Shock.” I analyze works such as Minao Shibata’s Poem

Recited in the Night (1963), Takemitsu’s Textures (1964), and Matsudaira’s theater piece What’s

Next? (1967‒71), among others, which reflect the transient interest in Cage’s aleatoric

techniques among some Japanese composers. Although the two-way cultural exchange did not

22
Galliano, Yōgaku, 217; Jōji Yuasa, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, December 20, 2018.

12
guarantee a mutual understanding, it caused reactions and irreversible changes in the musical

thoughts of both sides. For Japanese composers, I argue this period of imitation ended with a

transition away from importing the latest western trends and a move toward exporting their

music abroad.

Chapter 3 investigates the Japanese reception of Cage from 1970 to the present, focusing

on generations that did not experience “Cage Shock” firsthand. As the fever of avant-gardism

gradually faded away, young composers learned the Cagean experimental tradition in an

academic environment (sometimes in individual composition lessons). I also focus on the

personal histories of representative Japanese who continued to associate with Cage and his

philosophy after 1970, such as composer/performers Kondō (1970s), Aki Takahashi (1980s), and

Mamoru Fujieda (1990s). All were involved in different types of activities related to Cage,

reflecting Cage’s philosophy in their music through a postmodern perspective beyond the East-

West dichotomy. It was also in the 1990s that some older composers who had witnessed the

supposed “Cage Shock” firsthand started to state that Cage’s Japanese debut had not been

shocking at all. I argue that instead of reflecting objectively Japanese reception of Cage, the wide

circulation of the term “Cage Shock” through the mass media since the 1960s only shows the

fact that Cage’s name recognition had radiated outward from a few Japanese avant-garde leaders

to the larger general public.

The second half of my dissertation departs from the chronological narrative to address

the two major responses to Cage’s philosophical questions. Chapter 4 examines the confluence

of the eastern and western musical traditions, discussing composers who found in graphic scores

a common ground between traditional Japanese music and the western avant-garde, uniting

indeterminacy and other Cagean techniques with traditional Japanese instruments and aesthetics.

13
This chapter analyzes these works of cultural synthesis such as Takemitsu’s November Steps for

biwa, shakuhachi, and orchestra (1967) and Maki Ishii’s Sō-gū (Encounter) for shakuhachi and

piano (1970), as well as the two pieces that Cage composed in collaboration with the shō player

Mayumi Miyata. Through these examples, I aim to depict the phenomenon of “reverse

importation,” in which Cage’s re-contextualizing of Japanese thoughts into aesthetic premises

inspired Japanese composers to find new artistic approaches from their own culture without

becoming nationalistic or sentimental.

The second major response to Cage’s philosophy, explored in Chapter 5, is Cage’s

interaction with Japanese artists and organizations outside the field of music, including the

dissemination of his ideas in museums, art galleries, and multimedia performing spaces. I focus

on the international careers of sound artists such as Kosugi, Tone, Keijirō Satō, and Akio Suzuki

who had kept up with the aesthetics of Cage throughout their careers by exploring the nature of

sounds in the everyday objects and acoustic spaces of Japan. I also analyze the Cage-related

exhibitions held in the 1990s, where Japanese across generations and genres connected with the

Cagean sound- and listening-based practice in a museum context. I argue that in comparison to

the musician-centered reception of Cage in the 1950s and 1960s, the Japanese reception of Cage

after 1990 was expressed more by sound artists, who promoted Cage’s musical ideas in a

museum context.

By examining the relationship between Cage and Japan from the postwar to the present,

from the generational impact (Cage Shock) to the two fields of traditional Japanese music and

sound art, this dissertation aims to comprehensively present a wide array of meanings generated

from Cage’s musical and intellectual presence in Japan. I unfold the stories of cross-cultural

14
encounters, exchange, friendship, collaboration, and mutual respect between Cage and several

generations of Japanese composers, musicians, and artists.

15
 Chapter 1 The Early Contact between Cage and Japan (1948–62)

Japan’s Early Contact with Cage from the Late 1940s: Kuniharu Akiyama and Jikken Kōbō

Cage’s name first appeared in the Japanese press in 1948. Three years after World War II

had ended, Saburō Sonobe rejoiced that information about foreign countries was finally entering

Japan.1 Yet, Sonobe lacked information on the compositional activities in Europe and the US

because of the wartime blockade. Thus, he turned to information from US newspapers likely

accessible to him through the library policies of the US Occupation.2 For example, Sonobe

summarized Virgil Thomson’s essay in The New York Herald Tribune, one of the few sources

that he could then obtain, which cited Cage as a new leading composer of the percussion (or

rhythmic) school in American contemporary music.

It was not until the 1950s that individuals who had personal contacts with Cage began to

write Cage-related articles. Kuniharu Akiyama (1929–96), a leading critic of 1950s Japan, wrote

across genres ranging from avant-garde arts to modern poetry in magazines such as Ongaku

geijutsu, Rekōdo geijutsu, and Bijutsu techō. It was he who initiated the conversation between

Cage and Japanese music circles. Akiyama became interested in Cage’s music in the spring of

1949, during his freshman year. In the library of the Civil Information and Education Section of

GHQ (the General Headquarters of the Allied powers), he read Peter Yates’s article in Art and

Architecture and Peggy Glanville-Hicks’s article in Musical America about Cage and the

1
Saburō Sonobe, “Ōbei sakkyoku-kai no genjō [The current situation of the European and American
composition circles],” Ongaku geijutsu 6, no. 2 (1948): 2.
2
In the years immediately after the end of World War II, very few Japanese citizens were allowed to travel
abroad at the time. Imported newspaper and art journals were the major sources of information and inspiration for
those interested in western modern art. Hiroko Ikegami and Robert Rauschenberg, The Great Migrator: Robert
Rauschenberg and the Global Rise of American Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 157.

16
prepared piano.3 Glanville-Hicks was one of the first to describe Cage as “an important and

controversial figure” among the American avant-garde when certain New York critics had

dismissed his work as “infantile and incomprehensible.”4

About the same time as the avant-garde activities of Cage and the New York School,

Akiyama and his young cohorts, including Tōru Takemitsu (1930–96), founded the avant-garde

group Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop) in Japan in 1951. Akiyama’s increasing interest in

Cage and avant-garde art drove him to contact Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988), who had come to

Japan in 1950. As the editor of Rekōdo geijutsu, Akiyama interviewed Isamu Noguchi in

Kamakura in January 1952, nominally for information about American music and new ballet. As

Akiyama later revealed, the real purpose of his meeting with Noguchi was to learn about Cage’s

dance music, since Noguchi had been the stage designer for the Cage/Cunningham collaborative

work The Seasons (1947), which would premiere in New York on May 18, 1947.5

Not only Akiyama, but the entire group of Jikken Kōbō was aware of Cage. Its members

became acquainted with Cage’s music through their private gatherings where they would discuss

scores of the western composers (such as Olivier Messiaen) and information gleaned in the US

magazines. The Jikken Kōbō composers recognized that the countercultural force of Cage’s

music, such as defying the temporal structures of classical music, closely paralleled their own

anti-establishment stance. Composer Jōji Yuasa (1929–), also a member of Jikken Kōbō, stated,

3
Peter Yates, “Music,” Art and Architecture 64, no. 4 (1949): 21–23; Peggy Glanville-Hicks, “John
Cage … ‘A Ping, Qualified by a Thud’,” Musical America 68, no. 10 (September 1948): 5, 20.
4
Glanville-Hicks, “John Cage … ‘A Ping, Qualified by a Thud’,” 5; for more on Glanville-Hicks, see
Suzanne Robinson, Peggy Glanville-Hicks: Composer and Critic. Music in American Life (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2019).
5
Kuniharu Akiyama and Toshi Ichiyanagi, “Dialogue: John Cage and Japan by Toshi Ichiyanagi and
Kuniharu Akiyama,” Music Today 18 (1993): 4.

17
“In liberating music from its own world, we were reacting against the academic conventions,

systems, and the establishment.”6 And Cage’s works, which often erased the boundaries of

music, sound, art, and life, were very close to Jikken Kōbō’s cross-disciplinary artistic

productions which aimed “to combine the various art forms . . . and to create a new style of art

with social relevance, closely related to everyday life.”7 As if finding a fellow traveler on the

other side of the Pacific, Jikken Kōbō became eager to experience and perform the composer’s

works in their concert series.

In meeting Akiyama, Noguchi not only gave him Cage’s contact information but also

encouraged him to write to Cage since he knew Cage was very friendly. On behalf of Jikken

Kōbō, Akiyama wrote to Cage in idiosyncratic English on April 18, 1952:

All members of our ‘Jikken Kōbō’ have been combined in their opinion and wish that
your brilliant works should be played and introduced to [the] public in Tokyo. . . . Its
[Jikken Kōbō’s] promising artist members all have shown energetic activities, exhibiting
their works to be proved not conventional like those [that] can be seen everywhere in this
country nowadays. . . . In Japan, to our great regret, old forms, techniques, and only
classicism in the sphere of music are in flood; very scarce opportunities are given to us to
hear any kind of contemporary music played. We determined, therefore, if it means an
adventure to us, to introduce to Japanese audience the works of the composers who can
represent and create [a] truly modern sense of humanity today.
It will be greatly appreciated by all of us, if you are kind enough to send us scores of
your valuable works for piano and also for chamber music, and [to] give us [the] honor
and privilege to use them for our concert, which we hope to be able to hold next July in
Tokyo. On this occasion, the program, in addition to your works, will be: André Jolivet;
Sonata for Piano, Concerto pour Flute; Jōji Yuasa: Movement for Clarinet and Piano
(Member of our Group).8

6
Jōji Yuasa, “Jikken Kōbō Concert,” liner notes to Jikken Kōbō no Ongaku, Fontec FOCD3417, 1996, CD,
11.
7
Kitadai Shōzō’s draft of Jikken Kōbō’s manifesto. Satani Gallery, ed., Experimental Workshop: The 11th
Exhibition Homage to Shuzo Takiguchi (Tokyo: Satani Gallery, 1991), 102.
8
Typescript letter from Kuniharu Akiyama to John Cage, April 18, 1952, John Cage Correspondence,
1901–1993, Northwestern University Music Library.

18
Whatever his limitations in English, Akiyama clearly expressed his and Jikken Kōbō’s wish to

premiere Cage’s music in Japan, though this wish was not fulfilled in the 1950s. Because Cage’s

initial reply did not arrive until the concert ended, Jikken Kōbō could not access Cage’s scores in

time for the July concert in 1952. In 1953, Akiyama finally received two of Cage’s scores, A

Book of Music (1944) and Music of Changes (1952), from the German harpsichordist Eta Harich-

Schneider, who had asked him to translate her article “Recent Trends in Contemporary American

Music.”9 Though Akiyama planned to program these works on the first concert of Cage’s

compositions in Japan, he confronted a significant obstacle. “Though I got Cage’s Music of

Changes and A Book of Music and hoped to perform it among the Jikken Kōbō group,” he

explained, “no pianist at that time could perform either of these two pieces. Eventually, we just

performed Messiaen’s pieces, but not Cage’s, whose music I had wanted to be performed the

most.”10

Despite the unrealized concert, in Cage and Akiyama’s correspondence, Cage expressed

his desire to visit Japan: “I have always had the desire to come one day to Japan and perhaps

through the Fulbright might manage to do it. In that case I look forward to meeting you.”11 Cage

was not just being polite. He did plan to visit Japan with the Merce Cunningham Dance

Company on a tour from December 1955 to January 1956. He hoped his Japanese friend,

Hidekazu Yoshida (1913–2012) could connect him to the Japanese newspapers, who often

9
The article was going to be published in the magazine of NHK Philharmonic Orchestra Philharmonics in
December 1953. Eta Harich-Schneider and Kuniharu Akiyama, “Gendai Amerika ongaku no saikin no keikō
[Recent trend of contemporary American music],” Philharmonics 25, no. 11 (Dec 1953): 26–29.
10
Akiyama and Ichiyanagi, “Dialogue,” 5.
11
Cage did not receive the Fulbright fellowship to Japan that he refers to in this letter. Handwritten letter
from John Cage to Kuniharu Akiyama, July 23, 1952, John Cage Correspondence, 1901–1993, Northwestern
University Music Library.

19
arranged concerts in Japan. Cage also wrote to Akiyama in the hope of obtaining more

engagements in Japan to pay their traveling expenses. At the end of the letter, Cage again

expressed his yearning to visit Japan: “I cannot tell you how much I look forward to meeting you

and being in Japan; it is the country of the whole world whose art and thought has most vitality

for me.”12 Though Cage’s plan was not carried out in the 1950s, his increasing contact with

Japanese critics and composers since then led to the realization of his dream of visiting Japan in

1962.

When translating Harich-Schneider’s article, in 1953, Akiyama learned of Cage’s interest

in the East, which led him to think of Cage around August 1954 when he started to edit the

special issue “Rediscover the East” of the Tokyo Philharmonic journal Symphony. The issue was

inspired by a recent trend among western European artists to focus on the East; “The Eastern

Problem” was discussed at the conference of the International Society for Contemporary Music

in May 1954. Considering Cage could be the featured contributor to his own special issue,

Akiyama wrote to Cage in 1954: “I am planning to print your and Olivier Messiaen’s essays on

[the] Far East problem from the point of composer’s view in the autumn number of [the] Far East

problems. I should be very delighted if you would write it to me. The closing day is [the] 25th of

September (over six sheets of type writing paper). The magazine is named ‘The Symphony’ and

I am editor in chief of it.”13 The special issue, eventually published in February 1955, included

the Japanese translation of Cage’s spare six-page article “Problem” and Cage’s 1949 essay

12
Typescript letter from John Cage to Kuniharu Akiyama, March 11, 1955. (Private letter owned by Aki
Takahashi)
13
Handwritten letter from Kuniharu Akiyama to John Cage, August 1954, John Cage Correspondence,
1901–1993, Northwestern University Music Library.

20
“Raison d’Être de la musique modern,” originally published in Contrepoints.14 Compared with

the other articles in the special issue, Cage’s article initially looks like the least connected to the

topic. Although Akiyama arbitrarily translated into Japanese Cage’s title as “Far East Problem,”

in accordance with the topic, Cage begins with a rather universal view of music:

The present musical situation (magnetic tape) has no problems (-East, -West, -North, -
South, -up, -down, Far- or Near-) in it. Action without problems is purposeless and
accomplishes nothing (one’s ears are therefore in excellent condition for hearing. (silence
does not exist, not in any season). . . . Action is (skillful) non-interrupting and itself not
interrupted by whatever.15

For the Japanese reader unaware that Cage had studied with D.T. Suzuki, the Zen Buddhist

origins of terms such as “purposeless,” “nothing,” or “non-interrupting” might have been

undecipherable.

Perhaps to better justify Cage’s article in the special issue, Keijirō Satō (1927–2009), also

a member of Jikken Kōbō, strengthened Cage’s connection to the East in his contribution “East

in the West: Raison d’Être de la musique modern,” which followed Cage’s article.16 Satō

emphasized that Cage was:

The American composer who was investigating a new possibility in contemporary music
while taking much inspiration from eastern music (tala and noh) and thought. . . . Cage
threw away pitched tuned instruments, and wrote for the percussion orchestras, which
exhibit the construction of repetition, and accumulated rhythmic patterns similar to
eastern music. . . . Though Cage didn’t use any eastern elements in the prepared piano
music in [Alexander] Calder’s film, I felt an “eastern” sense from Cage’s music. For the
most part, sounds did not engrave themselves in time but were arranged in space.17

14
John Cage, “Tōyō no mondai gendai ongaku no sonzai riyū [Far East problem: Raison d’Être de la
musique modern],” The Symphony 2, no. 8 (February 1955): 8–11; idem, “Raison d’Être de la musique modern,”
Contrepoints 6 (1949): 55–61.
15
Cage, “Tōyō no mondai gendai ongaku no sonzai riyū,” 8.
16
Keijirō Satō, “Seiyō ni okeru tōyō: Tōyō no kanōsei [East in the West: Raison d’Être de la musique
modern],” The Symphony 2, no. 8 (February 1955): 17.
17
Ibid.

21
With the efforts of Akiyama (and Satō), the special issue left Japanese readers in the mid-1950s

with an impression that Cage was an enthusiast of eastern cultures.18

Through the European Perspective

The other strand of Japanese composers’ early contact with Cage happened concurrently

in Europe. The key mediator, music critic Yoshida, met Cage at the Donaueschingen Music

Festival in the fall of 1954. His anecdotes about Cage, later published in his travelogue Ongaku

kikō (1957), confirm Akiyama and Jikken Kōbō’s understanding of Cage—as an ardent admirer

of the eastern culture.19 Yoshida first went to Europe in the spring of 1954, where he attended

Cage and David Tudor’s final rehearsal for their European debut at the Donaueschingen Music

Festival in October 1954. As Yoshida wrote in Ongaku kikō, “after seeing Cage’s rehearsal,

Heinrich Strobel (1898–1979) and Madame Strobel suggested that Cage should give an

explanation before his performance. Cage walked to us with a smile and rejected giving any

explanation for his work: ‘Do you think it’s so important to be understood by the public? This is

an expression and nothing else. There’s no meaning to be explained.’”20 Then Cage turned to

Yoshida, whom he met just a day before, and asked, “As a Japanese [person], what do you

think?” Yoshida replied, “If the music can be explained by words, then the music is

18
According to Masaaki Ueno, in the 1950s, Cage-related articles in Japan were mostly about his
relationship with the East. Lots of the articles discuss Cage’s embrace of eastern art and concept, including noh,
Buddhism, Zen, Japanese living and architectural styles, and I-Ching. Others emphasized that Cage’s rhythmic
structure and aleatoric improvisation were influenced by eastern rhythm or Japanese ma. For more, see Masaaki
Ueno, “Cage to Nihon: Sengo gendai ongaku no fuchi [Cage and Japan: Modern music in the postwar era]” (PhD
diss., Osaka University, 1999), 28–36.
19
Hidekazu Yoshida, Ongaku kikō [Music travelogue] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1957).
20
Ibid., 350–51.

22
unnecessary.” Taking Yoshida’s words as a justification for not giving an explanation of his

work, Cage laughed and said: “That’s it! A Japanese laughs, I laugh and it’s enough!”21

On the next day, Yoshida and Cage happened to meet again at a café. Cage came to

Yoshida and showed his strong interests in the East: “America is a mixed nation and has no

unified spiritual basis. We rely on material culture and therefore have less and less spirituality.

Yet, I think the East is totally the opposite. My interest in Zen is based on my hope to recover

Americans’ lost spirit.”22 In the afternoon rehearsal of Cage’s prepared piano pieces, Cage and

Tudor played 34'46.776" (1954) with two pianos for 34 minutes and 46.776 seconds. Among the

audience, Heinrich Strobel and his wife were annoyed and urged Cage to shorten the piece to

one-fifth of its length. Again, Cage turned to Yoshida in the audience and asked what he thought

as a Japanese. Yoshida replied: “In Japan, striking the body of the instruments, producing noisy

effects by plucking, or tuning the strings during the performance were all common in Japanese

music. But I couldn’t understand why the piece must be so long. This was the most unpolished

classical piece that I have ever met. I almost wonder whether this piece has any value in the

classical music repertoire.”23 Without the support of his Japanese friend, Cage walked down

from the stage and, looking like he might cry, said: “It’s a pity. They don’t permit me to play the

whole work. I have to cut the piece!”24

For Cage, the encounter was memorable enough that he recounted it in his “Remarks

before a Visit to Japan” (1962): “At the end of this rehearsal [at the 1954 Donaueschingen Music

21
Ibid., 351.
22
Ibid.
23
Ibid., 352.
24
Ibid.

23
Festival] only one person in the audience offered his congratulations. He was Hidekazu Yoshida

who later traveled with us to Cologne and Paris and who answered my questions regarding haiku

poetry.”25 The haiku knowledge that Cage learned from Yoshida later became the basis of his

trilogy, Atlas Eclipticalis (1961–62), Variations IV (1963), and 0'00" (1962). Yet, to Yoshida,

Cage’s understanding of Japan made him rethink of his own culture from a different angle.

While listening to Cage’s account of his aspiration to visit Japan on their train to Cologne,

Yoshida was thoughtful. “To foreigners’ knowledge of Japan,” he later wrote in his travel note,

“I often don’t know what to reply.” Among his questions were: “‘how does Zen live in Japan?’ It

is possible that there is Zen within Japanese wisdom and perspective on life. Yet, there are only a

few people who live directly, entirely with the philosophy of Zen.”26 While pondering the issue

of intercultural recognition, Yoshida also started to imagine Cage’s possible visit to Japan in the

near future and how Japan might disappoint or satisfy Cage.

When Yoshida returned to Japan, his experience with Cage circulated in Japan’s music

community. Yoshida’s report of the European reaction to Cage’s music dominated. As Minao

Shibata (1916–96), a composer of Yoshida’s generation, remembered:

Japanese composers first knew Cage around 1948 and 1949. Later, when Yoshida
Hidekazu came back from attending Cage’s European debut at the West German
Donaueschingen Music Festival in October 1954, we got to know Cage more
concretely. . . . Yoshida described the confusion and critical attitude of the German music
critics listening to Cage’s music for the first time at the rehearsal of the festival, and he
said that Cage’s performance got boos and laughter from the audience. At that time, we
[Japanese composers] were all Europe-oriented. Therefore, we approached Cage with the
same skeptical perspective as the Europeans toward Cage.27

25
John Cage, “Remarks before a Visit to Japan,” SAC Journal 27, special issue—Sogetsu Contemporary
Series 17 (October 9, 1962): n.p.
26
Yoshida, Ongaku kikō, 359–60.
27
Minao Shibata, “Essei Cage san [Essay: Tribute to Cage],” Gendaishi techō 28, no. 5 (April 1985): 18.

24
Besides becoming acquainted with Cage, Japanese composers acquired concrete examples of

aleatoric, indeterminate, and graphic scores from the European avant-garde composers.

Composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Raúl Kagel, Bo Nilsson, Pierre Boulez, and

Sylvano Bussotti adopted indeterminacy in their music after Cage’s appearances at

Donaueschingen in 1954 and the Darmstadt Summer Courses in 1958. Akiyama, who went to

Germany from 1959 to Spring 1960, attended the performance of Cage’s works (Aria with

Fontana Mix) for the first time in 1959 at Darmstadt. He was surprised to see European

composers such as Stockhausen and Bussotti, who saw Cage and Tudor’s performance last year

and before, reacting to the American experimentalism with the European indeterminate notation.

In the May issue of the leading monthly music magazine Ongaku geijutsu, Shibata took

up the responsibility of introducing the new European tendency of indeterminacy, all in

preparation for Japanese premiere of Klavierstücke XI (1956) at the second Contemporary Music

Festival at Karuizawa on August 21, 1958, the first European indeterminate work performed in

Japan.28 In June 1958, the twenty-seven-year-old composer Yoriaki Matsudaira (1931–) listened

to Stockhausen’s indeterminate work ahead of his Japanese colleagues, when Matsudaira’s own

work Variations for violin, cello, and piano (1957) was performed alongside Stockhausen’s

Zeitmass (1955–56) at the International Society for Contemporary Music World Music Days

Festival in Strassbourg (France). “It’s at that time that I became acquainted with Stockhausen’s

indeterminate music and started to compose with the European controlled indeterminacy, without

understanding Cage’s aleatoric or indeterminate music or knowing Cage’s influence on

28
Minao Shibata, “Stockhausen no Nr. 7 Klavierstücke XI ni tsuite [About Stockhausen’s Nr. 7 of
Klavierstücke XI],” Ongaku geijutsu 16, no. 5 (1958): 98–103.

25
Stockhausen’s indeterminate works,” said Matsudaira.29 Matsudaira adopted controlled

indeterminacy in his Velocity Coefficient for flute, keyboard, percussion, piano, and conductor

(1958). He composed most of the components, such as tempo, pitch, dynamics, attack, and

duration, in Velocity Coefficient serially while leaving the order of the three movements and

three improvisatory solo passages in each movement to the performers’ discretion.

Two years later, Matsudaira applied indeterminacy to the conductor’s score in the second

movement of his Orbits for flute, clarinet, and piano (1960) (fig 1.1), which has six circle graphs

instead of a full score. Each graph shows the variations of tempo, decided with serial methods,

within this piece. The conductor starts the piece at any point of each circle, reading the

metronome markings inside or outside of the circle either clockwise or counter-clockwise. Each

performer’s score also has some passages of notes with free rhythm. Thus, depending on the

conductor and performers, the performance would be different each time. Since there is no full

score, neither the conductor nor the performers know the other parts of the music. Matsudaira

minimized the conductor’s role from controlling the ensemble to merely indicating tempo, which

is coincidentally similar to Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958), where the conductor

acts as a chronometer on the podium whose arms simulate the movement of the hands of a clock.

(Matsudaira did not know Cage’s aleatoric piece at that time.) Their similar approach to the

aleatoric concept helped Matsudaira accept Cage’s music quickly when he later learned it in

detail from Toshi Ichiyanagi (1933–) in the early 1960s.

29
Yoriaki Matsudaira, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, February 5, 2017.

26
Figure 1.1 Score for Matsudaira’s Orbits for flute, clarinet, and piano. Photograph by the author,
2017.

Contacting Cage in New York

In the late 1950s, Toshirō Mayuzumi (1929–97) emerged as another key figure in

introducing Cage to Japan. Mayuzumi was one of the postwar composers who had been actively

connecting the Japanese contemporary music scene with the international music world since the

early 1950s. When Mayuzumi returned home from studying in Paris in 1953, he introduced jazz,

serialism, and musique concrète to his compatriots, along with names such as Stockhausen,

Boulez, and Luigi Nono. Mayuzumi’s French education and interests in the avant-garde,

experimental techniques, and later pan-Asianism inspired him to compose with unusual

sonorities and instrumental combinations. For example, his widely-heard Nirvana Symphony

(1958) involves using two separate pentatonic scales derived from the Buddhist temple bell’s

overtone series. He also placed three instrumental groups in different corners of the performance

hall, creating a three-dimensional effect arising as the partial tone structures from these groups

27
combine and cross over the heads of the audience. Akiyama remarked that Mayuzumi’s Nirvana

Symphony is emblematic of Japanese composers’ assimilation in the 1950s of the most up-to-

date European compositional trends (from total serialism to musique concrète) and of their move

forward to establish their own musical language.30

Mayuzumi’s interest in distinct timbres and acoustic sound made him keenly interested in

Cage’s prepared piano and aleatoric music. He wrote about Cage’s prepared piano and

philosophy of chance composition along with the elements of Indian and South Asian music in

two main contemporary music magazines in Japan.31 Although composer Fumio Hayasaka

(1914–55) had already used the prepared piano in the film Unter Heissem Himmel in 1954

without having any of Cage’s prepared piano pieces at hand,32 in 1957 Mayuzumi composed the

first prepared-piano piece in Japan after studying Cage’s prepared piano music such as Sonatas

and Interludes (1946–48) in detail. In his Pieces for Prepared Piano and Strings (1957), unlike

Cage, Mayuzumi only used the prepared piano to get timbral nuances to elaborate his serial

technique, instead of basing his music on American experimentalism. His instruction for

preparing the piano is illustrated by a graph which indicates the strings but not the specific

position to insert objects (the preparation can be different depending on the pianist’s taste). On

the other hand, he composed with fixed notation and left no indeterminacy (other than timbre) to

30
Kuniharu Akiyama, Nihon no sakkyokukatachi: Sengo kara shin no sengotekina miraihe jō [Japanese
composers: From the end of the war to a true postwar future. Vol. 1] (Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha, 1978), 81.
31
Toshirō Mayuzumi, “Rekōdo ni yoru gendai ongaku nyumon zenei [Introduction to contemporary
music—avant-garde by recording],” Rekōdo geijutsu 6 (October 1957): 44–45; idem, “John Cage san [Tribute to
John Cage],” Ongaku geijutsu 16, no. 12 (1958): 19–23; idem, “John Cage san II [Tribute to John Cage II],” Ongaku
geijutsu 17, no. 1 (1959): 101–5.
32
The music includes percussion and two prepared pianos. Hayasaka might have learned about prepared
piano from the Jikken Kōbō members Akiyama and Hiroyoshi Suzuki, who often wrote about Cage in the 1950s,
though Hayasaka didn’t get any concrete instruction from them about composing with prepared piano.

28
the performer. With the instruments of a string quartet extending and complementing the

imaginative sounds of the prepared piano, Mayuzumi’s Pieces for Prepared Piano and Strings

unfolds a world of the neo-impressionistic acoustics.

Mayuzumi probably hesitated to adopt aleatoric elements because he doubted Cage’s

reasons for composing with the aleatoric techniques. After observing the score of Cage’s Concert

for Piano and Orchestra, Mayuzumi was struggling to verify whether the irrational thought he

found in Cage’s work was total nonsense and whether this kind of music could truly be an art or

not. His curiosity drove him to New York to meet Cage in person thanks to a grant from the

Institute of International Education of New York for 1960–61. Through Ichiyanagi, Mayuzumi

became acquainted with Cage sometime before Christmas 1960. Knowing that Mayuzumi would

not reunite with his family in Japan, Cage hosted Mayuzumi in his home in Stony Point, New

York, on Christmas Eve.33 Mayuzumi later reported in the magazine Geijutsu shinchō his

surprise at Cage’s simple life and proximity to nature.34 Mayuzumi could not help but agree with

Cage’s artistic attitude that there is no division between art and life. He also hailed Cage as the

most fascinating person among the roughly fifty artists of various ages and genres that he had

met during his trip to the US, and considered Cage’s music as the freshest, richest oeuvre that he

had heard in the US.35

33
Cage even drove one hour to pick Mayuzumi up at his hotel in New York. Toshirō Mayuzumi, “John
Cage ni sasageru chōji [A condolence to John Cage],” Ongaku geijutsu 50, no. 10 (1992): 33.
34
Mayuzumi had later written a similar report in Toshirō Mayuzumi, “Rofuto zenereshon nyuyoku no
atarashi geijutsuka-tachi [Loft generation: New artists in New York],” Yomiuri Evening News (May 22, 1961): 5.
35
Although Mayuzumi agreed that Cage as one of the most influential composers and thinkers in the
twentieth century, he personally did not like Cage’s music that much. In 1961 in New York, Mayuzumi composed
Metamusic for saxophone, violin, and piano (1961), which is an ironic criticism of Cage’s music. Reading the score,
the musicians produce no sounds during the performance but just act as if they sound. The audience will only listen
to the incidental sounds made by the musicians’ actions. Later when Cage visited Japan in 1962, Mayuzumi
dismissed Cage’s significance as a composer—arguing that he stopped composing after 4'33". Toshirō Mayuzumi,
“John Cage no shōtai [The true character of John Cage],” Geijutsu shinchō 12 (March 1961): 58; idem, “Shizen o

29
 Consequently, and perhaps influenced by Japan’s long tradition of embracing the latest

trends from abroad, Mayuzumi felt it was imperative for Cage’s work to be heard in Japan.

While in the US, Mayuzumi was also surprised by new developments in Ichiyanagi’s work, that

is, after becoming Cage’s student in 1957 and getting involved in the New York avant-garde

scene.36 He recognized that Ichiyanagi could become an authority on the music of Cage and the

experimental New York School in Japan. Thus, Mayuzumi persuaded Ichiyanagi to return to

Japan and participate in organizing the Japanese premiere of Cage and his fellow Americans’

works at the 4th Contemporary Music Festival in Osaka on August 25–27, 1961, under the

auspices of the Twentieth Century Music Laboratory.

The 4th Contemporary Music Festival in Osaka

Mayuzumi had founded the Twentieth Century Music Laboratory in 1957 with

composers Makoto Moroi (1930–2013), Shibata, and Yoshirō Irino (Yoshida joined later), who

all desired to hold a contemporary music festival and lecture series in Japan. The Laboratory had

organized its contemporary music festivals, modeled on Donaueschingen, almost annually since

1957 with the initial goal of introducing European avant-garde music to Japanese audiences.

Because the Laboratory comprised composers of different ages and styles and opinions, not all

the members of the Laboratory supported Mayuzumi’s promotion of Cagean experimental music

in Japan. Moreover, the Laboratory ventured to hold its 4th Contemporary Music Festival in

Osaka, where the interest in contemporary music was still unknown; the Laboratory was afraid

genshutsu saseru ongaku [Music that makes nature appear],” SAC Journal 27, special issue—Sogetsu Contemporary
Series 17 (October 9, 1962): n.p.
36
Before Ichiyanagi went to the US in 1952, his music was close to the French neoclassicism. His favorite
composer was Francis Poulenc. Ichiyanagi seemed to have no interest in the avant-garde at all.

30
that the festival in Osaka would not succeed. The job of premiering the Cagean school of music

on the first day of the festival fell to Mayuzumi. He called the program “American Avant-garde

Music,” and the Laboratory left the responsibility of organizing entirely to Mayuzumi.37

All three nights sold out the 800-seat concert hall, proving that these concerns were

unnecessary. Owing to Osaka’s accessibility, more people attended the festival than the previous

festivals in the resort area, Karuizawa, including students and people outside the field of music

who wanted to learn contemporary music. Yet, in comparison to the previous festivals, there

were no lectures or seminars, perhaps because until 1961 there was no one in Japan who could

confidently explain Cage’s indeterminate and aleatoric music except Mayuzumi and Ichiyanagi.

At the beginning of the first-night concert, Mayuzumi simply introduced the repertoire and the

difference between Stockhausen’s rational use of aleatoric techniques and Cage’s anarchic

approach, since he was aware that his audiences were more familiar with the former. Akira Ueno

reflected on Mayuzumi’s presentation: “If Mayuzumi hadn’t introduced the repertoire of the first

day, the Japanese audience wouldn’t have laughed and freely expressed their emotion so easily

during the concert. They might have thought that they had to laugh more seriously.”38 Indeed,

Mayuzumi’s introduction turned out to be a quasi-permission for the Japanese audience to

express their reactions out loud. The music critic Hans E. Pringsheim described that “the first-

night’s concert, after one and a half hours, ended with continuous laughter and applause.”39

37
Akira Ueno, Tadao Koishi, Shinichi Matsushita, Katsuo Matsumoto, Makoto Moroi, and Hidekazu
Yoshida, “Dai 4-kai gendai ongaku-sai o kiite—chihō ongaku bunka to gendai ongaku [Listening to the 4th
Contemporary Music Festival—regional music culture and contemporary music],” Ongaku geijutsu 19, no. 10
(1961): 13.
38
Ueno et al., “Dai 4-kai gendai ongaku-sai o kiite,” 7.
39
Hans E. Pringsheim, “Contemporary Music Festival Is Open in Osaka for 3 Days,” Asahi Evening News
(Aug 26, 1961).

31
Specifically, Ichiyanagi was the central figure who made the audience laugh out loud.

Performing the last piece at the end of the concert—Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra,

Ichiyanagi “rubbed the piano strings, knocked the keyboard with the elbow, and at the end, went

under the piano and knocked the piano with a hammer with uncanny, poker face,” wrote

Yoshiaki Tōno.40

Ichiyanagi remembered that his performance at the festival “created a sensation, as it was

the first encounter by Japanese audiences with accidental or indeterminate music.”41 The

“sensation” he mentioned actually included a large portion of audience disfavor and

incomprehension. Yasushi Togashi reflected: “The performance [on the first night] was boring.

Obviously, Japanese were puzzled by Cage’s music. Japanese, who are mostly lacking in humor,

can hardly enjoy this kind of music.”42 In a post-festival review talk, Masashi Shibata confessed:

“I cannot agree with chance music at all. I think it is silly. . . . [In Cage’s Concert for Piano and

Orchestra], it was as if the musicians were barking together on the stage”; “I think the American

chance music, whose main theme is seeing other worlds as silly, is itself silly.”43 After listening

to Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra, composer Yasushi Akutagawa was also dissatisfied

that although Cage seemed to negate the existing concept of music and negate its conventional

40
Yoshiaki Tōno, “Ichiyanagi Toshi kiton-setsu [The view of Ichiyanagi as Buster Keaton],” SAC Journal
20 (November 25, 1961): n.p.
41
Toshi Ichiyanagi, essay for “Japanese Art, 1960s,” quoted in Caleb Stuart, “Yasunao Tone’s Wounded
and Skipping Compact Discs: From Improvisation and Indeterminate Composition to Glitching CDs,” Leonardo
Electronic Almanac 10 (September 2002): 5.
42
Yasushi Togashi, “Zenei sakkyoku andepandan wa ikaga [About the independence of the avant-garde
composition],” Ongaku geijutsu 19, no. 10 (1961): 24.
43
Masashi Shibata, Tasuku Watanabe, and Hirokazu Sugano, “Dai 4-kai gendai ongaku-sai o kataru [Talk
about the 4th Contemporary Music Festival],” Ongaku no tomo 19, no. 10 (1961): 120; Masashi Shibata, “Dai 4-kai
gendai ongaku-sai o megutte: Dai 4-kai gendai ongaku-sai no inshō [About the 4th Contemporary Music Festival:
The impression of the 4th Contemporary Music Festival],” Ongaku geijutsu 19, no. 10 (1961): 25.

32
values he nonetheless failed explain concretely what music is: “Certainly, Cage’s Concert for

Piano and Orchestra has the avant-garde spirit. Yet, it is more like a cry that ‘there must be

music here!’ Cage was just like an armchair detective who merely deduced things in his own

room and shouted out: ‘the star is in that direction!’”44 For Akutagawa, Cage was not qualified as

a composer:

Ichiyanagi once wrote: “Cage thinks that humans are part of nature, and therefore leaves
the control to nature.” I don’t think this is correct. . . . Humans are not able to control
nature at all. . . . Every composer lived by fighting against the silence. Just as the artist
lived by fighting against the white canvas. Each artwork is the record of the artists
fighting. . . . What composers are doing is not changing nature but continuously failing to
change nature. . . . Then, the wonderful efforts and pains they got from the failure help
them move continuously to the future without getting bored.45

Similar to Akutagawa, Tōno objected to Mayuzumi’s pre-concert statement that Cage

made music simply return to nature. Invoking an eastern perspective, he thought that Cage’s

music was an artificial simulation of nature: “The strict act that chance ventures on is the total

reverse of the eastern unlimited mu (nothingness) and nature. There is a long influence of

rationalism in the concept of chance. Nature should be just disordered; we should naturally carry

out what nature has caused so far. Cage’s pretense that we can be closer to nature is extremely

artificial.”46 Even Cage’s old friend Yoshida couldn’t feel sympathy for Cage’s music after

listening to the Concert. Yoshida agreed with Cage’s reconsideration of the concept of “what

44
Yasushi Akutagawa, “Dai 4-kai gendai ongaku-sai o megutte: Kami ni eikō are [About the 4th
Contemporary Music Festival: Glory to god],” Ongaku geijutsu 19, no. 10 (1961): 20–21.
45
Yasushi Akutagawa, “Gendai ongaku-sai ni chōsensuru [Challenge the contemporary music festival],”
Geijutsu shinchō 12 (October 1961): 117.
46
Yoshiaki Tōno, “Dai 4-kai gendai ongaku-sai o megutte: ‘Gūzen’ ni tsuka reta Aporo-tachi [About the
4th Contemporary Music Festival: ‘Apollo’ who was possessed by chance],” Ongaku geijutsu 19, no. 10 (1961): 16.

33
music is” and his critique of formalized music. Yet, as a listener, he found more merits in

European aleatoric works than in those of the American.47

Owing to the controversial “sensation” on the first night of the festival, the second-night

concert, “Japanese Avant-garde,” made a comparatively favorable impression on the Japanese

audience. The second night presented compositions of Japanese composers, whose works were,

as Yoshida remarked, “closer to the music that we used to have.”48 There were two main styles:

the “old” avant-garde serial style, with which Japanese had been familiar since the 1950s, in the

works of Irino, Shibata, and Moroi; and the “new” avant-garde, the Cagean aleatoric style, in

Takemitsu’s Ring for flute, terz guitar, and lute (1961) and Mayuzumi’s Prelude for String

Quartet (1961).49 Inevitably, the Japanese audience compared Takemitsu’s and Mayuzumi’s

works with the Cagean school of works they had heard the night before, and they excitedly found

that the Japanese pieces were more tangible and understandable than the American ones. The

critics unanimously praised the Japanese composers’ skillful use of the indeterminate element

without losing their Japanese roots or becoming ridiculous. For example, in Prelude for String

Quartet, Mayuzumi carried out Cage’s concept of simultaneous independence by placing the

string players as far away from one another as possible on the stage. The composer demanded as

little interruption between the notes of each performer as possible, and the four string players

47
Hidekazu Yoshida, “Ongaku jihyō suijun takai sakkyoku, ensō ‘gendai ongaku-sai’ o kaerimite [Music
review: Compositions and performance of high level—reflecting on the performance of the ‘Contemporary Music
Festival’],” Yomiuri Evening News (September 5, 1961): 5.
48
Ueno et al., “Dai 4-kai gendai ongaku-sai o kiite,” 9.
49
When Cage’s music was introduced into Japan, there was no clear distinction between the American
“experimental” music and the European “avant-garde” music. Thus, most of the Cage-related articles in the 1960s
label Cage as the “American avant-garde composer.” A small number of the critics who noticed that Cage’s music
and aesthetics were different from those of the European avant-garde and that Cage was an extremist artist in the
US, used the term “ultra-avant-gardist” to describe Cage in their articles. For example, Minao Shibata, “Sekai no
geijutsu <5> ongaku chō zen'ei: Dentō o furisuteru John Cage no shinpū [Art of the world <5> Ultra-avant-garde
music: The new style of John Cage, who abandons tradition],” Asahi Morning News (May 11, 1964): 10.

34
thus contribute to one sound space. He left the duration of each fermata—silence—up to the

performers, who were supposed to consider the order of appearances of the sounds produced by

the other performers. The entire piece suggests a progression from the hidden to the obvious,

from indeterminacy to determinacy. The indeterminacy and determinacy in Mayuzumi’s piece

are points on a spectrum, instead of being mutually exclusive. The critics also praised the piece

as entirely Japanese because Mayuzumi beautifully mixed indeterminacy with the sound of

gagaku’s shō (Japanese mouth organ) and hichiriki (double-reed Japanese flute) as imitated by

the European instruments, a style Mayuzumi started to use with his Nirvana Symphony.

Takemitsu’s Ring, a mixture of serialism, graphic notation, and the dramatization of

performance gestures, received even greater acclaim by winning the first composition prize of

the 4th Contemporary Music Festival. The four main parts of Ring use a loose space-time staff

notation with the tempo, dynamics, articulation, and part of the rhythm left to the performers’

discretion. These sections are separated by purely graphic notations using more exquisite

calligraphy than Cage’s Solo for Piano, from which Takemitsu claimed he received a direct

influence.50 The graphic parts require the performer to add personal input to the performance or

to play around the lingering feeling from the previous section. Because the score does not require

a conductor, the conductor Seiji Ozawa only served to indicate time for the performers on the

stage. The critics applauded Takemitsu’s refined, moderate use of indeterminacy and graphic

notation, which they saw as different from Cage’s destructive style. Haruo Teranishi made the

comparison directly: “Though both Takemitsu and Cage use chance and indeterminacy,

50
When Ichiyanagi returned to Japan in 1961, Ichiyanagi probably gave Takemitsu the scores of Solo for
Piano from the Concert for Piano and Orchestra and one or both of Fontana Mix and Cartridge Music. See Hugh
De Ferranti and Yōko Narazaki, eds., A Way a Lone: Writings on Tōru Takemitsu (Tokyo: Academia Music, 2002),
5.

35
Takemitsu’s work connects more closely to the creation and brought more humanistic touching

moments than Cage’s work.”51 Yoshida also praised Takemitsu for adopting Cage’s concept of

improvisation into his own work, which “inspired a higher level of creation than any of Cage’s

works that I know,” and even wrote without reserve that “Japanese instinctively know more than

Americans about thinking and creating on the dualities of order and freedom, or congruence and

incongruence.”52 Perhaps Toshio Matsumoto’s comment provides a clue to the contrasting

reviews on Takemitsu’s and Cage’s works: “Takemitsu usually rejected carrying out one concept

thoroughly in his work,” he wrote. “As a Japanese, I understand him. Japanese art is often

created for savoring its compound, delicate relationship between different elements, and cannot

be so clear-cut as the American conceptual art which throws away all unnecessary elements and

reduces the work to the simplest form.”53 Therefore, Takemitsu, who elegantly amalgamated

indeterminate elements with a number of his other preoccupations from this period—serialism,

expansion of timbral possibilities, and others—won the favor of his compatriots. In comparison,

most of the critics stayed silent about Cage’s works, which they found less impressive.

The arrangement of presenting Japanese avant-garde works one day after the American

avant-garde work left some Japanese with a positive attitude toward the accomplishments of

their domestic avant-garde composers. Kazuo Yoshimura reflected: “this festival showed that

Japanese contemporary music is actually not that bad. In future contemporary music festivals, we

51
Haruo Teranishi, “Dai 4-kai gendai ongaku-sai-hyō 2 [Review of the 4th Contemporary Music Festival
2],” Ongaku geijutsu 19, no. 10 (1961): 32–33.
52
Yoshida, “Ongaku jihyō suijun takai sakkyoku, ensō ‘gendai ongaku-sai’ o kaerimite,” 5.
53
Toshio Matsumoto, quoted in Kōji Kawasaki, Nihon no denshi ongaku [Electronic music from Japan]
(Tokyo: Aiikusha, 2009), 307.

36
can surely present only Japanese contemporary works.”54 Yoshida also described how

Takemitsu’s piece functioned as revelation that helped him comprehend the pieces in the first-

night’s concert:

After listening to the concert of Day 1 and then Day 2, I got the impression that music on
Day 2 was a little bit closer to the music what we used to have. Yet, if the order has been
reversed, Day 2 first and then Day 1, works such as Mayuzumi’s Quartet might have
sounded very different from the usual contemporary music that we knew.55
It was by listening to Takemitsu’s Ring on the second night of the festival that I got to
understand that the composers Cage, [Christian] Wolff, and Ichiyanagi composed their
works with the aim of producing silence.56

One might speculate that the festival organizers had thought about the strategy of using the first

day’s program to garner initial interest through the notoriety of Cage’s music and ultimately to

highlight the superiority of the Japanese works on the second day. In any case, Mayuzumi’s

production on the first night of the festival was successful in stimulating a Japanese audience

with the pieces of the Cagean school whether the audience felt sympathy for those pieces or not.

The Contemporary Music Festival in Osaka significantly affected the Japanese music

scene, differentiating between Japanese composers who were interested in Cage and those who

were not. Ichiyanagi remembered that when he introduced the Cagean school of music to Japan

at the Contemporary Music Festival in Osaka, the majority of the Japanese composers attended

because they were simply curious about Cagean music.57 After the festival, Ichiyanagi observed

54
Kazuo Yoshimura, “Dai 4-kai gendai ongaku-sai o megutte: Dai 4-kai gendai ongaku-sai [About the 4th
Contemporary Music Festival: The 4th Contemporary Music Festival],” Ongaku geijutsu 19, no. 10 (1961): 25.
55
Ueno et al., “Dai 4-kai gendai ongaku-sai o kiite,” 9.
56
Hidekazu Yoshida, “Cahier de Critique 10,” Ongaku geijutsu 19, no. 10 (1961): 35.
57
Toshi Ichiyanagi, “Judai no boku ni Mondrian o oshiete kureta no wa, karedatta—ringu Takemitsu Tōru
to no deai [It was him who taught Mondrian to me in my teens—RINGS, encounter with Tōru Takemitsu],” in
Takemitsu Tōru—botsugo 10-nen, narihibiku ongaku [Tōru Takemitsu—10 years after death, resounding music]
(Tokyo: Kawade shobo shinsha, 2006), 24.

37
that in general Japanese composers fell into two groups: 1) German-influenced composers, such

as Moroi and Irino, and less enthusiastic about Cage’s music, and 2) French-influenced

composers, such as Mayuzumi and Takemitsu, more enthusiastic. Needless to say, it was the

second group of composers, later joined by younger composers and musicians, that participated

in expanding the repertoire of Cagean experimental music and organizing Cage and Tudor’s first

visit to Japan one year later. Mayuzumi, as the introducer of the Cagean music, was happy to see

his production had aroused a strong response in Japanese music circles and expressed his view

that this kind of contemporary festival, which introduced new music, should be continued.

Takemitsu, one of the few composers explicitly stating that he felt a “shock” at hearing Cage’s

music for the first time in 1961, praised Cage’s music for its human qualities: “In comparison to

the large European avant-garde music like Boulez’s which took the entire music history as his

responsibility, the [experimental] American music which focused on personal living is more

friendly.”58 After the Osaka Music Festival, Takemitsu joined Mayuzumi and Ichiyanagi to

invite Cage to Japan.

Group Ongaku’s Debut Concert

Upon returning to Japan from the United States, Ichiyanagi had two agendas in mind.

One was to disseminate Cage’s music and writings. The other was to introduce Fluxus to Japan.

Though he never tried to organize concerts of Fluxus-style pieces, he succeeded with the former

goal.59 Through contact with Ichiyanagi, many composers and musicians received scores and

58
Takemitsu Tōru, quoted in Toshi Ichiyanagi, Ongaku to iu itonami [Music and contemporary age]
(Tokyo: NTT Publisher, 1998), 83.
59
Ichiyanagi: “Before I went back to Japan, I was planning to introduce Fluxus to Japan. Yet, when I
actually came back to Japan, I was so busy with introducing Cage and had no time to introduce Fluxus at all.

38
ideas of American experimental music, and many tried to apply these “new” avant-garde

concepts to their compositions and musical activities. Gradually the American experimental

spirit sprouted up among the Japanese avant-gardists and even enhanced the reputation of the

existing local experimental movement. The flowering of experimental avant-garde events,

launched by the Osaka Music Festival, prepared the Japanese audience to receive Cage and

Tudor’s performance in 1962.

Ichiyanagi had been previously unaware of the Sogetsu Art Center (SAC), which had

been a hub for avant-garde activities in Tokyo since 1958. When he started to visit the SAC and

happened to attend the 1961 debut concert of the improvisational Group Ongaku, he was

surprised by the group’s aggressiveness in challenging western art music conventions and by

their close resemblance to Cage and the New York School.60 Group Ongaku comprised a group

of students from the Tokyo University of the Arts and Chiba University, who had been practicing

collective improvisation in practice rooms at the university since November 1958. The founding

members Takehisa Kosugi (1938–2018) and Shūkō Mizuno (1934–) started the group by

presenting impromptu sound with violin and cello. They aimed to challenge conventional modes

of artistic expression—the European music of fixed notation which only produces music in line

with the aesthetics of the composer. Later they were joined by music students Chieko Shiomi

(later Mieko Shiomi, 1938–), Mikio Tojima, Genichi Tsuge, and Yumiko Tanno, who also felt

unsatisfied with their academic training in traditional western music. Together, they reacted

Besides, Fluxus at that time didn’t have a clear, satisfied substance and position.” Nam June Paik, Isamu Kurita,
Sakon Sō, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yūji Takahashi, and Makoto Moroi, “Sekai no zen'ei to ongaku [Avant-garde and
music in the world],” Ongaku geijutsu 21, no. 8 (1963): 42.
60
Ichiyanagi recalled: “At that time, Cage’s scores and recording were not accessible in Japan, neither were
the foreign composers/artists younger than Cage yet introduced to Japan. Therefore, I was very surprised that there
were musicians in Japan who held ideas similar to those American artists.” Ibid.

39
against what they considered the bankruptcy of European music by creating sound and noise

from customarily unplayable parts of instruments and everyday objects. They were aware of

contemporary international avant-gardism, such as Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrète, and had

heard about Stockhausen and Cage. They were sick of the Japanese avant-garde which, they felt,

learned the new western European music techniques superficially without reflecting on each of

their philosophies thoroughly. Avoiding superficial imitation of European avant-garde

techniques, they applied Schaeffer’s concept of “sonic objects” to live performance, presenting

sound as sound itself (instead of a representation of an idea) in an improvised setting that

eschewed egoistic improvisation.

When Yasunao Tone (1935–) joined the group in the early 1960s, he introduced them to

the new ideas of Dadaism and Surrealism (in which Kosugi had also been interested), and new

ways of performance, including unconscious improvisation. Making comparisons to the first

work of automatism, the surrealists Philippe Soupault and André Breton’s book Les Champs

Magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), Tone saw their collective improvisation as a form of

automatic writing, which offered an efficient way for them to circumvent personal idiosyncrasies

and conventional thought patterns and attain an experience outside of conscious subjectivity.

Tone also helped the group broaden their definition of music, modeling it on the surrealist

Breton’s expansion of the definition of literature, by using different concepts, such as action and

performance. Tone described their collective performance as an action process (in the spirit of

Jackson Pollock’s drip painting), saying: “I thought we were doing action painting in music.”61

At that time, their improvisations departed radically from classical and jazz improvisation,

61
Yasunao Tone, “Interview with Yasunao Tone by Hans Ulrich Obrist at Yokohama Triennale in August
2001,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language, ed. Yasunao Tone and Robert Ashley (Los Angeles: Errant Bodies
Press, 2007), 64.

40
becoming improvisation with no pattern, and using the body as a conscious vehicle to uncover a

creative potential for making music.

At their first and only public performance, “Improvisation and Objet Sonore,” at the SAC

on September 15, 1961, Group Ongaku impressed Ichiyanagi with what its members called

“automatic improvisation” with sonic objects, such as water, bells, and glasses. The concert

included members’ works with tape and live performance in the first half, “Composition and

Music Concrete,” and a group improvisation Metaplasm 9–15 in the second half. The group

adopted collective improvisation within the framework of musique concrète—a spontaneous

performance based on a wide range of electronic and acoustic sounds. In Metaplasm 9–15, the

performers treated each sound as a sonic object to be added to a sonic assemblage. Similarly, in

Shiomi’s work Mobile I, II, III (1961), she invited the audience’s “active imagination” to grasp

each sound as an objet by arranging several performers to laugh and ring a gong behind the

curtains and by having Kosugi play saxophone in the lobby area and herself wear wooden clogs,

walking up and down the stairs outside the hall. By centrifuging the sound events, Shiomi

“wanted to open everyone’s sensibility to the environment” outside the privileged space of the

concert hall.62 Tone described their debut concert as “musique concrète combined with Surrealist

automatism,” noting that “these improvisations with everyday objects serving as musical

instruments aimed to pursue a reciprocity between listening experience and improvised musical

performance.”63 In organizing the debut concert, Kosugi and Tone even had the idea of running

all the pieces together, creating a performance in which pieces overlapped, the beginnings and

62
Mieko Shiomi, quoted in Luciana Galliano, Japan Fluxus (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019),
13.
63
Yasunao Tone, “On Improvised Music as Automatism” (September 1960), translated by Colin
Smith, Post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe, entry posted February 15, 2013,
http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/94-on-improvised-music-as-automatism.

41
endings to be lost somewhere in between, somehow resembling Cage’s 1960s view of music as a

process or natural event without a beginning, middle, or end. Though Kosugi and Tone

eventually compromised and played the pieces separately, they arranged some pieces to be

played off-stage, in the hallway and the aisles. In his interview with Alexandra Munroe, Tone

described the performance as “a rumble of sounds, leftover sounds, actions, water, bells, glasses,

blowing.”64

After the concert, Ichiyanagi and Akiyama visited the group in the green room and

encouraged them to continue performing. Ichiyanagi was then searching for composer-

performers willing to perform graphic notation, indeterminate, and action music. Ichiyanagi

invited Group Ongaku to perform at his home coming solo recital at the SAC in November,

which involved the historic performance of the first happenings in Japan. While becoming close

friends with these young avant-gardists, Ichiyanagi introduced them in detail to Cage’s

indeterminate, chance, and graphic notation scores (as well as Fluxus). Tone and Kosugi

especially felt a strong interest in Cage and later became two of the Japanese artists closest to

Cage in the second half of the twentieth century.

Yūji Takahashi’s Winter Music

The availability of Cage’s scores through Ichiyanagi also helped the home-grown

experimentalist, Yūji Takahashi (1938–), dubbed the “David Tudor of Japan,” establish himself

as a performer of avant-garde piano works, including Cage’s Winter Music. In parallel to his

career as a pianist, Takahashi had aimed to be a composer since his teens. In the mid-1950s, he

64
Yasunao Tone, quoted in Alexandra Munroe, “A Box of Smile: Tokyo Fluxus, Conceptual Art, and the
School of Metaphysics,” in Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, ed. Alexandra Munroe (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 218.

42
learned Cage’s musical concepts through the Tokyo Philharmonic journal Symphony that

Akiyama edited and became interested in the chance method that Cage used in his pieces with I-

Ching. Since there were neither explanations nor scores of Cage’s music available to him at that

time, Takahashi attempted to compose his own music using I-Ching in 1957. Takahashi became

famous thanks to his debut performance at age twenty-two at the Tokyo Contemporary Music

Festival in September 1960, where he substituted on short notice for the pianist to play Bo

Nilsson’s Quantitäten (1957). He astounded the audience not only with his skillful performance

of a complicated contemporary piece mastered practically overnight, but also with his

unconventional bright red shirt. He walked sulkily onto the stage and did not bow but rather put

his hands together as if in prayer.65

When Ichiyanagi came back from the US, Takahashi became acquainted with Ichiyanagi

through Ichiyanagi’s old friend Takemitsu, whom Takahashi assisted in creating his film music.

Takahashi received the score of Cage’s Winter Music from Ichiyanagi. Though he did not

receive any instructions for the performance from Ichiyanagi, Takahashi interpreted Cage’s

Winter Music in its entire 100-minute form, a Japanese premiere, in his concert, “Piano

Distance,” at the Sogetsu Art Center Hall on October 30, 1961. Takahashi chose to play all

twenty pages of the score but only five groups of notes or tone clusters from each page. Since the

score allows the pianist to decide the length of silence between the notes, he decided that each

group of notes and the following silence should last for exactly one minute using the stopwatch.

With some pages filled entirely by silence, Takahashi’s performance gave the impression of a

65
In a 2002 book in memory of the 1960s Japanese art/music scene, Makoto Moroi recalled the details of
Takahashi’s debut performance and commented that “the revolutions that Yūji Takahashi performed at the concert
of the Tokyo Contemporary Music Festival were perhaps more radical than those of Cage.” “Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no
Kiroku” Kanko Iinkai, ed., Kagayake 60-nendai: Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no zenkiroku [Shining 60s: The complete
records of the Sogetsu Art Center] (Tokyo: Firumu Āto Sha, 2002), 153.

43
repeated cycle of short tone clusters (about two seconds) followed by extremely long silences

(varying from one to seven minutes). During the performance, the audience was free to enter and

exit the hall (the door of the concert hall was open). There were people who chatted in the lobby,

waiting for the end of the performance, while a third of the audience remained in the concert

hall. As Shiomi recalled, there was no one shouting or disrupting the performance; the audience

members were very quiet, though some of them just fell asleep and snored.66

Takahashi’s bravery in conversing with the emptiness of extremely long silences shows a

receptivity to Cage’s compositional ideas. Takahashi explained: “I wanted to express that one-

way communication [from the composer to the listener] is no longer possible. Cage doesn’t aim

to express any meaning in his music. Instead, he wanted the listeners to create their own meaning

by listening.”67 Some listeners at Takahashi’s performance were impressed by the long, vivid

silences between one phrase and another. Tone remembered that it was as if he were listening to

the performance of silence with a background of piano sound.68 Because it was in an insulated

concert hall, the strong, vivid silence stood out to Tone more than the environmental sounds.69

Shiomi also compared her experience of Takahashi’s Winter Music to feeling a type of “heavy

silence”: “It is like when you look at the stars in the clear night sky, you can see a lot of stars as

if they are descending very heavily to you.”70 She found Takahashi’s 100-minute-long

66
Mieko Shiomi, interview by the author in English, Osaka, Japan, October 16, 2016.
67
Yasushi Akutagawa, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Yūji Takahashi, Toshirō Mayuzumi, Kuniharu Akiyama,
“Gūzensei no ongaku o megutte [About the aleatoric music],” Ongaku geijutsu 20, no. 1 (1962): 60.
68
Yasunao Tone, “Cage to Nihon no suisha [Cage and Japanese waterwheel],” Space Design 57 (1969):
118.
69
Yasunao Tone, interview by the author in English, New York, November 12, 2017.
70
Mieko Shiomi, interview by the author in English, Osaka, Japan, October 16, 2016.

44
performance of Winter Music was more effective in demonstrating the power of silence than

Cage’s 4'33": “I think it takes time for the audience to listen to the silence. Only a few minutes is

too short, [like in 4'33"]. To create heavy silence in performance, the performer needs a strong

will to perform.”71 Indeed, Takahashi’s thoughtful presentation of the heavy (or vivid) silence in

Cage’s Winter Music distinguishes him from the conventional pianist. Akiyama praised him:

“[Takahashi] gave birth to a new type of pianist in our country. He is not a pianist technician, but

a composer who uses the piano to communicate.”72

Also in September 1960, Takahashi explains his performance of Winter Music in the

article, “Face the Music.” Experiencing Cage’s music by performing and studying the scores, he

hoped to clear up current Japanese misapprehensions of Cage’s concepts and also criticized some

of Cage’s musical methods from his own perspective as a composer, performer, and listener. He

pointed out that Japanese composers and audience members too easily subsumed everything they

knew about Cage under the category of either aleatoric music or Zen and Orientalism. He

believed the real purpose for Cage to adopt the aleatoric technique or the Zen concepts in music

is to show the “freedom” that performers or listeners could have (though it is a limited freedom

granted by Cage and has to be played at the certain places [e.g. concert hall]). Takahashi did not

agree with Cage’s idea that one has to avoid one’s ego to become free. Because humans are born

with freedom of choice, as long as one has free consciousness, one’s ego would not be revealed

and limit oneself.73 Furthermore, Takahashi observed, Cage’s method of chance operations,

71
Ibid.
72
Kuniharu Akiyama, “Ongaku—piano—atarashi ongaku no ichi pēji: Takahashi Yūji dai 2-kai risaitaru
[Music—piano—one page of the new music: Yūji Takahashi’s second recital],” Yomiuri Evening News (March 2,
1962): 5.
73
Takahashi defined ego or self as a reflected image in the past: “When you reflect on yourself, it is already
a made-up image. The made-up image of yourself is not you. You see yourself as an other, or as an object. While

45
which aims at avoiding human influence, is also futile. Because at the moment that one decides

to make a decision with dice or coins, the human ego has already exerted its influence, the results

can only happen within certain possibilities.74 As for the listener, Takahashi argued, it is

impossible to surpass oneself (one’s ego) by listening to composers’ or musicians’ arbitrary

selections in indeterminate music, because listening itself results from controlling one’s

consciousness.75

Takahashi understood Cage’s imperfect musical methods as idiosyncratic answers to the

questions he faced as a twentieth-century American composer. Takahashi therefore appealed to

his fellow composers, observing that fetishizing Cage’s techniques and acoustics would never

help them find the true meaning of Japanese contemporary music. Rather, the thing that they

should learn from Cage is to create their own musical questions. For Takahashi, his own question

about contemporary music is how to create a work that can connect to people’s consciousness.

He considered that a work full of the author’s ego that no one can understand is meaningless. He

suggested that “contemporary musical works can only be given life and wing by making creative

products that can continuously make new relations with people.”76 Reflecting on this idea in the

performance of Winter Music, he meant to invite various ways of listening (e.g. staying inside or

outside the concert hall) and interpretations from his listeners.

you are moving around, you usually don’t think that you are a person doing this or that. Only when you define
yourself with words or ideas, then it [self] becomes static [fixed]. By defining yourself, you limit yourself, though
you could be anything without definition.” Yūji Takahashi, interview by the author in English, Tokyo, Japan,
January 29, 2018.
74
Yūji Takahashi, “Face the Music,” SAC Journal 19 (October 25, 1961): n.p.
75
Takahashi explained his perspective on listening in a later article. Yūji Takahashi, “Note,” SAC Journal
22 (February 25, 1962): n.p.
76
Takahashi, “Face the Music,” n.p.

46
The First Happenings in Japan

Three months after the Contemporary Music Festival in Osaka, Ichiyanagi finally found

all the performers who would perform together in his solo recital on November 30, 1961 at the

SAC. They were the members of Group Ongaku, Takahashi, Takemitsu, Mayuzumi, and two

players of traditional Japanese instruments, who accepted the idea of playing graphic notation

more easily than the classically trained musicians. Because the Osaka Music Festival had made a

such an impact on the Japanese music scene, the news soon spread to Tokyo and Ichiyanagi’s

recital at the SAC three months later received plenty of attention.77 In the first half of the concert,

the simultaneous performance of Ichiyanagi’s Music for Piano No. 2 and Stanzas for Strings, and

the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) piece Shika no tōne (Distant Call of the Deer) presented

Ichiyanagi’s new attempt to combine graphic notation work with traditional Japanese music and

live electronics. (This constituted the first-ever live electronic music performance in Japan.)

Ichiyanagi assigned Kosugi and Mizuno to perform the live electronic music in Stanzas for

Strings—including improvising new sound on the stage as they often did with Group Ongaku.

The loud squeaking sounds from their violin and cello, amplified by contact microphones,

interrupted the quietness created by the shakuhachi and piano from the beginning. When the

shakuhachi player finished Shika no tōne, he exited the stage while other pieces were still

played. The unsynchronized ending surprised Akiyama in the audience with the concept that a

performance does not have to be restricted to presenting merely a single complete composition.78

77
Asahi News, Daimai News, and two film companies advertised the recital.
78
Kuniharu Akiyama, “Tokushū: Gendai Nihon sakkyokuka-ron—Ichiyanagi Toshi [Special series:
Contemporary composer—Toshi Ichiyanagi],” Ongaku geijutsu 21, no. 1 (1963): 33.

47
 Ichiyanagi’s IBM—Happening and Musique Concrète in the second half of the concert

was even more striking (fig 1.2). Inspired by Cage’s chance operations, Ichiyanagi employed an

arbitrary set of IBM computer punch cards as scores. Without any rehearsal, Ichiyanagi asked the

performers to prepare two different actions in advance. On the stage, the performers had to

perform their preconceived actions according to the number of repetitions and the relative

duration (e.g. long or short) designated by the aleatoric number and the black and white

rectangles shown on the punch cards they received from Ichiyanagi. At the same time, they were

asked to concentrate on their actions without reacting to each other. Thus, the happenings

showed a wide range of unrelated actions, deviating far from classical music performance and

resembling the chaos of real life. For example, Kosugi used a saw and an electric drill against a

wooden board. Ichiyanagi drew lines with paints and crayons on a canvas. Takemitsu said that he

was “negotiating with sound” on the piano.79 Yūji Takahashi sat on the piano bench, but instead

of playing piano, started to converse with the chair. Tone produced faint sounds by breaking a

ceramic bowl first into a half, quarter, and then pieces with a golden hammer. Shiomi first played

an electric-wave instrument similar to a theremin, which she found in a school festival of a

science and technology university, when she saw the white rectangle and later blew soap bubbles

for the black rectangle. Shiomi recalled: “I want to show that the theremin was very musical and

sound-like. In opposition to that, I wanted to make a faint sound but with a distinctive action.

From that point, I moved to action music. Like blowing soap bubbles is an action, not music. So

I wanted to do different performances like black and white.”80 Mayuzumi, borrowing Duchamp’s

79
Kōichi Iijima, Yoshiaki Tōno, Makoto Ōoka, Yūsuke Nakahara, Tōru Takemitsu, and Toshi Ichiyanagi,
“Geijutsu no gūzen-sei o megutte [About the aleatoricism of art],” SAC Journal 22 (February 25, 1962): n.p.
80
Mieko Shiomi, interview by the author in English, Osaka, Japan, October 16, 2016.

48
idea, gradually wrapped up the stage with white paper tape to form a gigantic spider’s web on

stage, extending down toward the audience and the cameraman.81 While the eight musicians

calmly performed a variety of events simultaneously but independently of one another, the

loudspeakers blasted everyday sounds and noises from the streets of Tokyo.82 The performance

lasted about ten to fifteen minutes. All performers ended their actions asynchronously.

Figure 1.2 The premiere of Ichiyanagi’s IBM—Happening and Musique Concrète at the SAC.
From left to right, Takemitsu, Shiomi, Mayuzumi, Kosugi, Tone, Mizuno, Ichiyanagi, and
Takahashi. Photographer unknown. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Archive, I. The Museum of
Modern Art Archives, New York.

Most of the IBM performers experienced Cagean happenings for the first time through

Ichiyanagi’s work. For Group Ongaku, IBM was their first public performance of action music.

Some of the Ongaku members, such as Kosugi and Shiomi, had previously added the element of

81
Midori Yoshimoto, Into Performance Japanese Women Artists in New York (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 2005), 143.
82
The performers also include Mizuno and possibly the film director Yoshiteru Kurokawa.

49
action in their improvisation, showing their interests in shifting from pure sound to action-sound

performance.83 However, they noticed that the relationship between performers in IBM was

totally opposite to that of their own improvisations. When playing in Group Ongaku, they were

always listening to what others were playing and reacting to each other like a musical dialogue.

Yet, in IBM, all the performers were independent and simply co-existed on the stage. Describing

this relationship as “an empty coexistence,” Akiyama observed that IBM is not merely an

example of Cage’s happenings, in which performers are asked to present simultaneous but

unrelated musical events. By choosing a happening full of discontinuity between materials and

between humans, Ichiyanagi had shown the Japanese audience the contemporary freedom and

creation that he had experienced in the US. At the same time, the performers’ lonely sounds and

actions, which presented the empty drama of dismantled ego, stand as Ichiyanagi’s critique of

alienation in modern Japanese society.84

Ichiyanagi’s concert at the SAC attracted huge attention and satisfied both the audience

and producers. The audience was mostly composers, artists, actors, and singers in Tokyo who

had already seen many experimental/avant-garde performances at the SAC. They felt satisfied

with Ichiyanagi’s concert since the performance was as unusual as they expected. Ichiyanagi was

also happy because the performers he invited did a great performance in IBM, justifying his

decision to invite composer-performers instead of classically trained musicians to perform.

83
In our interview, Shiomi told me that she moved onto action music in 1960: “I remembered that when we
[Group Ongaku] were practicing music and others were making really dramatic and noisy sounds, I got tired of it. I
started to produce a faint but outstanding sound by throwing a key into the ceiling. When the key touched the
ceiling, it made a metal noise. I wanted to make an ostinato through keeping tossing the key. When I was tossing the
key, I saw my total action, my consciousness got apart from me. I was able to watch myself from outside, [and
thinking that] ‘She is not only making a metallic sound but keeping tossing the key into the ceiling.’” Mieko Shiomi,
interview by the author in English, Osaka, Japan, October 16, 2016.
84
Kuniharu Akiyama, “Gendai ongaku no jiyū to bōken [Freedom and adventure in new music],” Yomiuri
News (December 8, 1961): 7.

50
Yuasa, among the audience, expressed the inspiration he received from attending Ichiyanagi’s

concert: “I sympathized with the feeling that music was liberated from the narrow framework,

which gave a rich clue for my own composition without using staff notation that I started last

year [1960].”85 In addition to the composers, the concert also impressed many people from other

fields. The artist and architect Shūsaku Arakawa commented: “The entire program was great.

Specifically, I was astounded by the last piece, IBM. It is neither drama nor painting. It is not

merely simple action, but is a concrete proposal of a strong philosophy.”86 The poet and artist

Shūzō Takiguchi (1903–79) also praised the refinement and revolutionary thought in

Ichiyanagi’s works: “Ichiyanagi’s concert is the opposite of the Dadaistic fuss and clean up. . . .

My impression was that he touched on the more fundamental question of art. That is, it is

important to show that music also needs to return to human behavior.”87 Because of Ichiyanagi’s

recital, Cagean styles of music received more attention from Japanese of various fields.

Within the half year following Ichiyanagi’s recital, there were a series of concerts and

events at the SAC and the galleries in Tokyo conducted by the composers and performers who

learned about the Cagean avant-garde through Ichiyanagi. Each digested and responded to

American experimentalism in its own way. Tone learned about the graphic scores of the New

York-based composers Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, and Cage from Ichiyanagi. He presented

his first graphic score Anagram for Strings (1961) in his solo concert, “One Man Show by a

Composer,” at Minami Gallery in Tokyo on February 3, 1962, including Group Ongaku,

85
Jōji Yuasa, quoted in “Ichiyanagi Toshi sakuhin happyōkai ni tsuite [About the recital of work of Toshi
Ichiyanagi],” SAC Journal 21 (December 15, 1961): n.p.
86
Shūsaku Arakawa, quoted in Takashi Tachibana and Tōru Takemitsu, Takemitsu Tōru: Ongaku sōzō e no
tabi [Tōru Takemitsu: A journey to the music creation] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2016), 434.
87
Shūzō Takiguchi, quoted in “Ichiyanagi Toshi sakuhin happyōkai ni tsuite,” n.p.

51
Ichiyanagi, and Takahashi as the performers. With the knowledge of graphic notation he

acquired from Ichiyanagi, Tone was able to write down musical ideas that he used to keep in his

head. Tone remarked: “In Group Ongaku’s improvisation, we sometimes did a lot of

glissandi. . . . I thought that it would be nice if we played all together, glissandi only.”88 In the

score of Anagram for Strings, Tone asks performers to draw a line that intersects with various

circles (fig 1.3). On the intersections, the performers are asked to play different downward

glissandos for whatever length of time they choose. Tone said that his concept of indeterminacy

was rooted in his interest in surrealism but was concretized through graphic notation. He hoped

that the performers would feel that they have as much right to create and shape the music as the

composer. In addition to concretizing his idea with the graphic score, Tone organized the concert

according to his previously unrealized plan (conceived for the Group Ongaku debut concert) of

running the pieces together, similar to but predating Cage’s Musicircus. The concert presented a

total of fifteen pieces, which had all been written in less than two months, and lasted for five

hours. Some of the pieces overlapped as the members of Group Ongaku performed Tone’s pieces

along with Yūji Takahashi, who played Tone’s Music for Reed Organ and Toshi Ichiyanagi, who

played Tone’s Door. Tone even made the audience sit on the floor, not on chairs because the

concert was in an old gallery space, where the floor had wall-to-wall straw carpet.

88
Yasunao Tone, interview by the author in English, New York, November 12, 2017.

52
 Figure 1.3 Score for Tone’s Anagram for Strings. The Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus
Collection Gift. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

Japanese Adventures in Graphic Notation

Yūji Takahashi’s recital, titled “Piano Distance,” took place at the SAC on February 23,

1962, offering another round of new Japanese graphic works by Yuasa, Takemitsu, and

Takahashi. Encouraged about his graphic composition after Ichiyanagi’s recital, Yuasa

completed Projection Esemplastic for piano(s) (1961) for Takahashi. It was his first work using

entirely graphic notation and indeterminate elements. The score comprises twelve graphs. The

performers are free to choose the dynamic level and the order of the passages, and to interpret the

pitch and duration from the geometrical graphs. Some of the audience might have felt surprised

at the radical change in Yuasa’s style from his previous piano piece Projection Topologic (1959),

which was composed systematically with tone clusters. Yet, the freedom to try such a radical

new style reflected the experimental atmosphere in Tokyo in the early 1960s. Yuasa actually

used the term “projection” in the title of the work whenever he was influenced by a new

technique and wanted to try it out. While “esemplastic” means collecting several images and

53
molding them into one, Projection Esemplastic for piano(s) shows Yuasa’s attempt to mold

twelve fragments into one composition. He adopted both chance procedures and acoustic

visualization to realize various sound effects, such as muting or picking the strings with fingers,

playing the keyboard with fists, etc.

After Yuasa’s Projection Esemplastic, Takahashi premiered Takemitsu’s Corona for

pianist(s) (1962) (fig 1.4). Confident in his pianist, Takemitsu depended greatly on Takahashi’s

talents to realize the open aleatoric score of Corona. Based on his previous success in Ring,

Takemitsu extended his idea of the circle graphic design to the entire piece and to the

professional level—in collaboration with the graphic designer Kōhei Sugiura. Takemitsu noted

that teamwork with other artists at the production stage can lead to the same goal as Cage’s

indeterminate work—escaping one’s ordinary self and achieving unexpected results (perhaps the

experience of collaboration in Ichiyanagi’s IBM also shaped Takemitsu’s thought on this point).

Working on Corona, Takemitsu and Sugiura agreed to draw the circle at the center and draw

many signs (curves, lines, dots, etc.) around it. They also decided to print the five sheets of the

score on five different colors—yellow, blue, red, white and grey. Drawing from the Buddhist

philosophy, they related the five colors to the five elements—earth, water, fire, wind, and sky—

that form the universe, emphasizing the symbolic image of corona or sunlight as the root of

vitality.

Each sheet, with the same circle but different color and patterns of straight lines, curves,

and dots above it, has one special topic—vibration, intonation, articulation, expression, and

conversation. With one movement per sheet, the performer can select the order of the movements

or repeat or omit any movement. Specifically, it was Sugiura who came up with the idea to

superimpose one sheet on another by interlocking the sheets with an incision on each sheet.

54
Variations of the score can be created by rotating one of the two sheets. On the back of each

sheet, Takemitsu wrote the directions, indicating the parts he wanted to control—dynamics,

density and texture, and articulation. The rest of the parameters—pitch, time, duration, the way

of reading (clockwise or counterclockwise)—are left up to the performer. Scholar Richard Toop

noted that Takemitsu came closest to Cage’s aesthetics in Corona.89 Takemitsu used the openly

aleatory procedure and graphic symbols to generate various interpretations of his compositions

from artists; thus, his music could be transformed and separated from the composer, allowing

Takemitsu to achieve a kind of anonymity. Though Takemitsu never considered giving up the

composer’s individual expression, his description of Corona as “an etude for perceiving one note

as a complete entity, full of life,” certainly matches Cage’s artistic position.90

Figure 1.4 Score for Takemitsu’s Corona for pianist(s) (grey). Paris: Salabert, 1972.

89
Richard Toop, “Takemitsu and the Avant-garde,” in A Way a Lone: Writings on Tōru Takemitsu, ed.
Hugh De Ferranti and Yōko Narazaki (Tokyo: Academia Music, 2002), 6.
90
Tōru Takemitsu, Yoshiko Kakudo, and Glenn Glasow, Confronting Silence: Selected Writings (Berkeley,
CA: Fallen Leaf Press, 1995), 87.

55
 Following Takemitsu’s Corona, Takahashi performed his own graphic work Ekstasis for

pianos (1962), which was, as Takahashi claimed, neither influenced by Cage nor by Iannis

Xenakis but constituted by his own critique of the graphic notation.91 In the program note,

Takahashi wrote: “We exclude the personal [composer’s] choice and think that only the

movement of autonomous sound can assure the fundamental reflection between sound and

human. For that reason, a score is actually not a specification but a paradox, a rejection.”92 In the

first part of Ekstasis, there are two, two-dimensional square images of quadrants with black and

red points in them (fig 1.5). Takahashi instructs the performer to combine the two images along

the vertical axes and make it an octant (a three-dimensional coordinate system). Yet, the

combination is indeed impossible because the black and red points, which indicate the musical

parameters, scattered on the two quadrants do not correspond to each other in a three-

dimensional space. Thus, the performer can never play the score according to the instruction

correctly.

91
Takahashi learned Xenakis’s music through Akiyama, who gave him many of Xenakis’s scores and
essays around 1958. Takahashi soon felt strongly interested in Xenakis’s music and theory. He
became acquainted with Xenakis in Spring 1961 when Xenakis visited Japan for the World Music Conference.
Xenakis was surprised at Takahashi’s talent when listening to Takahashi’s premiere of Takemitsu’s Piano Distance
(1961). Upon his return to Paris, Xenakis composed his first published solo work, Herma (1961), for piano, which
Takahashi premiered at his second piano recital at the SAC on February 23, 1962.
92
Yūji Takahashi, “Yūji Takahashi Piano Recital 2, Piano Distance,” SAC Journal 22 (February 25, 1962):
n.p.

56
 Figure 1.5 Score for Takahashi’s Ekstasis for pianos (part 1). David Tudor Papers. Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles.

In the second part of Ekstasis, Takahashi uses a Euler graph as the score. The performer

can only move from one area to a neighboring area of the graph and plays notes according to the

charts indicating the music parameters such as density, duration, and interval (fig 1.6). In either

part of Ekstasis, Takahashi attempted to prevent the audience from imagining what kind of

graphic scores the performer is playing: the first part includes an instruction that is impossible to

follow; the second part includes the mathematical graph and chart which are difficult for listeners

to reproduce in their minds intuitively. What Takahashi wanted to criticize is the inefficiency of

the graphic score: “Most of the time, no one knows which graph the performer is playing,

sometimes including me as a performer, and what I was playing.”93 With his experience of

performing graphic scores, Takahashi stated that graphic notation can sometimes help you

imagine something different, but “it is not necessary to follow all the details. Even when you

play a piece with regular staff notation, it is not the right way to perform it by following the score

93
Yūji Takahashi, interview by the author in English, Tokyo, Japan, January 29, 2018.

57
exactly. You should imagine what kind of music it is, and not play each note exactly as

written. . . . Thus, no matter whether it is aleatoric or any other type of music, one should always

perform it differently according to the situation—where you play, for whom, etc.”94 Takahashi

considered the most important aspect of producing music (either performing or composing) to be

the fundamental relation between sound and human. His Ekstasis is, therefore, a parody showing

the inability of the graphic score to build the relationship between sound and human and

emphasizing that graphic scores are not the only ways to stimulate one’s imagination.

Figure 1.6 Score for Takahashi’s Ekstasis for pianos (part 2). David Tudor Papers. Getty
Research Institute, Los Angeles.

The rapidly growing trend of composing graphic score led to the first exhibition of

graphic scores in Japan, two months later. (Ichiyanagi had previously exhibited some graphic

scores in the lobby of his solo recital at the SAC the previous November.) Ichiyanagi,

Mayuzumi, Takahashi, and Takemitsu held the exhibition “4 Composers—Exhibition of Graphic

94
Ibid.

58
Score” at Tokyo Gallery from April 16 to 26 (possibly extended to April 30), 1962. Most of the

composers presented their graphic works composed within the first four months of 1962, except

Ichiyanagi, who exhibited his graphic scores from as early as 1959 and Takemitsu, who included

Ring, composed in 1961. The exhibition presented some works that had been performed, such as

Takemitsu’s Corona and Takahashi’s Ekstasis, and some that had not yet been (or would never

be) performed. Mayuzumi was the only newcomer to graphic scores among his colleagues

despite his precedence in contacting Cage. Yet, the two works he exhibited, Mobile Music (1962)

(fig 1.7) and Tadpoles-Music (1962) (fig 1.8), surprised his colleagues for his step beyond the

two-dimensional graph to the three-dimensional presentation and beyond music to the realm of

conceptual art. In his Mobile Music, Mayuzumi hung up lots of toys and objects against a

backdrop of five strings placed horizontally across the wall of the exhibition space. Ideally, the

performer should play the music according to their imagination with the objects, each of which

can be read as a single note or tone cluster. The music can be played by any instrument, and the

staff can be in any clef. After the music is played, the performer can rearrange the position of the

object freely and perform again. The performer can play the music for any duration and may

repeat at any time. In Tadpoles-Music, Mayuzumi used the five-line staff again. He required the

performer to read the “score,” but two five-line staves, were placed under a transparent glass

water tank in which several tadpoles were swimming. The performer has to capture the random

moving tadpoles at certain moments, reading their positions of the tadpoles as musical notes on

the staff. Thus, each performing unit is a quick, one-time event. The performance duration can

range from zero (no performance) to unlimited (until the tadpoles become frogs, jumping out of

the water tank).

59
 Figure 1.7 Score for Mayuzumi’s Mobile Music. Photographer unknown. The Gilbert and Lila
Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, I.11. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

Figure 1.8 Score for Mayuzumi’s Tadpoles-Music. Photographer unknown. The Gilbert and Lila
Silverman Fluxus Collection Archives, I.11. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.

Although not every Japanese avant-garde work was well-received, the impulse to break

existing musical frameworks and to question what music is permeated music circles in Japan.

Matsudaira, who had been composing in the style of European indeterminacy, learned about

60
Cage’s experimental and chance music from Ichiyanagi when Ichiyanagi came back to Japan. He

quickly became interested in American experimental music. In our interview, Matsudaira, who is

both a composer and a scholar of biophysics, explained his perspective on avant-garde: “Because

I didn’t receive the normal musical training, I felt fewer constraints against composing avant-

garde music. And because I didn’t have the sense of mission (or feel a pressure) that I must

compose avant-garde music, I tend to like to compose in an avant-garde style which is what I

liked and wanted to do. Basically, I just did what I liked, especially when it was something

new.”95

During the period between learning Cagean music from Ichiyanagi and Cage’s first visit

to Japan, Matsudaira attempted Cagean indeterminacy in two works—Instruction for Piano

(1961) and Co-Action I & II for Cello and Piano (1962). In both works, the performers have the

right to choose or change the musical materials, and the performance will be entirely different

each time. In Instruction for Piano, Matsudaira created indeterminacy by cutting several square

holes from two sheets of score and composing around the empty holes on both sides. An

additional sheet contains only holes and tempo markings. The pianist performs by covering one

sheet with another, so the empty holes show part of the score beneath. By flipping the sheets and

changing tempo, the pianist can create more possibilities. With the holes analogous to the

changing scenery one might see standing before an open window, Matsudaira’s work allows the

performer to look into another world and communicate with other dimensions. Matsudaira

dedicated this piece to Takahashi, who premiered it at the sixth concert of the composer

collective Group 20.5 in Yamaha Hall, Tokyo, on October 31, 1961. The staff of Yamaha Hall

reproached the performers because the concert involved playing the internal parts of the piano,

95
Yoriaki Matsudaira, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, February 5, 2017.

61
which violated the rules of Yamaha Hall. Due to the dispute with Yamaha Hall and the

members’ dissatisfaction with Matsudaira and Takahashi’s introduction of the concept of Cagean

indeterminacy to the group, the avant-garde collective Group 20.5, started in 1956, disbanded

after the sixth concert.96

Without being frustrated by the premiere of Instruction, Matsudaira continued to

experiment with Cagean indeterminate composition by adding graphic elements to his scores.

Co-Action I & II for Cello and Piano involve playing the internal parts of the piano, and mixing

fragments of staff notation (specifying pitch), graphic notation and tablature for cello. He treated

cello as a sound object (for example, requiring the cellist to hit the body of the cello). He also

stressed the relationship between the performers—the aspect he had started to experiment with in

Orbits (which explored the relationship between conductor and players). Co-Action I asks the

second player to decide whether to follow the initial player’s choice of order or not, and the

initial player to be aware of the other player’s choice. Co-Action II, presenting a format closer to

Cage’s happenings, allows all performers to decide the order of the movement independently

without taking into account the initial player’s choice. In a way, Matsudaira shares Cage’s aim to

negate the intervention of composer’s ego and willful expression. Co-Action I & II had no

chance to be performed until 1964, but Cage viewed the score (or at least heard the idea) of the

piece when visiting Japan in October 1962. He praised Matsudaira’s work and expressed regret

that it had not yet been performed.97

96
Motoharu Kawashima, “Matsudaira Yoriaki sakuhin-hyō kaidai [The explanatory notes on Yoriaki
Matsudaira’s work list],” Kōzui 13 (January 2014): 33.
97
Yoriaki Matsudaira, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, February 5, 2017.

62
 In conclusion, we can affirm that in early 1960s Japan, musical activities were

increasingly linked with the American experimental avant-garde and many Japanese

performances were structured as happenings or events. Yoko Ono (1933–), who had been in the

United States since 1953 and was part of Cage’s circle in New York, returned to Japan in 1962,

remaining for two years during which time she reinforced the link between the avant-garde in

Japan and the US, though in a complex way. The events she created, which were often

mislabeled as happenings, made some Japanese regard her as Cage’s disciple, though she was

more a collaborator than a student of Cage. Many of her ideas about music—for example,

imperceptible, conceptual sound can also be music—are different from Cage’s. Her debut

concert at the SAC on May 24, 1962, was welcomed by the avant-garde community at first (with

people packed into the hall and a TV broadcast), owing to the support of her then successful

husband Ichiyanagi.98 Yet, Ono’s more extreme event pieces, especially the last work in her

debut concert, Audience Piece, which involved the performers staring at an audience in the dark

for five hours till 1:30 am, confounded the audience. Ono and the show were poorly received.

Japanese critics dismissed Ono as an eccentric or an imitator of Cage. It is possible that in the

male-dominant music circles in Japan, Japanese critics denied Ono’s avant-gardness because

they simply could not imagine a young, Japanese, and female composer to have the same level of

original thought as any senior, male composer from the West.99 Despite the hostile reviews,

Ono’s personal ties with the New York avant-garde scene and her abilities as a translator and a

collaborator made her indispensable in receiving Cage and Tudor later in the year.

98
Ono was married to Ichiyanagi from 1956 to 1962.
99
Miki Kaneda, “The Unexpected Collectives: Intermedia Art in Postwar Japan” (PhD diss., University of
California, Berkeley, 2012), 71.

63
 In this chapter, we have examined the early contact between Cage and Japan, from which

we can conclude that: 1) some leading composers in Japan had learned of Cage and composed

works in response to his musical ideas well before they met Cage in-person. 2) The Japanese

avant-garde was thriving in the 1950s, which had not only prepared Japanese audiences to

receive Cage and Tudor’s performance in 1962 but also provided a basis for the two-sided

exchange between Cage and Japanese music circles.

64
 Chapter 2 The Cultural Exchange between Cage and Japan in the 1960s

From the time his name first appeared in Japan in 1948, John Cage was connected to

Japanese music circles through individual composers and scholars. His impact was later enlarged

by Toshi Ichiyanagi, who brought the American’s experimental scores and approaches to

performance into Japan in the early 1960s, expanding Japanese conceptions of Cagean

experimental music. It was not until Cage’s arrival in Japan, however, that the two-way cultural

exchange between Cage and Japan officially began. By visiting Japan in person, Cage corrected

his image of Japan. Where he had pictured a Zen-like, ancient eastern country, he found a

vibrant, modern society. Japanese musicians, on the other hand, could verify the sound they

imagined for Cage’s works and see how Cage’s radical thought, derived from eastern cultures,

resulted in the most avant-garde music in contemporary western music circles. Although the two-

way cultural exchange did not guarantee a mutual understanding, it caused reactions and

irreversible changes in both musical worlds. In this chapter, I suggest that the start of the cultural

exchange between Cage and Japanese composers in the 1960s not only helped facilitate the

westernization of Japanese music, but was a turning point for many Japanese composers, inviting

them to stop following in the footsteps of European composers and to explore their own paths in

an inter-national music context.

Cage and Tudor’s First Visit to Japan

After the Contemporary Music Festival in Osaka, Tōru Takemitsu and Toshirō

Mayuzumi, as the members of Sakkyokuka Shūdan (Composer Group) at the Sogetsu Art Center

(SAC), joined Ichiyanagi to organize Cage and David Tudor’s tour of Japan. Around 1960,

Mayuzumi had undertaken the task of inviting a foreign artist to the SAC to increase the Center’s

65
international visibility. Mayuzumi and the director of the SAC Hiroshi Teshigahara (1927–2001)

decided to invite Edgard Varèse in 1961; however, due to Varèse’s sudden illness, the visit had

to be canceled. In lieu of Varèse, Mayuzumi thought about inviting the American group Vortex.

Instead, believing that Vortex was not business-like and might not be reliable, Mayuzumi invited

Cage, whom he had met in New York in late 1961. Cage reacted positively to the prospect of

going to Japan for the SAC. Although Hiroshi Teshigahara knew Cage, his father Sōfu

Teshigahara (1900–1979), who was the main sponsor of the SAC, did not know Cage at all.1

After Ichiyanagi’s recital in November 1961, Ichiyanagi proposed to Sōfu Teshigahara his plan

of bringing Cage and Tudor to Japan next year. He emphasized that both Shūzō Takiguchi at

Jikken Kōbō and Hidekazu Yoshida at the Twentieth Century Music Laboratory had wanted to

invite Cage to Japan (though none of the plans had worked out) and pointed out that NHK had

decided to broadcast Cage’s performance on radio. Finally, Ichiyanagi acquired permission from

Sōfu Teshigahara and launched into preparing and translating the documents for Cage’s visit to

Japan in October 1962.2

For Cage, the SAC’s offer fulfilled two needs. The first was his aspiration to secure

performances, since American experimental composers sometimes found it hard to find support

for their work in the US. The SAC would cover the two artists’ transportation, room and board,

and performance expenses, though it promised no performance fees because their concerts would

be held on a nonprofit basis. The second was his long-term dream of visiting Japan, to see the

country whose culture had inspired him since the 1950s and to meet his teacher of Zen D. T.

1
Kōzō Igawa, “Ātosentā no un'ei o maka sarete [I was in charge of running the art center],” in Kagayake
60-nendai: Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no zenkiroku [Shining 60s: The complete records of the Sogetsu Art Center], ed.
“Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no Kiroku” Kanko Iinkai (Tokyo: Firumu Āto Sha, 2002), 104.
2
Toshi Ichiyanagi, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, August 28, 2017.

66
Suzuki. In his “Remarks before a Visit to Japan,” written two weeks before departing for Japan,

Cage stated enthusiastically to the Japanese audience: “The month of October 1962 will be very

interesting for David Tudor and for me. Neither one of us has ever been in the Orient before.”3

Understanding Cage’s and Tudor’s excitement and interest, the host SAC developed a schedule

that maximized the opportunities for them to experience Japanese cultures, to interact with

Japanese composers, musicians, and artists, and to participate in the events which would draw

public attention both to their tour in Japan and to the SAC. Upon arriving at Haneda Airport in

Tokyo on the night of September 30, 1962, Cage recalled that a photographer “snapped

everything from the time I got off the plane with David,”4 and a press conference with the media

followed immediately on the next day. In the press conference, Cage talked about the eastern

influence on him and his music, in particular the philosophy of Japanese Zen which, he thought,

has kept the sense of humor that European philosophy had lost.5 As Cage hoped to effectively

explain the connection between his music and Japanese culture, he drew an analogy between

listening to his avant-garde works and the experience common in a kōan story that “[at the

beginning] you feel impatient with it, but after a while, you feel good with it.”6 Speaking from

the same perspective as Cage, Tudor helped justify their coming to Japan by relating the music

they had been doing to eastern culture: “[Chance music] is a music in which process is

3
John Cage, “Remarks before a Visit to Japan,” SAC Journal 27, special issue—Sogetsu Contemporary
Series 17 (October 9, 1962): n.p.
4
Letter from John Cage to Will, November 20, 1962, Cage Trust Archives.
5
Letter from Cage to Walter and Evelyn Hinrichsen, October 10, 1962, quoted in John Cage and Laura
Diane Kuhn, The Selected Letters of John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016), 257.
6
John Cage and David Tudor, “Higashi no kaze, nishi no kaze—Cage, Tudor kisha kaiken [The East wind
and the West wind—the press conference with Cage and Tudor],” Ongaku no tomo 26, no. 11 (1962): 77.

67
important. . . . It is close to eastern music.”7 At the end of the talk, Cage also revealed his first

impression of (or disappointment with) Japan: “I heard that Japan is a very beautiful country.

Yet, when I arrived Tokyo yesterday, I found that Tokyo is also a city that makes one feel

annoyed. (laugh)”8

Cage’s impression of urban Tokyo was soon balanced by various cultural sites and

natural scenery which he and Tudor visited in Tokyo and around Japan. On their third day in

Japan, Ichiyanagi brought Cage to meet his teacher Suzuki at Shōkōzan Tōkei-ji in northern

Kamakura. Cage gave Suzuki his recently published book Silence, discussing with Suzuki the

concept of mu (nothingness) and Cage’s recent life. After the meeting, Suzuki’s assistant

explained to Cage and Tudor the details of the Zen music at the ceremony of a Zen temple—

Daihonzan Eiheiji—in Fukui prefecture that Suzuki had just mentioned to them. The unusual

instrumentation—with various metal and wooden bells—and performance aroused Cage and

Tudor’s interest and heated discussion. Combining what he had just learned while indulging

himself in meditation, Cage excitedly imagined that “this ceremony must be dominated by

silence.”9 Before leaving, Cage received special permission from Tokei-ji to knock the temple

bell. After making his first strike, Cage mischievously entered the bell and listened to its

reverberation (fig 2.1). Cage soon figured out that, in contrast to western bells, the Japanese bell

resonates first inwardly and then outwardly; the reverberation is extraordinarily beautiful and has

a strong energy penetrating the air.10

7
Ibid.
8
Ibid.
9
Toshi Ichiyanagi, John Cage, and Daisetz T. Suzuki, “Zen'ei ongaku no hassō to tenkai [The concept and
development of avant-garde music],” Geijutsu shinchō 13 (November 1962): 110.
10
Ibid., 111.

68
 Figure 2.1 Cage and Tudor at Tōkei-ji, Kamakura. Photograph by Kunitoshi Matsuzaki.

Back in Tokyo, Cage and Tudor saw a geisha banquet given by Sōfu Teshigahara at the

SAC; the event was not easily accessible to the general public but was arranged for international

guests of honor. Jōji Yuasa also drove Cage through the traditional downtown district of Tokyo

and the Meiji Shrine. When seeing the dirty sewage canal beside the fish market, Tsukiji, Cage

exclaimed that Tokyo was so beautiful, bewildering Yuasa, who was curious about whether Cage

had reached sudden enlightenment already.11 While touring west to Kyoto and Osaka for

concerts, Cage and Tudor visited various historically significant temples, shrines, and scenic

attractions in Kyoto, Nara, and Ise, accompanied by Ichiyanagi, Yoko Ono, Mayuzumi, Peggy

Guggenheim (Cage and Ono’s old friend), photographer Yasuhiro Yoshioka, and other Japanese

11
Jōji Yuasa, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, December 20, 2018.

69
musicians. The Zen temple Ryōanji, featuring a garden with fifteen stones arranged with a

geometrical plan, left a deep impression on Cage, though he doubted that the placement of the

fifteen stones had been planned. “Those stones could have been anywhere in that space,” he told

a Japanese critic.12 Cage’s belief that “the emptiness of the sand was such that it could support

stones at any points in it” formed the basis of his score Ryoanji (1983), composed twenty years

later, where he traced the contours of the fifteen stones and used chance operations to decide

their positions on paper.13

In his 2002 reminiscence of Cage and Tudor’s first visit to Japan, the photographer

Yoshioka, commissioned by the SAC to accompany the two artists everywhere they went,

remembered several details about Cage during the trip. When the group visited Tatsumura

Textile, the manufacturer of the traditional fabric Nishijin Weaving in Kyoto, Cage used chance

procedures—throwing a coin in a box—to decide the color of a necktie to buy. At the hotel,

Cage learned gomoku (Five in a Row) and Japanese chess.14 At the end of their tour, Yoshioka

compiled his photographs in two albums—one focusing on sight-seeing and the other on

performances—and gave them to Tudor as a present.

Within just a few days of their arrival in Japan, Cage and Tudor not only discovered that

their visit had been highly anticipated, but also found their hosts constantly attentive to every

detail of their tour. In a letter dated October 10 to music publisher and owner of C. F. Peters,

Walter Hinrichsen and his wife, Evelyn Hinrichsen, Cage described his experience while in

12
John Cage, A Year from Monday: New Lectures and Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University
Press, 1967), 137.
13
Ibid.
14
Yasuhiro Yoshioka, “Yoko tte, ittai nanimono? [Who on earth is Yoko?],” in Kagayake 60-nendai:
Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no zenkiroku [Shining 60s: The complete records of the Sogetsu Art Center], ed. “Sōgetsu Āto
Sentā no Kiroku” Kanko Iinkai (Tokyo: Firumu Āto Sha, 2002), 182.

70
Japan in particularly glowing terms: “It would be impossible to imagine the thoughtfulness,

kindness, etc., that our friends here are showing us increased. They are unbelievably imaginative

in finding ways to make our visit enchanting. . . .”15 Tudor also wrote M. C. Richards about the

cordiality of their hosts: “They are treating us wonderfully & also it seems that it’s also very nice

for them because everything here has to be specially arranged & we are thus sometimes

introducing them to their own culture—(geishas & all that).”16 The favorable reception Cage and

Tudor received translated into positive energy directed toward the two artists as they made their

performing debut in Japan.

Cage and Tudor’s Debut Concerts in Japan

During their six-week stay in Japan, the two artists gave seven concerts in Tokyo, Kyoto,

Osaka, and Sapporo, one performance at Minami Gallery, and an hour-long program performing

Cartridge Music on Japanese television NHK. They also recorded a four-piano version of Winter

Music for NHK radio. At their own discretion, Cage and Tudor showcased a combination of

music by New York and non-New York School composers, including Cage, Christian Wolff,

Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Sylvano Bussotti, Xenakis, Ichiyanagi, and George

Brecht. While some pieces had been recently performed, some were premieres, such as

Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck X (1961) and 0'00" (1962).17 As Gen Igarashi remarks in his liner

notes of CDs released in 2012 documenting Cage and Tudor’s 1962 performance: “The fact that

15
Letter from Cage to Walter and Evelyn Hinrichsen, October 10, 1962, quoted in Cage and Kuhn, The
Selected Letters of John Cage, 257.
16
Letter from David Tudor to M. C. Richards, October 25, 1962, David Tudor Papers, Getty Research
Institute.
17
Some sources claim that Tudor’s performance of Stockhausen’s Klavierstuck X on October 10, 1962, was
the world premiere, while others report that Frederic Rzewski performed it on the same day in Italy.

71
a majority of the pieces they performed at this time were first time performances of new material

not only indicates the desire to exhibit their now familiar repertoire, but also to mark the Japan

tour as part of their ongoing progressive activities.”18

Unsurprisingly, many of their progressive activities were complemented by

collaborations with experienced Japanese experimental musicians (see Appendix C). Starting

from the first concert at the Tokyo Bunka Kaikan on October 9, Cage and Tudor, along with the

Japanese composer-performers Ichiyanagi, Kobayashi Kenji, Ono, Mayuzumi, Yūji Takahashi,

Takemitsu, and others, the Japanese audience was impressed with the serious outlook in the

midst of eccentric and incendiary performances. In Cage’s Music Walk (1958), in which “the

performers may move at any time from one playing position to another,” some performed a

conceptual “music walk” by lying below the piano (Tudor) and across the piano strings (Ono)

instead of simply walking around (fig 2.2).19 Akiyama noticed that “When the performers

walked from one place to the other corner on the stage, the silent time flowed, and the audience’s

noise got more obvious and became part of the performance.”20 The critic Akira Tanimura was

surprised by the “destructive power” he found in Cage’s Music Walk, “making an appeal for the

recovery of a humanistic approach to music from the machine age.”21

18
Gen Igarashi, liner notes to John Cage Shock. Vol. 3, John Cage, Michael von Biel, and Toshi Ichiyanagi,
EM Records EM1106, 2012, CD.
19
John Cage, Music Walk (New York: Henmar Press, 1960).
20
Kuniharu Akiyama, “Cage no ‘bakudan’ toka—onkyō to ongaku no kyōkai-sen nozoku [Cage’s ‘bomb’
dropped—eliminating the boundary between sound and music],” Yomiuri Evening News (June 15, 1963): 7.
21
Akira Tanimura, “Gendai e no chōsen to teikō—Amerika zen'ei sakkyokuka John Cage ensō-kai
[Challenge and resistance to the present age—the concert of the American avant-garde composer John Cage],”
Asahi Evening News, Osaka version (October 15, 1962): 5.

72
Figure 2.2 Tudor, Cage, Ono, and Mayuzumi performed Cage’s Music Walk at the Tokyo Bunka
Kaikan on October 9, 1962. Photographer unknown.

At the concert at the SAC on October 23, Cage and Tudor stunned the Japanese audience,

including musicians and composers, who reacted to the sound events of Cage’s Theatre Piece

(1960) “speechlessly.”22 On the stage, Cage and Tudor attached numerous contact microphones

to various objects, such as the piano, kitchenware, and toys. Performing actions from the list of

twenty nouns and/or verbs he and Cage had made, Tudor started to cook rice and stir-fried food

with a frying pan. The architect Arata Isozaki in the audience remembered this multisensory

scene, recalling “not only the sound of stir-frying but also the smell of cooking coming out from

the stage.”23 Later, Tudor made electronic sound with a giant fan and breathed softly into a

22
Kuniharu Akiyama, “John Cage aruiwa zero no jikan [John Cage, or zero hour],” Ongaku geijutsu 20, no.
12 (1962): 6.
23
Toshi Ichiyanagi and Arata Isozaki, “Cage to ongaku no kaitai [Cage and the destruction of music],”
Gendaishi techō 28, no. 5 (April 1985): 45.

73
loudspeaker. In the next second, he sat under the piano and kept hitting it with a hammer like a

carpenter.24 Cage, on the other hand, as Akiyama recalled, “calmly emitted everyday sound

continuously using a rice cooker, a frying pan, a kitchen stove, a seaweed container, kitchen sets,

etc., making the concert mingle with silence and noise.”25 Masuo Ikeda also remembered:

“During the one hour performance, Cage suddenly stood up and disappeared from the stage. The

audience were all waiting for Cage’s return. After a while, the audience finally realized that this

was also part of the performance.”26 The critic Jun’ichi Yano observed the change of the

audience, “While the audience were laughing at the performers’ meaningless actions, gradually

they were all drawn into Cage and Tudor’s rhythm of life on stage.”27

At the concert at the SAC on October 24, Cage dedicated a new piece 0'00" (4'33" No. 2)

(1962) to his friends and hosts Ichiyanagi and Ono, who had accompanied Cage throughout his

monthlong tour (fig 2.3). Cage’s performance at the premiere of 0'00" consisted of notating the

score of the piece he was performing in front of the audience with contact microphones attached

to his pen, eyeglasses, and other objects. The resulting score includes only one sentence: “In a

situation provided with maximum amplification (no feedback), perform a disciplined action.”

Cage’s performance was so impressive that, thirty years later, Takehisa Kosugi, who was in the

audience, still vividly remembered the details of the disciplined actions Cage did on stage: “Cage

24
Kuniharu Akiyama, “Soko wa 60-nendai zen'ei geijutsu no shingenchidatta [That was the epicenter of the
avant-garde in the 1960s],” in Kagayake 60-nendai: Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no zenkiroku [Shining 60s: The complete
records of the Sogetsu Art Center], ed. “Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no Kiroku” Kanko Iinkai (Tokyo: Firumu Āto Sha,
2002), 50.
25
Ibid.
26
Masuo Ikeda, “John Cage danpen [John Cage: Some thoughts],” 21 seiki hanga 3, no. 11 (November
1992): 41.
27
Jun’ichi Yano, “Shizen no ongakuka: Cage to Tudor no sekai [Musicians of nature: The world of Cage
and Tudor],” Rekōdo geijutsu 11, no. 13 (December 1962): 121.

74
sat at the desk and wrote with a pen. The contact microphone picked up and amplified sounds

from the desk, ashtray, glasses, paper, etc. The audience could hear the sounds of Cage wearing

his glasses, taking off his glasses, and putting them on the desk, or smoking his pipe and placing

the pipe on the ashtray.”28 After finishing his writing, Cage blew on the paper to make the ink

dry more quickly, walked toward Ichiyanagi and Ono in the audience, and dedicated the piece to

them. Ono then answered Cage with a kiss.

Figure 2.3 Cage premiered 0'00" at the SAC on October 24, 1962. Photograph by Yasuhiro
Yoshioka.

28
Takehisa Kosugi, quoted in Yoshiharu Suenobu, Kaisō no John Cage: Dōjidai o ikita 8 nin e no intabyū
[Reminiscences of John Cage: Interviews with eight people living in the same age] (Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha,
1996), 137.

75
 For some audience members, such as Makoto Moroi, Cage’s forty-minute performance

was full of meaningless boredom and noises.29 The novelist Keizō Hino joked after seeing

Cage’s performance of 0'00", “I will think of Cage’s music when I am at a construction site or in

an AC room.”30 Still, other audience members found profound meanings in this forty-minute

performance of emptiness. Keijirō Satō saw it as a spiritual training for endurance that could be

helpful for everyday life.31 Akiyama stated that, in certain moments of Cage’s performance, he

heard “the sound of an everyday object mixed with its spirit”; similarly, he believed that “there

must be someone who encountered a fresh moment during the forty-minute meaningless

sound.”32 Yuasa said that, more than letting the audience listen to the sound, Cage’s enactment of

everyday life “provided an entirely non-everyday, cosmic place for sound.”33 Kosugi, who had

never seen Cage before, felt the greatest surprise with Cage’s 0'00": “It was a very shocking

performance to me. Writing as an everyday behavior became sound sources. This composite

phenomenon of sound and action shows a way of surpassing the limit of music.”34 Cage’s

concepts resonated strongly with Group Ongaku’s performance of action music in the early

1960s. Kosugi was delighted to find how close Cage’s musical idea was to Ongaku’s objective of

expanding the concept of music and blurring the distinctions between composition, performance,

and reception.

29
Makoto Moroi, “John Cage zakkan [Miscellaneous thoughts on John Cage],” Ongaku geijutsu 20, no. 12
(1962): 21.
30
Keizō Hino, quoted in Keisuke Mihashi, “John Cage Shock,” Shunjū 543 (November 2012): 2.
31
Keijirō Satō, quoted in Ibid.
32
Akiyama, “John Cage aruiwa zero no jikan,” 12.
33
Jōji Yuasa, quoted in Mihashi, “John Cage Shock,” 2.
34
Takehisa Kosugi, quoted in Suenobu, Kaisō no John Cage, 127.

76
 The last concert, on October 26, took place under the auspices of the Sapporo

Contemporary Music Festival and involved the greatest amount of exchange and collaboration

between the two Americans and the Japanese artists. Half of the program consisted of works by

Japanese composers. Cage and Tudor were thus able to perform and experience Japanese avant-

garde works written in fashion similar to theirs, including Satō’s Calligraphy for Piano, and

Takemitsu’s Ring and Corona. In addition, Ichiyanagi’s new piece Sapporo, composed as a

gesture of welcome to Cage and Tudor was a culmination of Ichiyanagi’s reflections on

indeterminacy, silence, and graphic notation in combination with his interest in space and group

interaction. In Sapporo, the performers—up to fifteen players (and conductor)—may choose any

kind of sound-making objects “capable of meeting the requirements indicated in the score.”35

Sustaining sounds, attack sounds, upward and downward sliding sounds, multiple simultaneous

sounds, and long silences are all required. The letter symbols S, M, and C on the score instruct

one performer to listen to the sound produced by another while continuing his own sound,

sometimes while watching the sound-making movements of another performer, or while

watching/listening to whatever the conductor does. Because each performer, including the

conductor, has a different page, when a performer looks at someone else, he or she may stop

playing his/her own part and jump instead to play from the notations he/she just observed. If the

player cannot find the signal to observe someone else in his/her score, that player can exchange

his/her part with that of any performer or the conductor. Adding a sense of freedom to his piece,

Ichiyanagi also allows the performer to go on without paying any attention to the letters if he

feels like moving on himself. Anarchically, the conductor does not control the performer but has

equal weight with the performers. The conductor is free to make movements or actions to

35
Toshi Ichiyanagi, Sapporo (New York: C. F. Peters, 1963), 1.

77
indicate sustaining, attacks, and sliding qualities, as well as to make the same kinds of sounds as

the other performers.

At the premiere of Ichiyanagi’s Sapporo (fig 2.4), there were eleven players on the stage

playing a mix of objects and instruments (western and Japanese). Cage was the conductor. Tudor

played the Japanese instrument biwa (Japanese short-necked lute). Takahashi, who found a

bicycle near the stage, rode the bicycle on the stage while exchanging score with others.

Akiyama made sounds with ten wood boxes. Ichiyanagi played piano and drum. Takahashi

remembered the conductor Seiji Ozawa was kicking a toy car around the stage.36 Because the

piece requires attention and reaction to others’ performance, the unspoken intimacy that binds

the players and links the scattered improvisations created a tension among the performers while

accentuating their awareness of the dynamic, textual and timbral changes. Moreover, Ichiyanagi

stipulated that all the sustaining sounds should be produced softly, and so a sense of uneasy

silence gradually arose during the performance. Akiyama remembered: “While I was knocking a

wood box, Takahashi was riding across the stage. We were all circled by the quiet world of

sounds.”37 Takahashi also recalled:

Even without the instruction that performers should pay attention to other players, I was
consciously paying attention to other players’ sounds . . . because the entire piece was
very quiet, I became very sensitive to the sound. It is opposite to Cage’s concept that
silence is unintentional sound. In Ichiyanagi’s Sapporo, I felt that I need effort to make
sound otherwise I would be pulled into silence which was active in that situation.38

36
Yūji Takahashi, email message to author, April 24, 2018.
37
Kuniharu Akiyama, “Tokushū: Gendai Nihon sakkyokuka-ron—Ichiyanagi Toshi [Special series:
Contemporary composer—Toshi Ichiyanagi],” Ongaku geijutsu 21, no. 1 (1963): 35.
38
Kuniharu Akiyama, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Kenji Kobayashi, Yūji Takahashi, Hiroshi Kumagai, and Kōichi
Yamaguchi, “Zukei gakufu no mondai—konkai no sakuhin o chūshin ni [Problem of the graphic score—centering
on the works this time],” SAC Journal 32 (July 1, 1963): n.p.

78
The looming silence that Akiyama and Takahashi felt was partly a result of Ichiyanagi’s spatial

design. On the graphic score of Sapporo, there is a lot of space in between the signs. The players

could interpret the duration of the silence independently, since the piece does not unfold

according to a single timeline. In addition to the spacing of the signs on the score, Ichiyanagi

applied the spatial concept—between-ness (or ma, the negative space, from the Japanese

aesthetics)—to several levels of the work, including the performers’ movements and the

performers’ positions onstage (e.g., the performers should be seated as far apart as possible on

the stage). Ichiyanagi’s emphasis on spontaneous interaction between performers and multiple

approaches to the concept of between-ness differentiate his indeterminate works from those of

Cage. Sapporo, with these two distinct features, marked Ichiyanagi’s departure from Cage to

forge his own path after the period in which he assimilated Cage’s experimental musical thought.

Figure 2.4 The premiere of Ichiyanagi’s Sapporo at the Sapporo Contemporary Music Festival.
From left to right, Yūji Takahashi (bicycle), Ono (voice), Kobayashi (violin), Akiyama (wood
boxes), Toshinari Ōhashi (contrabass), Toshio Kuronuma (cello), Harumi Ibe (guitar), Tudor
(biwa), Ichiyanagi (piano and drum), and Cage (conductor). Photograph by Yasuhiro Yoshioka.
David Tudor Papers. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.

79
 On the whole, Cage and Tudor’s concerts in Japan proceeded smoothly. Several good

recordings of their performances in Tokyo and Osaka illustrate how Japanese audiences

remained quiet throughout most of the concerts, a striking contrast to the audience at the 1954

Donaueschingen festival, which responded with a mixture of shouting, laughter, and general

confusion for Cage and Tudor’s European debut.39 To be sure, some laughter can be heard at the

beginning of 0'00", showing that Cage’s performance was not entirely “full of meaningless

boredom and noises” as Moroi put it.40 At a symposium held a day after Cage and Tudor’s

concerts at the SAC on October 23 and 24, Cage expressed his opinion that the audience at the

SAC were especially friendly to him and Tudor, and “because the SAC concert hall is smaller

than Tokyo Bunka Kaikan, I felt it is easier to create an intimate atmosphere.”41 Since the

audience attending their concerts at the SAC were mostly SAC-related musicians, artists, and

friends, they welcomed Cage and Tudor with a gentle, favorable attitude.42 However, the

audience in Kyoto and Sapporo reacted differently from the audience in Tokyo. At the concert in

Kyoto on October 12, one excited student disrupted the performance and was expelled from the

concert.43 At the concert in Sapporo on October 26, many audience members seemed to be

39
John Cage, Tōru Takemitsu, and Christian Wolff, John Cage Shock. Vol. 1, John Cage, David Tudor,
Yūji Takahashi, and Kenji Kobayashi, recorded October 24, 1962 (tracks 1 and 2), and October 17, 1962 (track 3),
EM Records EM1104, 2012, CD; John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage Shock. Vol. 2, David Tudor,
Toshi Ichiyanagi, Kenji Kobayashi, and Yoko Ono, recorded October 17, 1962, EM Records EM1105, 2012, CD;
John Cage, Michael von Biel, and Toshi Ichiyanagi, John Cage Shock. Vol. 3. John Cage, David Tudor, Toshi
Ichiyanagi, recorded October 24, 1962 (tracks 1 and 2), and October 17, 1962 (track 3), EM Records EM1106, 2012,
CD; Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to
Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 62.
40
Makoto Moroi, “John Cage zakkan,” 21.
41
Sōfu Teshigahara, Yusaku Kamekura, Yoshiaki Tōno, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Toshirō Mayuzumi, Yoko Ono,
John Cage, David Tudor, and Peggy Guggenheim, “John Cage David Tudor o kakonde [Around John Cage and
David Tudor],” Ikebana Sōgetsu (November 1962): 20.
42
Ibid.
43
Tanimura, “Gendai e no chōsen to teikō,” 5.

80
agitated by the performance and shouted to the performers onstage “Don’t make fun of us,”

“This is not music,” and “Are you crazy?” The person in charge of the Sapporo concert from the

Hokkaidō Broadcasting Company, Tatsurō Yamamoto, suggested that some in the audience may

have regretted paying for the concert: “after the first part of the concert, half of them just left.

Only those western music lovers remained until the concert ended.”44 These diverse reactions in

various regions reflect different levels of exposure to information on Cage and to experimental

music in general.

Cage’s Impression of Japanese Composers

In addition to sharing the stage during his performances, Cage met and heard music by

various Japanese composers and artists in the little free time he had. Cage felt surprised that

many Japanese avant-gardists were doing work along lines that he was engaged in exploring and

confessed that the Japanese composers interested him more than their contemporaries in Europe,

because “they [their works] give me more freedom to do my own listening.”45 In Osaka, Cage

attended a performance by the Gutai Theater Group, which was the first radical, post-war artistic

group in Japan, founded in Osaka in 1954. They impressed Cage with their performance-oriented

art, which “moves not so much toward music itself but toward theater,” resembling but preceding

Cage’s own happenings in New York.46 In Tokyo, Cage also saw a collaboration between some

44
Tatsurō Yamamoto, quoted in Kimi Maekawa, Hokkaidō ongaku-shi [The Hokkaidō music history]
(Tokyo: Ōzorasha, 1992), 509.
45
Cage, A Year from Monday, 33.
46
John Cage and Fredric Lieberman, “Contemporary Japanese Music: A Lecture,” in Locating East Asia in
Western Art Music, ed. Yayoi Uno Everett and Frederick Lau (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004),
195.

81
of the members of Group Ongaku, Kosugi and Yasunao Tone, the avant-garde artist

Natsuyuki Nakanishi, and the dancer Tatsumi Hijikata at a welcome party for Cage and Tudor in

Hijikata’s Asbestos Studio.47 Kosugi presented a work of action music, later titled Tender Music,

that involved putting a stone into a guitar and making sounds by rotating the guitar. As Kosugi

commented on the concept of Tender Music: “Automatically this has sound, but this is not

sound-oriented music. This action is a kind of total performance. . . . People who like action will

appreciate watching it and sometimes listening to the occasional sound. . . . It’s a combination of

sound and action together.”48 Kosugi also performed Micro 1 (1961) for solo microphone, based

on a similar concept. He wrapped up a microphone in paper and amplified the crumpled sounds

as the paper is gradually removed.49 The performance is both audio and visual, and Kosugi

connected it explicitly with Brecht’s Incidental Music and Cage’s performance of 0'00", which

made sound with the everyday action of writing.

The welcome party delighted Cage, as did the Japanese artists’ unconventional

presentation. He wrote in glowing terms:

These very experimental people are willing to give performances (as they did) for just a
few of us. They would run a piece by one composer into a piece by another composer,
giving you no program of what’s going on, and sometimes playing works by two or three
composers simultaneously, also without informing you in advance. And so each
performance is a new experience for anyone who sees it, and also for the composers and
performers.50

47
Ibid.
48
Takehisa Kosugi and René Block, eds., Takehisa Kosugi, Interspersions 18. Januar—16. Februar 1992,
Daadgalerie (Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogramm des DAAD, 1992), 9.
49
Yayoi Uno Everett, “‘Scream Against the Sky’: Japanese Avant-garde Music in the Sixties,” in Sound
Commitments: Avant-Garde Music and the Sixties, ed. Robert Adlington (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009), 195.
50
Cage and Lieberman, “Contemporary Japanese Music: A Lecture,” 196–97.

82
Within this continuous performance, Cage was especially fond of Tone’s Geodesy for Piano

(1962). He even shared the details of its performance with students at the University of Hawaii in

the lecture “Contemporary Japanese Music” when he and Tudor returned from their first visit to

Japan and stopped in Honolulu for several days in the winter of 1963:

Tone would . . . drop from a measured altitude some unspecial object onto a poor upright
piano, and this object (according to chance) would simply fall on the floor or on the
keyboard or perhaps onto the strings of the piano; this would be a noninteresting, dull
experience, preceded and followed by at least three or four minutes of silence. During
this a company of dancers were performing in a situation in which the lights were
changing from absolute blackout to normal room illumination, and very curious events
were going on.51

Cage recognized Tone’s “noninteresting” performance as the “most extraordinary music that

some people might not call music at all, consisting of wide spaces of silence with only a few

(and to many ears very unsatisfactory) sounds dropped into these spaces of silence.”52 It was not

until Cage saw the graphic score of Geodesy for Piano in “An Exhibition of World Graphic

Scores” at Minami Gallery that he realized that Tone’s work anticipated a composition he

himself had in mind but had not yet written:53

I was delighted to discover that a composition which I have not yet written is in the area
in which he [Tone] is working, namely to discover some way to use maps of the earth’s
surface in order to yield directions for the performance of music. I have in my “Atlas
Eclipticalis” made music from maps of the stars, and my intention now is to make it from
maps of the earth. And Tone is already doing this.54

51
Ibid., 196.
52
Ibid.
53
Akiyama and Ichiyanagi organized “An Exhibition of World Graphic Scores” to coincide with Cage and
Tudor’s first visit to Japan. There were around 100-ish works exhibited, including new works from 40 avant-garde
composers from Japan and all over the world. The walls, even the ceiling, were full of the scores. When visiting the
exhibition, Cage exclaimed: “No exhibition has collected as many works as this exhibition in one place before!”
John Cage, quoted in Jun’ichi Yano, “Sekai no gakufu-ten—zero e no kaiki [An exhibition of world graphic score—
return to zero],” SAC Journal 27 (November 25, 1962): n.p.
54
Cage and Lieberman, “Contemporary Japanese Music: A Lecture,” 196.

83
Though Kosugi and Tone did not really talk to Cage nor Tudor at their first encounter because of

the language barrier, their interests in incidental sound and simultaneous performative events had

drawn Cage’s attention. It is no coincidence that Cage, considering Tone’s and Kosugi’s artistic

compatibility with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, invited them to join the Company in

1974 and 1977, respectively, and had frequent musical collaborations with them in New York

from then on.

In addition to watching the live performances, Cage gathered the rest of his information

about Japanese music from conversations with Japanese composers and from hearing recordings

of their music at the SAC. In 1963, during a lecture in Hawaii, Cage spoke of several Japanese

musicians, artists, and technicians who left a great impression on him. He also realized that the

successful young experimental composers in Japan such as Mayuzumi and Takemitsu—the two

composers whom he found most interesting—made a living by writing a great deal of music for

the films, a major factor in distinguishing modern Japanese music from the musics of America

and Europe. After watching the film Harakiri (1962) with music by Takemitsu, Cage admired

how Takemitsu used silence to create tension and led the audience “into suspense as to when

there’s going to be any music,” both characteristics that Cage found “classically Japanese.”55

Cage had at least listened to Takemitsu’s Ring, Corona for pianist(s), and Corona for

strings during his stay in Japan. His general impression was that Takemitsu learned toward

Darmstadt-school avant-gardism. He noticed that Takemitsu’s music had “an elegance greatly

colored by contemporary European musical styles.”56 After watching a performance of one of

Takemitsu’s works, Cage seemed slightly disappointed:

55
Ibid., 198.
56
Ibid., 197–98.

84
 It was clearly most beautiful, but I didn’t find it particularly Japanese. It struck me as
European in character because the concern was for continuity. Everything was done to
make one thing move smoothly into another. But not with that kind of overlapped
continuity which gives the endlessness of quality typical of gagaku, but with the
articulated continuity one associates with European musical thought.57

By contrast, Cage found that Mayuzumi’s music was eclectic and quintessentially Japanese in

aesthetic and music.58 Even though Mayuzumi interested Cage as an experimental composer,

Cage still thought he discerned an inherent desire in Mayuzumi’s music to please others that he

found incompatible with the experimental attitude.

In addition to Takemitsu and Mayuzumi, Cage had an unusual experience in meeting

Takemitsu’s teacher Shūzō Takiguchi. Cage recalled that Takiguchi’s extraordinary modesty and

quietness were such that “it was very difficult for me to talk with him at all because he was

reluctant to be so audacious as to express an idea.”59 He thought that Takiguchi’s sweetness and

humility, so typical of a Japanese, “must have been a mask for something I didn’t encounter, as it

is he who has been most encouraging to all the young people.”60 Cage also remembered

Akiyama, who started to correspond with Cage in the 1950s and did not have a chance to meet

Cage in person until 1962, as “a perfectly charming person whose studio could be anywhere in

Japan.”61 During his time in Japan, Cage had visited Akiyama’s house with Ichiyanagi and Ono

one night. Akiyama asked Cage lots of questions about Zen and his music. As for Cage, he was

surprised to see Akiyama’s enormous interest in what was going on all over the world;

57
Ibid., 198.
58
Ibid., 197.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid.
61
Ibid.

85
collections of books, music, and recordings, had taken up almost all the space of the tiny house

that he shared with his wife and two little daughters.

Aside from Japanese composers and artists, the sound engineer for the SAC, Junosuke

Okuyama, also left a deep impression on Cage and Tudor. During their stay in Japan, Okuyama

provided Cage and Tudor technological assistance for their concerts at the SAC, including

making a mixer for 50 channels on one night for them and helping set up 50 contact microphones

around the piano for their performance. Okuyama’s professionalism made Cage regard him as

“one of the finest engineers I’ve ever encountered,” and later write in his book A Year from

Monday (1967) that “if the Lord knew His business [Junosuke Okuyama] would be multiplied

and placed in every electronic music studio in the world.”62 Half-jokingly, half-seriously, Cage

even told Hiroshi Teshigahara that he would like to bring Okuyama back to the US. Of course,

Teshigahara rejected Cage’s request, preferring to retain Okuyama at the SAC.63

Besides technological assistance, Okuyama also inspired Cage and Tudor with his new

perspectives on electronic devices. Cage remembered Okuyama told him that, “Using contact

microphones in musical compositions was very interesting, but what seemed to him more

interesting yet was the use of such fine microphones that one would be able to place one on a

piece of wood, for instance, and without intentionally producing any vibration, to make audible

the interior vibrations of the wood itself.”64 Delighted by Okuyama’s way of thinking, Cage

found this idea a “truly beautiful and typically Japanese intention.”65 Okuyama had also

62
Ibid., 195; Cage, A Year from Monday, 33.
63
Kōji Kawasaki and Shigeru Matsui, Nihon no denshi ongaku. Zoku [Electronic music from Japan. The
sequel] (Kyoto: Engine Books, 2013), 74.
64
Cage and Lieberman, “Contemporary Japanese Music: A Lecture,” 195–96.
65
Ibid., 196.

86
discussed with Cage the possibility of transmitting sounds in space without the use of wires and

assured him the technique would be available when Cage and Tudor came to Japan again in

1964. Cage loved the idea that sounds could be broadcast from the performing area to be

received by a multiplicity of small speakers which could be situated throughout the audience. He

imagined the listening experience would be similar to that in real life:

They [the speakers] could be concealed, for instance, like hats, below the seats of the
audience, and thus the whole space instead of being flooded (as it is now) by a few loud
speakers, the whole sound could become luminous with a multiplicity of small sounds
and some large ones through the whole space; the objective being in much of my music a
movement toward the kind of acoustic experience we have when we’re outside the
concert hall, in our daily life. And in life, sounds come to us from all directions.66

Okuyama, according to Akiyama, was not only an engineer, but also a creator.67 At the

SAC, Okuyama had showed Cage some works he put together in spare moments, which Cage

found “not without interest.”68 Cage noticed that Okuyama “has what is so special—at least in

my [Cage’s] experience—to the Japanese people: a high regard for things in the world, for

plants, for wood, for metal, for the things of nature.”69 Cage, again trying to connect all things

and people in Japan with the limited knowledge he possessed at that time, surmised that

Okuyama’s special regard for things could be explained “by the Buddhist doctrine that there are

two types of being in the world, sentient and nonsentient, and they both share in Buddhahood.”

He continued, “This high regard is quite rare in the US and Europe but is quite noticeable in

66
Ibid.
67
Kuniharu Akiyama and Toshi Ichiyanagi, “Dialogue: John Cage and Japan by Toshi Ichiyanagi and
Kuniharu Akiyama,” Music Today 18 (1993): 12.
68
Cage and Lieberman, “Contemporary Japanese Music: A Lecture,” 195.
69
Ibid.

87
Japan.”70 Through collaborating with Cage, Okuyama also felt a sense of confidence about what

he had accomplished so far—such as multiplication of frequencies and making tone generators—

which were not so different from how Cage created indeterminate sound on stage.71 Like Cage,

Tudor also appreciated Okuyama and developed a good friendship with him. Sharing an interest

in electronics with Tudor, Okuyama fixed some of the electronic equipment Tudor had brought

from the US. In his later reflection on Cage and Tudor’s first visit to Japan, Akiyama boldly

suggested that Tudor’s change of career to become a creator of the electronic music can be

partially attributed to Tudor’s encounter with Okuyama.72

According to Cage’s writing about his visit to Japan, he seemed to enjoy Japanese

composers’ and artists’ works because he found more freedom in listening to their works: “They

don’t use sound to push me where I don’t want to listen.”73 What’s more, Cage, who habitually

searched for “Japanese” elements in all things during his visit, excitedly found that “They

[Japanese composers] all connect themselves (their ideas, their feelings, the accident that they’re

Japanese) with the sounds they make.”74 Encountering these culturally rooted composers and the

energetic, extensive, and wildly insurgent avant-garde in Japan, Cage praised the country in

general: “In this changing musical world Japan is no less centrally placed than any other country.

70
Ibid.
71
Kawasaki and Matsui, Nihon no denshi ongaku. Zoku, 75.
72
Akiyama and Ichiyanagi, “Dialogue,” 12.
73
Cage, A Year from Monday, 33.
74
Ibid.

88
Having the composers and technical assistance it has, it is more fortunately populated than

most.”75

Japanese Criticism on Cage’s Debut in Japan

During their stay in Japan, Cage and Tudor had been surrounded by their cordial hosts at

the SAC, the experienced Japanese experimental musicians on stage, ingenious sound engineers,

and knowledgeable artist friends. Cage therefore came to the conclusion that “Japan was the first

country to recognize and understand what he was doing,” as Tone remembered.76 Cage could not

have known that his and Tudor’s musical presence in Japan would later arouse a huge wave of

reaction and discussion among the Japanese public. Tone indeed questioned Cage’s

misperception that all Japanese understood his music, arguing that for the general public “the

[Japanese] understanding of Cage in general was very superficial. For those people who

contacted Cage, they understood Cage much better. [Yet,] there is a big gap between scholars

[experts] and usual people.”77

Within two months after Cage and Tudor left Japan, the gap between Japanese who

declared themselves friends or foes of Cage’s radical approach became visible in the mass

media. Journals such as Ongaku geijutsu and the SAC Journal, and newspaper articles were the

main venues for first-hand critiques of Cage, including a range of reviews. Some extremely

dismissive reviews came from Japanese critics who admired Cage’s philosophical ideas but were

75
Ibid., 34.
76
John Cage, quoted in Yasunao Tone and Miki Kaneda, “Interviews: The ‘John Cage Shock’ Is a Fiction!
Interview with Yasunao Tone, 1,” Post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe, entry posted
March 8, 2013, http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/178-the-john-cage-shock-is-a-fiction-interview-with-tone-
yasunao-1.
77
Yasunao Tone, interview by the author in English, New York, November 12, 2017.

89
disappointed by his music. Yoshio Nomura, for instance, expressed his admiration for Cage’s

personality and embrace of Zen characteristics when he learned about Cage through print media

in 1959. After watching Cage’s 1962 performance, however, Nomura found it difficult to relate

the noisy performance of Cage’s work and Cage’s interest in eastern thought and religion.

Nomura therefore complained that “Cage’s Zen is not the real Zen” because his music was not

composed as religious music.78 Similarly, Sadao Bekku, famous for disliking avant-garde music,

considered Cage’s thoughts to be inconsistent with his art: “I don’t think that Cage had realized

his ideal aesthetics. In concert, in front of the audience who bought the tickets, Cage knocked the

inside of piano with hammer. How did it relate to life? Eating a rice cookie whenever you want

is life. Showing the audience that you eat the rice cookie doesn’t relate to life at all. Having a

concert with the audience paying for the show itself contradicts Cage’s aesthetics.”79

Other critics cast doubt on Cage’s radical techniques but came to admire artistic attitude.

Composer Shinichi Matsushita (1922–90) pointed out that the result of chance operations or

indeterminacy is not wholly random (Takahashi had raised a similar point in his 1961 article

“Face the Music”): “When one suddenly comes up with a melody in one’s head, that is

chance.”80 By contrast, rolling dice or letting composers choose which notes to perform will

result in relatively predictable outcomes. While he was skeptical about chance procedures,

Matsushita did admire Cage’s artistic outlook, writing: “The real greatness of Cage is not about

chance, but his action and desire to let the art escape the closed consciousness of the past and

78
Yoshio Nomura, “Gendai to shūkyō ongaku: Nihon ni okeru kanōsei [Modern and religious music—the
possibility in Japan],” Yomiuri News, morning version, (February 16, 1964): 7.
79
Sadao Bekku, “John Cage zakkan [Miscellaneous thoughts on John Cage],” Ongaku geijutsu 20, no. 12
(1962): 43.
80
Shinichi Matsushita, “Boku no John Cage-ron josetsu [An introduction to my John Cage theory],”
Ongaku geijutsu 20, no. 12 (1962): 17.

90
more toward the open consciousness. In other words, he is not expanding or improving existing

ideas but transforming our conception of art.”81

Many Japanese composers, both conservative and experimental, described their

experience of Cage and Tudor’s performances as a shock for them in various ways. For Kosugi,

the shock of Cage shock was an inspiration—more so when he saw Cage’s event-like

performances than when he encountered Cage’s pieces using staff notation. “Because, at that

time, I happened to be interested in music without fixed notation such as music concrète and

improvisation,” Kosugi explained.82 In addition to the surprise he found in Cage’s 0'00", Kosugi

was drawn to Tudor’s performance of Brecht’s Incidental Music: “Although it is a piano piece,

Tudor didn’t play any note on the keyboard at all. He opened the piano cover, put a pillow into

the piano, and closed the cover. Then he piled woodblocks on the strings and let them fall down.

He also spread beans or rice onto the piano keyboard.”83 Kosugi felt surprised to see that Tudor

connected the non-music performing action of the performers with the piano as a visual object.

“Tudor’s performance was shocking to me,” he concluded.84 Scholar Alan Licht observed that

Kosugi’s exposure to Cage’s works in the early 1960s, including seeing Cage and Tudor’s 1962

performance in Tokyo, confirmed his interests in intermedia art and led to his involvement with

Fluxus through Ichiyanagi.85

81
Ibid.
82
Takehisa Kosugi, quoted in Suenobu, Kaisō no John Cage, 131–32.
83
Takehisa Kosugi, Kosugi Takehisa oto no sekai: Atarashii natsu [Kosugi Takehisa’s world of sound:
New summer] (Ashiya, Hyōgo: Ashiya Shiritsu Bijutsu Hakubutsukan, 1996), 11.
84
Ibid.
85
Alan Licht, Sound Art: Beyond Music, between Categories (New York: Rizzoli International
Publications, 2007), 147.

91
 Composers such as Shibata and Moroi, who were the pioneers in following the European

avant-garde in the 1950s, experienced a depressive, horrifying shock from Cage’s performances

which caused an unproductive period in their careers. “I no longer felt a special need to

compose,” Shibata moaned after attending Cage and Tudor’s concerts.86 Shibata expressed his

opinion: “I was confused by the thoughts of Cage and Ichiyanagi. . . . I couldn’t see how to

accept such ideas within myself.”87 Responding more radically, Moroi wrote a pessimistic article

criticizing Cage as a nonsense artist and mourning the imminent death of music that Cage had

caused. Listening to the continuous loud noise from the speakers in Cage’s Atlas Eclipticalis and

Variations II “was just like a torture” to Moroi:

No matter how many times we listen to this kind of music, the results are all the same—it
always sounds like a collection of noise. . . . Aleatoric music can only be understood as
ennui (boredom). What kind of emotional feeling can we get from this long and
unbearable music? If there is a deep emotion, it is merely the sense of satisfaction that
one has conquered oneself by going through with the asceticism, or the self-satisfaction
that one didn’t feel bored about the performance. Either way is masochistic.88

For Moroi, Cage’s “nonsense art is not art anymore but is nonsense behavior beyond the pale of

proper music.”89 Cage’s performance impressed Moroi as nothing less than a declaration of the

coming death of music: “Cage’s music is a destruction, similar to a nuclear bomb experiment

outside the earth’s atmosphere.”90 After the nuclear bomb exploded, “we come to realize that

86
Minao Shibata, quoted in Luciana Galliano, Yōgaku: Japanese Music in the Twentieth Century (Lanham,
MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 178.
87
Minao Shibata, quoted in Kuniharu Akiyama, Nihon no sakkyokukatachi: Sengo kara shin no
sengotekina miraihe jō [Japanese composers: From the end of the war to a true postwar future. Vol. 1] (Tokyo:
Ongaku no Tomosha, 1978), 213. When Shibata once more found a way forward for himself, it was probably thanks
to his investigation of the use of improvisation by Japanese instrumentalists. Galliano, Yōgaku, 222–23.
88
Makoto Moroi, “John Cage zakkan,” 21.
89
Ibid.
90
Ibid., 22.

92
there is nothing for us to carry on but terror and loneliness in the bleak outer space.”91 Moroi

thought the worst aspect of Cage was his perversity: “there are sounds throwing away music,

music throwing away sound, and musicians who don’t play music anymore.”92 The destructive

nature of Cage’s works led him to affirm that Cage’s music “belongs to a different world” from

his own, one that he would never understand.93

Works and Performances after Cage and Tudor’s First Visit to Japan

According to Akiyama, avant-garde activities at the SAC increased after Cage and

Tudor’s visit to Japan in 1962.94 One direct result was the founding of the group New Direction;

Tone called it the “bastard child” of Cage.95 The members were fifteen performers who had

collaborated frequently at the SAC, including the organizers Ichiyanagi, Akiyama, and

Takahashi, violinist Kobayashi, cellist Toshio Kuronuma, conductor Yasushi Akutagawa, and

others. The core members were drawn from the performers in Cage and Tudor’s concert at the

Contemporary Music Festival in Sapporo. After the festival, some of the performers decided to

continue the group, which Akiyama named New Direction. Ichiyanagi explained that Cage and

Tudor’s visit to Japan helped them realize that, “there were almost no performers’ groups for

performing new music in Japan around that time.”96 Thus, he worked with the few performers

91
Ibid.
92
Ibid.
93
Ibid., 21.
94
Akiyama, “Soko wa 60-nendai zen'ei geijutsu no shingenchidatta,” 55.
95
Yasunao Tone, “J. Cage to New Direction: Gendai ongaku o meguru jōkyō [J. Cage and New Direction:
The situation of contemporary music],” SAC Journal 35 (April 8, 1964): n.p.
96
Toshi Ichiyanagi, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, August 28, 2017.

93
who could play new music with the goal of promoting and performing contemporary works.

Although inspired by Cage, “the group did not aim at realizing Cage’s ideas,” Ichiyanagi

clarified.97 Indeed, their goal was to launch a new creative movement led by performers. As

stated in New Direction’s first concert program: “In the contemporary music activities,

performers are mostly subordinated to composers, taking the job of reproducing the score. . . .

We want to help performers out of this situation by promoting the type of music that performers

participate in creating.”98

In a total of six concerts from May 1963 to November 1964 (table 2.1), New Direction

introduced important foreign pieces by Earle Brown, Mauricio Raúl Kagel, Sylvano Bussotti,

Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Krzysztof Penderecki, Pierre Boulez, Alban Berg,

Arnold Schoenberg, Iannis Xenakis, Morton Feldman, George Brecht, and others, with a wide

range of styles from the European avant-garde to American experimental music and Fluxus. In

each concert, they also premiered some Japanese works with Cagean features.99 For example,

Matsudaira’s Parallax for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and saxophone (1963, unpublished),

premiered at the first concert on May 26, has a second part, “à la Cage” (in the style of Cage),

featuring chance and spatialization of moving sound sources. There were six music stands on the

stage and backstage and one placed in the audience. Each player has to stop by one music stand

and perform an improvisation that Matsudaira called a “chance operation,” such as groaning,

blowing a toy that sounds like a bird, or making noise with a toy car before walking to the next

97
Ibid.
98
Program for Sogetsu Contemporary Series 20: New Direction—teiki ensō-kai 1 [Sogetsu Contemporary
Series 20: New Direction—concert series 1], May 26, 1963, Sogetsu Art Center Collection, Keio University Art
Center, Tokyo.
99
Cagean features such as chance operations, indeterminacy, and graphic notation.

94
music stand. As the performance gets more theatrical, the performers even open and close the

door at the stage wing and throw objects onto the stage floor. Matsudaira said that his intention

was to leave many parts of his work to chance, so “it can form the most creative moment close to

nature.”100 Yuasa, who is in the audience, commented that when the five performers started to

perform at different sound spots he “felt the freshness of hearing the sound space expanded by

sounds exchanged across the space,” and appreciated the “creative moment” of nature that

Matsudaira proposed.101 By contrast, American critic Heuwell Tircuit, then in Japan, wrote: “I

felt so bored [with Matsudaira’s Parallax]. The players were just repeating a boring joke in this

piece. His idea did not arouse as much interest [as Cage and Tudor did]. This piece has been out-

of-date for a year and a half.”102

Concerts Program
May 26, 1963 Berg: Lyric Suite for string quartet
Sōgetsu Hall, Tokyo Boulez: Improvisation I & II sur Mallarmé
“Ensoka Shūdan New Direction: First Angelo Paccagnini: Musica da camera
Concert” Matsudaira: Parallax
Sogetsu Contemporary Series 20 Berio: Sequenza
July 3, 1963 Bussotti: Phrase à Trois
Sōgetsu Hall, Tokyo Stockhausen: Zyklus
“Ensoka Shūdan New Direction: Second Yuasa: Interpenetration for two flutes
Concert” Kagel: Transición II
Sogetsu Contemporary Series 21 Brecht: Drip Music
Ichiyanagi: Sapporo
Oct 12, 1963 Boulez: Piano Sonata No. 3
Sōgetsu Hall, Tokyo Takemitsu: Sacrifice
“Ensoka Shūdan New Direction: Third Brown: Music for Cello and Piano
Concert” Kosugi: Organic Music
Sogetsu Contemporary Series 22 Yūji Takahashi: Les fenêtres à Antonin Artaud

100
Yoriaki Matsudaira, quoted in Jōji Yuasa, “New Direction dai 1-kai teiki ensō-kai [New Direction
concert series 1],” SAC Journal 32 (July 1, 1963): n.p.
101
Yuasa, “New Direction dai 1-kai teiki ensō-kai,” n.p.
102
Heuwell Tircuit, “New Direction daiichikai kōen [The first performance of New Direction],” Ongaku
geijutsu 21, no. 7 (1963): 40.

95
 Dec 19, 1963 Yoshio Hachimura: Improvisation for Piano
Sōgetsu Hall, Tokyo Penderecki: String Quartet
“Ensoka Shūdan New Direction: Fourth Webern: Quartet for violin, clarinet, tenor
Concert” saxophone, and piano, Op. 22
Sogetsu Contemporary Series 23 Yutaka Mizutani: Douze section pour piano
Berio: Circles
April 8, 1964 Feldman: Projection No. 5
Sōgetsu Hall, Tokyo Feldman: Durations I & V
“Ensoka Shūdan New Direction: Fifth Stockhausen: Refrain
Concert” Keijirō Satō: Calligraphy for Strings No. 1
Sogetsu Contemporary Series 24
Nov 4, 1964 Schoenberg: String Quartet No. 4
Sōgetsu Hall, Tokyo Xenakis: ST/4-1,080262
“Ensoka Shūdan New Direction: Sixth Ichiyanagi: String Quartet No. 1, Nagaoka
Concert” Michio Mamiya: String Quartet No. 1
Sogetsu Contemporary Series 25
Table 2.1 New Direction Concerts at the SAC

In their second concert on July 3, New Direction presented experimental pieces in the

same vein. In his Interpenetration for two flutes (1963), part I, Yuasa selected pitches by serial

methods and rhythm and tempo changes by chance operations. In part II, he left the timing of

performers’ entrances to indeterminacy, an idea dear to Cage but in this case inspired by the

performance practice of Japanese noh theater, mihakarai, in which each member plays according

to their inner time while listening to other players. Later, Yūji Takahashi and Ichiyanagi

performed Brecht’s event Drip Music (1959) by climbing up a ladder and dripping water slowly

down into a bucket. This performance also became a life-changing moment for Takahashi’s

younger sister Aki Takahashi, a classically trained pianist. Watching the event performance for

the first time, she was deeply moved and determined to devote herself to contemporary music

from then on. The last piece at the concert was another creative interpretation of Ichiyanagi’s

Sapporo. Members of New Direction performed various actions across the stage; Yūji Takahashi

hung a toy ukulele from the ceiling, Ichiyanagi turned on and off a neon light tube, and

Kobayashi Kenji played the kokyū (Japanese traditional bowed string instrument).

96
 Although performances featuring indeterminacy, chance operations, and happenings were

now more frequent, Japanese critics’ responses were no longer as excited as they had been before

Cage visited Japan. “The indeterminate events were not that surprising,” Akira Ueno commented

after the second concert, where he felt the freshness of the event had decayed even among the

performers.103 Tircuit questioned the necessity of continuing to perform any Cage-related genres

at this time: “When Cage visited Japan, his happenings had already happened. I think that this

kind of performance should stop. There is a limit to audience patience and collaborative

performance. Presenting too much of this kind of ‘music’ would only be harmful to the

development of contemporary music in Japan.”104

From the third concert (October 12) on, New Direction continued to present Japanese

indeterminate works alongside concert works by composers from the New York School, such as

Earle Brown and Feldman, and the European avant-garde. The frequency of theatrical works

such as happenings decreased. One of the few such events was Kosugi’s Organic Music (1962),

which created a sensation at the third concert.105 According to the simple instruction to breathe

by yourself or to make something breathe for the number of times which you have decided

(instruments are optional), seven performers breathed through instruments and objects onstage

for a total of thirty minutes.106 Akiyama breathed through a rubber tube connected with the lip of

a metal bottle. Kobayashi connected the mouthpiece of a rubber balloon with a toy flute which

would sound when breathing into the rubber balloon. Ichiyanagi made an accordion smoke by

103
Yasunao Tone and Akira Ueno, “New Direction dai 2-kai kōen [The second performance of New
Direction],” Ongaku geijutsu 21, no. 9 (1963): 55.
104
Tircuit, “New Direction daiichikai kōen,” 40.
105
“Sobyō [Sketch],” Asahi News (Oct 16, 1963): 8.
106
Takehisa Kosugi, Events (New York: Fluxus, 1964).

97
attaching a cigarette to the tube of an accordion. While he made the accordion sound, the air of

the accordion would go through the cigarette. Kosugi gave artificial respiration to Shō Kazakura,

who was lying on the stage, facing up and wearing a gas mask. Kazakura’s breath passed through

a long vinyl tube connecting the gas mask to a mouth-shaped balloon hanging from ceiling,

inflating the balloon breath by breath. At the same time, his breath made the valve of the gas

mask sound incidentally. Indeed, Kazakura in this performance was seen as an instrument; his

name was not even listed on the program. “The essence of this piece is not to make sound as an

aim. To encounter unexpected incidental sounds in the performance is, to me, very fresh and

beautiful,” Kosugi clarified.107 Through these various types of breathing, Kosugi became keenly

aware of how sound is heard within and through the human body, which became an instrument

in Kosugi’s work. His interest in instantaneous and spontaneous sound led him on an artistic path

close to Cage’s.

On September 5–7, 1963, all members of New Direction participated in the Fifth

Contemporary Music Festival in Kyoto, held by the Twentieth Century Music Laboratory. Many

of them mentioned in a post-concert talk that they had “an unprecedented experience of showing

their selves” in performing Ichiyanagi’s Pratyahara Event (1963).108 Continuing his interests in

group interaction that he developed after the period of assimilating Cage’s experimental musical

thought (since Sapporo), Ichiyanagi turned to explore the issue of body, using performers’ breath

as the basic time unit to measure the ma between the execution of successive events. Three to ten

107
Takehisa Kosugi, “Paiku ga piano o kowashita! [Pike broke the piano!],” in Kagayake 60-nendai:
Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no zenkiroku [Shining 60s: The complete records of the Sogetsu Art Center], ed. “Sōgetsu Āto
Sentā no Kiroku” Kanko Iinkai (Tokyo: Firumu Āto Sha, 2002), 161.
108
Kuniharu Akiyama, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Tadao Iwamoto, Toshinari Ōhashi, Atsushi Kakishima, Yūji
Takahashi, Noguchi Ryū, and Kōichi Yamaguchi, “20-seiki ongaku kenkyūjo dai 5-kai gendai ongaku-sai ni
shutsuen shite [Performed at the 5th Contemporary Music Festival of the Twentieth Century Music Laboratory],”
SAC Journal 33 (Oct 1, 1963): n.p.

98
soloists read the score with only signs—instructing the performers to perform a single sound,

chord (or cluster), phrase, or event—and numbers—indicating the number of breaths between

each event (fig 2.5).

Figure 2.5 Score for Ichiyanagi’s Pratyahara Event. Tokyo: Zen-on Music, 1973.

Since pratyahara in Sanskrit means the way to control the five senses, the performance

events are open to utilizing or producing sound, light, image, or behavior. The highly

indeterminate score requires that each soloist consciously conceive the performance content

while connecting with others in various ways—imitating, performing against, or cooperating

with another or all performers. As a member the audience, Isamu Kurita recounted New

Direction’s performance of Pratyahara Event in his festival report:

Ichiyanagi’s Pratyahara Event was the most shocking piece for me. I remember that
Mayuzumi cut the wood with a saw in the midst of the audience (captured by the
camera). Other performers Hisao Kanze, Kobayashi, Takahashi Yūji, and Ichiyanagi
were forced to solve some contradictory instructions from time to time. . . . At the end of
the performance, after all members left the stage, Kosugi, who had to perform against all

99
 the rest of the performers, remained standing on the stage. Several minutes passed. The
audience applauded. Kosugi was still standing. Another several minutes passed. The
audience applauded again. Kosugi was still standing. The audience in Kyoto didn’t get
angry or shout at Kosugi. It was as if they were performing their own event: by
applauding they expressed their hope that Kosugi should leave the stage, so the
performance could end.109

As Pratyahara reflects a way to unite the five senses with the mind, Ichiyanagi successfully

connected the performers with breath and group interaction, extending the spirit of the event

even to the audience.

Although New Direction’s meeting and performances became an inspiring place for

young composers and artists to try out new works and ideas, there were still some criticisms.

Mayuzumi commented after seeing the first concert of New Direction, “Although New Direction

was organized through the performers’ active creativity and autonomy . . . I have concerns about

its disorganization in terms of their way of collaboration and inconsistent perspectives shown in

each work.”110 Tone, as well, spoke frankly about New Direction: “I think New Direction was

not new. . . . Their ideas about music were very old.”111 Tone felt disappointed that, despite its

distinguished performers, New Direction did not show their understanding of Cage’s

compositional ideas, but only acquired the ability to be versatile in dealing with various

compositional styles.112 These problems of being a fully creative performers’ group worsened in

1963, when Akiyama and Yūji Takahashi left the group and went abroad to New York and

109
Isamu Kurita, “Yabunirami gendai ongaku-sai [A squint at the Contemporary Music Festival],” SAC
Journal 33 (Oct 1, 1963): n.p.
110
Toshirō Mayuzumi, “‘Sōzō-teki ensō’ e ippo [One step to ‘creative performance’],” Yomiuri Evening
News (May 31, 1963): 7.
111
Yasunao Tone, interview by the author in English, New York, November 12, 2017.
112
Ibid.

100
Europe respectively. Without these central figures, it was increasingly difficult for the group to

continue its activities, and it eventually disbanded in 1964.

Another group that sprang up after Cage’s visit was Collective Music, formed in May

1964, several months after Takemitsu traveled overseas and deepened the friendship with Cage

that began when Cage visited Japan. Takemitsu encountered Cage again at the four-day David

Tudor Music Festival held at the San Francisco Tape Music Center in March 1964, and attended

by Akiyama, Pauline Oliveros, and Jasper Johns, among others. Takemitsu, Cage, and Johns

later went to Hawaii together for the Festival of Today’s Music and Art at the East-West Center

in Honolulu on April 19–26, 1964. Spending almost three weeks together, Takemitsu and Cage

had ample opportunity for artistic and personal exchange. Cage performed three of Takemitsu’s

pieces Requiem for Strings, Crossing, and the new work Blue Aurora for Toshi Ichiyanagi

(1964) at the festival. Takemitsu composed the multimedia theater piece (musical happening)

Blue Aurora with Cage in mind, using three art collages and an instruction. Instead of showing

the performance rules, the three collages are referential materials to arouse the performer’s

imagination. One of the collages is an abstract painting of blue aurora (with white space and the

multiple layers of dim blue outline). Below the blue painting is the poem “E’en, see

SEe…senSe…esSeNSe…,” faintly printed, indicating the performance directions (East, South,

or North), while the capital and lower-case characters show the dynamics and lengths of

performance. The only clear request from the composer is that “the performer should produce

rich silence and action that fits the silence. I hope that through the performance, one can

understand that the space and time of performance are not a single entity but a condition with

continuous multilayer changes.”113 Indeed, Takemitsu’s image of a changing condition was

113
Tōru Takemitsu, Blue Aurora théâtre musical pour Toshi Ichiyanagi (Paris: Salabert, 1971).

101
inspired by seeing the ocean at Waikiki beach, where he also found his philosophy of art: “When

I stood on the beach at twilight, seeing the sea which is merged with the night, east or west

doesn’t matter anymore. The West doesn’t mean new, neither does the East mean old.”114

Enlightened by the idea of no division between East and West, Takemitsu became good friends

with Cage after the festival. They even traveled around Hawaii and did mushroom hunting

together before returning home.

Upon returning to Japan, Takemitsu organized Collective Music with Ichiyanagi and

Kosugi, which held its first concert at the SAC on May 23, 1964. On the top of the concert flyer,

Cage’s name, as the composer of the first piece Variations IV, was phonetically translated into

kanji (Chinese characters) “如雲啓示 [Joun Keiji],” which gave John a common Buddhist-like

name (Joun) and implied that Cage’s presence in Japan was like a revelation for them (Keiji).

Yuasa explained that the term “Joun Keiji” reflects Japanese appreciation that Cage had

approached Zen and eastern philosophy from a western perspective rooted in rationalism,

opening a new music vision to the world.115 In their concert, Takemitsu, Ichiyanagi, and Kosugi

each presented a new experimental or event-based theater piece, not only making the concert

unusual but also showing their responses to Cage’s performance in 1962. Takemitsu was very

interested in musical events and happenings at this time. He presented Time Perspective for J.

Johns (1964) to coincide with Jasper Johns’s visit to Japan, although it turned out to be one of

the last happenings Takemitsu composed before his interest in Cage began to wane. Kosugi’s To

114
Tōru Takemitsu, “Kanōsei ni mewomukeru: Nishi mo higashi mo nai, umi o oyogu [Looking to bridging
the gap between the East and West],” Music Today 13 (Summer 1991): 2.
115
Jōji Yuasa and Yasuo Kōno, “‘Ongaku to wa nani ka’ o kataru II Yuasa Jōji no ongaku sekai [Talking
about ‘what is music’ II—Jōji Yuasa’s music world],” in Yuasa Jōji no sekai [The world of Jōji Yuasa], ed. Yasuo
Kōno (Tokyo: Geijutsu Gendaisha, 2004), 108.

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W (event for wall) (1964) was even more striking. Responding to his own instruction to move all

things toward one wall, Kosugi started the performance by blowing the drop curtain with two

fans from one side of the seated audience to the stage. After things were all moved to one side,

Yuasa, as one of the performers, with a balloon in his hands, ushered the audience itself to the

wall to mark the end of the performance. The audience members were not just the viewers but

were also movable objects in the performance.

Cage and Tudor’s Second Visit to Japan: Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 1964

In November 1964, Cage and Tudor came to Japan again, this time with the Merce

Cunningham Dance Company, which would reside in Tokyo for a month as the last stop of its

six-month trip through Europe and Asia. The Company’s residency had been decided upon when

Cage and Tudor visited Japan in 1962 with Ichiyanagi again in charge of arranging the details of

the Company’s residency. Although the SAC and the national Yomiuri News were the

Company’s official hosts, the Company was especially taken care of by individual artists and

friends of the Japanese avant-garde such as Akiyama, Mayuzumi, Ichiyanagi, Takemitsu, and

Teshigahara Hiroshi, which allowed for intimate artistic exchange. Takemitsu attended to Cage

individually probably because of their friendship, which had deepened in the US earlier that year.

Knowing that Cage loved Zen, Takemitsu brought Cage to see Zen practitioner and philosopher

Shinichi Hisamatsu and Zen musician Dōso Watazumi. Both Takemitsu and Cage got to learn

about the Japanese bamboo flute hotchiku (for Zen meditation) from Watazumi.

Among the thirty cities in the fourteen countries they visited, the Company may have felt

most welcome in Japan because of the engagement of the Tokyo arts community. Not only was

the Company greeted by an enthusiastic group of artists and friends at the airport when they

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arrived in Tokyo, they had also been widely publicized in the country by their hosts in advance.

For the Company’s four performances in Tokyo, the SAC asked the top ranked Japanese

designer Kiyoshi Awazu (1929–2009) to design a set of elegant colored posters and programs.

The hosts were also well equipped for photographing and documenting every moment of the

Company’s performances and public events, so the Company-related reports could be hot off the

press. Prior to the Company’s residency, critics and artists such as Akiyama, Ichiyanagi,

Kenzaburō Ōe, and Yoshiaki Tōno wrote introductory articles about Cage’s collaborations with

Cunningham and the stage designer Robert Rauschenberg, who also visited Japan with the

Company.

Cage, as the music director of the Company, had a chance to present his musical ideas

this time in a more interdisciplinary context than in 1962. His collaborations with Cunningham

and Rauschenberg put on stage chance and indeterminacy in multimedia works. In the

Company’s six performances around Japan (in Tokyo, Kōbe, and Osaka), the Company used

mostly music of the experimental composers such as Cage, Feldman, Wolff, and La Monte

Young to be played alongside the dancing.

The dance Story (1963), performed no fewer than three times in Tokyo, received the most

attention because chance procedures ensured that each performance was different. Cage used

Ichiyanagi’s Sapporo as the music for Story at its premiere and during the Company’s six-month

world tour. In each performance, the structures of the eighteen-section dance and the music were

determined by chance. Stage designer Rauschenberg also improvised décor, props, and

costumes, using an array of objects found around the theater on the day of the performance. In

one of the Tokyo performances, the group of musicians, including Cage and the invited Japanese

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musicians such as Kosugi, performed on the stage behind the dancers, visually strengthening

audience perception of the simultaneous but uncoordinated performance.

Although some critics were disappointed that the Company didn’t have the same “shock”

value as Cage’s first visit to Japan, many others gave positive reviews and expressed surprise at

the high degree of artistic freedom in Cage and Cunningham’s works.116 By “seeing these free,

unconstrained artists on stage,” writer Kenzaburō Ōe stated that “I realized that the senses of

freedom and liberation are the best effect of art.”117 Because it contained no coherent narrative,

Story freed the audience from the obligation to follow along, allowing the audience simply to

enjoy observing everything onstage. Other critics, such as Kishō Kurokawa, felt especially

connected to the elements of chance, simultaneity, and indeterminacy in Cage and Cunningham’s

works because they seemed reminiscent of the chaotic urban life of Tokyo owing to the rapid

modernization especially caused by the Tokyo 1964 Olympic Games.118

Cage and the Company’s 1964 residency in Japan had a deep personal impact on Kosugi.

In his interview with Yoshiharu Suenobu reminiscing about Cage, Kosugi expressed that he felt

very “lucky” to be selected by the Company to participate in their performances while in

Japan.119 Later at the US–Japan modern dance workshop, the performance of Kosugi’s event

116
Reporter Shōei Fujitake wrote that the performance of Merce Cunningham Dance Company “ended
without causing any shock.” Shōei Fujitake, “Tanoshinda no wa go hon'nin—Merce Cunningham kōen [The person
who enjoyed are themselves—Merce Cunningham public performance],” Yomiuri Evening News, Osaka version
(November 17, 1964): 5.
117
Kenzaburō Ōe, “Merce Cunningham o miru butai no ue no jiyūjin [Watching Merce Cunningham—The
free man on stage],” Yomiuri Evening News (November 16, 1964): 9.
118
Architect Kishō Kurokawa wrote, “Cunningham’s work is like a modern city, where the elements exist
indifferently but still stimulate each other.” Kishō Kurokawa, “The Merce Cunningham Performance and Modern
Space,” quoted in Sebaly, “The Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Last Stop in Tokyo, 1964,” Post: Notes on
Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe, entry posted November 4, 2014,
http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/497-the-merce-cunningham-dance-company-s-last-stop-in-tokyo-1964.
119
Takehisa Kosugi, quoted in Suenobu, Kaisō no John Cage, 132.

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Anima 7 (1964) both impressed Cage and enriched the artistic exchange between the two

cultures. The workshop was a public event held in Tokyo on November 20, arranged by

Akiyama and sponsored by the SAC. The two-part program presented Japanese modern dancers,

musicians, and performers in the first part, and Rauschenberg and a selection of Cunningham’s

dancers in the second part.120 Kosugi’s Anima 7, performed by a group of Japanese performers,

includes a brief set of verbal instructions, requiring the performers to perform an action—which

usually could be done in a short time—in an extended period. Although the action produces no

intended sound, the incidental sounds of the action are expected to be part of the performance.

Performing Kosugi’s Anima 7 at the workshop, Jiro Takamatsu turned the pages of a

newspaper slowly for ten minutes. Kosugi and Hiroshi Kawani spent ten minutes taking off

Kazakura’s outerwear by pulling the strings which were hung across the suspension of ceiling

and connected to Kazakura’s outerwear. Okuyama turned the tape recorder manually to play the

tape with the recorded word “south,” which is normally pronounced in one second. While

turning the tape, a noise came through the PA system from the upper recording studio, “which is

such a marvelous sound,” Kosugi exclaimed.121 The incidental sound delighted Kosugi,

reflecting his primary concern in Anima 7 with the action (process), instead of the result. By

performing an action at an extremely slow tempo, Kosugi directed people’s attention to the

intricacy of an action that one usually performs instinctively. Cage, who happened to attend this

workshop, praised it in his book A Year From Monday, writing that Kosugi’s Anima 7 “is taking

the clothes of theatre and wearing them in a way that redignifies both arts.”122 The visualization

120
Japanese performers include Kosugi, Bonjin Atsugi, Tatsumi Hijikata, Yuriko Kimura, Miki
Wakamatsu, Mariko Sanjo, Nijū Seiki Buyō no Kai (Twentieth-Century Dance Circle), and others.
121
Kosugi, “Paiku ga piano o kowashita!,” 160.
122
Cage, A Year from Monday, 33.

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of sound directs both the performers and audience to a phenomenological reengagement with the

physicality of the world. The nonseparation between seeing and hearing the performance in

Anima 7 resonates strongly with Cage’s idea that “Theatre is all around us . . . and it has always

hung around music—if only you let your attention be ‘distracted’ from the sounds.”123 Replying

to Cage, Kosugi expressed his gratitude that Cage had understood “the essence of my music.”124

Cage’s second visit to Japan had also inspired Tone, another member of Group Ongaku,

to move into a life-long exploration of live electronic music. In honor of the Company’s

premiere in Japan, Cage and Tudor gave a concert at the SAC on November 27. With the help of

Ichiyanagi, Kosugi, Takemitsu, and Okuyama, Cage and Tudor presented many works using live

electronics such as Takemitsu’s Blue Aurora for Toshi Ichiyanagi and Ichiyanagi’s Music for

Piano No. 4 (1960; live electronic version). Especially after seeing two of the early live

electronic pieces by Cage—Electronic Music for Piano (1964) and the Duet for Cymbal (1964),

a version of Cartridge Music, Tone felt enlightened to see the amplifier and modulator

functioning not merely as media, but themselves the instruments of expression.125 The idea later

led Tone to explore the potential of electronic media, such as compact discs or headphones, to be

used as instruments whose operation creates its own artistic meaning.

123
Michael Nyman, “Towards (a Definition of) Experimental Music,” in Audio Culture: Readings in
Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York: Continuum, 2004), 217.
124
Kosugi, “Paiku ga piano o kowashita!,” 160.
125
Yasunao Tone, Gendai geijutsu no isō: Geijutsu wa shisō tariuru ka [Phases of contemporary art: Can
art be thought?] (Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1970), 108.

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Cagean Repercussions

In a 1969 roundtable discussion summarizing the historical significance of Cage’s

influence on Japanese compositional circles in the 1960s, Yoshida encapsulated the multifaceted,

heated debates and the mixed reactions aroused by Cage and Tudor’s Japanese debut using the

term “John Cage Shock.”126 Along the lines of Yoshida, Akiyama suggested explicitly that Cage

and Tudor’s concerts in 1962 caused a real shock “nowhere to be seen in the history of concerts

in Japan,” shattering every preconceived notion about music, sound, and silence held by

Japanese artists and musicians.127 Shibata, who had been familiar with the European reaction to

Cage’s music in the 1950s, believed that at his debut in Japan Cage aroused an even bigger shock

than he had in Europe.128

From the 1960s to the 2000s, critics have tried to explain the drastic reactions of Japanese

composers to Cage. Akiyama in 1978 noted that after the war, they had been following the lead

of the European avant-garde, which claimed to pursue a linear progression of musical styles and

techniques. For example, Yoshida and Irino introduced serialism at the contemporary music

festival in Karuizawa in 1957. When Japanese composers saw the simple techniques Cage used

to dismantle western art music conventions, their belief in progress of technique was shaken.

“They saw the insanity of anti-music from Cage and thought that Cage declared the end of

music. . . . As a result, the chaos of ‘Cage Shock’ was born,” Akiyama wrote.129 Composer

126
The symposium “John Cage Shock” in 1969 gathered Akiyama, Yoshida, Shibata, and Hikaru Hayashi
to talk about the general influence of Cage on Japanese composers in the 1960s. Kuniharu Akiyama, Hidekazu
Yoshida, Minao Shibata, and Hikaru Hayashi, “John Cage Shock,” Ongaku geijutsu 27, no. 12 (1969): 24–29.
127
Akiyama, “Soko wa 60-nendai zen'ei geijutsu no shingenchidatta,” 60.
128
Akiyama et al., “John Cage Shock,” 26.
129
Akiyama, Nihon no sakkyokukatachi, 52.

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Shigeaki Saegusa hypothesized that the shock of “Cage Shock” was actually caused by the lack

of time and social context to accommodate such a new trend of music. Despite a dearth of

foreign information, four years after Yoshida and Irino introduced European avant-garde music,

Ichiyanagi introduced Cage to Japan in 1961. “Ten years of information about western music

from the war to postwar came to Japan in just a few years,” Saegusa said.130 In his view, it was

an inability to digest such diverse avant-garde trends that caused the chaotic Japanese reaction to

Cage’s music. Moreover, Cagean experimental music was essentially antithetical to the

European avant-garde that Japanese composers had just absorbed.

In addition to discussing the cause of “Cage Shock,” critics also tried to summarize its

effects. Some linked Cage to structural changes in Japanese compositional circles after his

presence in Japan, particularly to new definitions of the avant-garde in Japan. According to

Akiyama, many composers who had composed with European avant-garde techniques in the

1950s now believed that they saw the true meaning of experimental music through Cage’s

performances. They described the technical experiments they had done in the 1950s as merely

imitative or pseudo-avant-garde.131 The other group of composers who had already embraced

experimental music soon after Ichiyanagi returned to Japan—Takemitsu, Yuasa, Yūji Takahashi,

Group Ongaku, and others—became more confident about the avant-garde paths they had chosen

after seeing Cage and Tudor.132

130
Toshi Ichiyanagi and Shigeaki Saegusa, “Shōgen 1960 zen'ei ongaku no jidai—‘John Cage Shock’ no
motarashita mono [Testimony of the 1960s: The age of avant-garde music—the thing that ‘John Cage Shock’
brought],” Ongaku no tomo 59, no. 12 (2001): 93.
131
Akiyama, “Soko wa 60-nendai zen'ei geijutsu no shingenchidatta,” 50.
132
Akiyama and Ichiyanagi, “Dialogue,” 9.

109
 Another structural change can be found in the shifting of Japanese composers from

group-based to individual-based activities in the 1950s and 1960s. Akiyama described how the

generation of postwar composers, who had established their careers by the end of the 1950s

(such as Takemitsu, Mayuzumi, and Moroi) learned and explored similar musical styles and

techniques, sharing a common base of knowledge with each other throughout the 1950s. They

also worked together on connecting Japanese and international music scenes. In the 1960s, the

influential questions that Cage proposed in his performances in Japan pushed these composers in

different directions.133 Although Yoshida criticized the presumption that everyone in the 1960s

was influenced by Cage, Hayashi’s comment “there is no one who was immune from Cage” may

also be true. Viewing the history from a half century later, scholar Yōko Narazaki seems to

explain the effect of “Cage Shock” reasonably: “the term ‘Cage Shock’ implies not the

Japanese’s understanding of Cage’s music and aesthetics but the moves toward various

directions in Japanese music circles.”134 Though there were various immediate reactions to Cage

among Japanese composers—favoring or attacking Cage’s musical concepts—in the long run,

composers all had to reflect and declare their musical stances on the philosophical questions

Cage proposed.

Indeed, each composer took a different path and length of time to respond to Cage’s

musical challenges. Many in the 1960s adopted Cage’s musical strategies in combination with

their own musical interests, a trend Ichiyanagi noticed shortly after Cage’s 1962 visit. He wrote

to Cage: “Chance operation is getting more popular here after you left. Some of the composers

133
Akiyama et al., “John Cage Shock,” 24.
134
Nihon Sengo Ongakushi Kenkyūkai, Nihon sengo ongakushi jō [History of postwar Japanese music, I]
(Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2007), 340.

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begin to be in the turning points in their way of thinking and started to have different ideas about

music.”135 Even some Japanese composers associated with conservative or European avant-garde

styles in the 1950s started to experiment with Cage’s techniques in their music in the second half

of the 1960s. Although, as Tircuit observed, not all Japanese works adopting chance operations,

indeterminacy, graphic notation or theatrical elements sounded as interesting as Cage’s, clearly

he had influenced the diversity of musical genres Japanese composers explored.136

Among these composers were Minao Shibata and Makoto Moroi. Both felt confounded

and stopped composing at the time of “Cage Shock,” resumed composing in late 1963 and 1964.

Shibata, as the main introducer and promoter of twelve-tone music in Japan in the 1950s,

embraced a broader range of avant-garde techniques including indeterminacy and chance

operations between 1963 and 1973. In his Poem Recited in the Night (1963) for soprano and

chamber ensemble, presented at the Fifth Contemporary Music Festival in Kyoto in September

1963, Shibata started to loosen his control of some musical parameters. In the third section of

Poem, he left the order of the fragments to performers’ discretion and asked the violinist to

determine the length of the rests while observing others’ performances. He also simulated Cage’s

concept of simultaneous independence, assigning different tempi to the soprano, vibraphone,

bass clarinet, and violin. At the end of the score, Shibata reminded the performers not to perform

the fragments in a fixed order, so each performance could be as spontaneous as a group

improvisation. With minimal instructions for sound production, Shibata claimed, the result of the

135
Typescript letter from Toshi Ichiyanagi to John Cage, December 4, 1962, John Cage Correspondence,
1901–1993, Northwestern University Music Library.
136
Heuwell Tircuit, “Nihon to zen'ei ongaku [Japan and avant-garde music],” Ongaku geijutsu 23, no. 9
(1965): 49.

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performance became closer to his original image of music which is “like the amorphous fluid

which changes all the time or like the plastic soap bubbles that children blow. . . .”137

Yet, it was not until Shibata used the western avant-garde techniques of the 1950s and

1960s on Japanese traditional instrumentalists and singers that he found his path to move beyond

Cage’s challenge. In 1966, Shibata applied chance procedures to traditional Japanese instruments

and voice in Mihotoke no haru (Buddha’s spring) for baritone, ryūteki, and Japanese percussion.

The piece was praised for its elegant match of western singing styles and the timbre of Japanese

instruments. In 1969, Shibata resigned from his position as professor in the Tokyo University of

the Arts and started to collect traditional folk songs from various areas in Japan. Drawing

together his folk song collection and his experience with avant-garde techniques, he composed

his first theater piece Oiwakebushiko (Reflections on Oiwakebushi, 1973) for choir and

shakuhachi, demonstrating how he found and used the commonality between western

contemporary musical techniques and Japanese folk music to establish his musical language and

identity.

The piece is indeterminate with no full score but fragmented folk tunes. The conductor

would improvise the structure of the piece in each performance by using signs with enlarged

Japanese characters to show the choir what to sing next. Because oiwakebushi and magouta are

traditional Japanese singing styles that people use while moving around, Shibata made the male

singers who are singing oiwakebushi and magouta to walk and perform around the audience. The

spatial distribution of the sound in the entire hall therefore unifies the two spaces of the stage and

the audience. At the same time, Shibata required extended techniques from the male chorus and

utilized the sound of the female chorus reading aloud to create an avant-garde musical space with

137
Minao Shibata, quoted in Akiyama, Nihon no sakkyokukatachi, 214.

112
the acoustic effect of noise. To retain the anonymity of Japanese folk songs, Shibata borrowed

directly from folk music without arrangement and left the final format of Oiwakebushiko to the

performers’ creation.

Like Shibata, Moroi, who had criticized Cage as the terminator of music in 1962,

resumed composing with a broader range of styles. He had been a musical progressive in the

1950s, a pioneer in adopting twelve-tone music, electronic music, and serial music in Japanese

music circles. He had believed that musical evolution should not be achieved by radical

revolution but by legitimate improvement and expansion, and that the essence of music is

mathematic order instead of chance. Thus, he reacted pessimistically when encountering Cage’s

radical music. However, later in the 1960s, Moroi prioritized his focus on expanding his musical

expression in order to reach a broader audience. He clarified that he did not want to adopt new

music techniques merely to differentiate himself from others as he had in the 1950s. Rather, he

chose to use certain new techniques only if they could fulfill his need for musical expression.

Therefore, when he resumed composing after the “Cage Shock,” along with his new interest in

composing for traditional Japanese instruments, Moroi opened himself up to American

experimental techniques, including indeterminacy and graphic notation. His Concerto for Piano

and Orchestra No. 1 (1966) involves an indeterminate painting technique, using dripping paint to

create ripples on paper. In Eight Parables for Piano (1967), Moroi left some note values and the

order and the length of eight sections indeterminate. In his Le false (1970) for violin, Moroi

combined indeterminate strategy with live electronics. He allows the violinist to arrange the

fragments of score by herself, while the live recording of the first half of the performance would

be played back during the second half of the performance, creating unexpected encounters each

time.

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 Tōru Takemitsu, on the other hand, did not experience a crisis, as Shibata and Moroi did.

Rather, Takemitsu continued to react to Cage’s and Ichiyanagi’s indeterminate music through the

mid-1960s. Takemitsu never composed with chance operations because he felt this was not

structured enough.138 “If this process [chance operations] is taken to its extreme, randomness

becomes just the opposite—it seems terribly logical,” Takemitsu wrote, “to the Japanese listener

the principle becomes rather tiresome.”139 He also did not agree with the idea that, by using

technology or chance operations, musical composition could achieve unlimited freedom. “Rather

than unlimited possibility, I am more interested in extremely impossible things or things with

limitations,” Takemitsu declared.140 Though Takemitsu had composed and participated in a few

performances of happenings and events to support his friends at the SAC, he did not continue far

along these paths. “Instead of doing events,” he said, “I felt that I wanted to study more music at

that time.”141 Even though his theater piece Seven Hills Events for Ay-O (1966) uses the term

“event” in the title, the work is closer to a pantomime than an event. Takemitsu wrote out the

performance instructions in detail, leaving little room for chance or the performers’ free

interpretation. Fundamentally, Takemitsu believed that music works must have a certain order

and structure. He did not think that composers should use “chance” as an excuse to write or ask

others to play arbitrary sounds.

138
Seiji Chōki and Ryūichi Higuchi, eds., Takemitsu Tōru. Oto no kawa no yukue [Takemitsu Tōru in
search of the river of sound] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2000), 288.
139
Tōru Takemitsu, “Contemporary Music in Japan,” Perspectives of New Music 27, no. 2 (Summer 1989):
199.
140
Tōru Takemitsu and Makoto Moroi, “Takemitsu Tōru no sekai [The world of Tōru Takemitsu],”
Ongaku geijutsu 25, no. 3 (1967): 28.
141
Takashi Tachibana and Tōru Takemitsu, Takemitsu Tōru: Ongaku sōzō e no tabi [Tōru Takemitsu: A
journey to the music creation] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2016), 434.

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 Therefore, Takemitsu’s approach to indeterminate strategy was not the same as Cage’s.

Instead of creating an anarchic, destructive type of music, he used indeterminate elements to

construct a dynamic, multi-level musical space-time defying the square temporal structure of

staff notation. After receiving positive reviews for Ring, Takemitsu composed two other pieces,

Sacrifice, for alto flute, lute, vibraphone, and cymbals (1962) and Valeria (1965), in an aleatoric

style to form a trilogy. Regarding his aleatoric works, Takemitsu stated, “I thought that the act of

composing is to create the environment where sounds can dramatically meet each other.”142

Takemitsu found that providing the performers with the freedom to meet each other also

broadened his opportunities as a composer.143 In Chant I of Sacrifice, Takemitsu uses no bar

lines but only indicates the length of time for particular moments. In Chant II, performers are

free to interpret the note values within each bar which has a fixed tempo of 30 beats per minute.

Giving flexibility in terms of tempo in both parts, Takemitsu encourages the performers to find

their inner pulsation while synchronizing with others’ pulsation cycles.

Later, Takemitsu extended indeterminate and graphic notations to his grander orchestral

works, aiming mainly to generate chaotic passages and multi-layered, constantly changing

textures. In Arc for Piano and Orchestra (1963–66), Takemitsu juxtaposed the determinate

notated part with graphic notations, which are used for the piano and strings to make the layers

of time subtle and complex.144 To depict the idea that each material in his imaginary music

garden transforms at a different rate, the composer employed heterocyclic time relationships

between each music group—some move at determined speeds and some move

142
Takemitsu and Moroi, “Takemitsu Tōru no sekai,” 29.
143
Tachibana and Takemitsu, Takemitsu Tōru, 445.
144
Tōru Takemitsu, Yoshiko Kakudo, and Glenn Glasow, Confronting Silence: Selected Writings
(Berkeley, CA: Fallen Leaf Press, 1995), 124.

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indeterminately.145 In one section of Your Love and the Crossing (1963) of Arc Part I, Takemitsu

made the soloists play phrases of various lengths in free rhythm and take arbitrary cues from

each other without referring to the conductor, resulting in fortuitous encounters.146

Textures (1964) of Arc Part II, had its premiere in the ceremonial concert for the 1964

Tokyo Olympics. Japanese scholar Kōji Sano commented that the positive reviews of Textures

verified that the popularity of indeterminacy in 1960s Japan was expanded not only by

Ichiyanagi’s extreme methodology but also by Takemitsu’s more moderate indeterminate

works.147 In Textures, Takemitsu stated his objection to conventional orchestral music where

each player has to discard their own personality and perform the role designated in the score. In

one section of the piece, Takemitsu frees the performance by arranging different phrase lengths

and indeterminate cycles for each player. He wished that “everyone in the orchestra can have

their own role and make a lot of encounters with other players as the work unfolds.”148 By asking

every string player to play a different part in creating the score’s large sound clusters, Takemitsu

“let the sound movement happen spontaneously.”149 His perspective is also based on his

agreement with Cage’s theory of listening “inside of sounds.”

145
Noriko Ohtake, Creative Sources for the Music of Tōru Takemitsu (England, Aldershot: Scolar Press,
1993), 22.
146
Fredric Lieberman, “Contemporary Japanese Composition: Its Relationship to Concepts of Traditional
Oriental Musics” (PhD diss., University of Hawaii, 1965), 117.
147
Kōji Sano, “Dai Ichibu—Nihon sōsaku-kai-shi: 1956-65 [Part I—History of Japanese creative world:
1956-65],” in Nihon no sakkyoku 20-seiki [Japanese compositions in the twentieth century], ed. Ongaku no Tomosha
(Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha, 1999), 70.
148
Tōru Takemitsu and Kazuyuki Toyama, “Ongaku no zen'ei [Avant-garde of music],” Kikan geijutsu 4,
no. 1 (December 1970): 14.
149
Tōru Takemitsu, quoted in Yōko Narazaki, “Cage to Nihon no sakkyokuka [Cage and Japanese
composer],” Art Vivant 27 (1987): 62.

116
 Ultimately, Takemitsu’s fascination with Cage began to wear off after Textures. He

returned to conventional notation, limiting his use of indeterminate and graphic notations mainly

to music with traditional Japanese instruments and some special occasions. After his last graphic

works Seasons (1970) and Munari by Munari (1971), there were no more wholly graphically

notated works modelled on Cage’s example. To explain the end of his exploration of

indeterminate notation, Takemitsu said:

There was one period of time when I adopted indeterminacy to broaden my music
horizon. . . . Yet, the results of these works always depend on the performers. . . .
Although my goal is to draw out the largest potential of the performers, I realized that
using graphic notation, which leaves the most important part of the music to the
performers’ discretion, is not enough to reach my goal. . . . My recent scores are
composed strictly note by note. . . . Rather than asking the performers to do arbitrarily
whatever they want, I found that providing clear instruction about how to play a certain
note is the better way to draw out the largest potential of the performers.150

Although Takemitsu discontinued using the practical techniques he acquired from Cage, many of

the philosophic ideas of this aleatoric period remain essential in his later compositions, including

“the concept of a pluralistic, many layered, spatialized music,” and “the idea of silence as

plenum rather than vacuum,” Peter Burt wrote.151

Like Takemitsu, Matsudaira received information about Cage well before Cage’s

Japanese debut. As Matsudaira often called himself an outsider to the music circles in Japan

because of his main career in biophysics, he was able to approach a wide range of avant-garde

music freely and composed works in response to Cage’s challenge with less pedantic but more

humorous and imaginative musical language. Although Matsudaira had composed several works

in the experimental style, inspired by Cage’s works, before Cage visited Japan, he was further

150
Takemitsu and Toyama, “Ongaku no zen'ei,” 14.
151
Peter Burt, The Music of Tōru Takemitsu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 96.

117
inspired to apply indeterminacy to the process of composition after seeing Cage’s performances

in person. When he was composing his Transient '64 for electronic sounds (1963–64) in the

NHK Electronic Music Studio, the engineer accidentally turned on the oscillators in reverse

order, producing unstable, transient sounds. Inspired by this unexpected incident, Matsudaira

decided to make the process of creating this electronic piece indeterminate. He composed square

graphic scores, each of which shows frequency on a vertical axis and duration on a horizontal

axis, with the red, yellow, and green rectangles indicating the different densities of the clusters of

sine waves (fig 2.6). At the beginning of each cluster, there is a transient phase, a characteristic

of instrumental sounds, created by using the oscillating sound of the unstable state of a vacuum

oscillator until it moves in the equilibrium state.152 The score can be read from four different

directions. When turning the score 90 degrees, the frequency and duration parameters would be

exchanged; by turning 180 degrees, the timeline would be read from the end to the beginning.

While reading and turning each page four times, the engineer could create many versions of the

work by manipulating a signal oscillator.

152
Yoriaki Matsudaira, liner notes to Transient: Works by Yori-Aki Matsudaira, Kazue Nakamura, Naoto
Ōtomo, and Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, Fontec FOCD2511, 1992, CD.

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 Figure 2.6 Score for Matsudaira’s Transient '64 for electronic sounds.153

Matsudaira also mentioned that, during Cage’s second visit to Japan, he became

interested in the technique of quotation and collage after seeing Cage used quotations of folk

song, noise, and a comic dialogue by two comedians in his music for Cunningham’s

choreography Cross Currents. In 1966, Matsudaira went to the US and learned more about

chance, collage, modern dance, and American pop art. After returning to Japan, he composed

three “wh-” theater pieces, What’s Next? (1967–71), Why Not? (1970), and Where Now? (1973),

which he created while still under the influence of Cage. He conceived What’s Next? for Soprano

and Two Noise Makers with Conductor, on a flight from Japan to Honolulu, though he later

revised it. The title echoes the catchphrase of Akiyama’s 1966 article regarding the stagnation of

musical development in Japan after Cage’s visits.154 Akiyama proposed that the question of

153
Transient: Works by Yori-Aki Matsudaira, Fontec FOCD2511.
154
Kuniharu Akiyama, “Nihon no sakkyoku-kai no seishin no jōkyō: John Cage no hamon-igo [The
condition of Japanese composition circles: After the ripple of John Cage],” Ongaku geijutsu 24, no. 12 (1966): 6–13.

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“what’s next?” for Japanese composers would not merely be an issue of finding new techniques,

but also of claiming a new stage on which composers could pursue their own music language,

theory, and development through analyzing and criticizing the questions proposed by new music.

Hence, at the beginning of What’s Next?, Matsudaira repeated the phrase “what’s next? It’s my

time again” several times, declaring the work as his own next step in response to Cage’s

challenge.

This event piece includes thirty unrelated sections. Each event looks meaningful but is

actually meaningless. The thirty-page graphic score provides detailed instructions for staging,

acting, music, and libretto. The performers have to create sounds/noises without using an

instrument (except toy piano) but employing everyday objects, such as a typewriter, alarm

clocks, a bundle of keys, cola bottle, toy piano, and clappers. To create dramatic, visual effect,

Matsudaira even indicated the use of a motorcycle on stage which shocked the audience at the

premiere during the 1972 International Society for Contemporary Music festival in Graz. Besides

noise, the score features many meaningless storylines and English text phrases. For instance,

when Noise Maker I asked “What’s soap?,” three performers have to pronounce the words such

as “beautiful,” “drop-out,” “doomy,” and “feel” in a disorderly fashion. Matsudaira explained

that the concept for the piece was based on his own experience in the US: “When I went to the

US, I couldn’t communicate with others in English. But with the meaningless vowels and the

theatrical elements, it became easier to communicate with the audience.”155 Furthermore,

Matsudaira specified that the first half of the performance should be played back as background

music for the second half of the performance (somehow similar to Moroi’s Le false)—adding a

sense of humor and letting the audience hear the first part differently, two ideas he had found

155
Yoriaki Matsudaira, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, February 5, 2017.

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compelling in Cage’s performances. Essentially, the overall mixture of sound, noises, theatrical

effects, everyday objects, nonsense conversation, and sections of fixed duration reflect the

essence of Cage’s theatrical works. Yet, concerned that the audience might not accept his type of

chaotic, unstructured work as favorably as Cage’s happenings, Matsudaira modified his work on

the basis of a psychological test published in Scientific American, which suggests that listeners

could better accept complex, unstructured sounds if these were mixed with simple, familiar

tunes, themes and objects.156 For this reason, Matsudaira mixed and collaged Mendelssohn’s

“Wedding March” and a Coca Cola commercial with other nonsense elements to make his work

accessible.

Matsudaira’s later theater piece Where Now? for actress, male dancer, and any kind of

instrument, focuses more on the action and relation between performers than on the juxtaposition

of diverse sounds. In a way, it shares the core concepts of group interaction with Ichiyanagi’s

Pratyahara Event and of encountering unexpected incidental sounds with Kosugi’s Organic

Music. Contrary to the usual dance music where the music is precomposed and the dancer would

follow the music, in Where Now?, Matsudaira asked performers to perform music by imitating

the action of the actress who leads the performance. Since there will not be an exact imitation,

the sounds performers make will vary from person to person. Matsudaira thought that using

concrete graphic notation such as pictures of the human body would be too limiting for the

performers. He wrote the score including mainly text instructions and a few phrases of staff

notation offered only as examples. To emphasize the individuality of each performer, Matsudaira

gives performers the freedom to change the music if they are not satisfied with the resulting

156
Judith Ann Herd, “Change and Continuity in Contemporary Japanese Music: A Search for a National
Identity” (PhD diss., Brown University, 1987), 308.

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sound of their imitation. Rather than showing one mega-character as traditional ensemble

typically does, the ensemble of Where now? shows a loose assemblage which is closer to the

everyday human community.

In addition to his three “wh-” theater pieces, Matsudaira has also engaged with the genre

of happenings. In the 1971 Cross Talk Festival in Tokyo, Matsudaira presented a unique type of

happening The Symphonie (1971), which requires a conductor to perform Anton Webern’s

Symphony, Op. 21 (1927–28). Though it is an orchestral piece, there is no performer on the stage

except the conductor and music stands. The symphony should be prerecorded and broadcast

when the conductor points to the particular instruments. In comparison to the highly

indeterminate nature of some happenings, all the musical parts and the ordering of events in

Matsudaira’s “happening” are predetermined. For the composer, the piece is not a critique of the

traditional happenings, but an extension of the genre meant to challenge the role of conductor in

an orchestra. Normally, the conductor is the person who gives cues to the performers to summon

the music. In The Symphonie, the conductor does not know the exact timing of the recording and

has to guess when the music is coming. The conductor is therefore being conducted by the

recording.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Matsudaira was not alone in adding theatrical elements

to indeterminate/graphic works. Jōji Yuasa, for example, also composed a fully graphically

notated work Triplicity for Contra-bass (1970) with theatrical instructions, which was presented

at the same Cross Talk Festival with Matsudaira’s The Symphonie. Yuasa’s interest in using

theatrical elements might be traced back to his experience with Cage. Before seeing Cage’s

performance, Yuasa had cast doubt on whether Cage’s chance procedures, an act of liberating

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sound from predetermined structures, could really result in the liberation of selfhood.157 Seeing

Cage’s 1962 performance personally dispelled Yuasa’s doubts. He wrote, “Cage’s visit to Japan

can only be described with the term ‘seeing is believing’. . . . Cage has corrected several ideas I

had about music.”158 One important idea he learned is that to allow sounds to be themselves, one

should listen to sounds without preconception.159 Applying the idea to his composition, Yuasa

decided to compose a piece for contra-bass beyond the existing concept of the instrument. In his

Triplicity for Contra-bass, he instructed the performer to play the instrument with

unconventional methods as if the performer does not know the instrument at all. The

performance involved diverse elements such as using the body of contrabass for drumming along

with a mallet or maraca, and the player also makes sound by voice or speaking. In the middle of

the piece, Yuasa asked the player to make a brief statement about something he or she happened

to be interested in that day and to play each syllable of the statement’s words with the knuckle

and palm of the hand.160 Yuasa called the piece a “one-person trio” because the second and third

parts of the trio are prerecorded and played along with the live performance of the first part.

Shinichi Matsushita, who had argued that the result of chance operations or

indeterminacy was not really random, also chose to add humorous theatrical elements into his

aleatoric pieces. In his Spectre pour piano no. 4 (1971), a piece containing various kinds of

aleatories, the pianist can arbitrarily decide tempo, dynamics, duration and the order of sections;

157
Jōji Yuasa, “Auto saido no ongaku chansu operēshon o megutte [Music of outside—about chance
operation],” SAC Journal 19 (October 25, 1962): n.p.
158
Jōji Yuasa, “Gendai jihyō: Cage no nokoshite itta mono [Contemporary review: The things that Cage
left],” SAC Journal 27 (November 25, 1962): n.p.
159
Ibid. Yuasa had probably encountered the similar idea, to look at things without preconception, in D. T.
Suzuki’s writing of Zen.
160
Jōji Yuasa, Triplicity: For Contrabass (Tokyo: Zen-On Music, 1978).

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more theatrically, the pianist must meditate or fantasize quietly over the last two notes in coda.

During the pause between sections, the performer is free to go to the toilet, eat a hamburger, etc.

In the score, Matsushita even wrote out instructions in case of the catastrophic situations:

In the event of stoppage of electric current, the player should either await the repairs, [or]
continue to play ad lib. From the last notes played just before the occurrence, or stop
playing and go out. If a great earthquake would happen so unfortunately during the
performance, play the last notes in fff and afterwards suddenly stop playing and carry
yourself in whole safety! As the most unhappy case, if atombomb or H-bomb explodes,
then all the matter should be quite beyond the remarks for this piece, thus nothing could
be said about it here.161

Matsushita’s wild instructions thrust a simple piano piece into an imaginative theatrical space,

eliminating the border between music performance and everyday life (as well as evoking postwar

anxieties).

Cage’s aleatoric musical techniques became a fashion among Japanese composers in the

second half of the 1960s. Along with their own interests and reasons, such as expanding one’s

musical expression, creating multi-layer texture, or adding theatrical effects, these composers all

tried to find their own paths through experimenting with Cagean techniques. It is not surprising

that after the shock wave passed, some years after 1970, none of these composers continued to

compose mainly with chance operations, indeterminacy or graphic notation. These experimental

techniques had gradually been accepted and had lost their avant-garde challenging of the status

quo of music as time went by. In our interview, Ichiyanagi expressed his disappointment with the

aftermath of “Cage Shock” in Japan:

Japanese composers didn’t take chance and indeterminacy from the inner thoughts of
Cage, who developed these techniques, but only borrowed the techniques, so they soon
reached an impasse. . . . I think the best situation is when Cage’s ideas are adapted into
people’s spirit, becoming a universal way of thinking. . . . It will be better if Cage is

161
Shinichi Matsushita, Spectre: pour piano (Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha, 1972).

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 accepted on the basis of the philosophical questions that he proposed from the beginning
instead of just relying on the techniques that he used.162

Of course, it is not true that there were no Japanese who accepted Cage primarily for the

philosophical questions he proposed. It might simply be that it is more difficult to track the

spread of Cage’s musical ideas. Indeed, the later development of Cage’s reception in Japan

comes into focus if we look into lives of individual composers, musicians, and artists who

continued to have contact with Cage and his musical practices. The following chapter will trace

the reception of Cage, interweaving it with the personal histories of these Japanese individuals’

interactions with Cage in the decades after the “Cage Shock.”

162
Toshi Ichiyanagi, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, August 28, 2017.

125
 Chapter 3 Japanese Reception of Cage from 1970 to the 21st Century

The Decline of the Avant-garde

In the years after Cage and Tudor’s debut in Japan, the later generations who were too

young to experience “Cage Shock” gradually emerged and developed new perspectives on

Cage—not only because they did not experience the shock firsthand, but also because Japanese

avant-garde music circles started to change around 1964 and 1965. After the excessive expenses

incurred for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s month-long residency, the SAC

experienced a serious financial deficit. The Teshigahara family eventually cut back its financial

support to avant-garde events. The SAC Journal series was also discontinued in April 1964. The

contents of the last issue (no. 35) reveal that, with many of its central artists going abroad, the

SAC was losing its force as a hub for avant-garde activities. Yūji Takahashi observed that even

though many exciting things happened during the first few years the SAC operated, after its

prosperous period (1959–64), “many genres became stale; people dispersed and started to focus

more narrowly on their individual careers. The SAC [which should be a place where interests

and energy across genres gathered] finally disappeared.”1 In financial straits, the center

redirected its focus to film and animation after the mid-1960s, and thus it had less contact with

experimental music in Japan. Eventually, the center shut down in 1971.

At the same time, interest in avant-garde music declined more generally. Audiences for

contemporary music concerts dwindled, according to the newspapers and magazines. “The flow

of audience members who used to go listen to new music began to dry up. . . . Even the music

1
Yūji Takahashi, “Ishitsu no enerugi ga shūchu shita basho [The places where heterogeneous energy
gathered],” in Kagayake 60-nendai: Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no zenkiroku [Shining 60s: The complete records of the
Sogetsu Art Center], ed. “Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no Kiroku” Kanko Iinkai (Tokyo: Firumu Āto Sha, 2002), 158.

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coffeehouse Fugetsudō [which specialized in modern and contemporary music] in Shinjuku no

longer played the recordings of twentieth-century music,” Heuwell Tircuit recalled.2 After 1965,

Ongaku geijutsu published fewer articles on the avant-garde art and music. In a 1966 article,

Kuniharu Akiyama described the sense of stagnation he felt in the Japanese music circles: “In the

past few years, I did not feel as many drastic changes as before. Most of the latest techniques and

music schools had been established in Japan. . . . The Japanese composition circle has become

conservative, or the energy of moving forward within the fifteen years after World War II has

faded away.”3 Also, several contemporary music groups ceased their activities. In 1965, the

Twentieth Century Music Laboratory stopped holding its contemporary music festival. Along

with the inactivity of the SAC, the places/organizations which produced Cage’s music in the first

half of the 1960s had all changed or disappeared.

The disappearance of these institutions and the waning enthusiasm for the avant-garde

implies a turning point in Japanese aesthetics. Scholars such as Eishi Kikkawa, Shigeo Kishibe,

and Minao Shibata have all proposed that, since the prehistoric (Jōmon) period, Japanese music

history has shown an alternation between periods of creation based on foreign influences and

creation based on national/local characters.4 Writing in 1991, the scholar Kazushi Ishida

observed that the last period of strong foreign influence was in the 1950s and 1960s.5 Composers

2
Heuwell Tircuit, “New Direction daiichikai kōen [The first performance of New Direction],” Ongaku
geijutsu 21, no. 7 (1963): 38.
3
Kuniharu Akiyama, “Nihon no sakkyoku-kai no seishin no jōkyō: John Cage no hamon-igo [The
condition of Japanese composition circles: After the ripple of John Cage],” Ongaku geijutsu 24, no. 12 (1966): 6, 9.
4
Eishi Kikkawa, Nihon ongaku no rekishi [History of Japanese music] (Osaka: Sōgensha, 1965); Shigeo
Kishibe, Tōa ongakushi kō [History of East Asian music] (Tokyo: Ryūginsha, 1944); Minao Shibata, Nihon no oto o
kiku [Listen to Japanese sounds] (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1983).
5
Kazushi Ishida, “Seiō shijō shugi kara kachi no sōtai-ka e [From the Eurocentrism to the relativization of
value],” Ongaku geijutsu 49, no. 7 (1991): 41.

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such as Shibata wrote twelve-tone music to eliminate any national color from his music and to

distance himself from wartime nationalism. In Ishida’s view, Cage’s aleatoric, indeterminate

music, happenings, graphic notation, and prepared piano, which became popular in early 1960s

Japan, all resulted from questioning the key western conceptions of modern music; Cage

eliminated the western characteristics from western music. Paradoxically, Japanese composers

learned from the West to liberate art music from the domination of western Europe.

During the second half of the 1960s, Japanese composers started to react to the

dominance of western classical music since the Meiji period and to celebrate the uniqueness of

Japanese music, desiring to establish their own standpoint in the international music scene. These

composers released internal tensions between globalism and localism as creative energy. After

the demise of the Twentieth Century Music Laboratory and the SAC, the contemporary music

festival Orchestral Space, organized by Tōru Takemitsu and Toshi Ichiyanagi in Tokyo in 1966

and 1968, became the new avenue for Japanese to export their music (synthesis of avant-garde

technique and Japanese elements) to the world. Thanks to the rapid economic growth in Japan,

the Orchestral Space could present more large-scale works by Japanese composers than at the

Laboratory’s festivals and the SAC.

The 1970 World Exposition in Osaka (Expo ’70) brought temporarily renewed interest in

the avant-garde arts. One might see it as a summary of the postwar period, since many artists

active at Jikken Kōbō and at the SAC were selected to participate in this giant national project.

Working for the corporate- and national-sponsored Expo ’70 created a rift among many artists

and literary figures whose avant-garde ethics dictated resistance to established modes of power.

However, performers and composers, such as Takahashi, Ichiyanagi, Akiyama, Takehisa Kosugi,

Yoriaki Matsudaira, and Jōji Yuasa, joined the project without entering into verbal debate

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against participating the national project. For them, Expo ’70 was a place where they could co-

present with international composers such as Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen and

meet the European avant-garde on equal ground. For example, Takemitsu, Takahashi, and

Xenakis had all composed works specifically for the giant multichannel sound system with over

1000 speakers that had been installed for the Expo inside the Space Theater in the Steel Pavilion.

Entering the theater, one could hear Takemitsu’s Crossing, Takahashi’s Yeguen, and Xenakis’s

Hibiki Hana Ma broadcast in rotation; all used similar sound sources that drew on prerecorded

and electronically modified sounds of acoustic instruments, and all carried out the spatialization

of sound as the central idea.6

Following the national collaboration in Expo ’70, however, came an even steeper decline

of interest in the avant-garde and a decrease in cross-genre collaboration in Japanese music

circles. Historians of Japanese music and several Japanese composers offer different accounts for

the decline of the avant-garde in the 1970s. Ichiyanagi explained, during the 1970s, Japan

became a rich, consumerist society with abundant resources and foreign information. If we

define avant-garde as “going ahead in order to reach the goal of improvement,” he noted, people

in the 1970s felt less need to improve their status quo than those postwar avant-gardists who had

experienced the wars and “desired to create something new that would negate the history that

resulted in the stupidity of war.”7 Even though there was not much financial support for avant-

garde events in the 1960s, “After the war, there was a feeling that we must live on. It is true that

there was food, but people also had a hungry spirit for absorbing all new information . . . and

6
Miki Kaneda, “The Unexpected Collectives: Intermedia Art in Postwar Japan” (PhD diss., University of
California, Berkeley, 2012), 107.
7
Toshi Ichiyanagi, An Ancient Resonance in Contemporary Music, translated by Gavin Frew (published
privately, 2007), 130.

129
strong consciousness about aiming at new goals in the 1960s. Yet, into the 1970s, people were

not yearning for new things as they had in the 1960s [because the economy was much better].”8

According to Ichiyanagi, societal affluence dissolved the sense of avant-garde community that

united artists and musicians to resist or rebel against the established institutions during the 1960s.

Thus, the term “avant-garde” ceased to be a catchword for contemporary music.

Another reason for the decline of the avant-garde in the 1970s is that those avant-garde

composers/musicians who were formerly outsiders to established artistic institutions were now

embraced by society and became the central figures of Japanese music circles. For example,

Takemitsu, Yuasa, and Ichiyanagi, erstwhile radicals, began teaching in academic institutions or

directors and board members of national and regional music competitions and festivals. Their

roles in speaking against the mainstream also changed. Instead of introducing music, aesthetics,

and methodology from overseas, they turned their attention to emphasizing Japanese uniqueness,

developing local aesthetics and methodologies, and exporting Japanese music abroad. From a

different perspective, Ishida described this change as a process of becoming mature.9 Almost

thirty years had passed since the postwar Japanese composers began to learn the latest music

trends from the West—starting with twelve-tone music immediately after the war. In the 1970s,

these Japanese composers finally “graduated” from the learning period, paying less attention to

the western avant-garde. Instead of being self-centered—focusing on trying out one’s

experimental ideas—they turned to considering their cultural positions and seeking ways to

connect their music to the audience. For instance, composers Yūji Takahashi and Hikaru Hayashi

8
Toshi Ichiyanagi, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, August 28, 2017.
9
Kazushi Ishida, “Enjuku-ki mukaeta Nihon gendai ongaku-kai [The Japanese contemporary music circles
which became mature],” Yomiuri Evening News (August 7, 1979): 7.

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started to work on music involving social participation in the 1970s. Shibata composed theater

pieces that incorporated folk music and traditional arts.

In addition, one practical reason for the postwar composers to stop composing in avant-

garde style (especially with indeterminate or graphic notation) was the lack of musicians

interested in avant-garde music and the increasingly entrenched division between the roles of

composers and performer. Ichiyanagi talked about his frustration: “Many [western-trained]

musicians [of the younger generation] could not understand the idea that the composer hopes to

make musicians perform with their own imagination in the framework that the composer

designs. . . . Therefore, composers were forced to change their styles.”10 Cage’s music was but

one example. As Ichiyanagi explained:

After Yūji Takahashi, there was no musician like Tudor in Japan who could perform
Cagean experimental avant-garde music. . . . Although there were many skillful
musicians in Japan, they were not that interested in performing Cage’s music. Most of
them had not stepped into performing Cagean new music at all . . . and thus did not know
how to perform Cage’s music.11

Ichiyanagi’s observation is verified by Takahashi. In 1984, Takahashi was still considered one of

the few musicians who could perform the avant-garde scores from the 1960s. When he was

asked to perform at Ichiyanagi’s concert “What was Next?—Music of the 1960s” in the Seibu

Art Museum on December 24, 1984, he lamented: “Though the history of music in Japan in the

1960s was glorious, there was no successor to our [avant-garde] music.”12 Ichiyanagi surmised

that because there were so few places like the SAC to support avant-garde activities after 1970,

10
Toshi Ichiyanagi and Shigeaki Saegusa, “Shōgen 1960 zen'ei ongaku no jidai—‘John Cage Shock’ no
motarashita mono [Testimony of the 1960s: The age of avant-garde music—the thing that ‘John Cage Shock’
brought],” Ongaku no tomo 59, no. 12 (2001): 94.
11
Toshi Ichiyanagi, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, August 28, 2017.
12
Yūji Takahashi and Jun'ichi Konuma, Takahashi Yūji taidansen [Dialogues with Yūji Takahashi]
(Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2010), 308.

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musicians and composers had fewer chances to experience cross-genre collaboration and/or to

try out their experimental thoughts.

Younger composers—those mainly born after the end of World War II—had their own

reasons for rejecting the avant-garde. Too young to engage in the avant-garde movement in the

1960s or to experience “Cage Shock”—many of them even felt they had no right to comment on

this phenomenon—they learned about avant-garde, experimental music techniques academically

rather than firsthand. Avant-garde techniques, including Cage’s experimental strategies, were

merely one option that they could choose to use among others, such as serialism, neoclassicism,

or jazz. Akiyama commented that it was easier for the postwar composers to be experimental

given the lack of role models in the previous generation before them, considering the hiatus of

Japanese art music scene during the wars.13 After the postwar composers had tried out various

avant-garde methods and established a tradition, the young composers felt that 1) it is difficult to

be avant-garde any more, or 2) it is not their responsibility to be adventurous anymore.14 Instead

of maintaining the equation “trying something new = avant-garde style,” the younger composers

were reconsidering the definition of “new” and establishing the musical language that could

reflect their own time.

Japanese Reception of Cage in the 1970s

It is in the 1970s that the Japanese experiences of Cage and American experimental

tradition diverged between generations. While there were still some composers of the “Cage

13
Kuniharu Akiyama, Hidekazu Yoshida, Minao Shibata, and Hikaru Hayashi, “John Cage Shock,”
Ongaku geijutsu 27, no. 12 (1969): 28.
14
Ibid.

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Shock” generation, the younger generation lived in the post-Cage Shock era, in which Cage’s

legend loomed large.15 Rather than facing an unavoidable generational encounter like those in

the 1960s, the youthful understanding of Cage was more diverse and depended more on personal

interest. With more information on Cage easily available than in the 1960s, young composers

could freely decide in what way they wanted to engage with Cage’s music and philosophy

without experiencing the mental disturbance that had bothered some composers in the “Cage

Shock” generation.

In Akiyama and Ichiyanagi’s 1993 overview of Cage’s reception in Japan, Akiyama

recalled that in the 1970s Japanese music circles “had no shock anymore as in the 1960s” since

the latest, most provocative music trends had all arrived in the 1960s.16 Scholar Miyuki Shiraishi

described the decade as a “transition” between Cage’s Japanese reception in the 1960s after the

“Shock” and the 1980s, when the relationship between Cage and Japanese composers grew

“deeper.”17 Between his two sensational visits in the 1960s and his five visits in the 1980s (table

3.1), Cage visited Japan only once, in April 1976 with Tudor and Merce Cunningham Dance

Company. On this tour, gone were the reviews with frightened or belligerent tones. Even Minao

Shibata, once convinced that Cage’s music was a catastrophe, now reacted calmly and positively

to Cage’s 1976 performance: “This time,” he recalled, “Cage was no longer the lonely artist on

15
Pre-war composer Yoshinao Nakada, for instance, still called Cage as a charlatan in a 1973 article in
Ongaku geijutsu: “I am surprised that there are Japanese who admired people like Cage who spoke and performed
ridiculously. . . . I am also surprised to hear that his 4'33" with a pianist sitting in front of a piano and playing
nothing can be seen as a music piece. It is like dinning in a restaurant and having an empty plate for dinner. If we
complain about it and are told that the dust on the plate is food, it is definitely a fraud, isn’t it?” Yoshinao Nakada,
“Petenshi Cage [Charlatan Cage],” Ongaku geijutsu 31, no. 2 (1973): 87.
16
Kuniharu Akiyama and Toshi Ichiyanagi, “Dialogue: John Cage and Japan by Toshi Ichiyanagi and
Kuniharu Akiyama,” Music Today 18 (1993): 12.
17
Miyuki Shiraishi, “1980-nendai kōhan no san dai shinbun ni miru John Cage [Reports of John Cage in
the three Japanese newspapers in the second half of the 1980s],” Ongaku kenkyū 29 (2017): 20.

133
the stage but appeared as a mature, successful artist. His music sounded pleasant, steady, and

peaceful to my ear.”18

Date Purpose
1962 / October Tour with Tudor
1964 / November Tour with Tudor and Merce Cunningham Dance Company
1976 / April Tour with Tudor and Merce Cunningham Dance Company
1981 / August Participated in the Marcel Duchamp Exhibition Memorial Concerts
1982 / June Participated in the Music Today festival, which celebrated Cage’s
seventieth birthday
1986 / December Premiere of Cage’s Etcetera 2/4 Orchestras in celebration of the opening
of Suntory Hall
1987 / June–July Tour with Tudor and Merce Cunningham Dance Company
1989 / November Received the Kyoto Prize
Table 3.1 Cage’s Visits to Japan

Visiting Japan only once in the 1970s, Cage made most of his connections to Japan with

composers and musicians individually in this decade. The following sections focus on the

personal histories of the Japanese composers and musicians in the younger generation who had a

persistent association with Cage after 1970.

Jō Kondō (1947–)

Composer Jō Kondō conversed deeply with Cage in the 1970s. Although Kondō was only

a teenager when Cage first came to Japan, he learned Cage’s music through listening to LP

recordings and Ichiyanagi’s or Yūji Takahashi’s performances in Tokyo of the late 1960s. When

studying Cage’s music as a college student, he learned about many other examples of American

and European avant-garde music. “I didn’t experience the historical context of these avant-garde

musics,” Kondō told me, “both the American Experimentalism and European avant-garde, like

18
Minao Shibata, “Essei Cage san [Essay: Tribute to Cage],” Gendaishi techō 28, no. 5 (April 1985): 19.

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Boulez or Stockhausen, were similarly novel to me. . . . [At that time,] anything new was

interesting to me.”19 In his senior year of college, Kondō tried to imitate the works of many

different avant-garde composers, including Luciano Berio, Boulez, Stockhausen, Cage, Morton

Feldman, and Robert Ashley, for example. Eventually, Kondō became more drawn to Cage’s

music than to that of the European avant-garde: “As a young composer, I tried to find . . . what

music is from the beginning. If you question like this, you have to really go down to the basic of

things about music, what is the most basic condition of music, or what is the most basic element

of music, etc. If you take that way of thinking, you will naturally be interested in the philosophy

of Cage.”20 Since there were some scores of Cage’s most famous pieces available in Japan at that

time, Kondō often visited the two only music shops that sold Cage’s scores in Tokyo and read

Cage’s scores in the shops. As he learned more about Cage’s music, Kondō felt especially

attracted to Cage’s early pieces such as the prepared piano pieces Three Dances (1944–45) and

Sonatas and Interludes (1946–48) for their sonority, in which the sounds are grouped through

rhythm/duration. For them, Kondō learned that temporal placement, without harmonic

progression, can be another way to form relationships between notes. Cage’s prepared piano

music also influenced Kondō’s ideas about listening. Because one can hardly imagine the sound

of a prepared piano piece by reading the score, one must listen to its performance. Since the

timbre of each key on the prepared piano can be varied, Kondō learned to perceive each

individual sound in music as a single autonomous event having an independent life.

19
Jō Kondō, interview by the author in English, Kanagawa, Japan, March 16, 2018.
20
Ibid.

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 Based on the compositional paradigm inspired by Cage, Kondō started to conceive his

own compositional style. First, he used chance operations as a means to break free from the

limits imposed on him during his education.

When I was young, trying to find my own way to make music, the big problem is the
education I received. The music I grew up with became some kind of cage and restriction
to me. . . . If you work into it without thinking anything, you just repeat what you had
heard or the stylistically similar thing. . . . If you really try to find something different or
original, you have to break through that restriction. You have to change your ear. . . . To
change your ear, . . . you have to force something to yourself. That’s why I used chance
operations.21

By relying on chance operations to decide the order of the pitches he selected, Kondō avoided

making the music either too tonal or too remote from tonality. Kondō found that leaving

ambiguities in music can be a way to invite the listeners to participate the process of

musicalizing sound by listening—including interpreting the grouping and core tones among a

random group of notes. In later works, as his ear was trained to notice the ambiguities—being the

listener of his own ambiguous music—Kondō was able to choose the pitches to obtain the right

degree of tonal ambiguity without recourse to chance operations.22

In 1973, he christened his compositional style sen no ongaku (linear music), which can be

applied to describe the character of Kondō’s earlier compositions, especially those before 1980.

One representative work, Standing (1973), for any three instruments of different families, as

Kondō expected, can sound to most people at first like an endless row of tones that proceed

without interruption.23 He did not specify the parameters such as dynamics and tone colors to

21
Ibid.
22
Jō Kondō, “The Art of Being Ambiguous: From Listening to Composing,” Contemporary Music Review
2 (1988): 20.
23
Jō Kondō, liner notes to Standing; Sight Rhythmics; Under the Umbrella, Sound Space Ark, Nexus, and
Aki Takahashi, CP2 Recordings CP² 11, 1981, LP.

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avoid limiting the listeners’ choices for grouping and selecting the core tone while listening.

Thus, the simple artlessness of the music’s unfolding enables listeners to hear at each sound

dispassionately, and to trace their own auditory journeys from the myriad of potential ones

available. Kondō’s concept of inviting the audience members to be active listeners was inspired

by Cage’s concept of changing the responsibility of composing from composer to listener, such

as in his 4'33". Hence, Kondō always composes with a premise that the composer’s role in music

is not to express but to provide acoustic materials. In his book Sen no ongaku (1979), he

explained:

I made the continuity. Yet, the way of following the continuity depends on the listeners.
That is, the composer prepares the place for the game, and the listeners are the players.
Here the listener is not merely a receiver but must musicalize the row of sounds through
active listening. What the composer provided is not a complete work, but materials for
listeners to make the music.24

Kondō understood that people listen according to their capabilities.

Though deriving many ideas from Cage, Kondō never asked performers to respond to

indeterminate scores: “I don’t let the performers perform with their own choices because I am

concerned with letting the audience feel that they should actively group the sound they hear.”25

Even his graphic notation, such that used in Breeze (1970), was strictly notated with thirteen

pages of instructions, leaving little room for performers’ discretion. Kondō used graphic notation

only as a tool to notate the sounds in his mind that cannot be captured in western staff notation.

Kondō became acquainted with Cage in 1977, when Kondō resided in New York on a

Rockefeller Foundation scholarship.26 It was the Rockefeller office that put Kondō in touch with

24
Jō Kondō, Sen no ongaku [Linear music] (Tokyo: Asahi Shuppansha, 1979), 102.
25
Ibid., 90.
26
Bonnie C. Wade, Composing Japanese Musical Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2014), 68.

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Cage and also Morton Feldman. Coincidentally, Kondō lived just two blocks away from Cage’s

residence at Westbeth and saw Cage almost every day. “He [Cage] invited me for dinner. He

cooked for us. I was with my wife. We were just like friends, though he was much senior,”

Kondō recalled.27 Cage had also attended several concerts in New York where Kondō’s works

were performed and recognized Kondō’s musical gift. After listening to Kondō’s work at a

concert of the Society of Contemporary Music from Japan in New York on November 10, 1977,

Cage wrote to Naoyuki Miura: “I particularly liked Jō Kondō’s work, both the composition and

the performances by the Nexus group.”28 For Kondō, Cage’s recognition was extraordinarily

encouraging:

Actually what I was doing before I went to New York was rather strange for the ear of
the music world here in Japan, not just the conservative one, but also in the avant-garde
circle. They thought that my music didn’t fit the European avant-garde category.
[Because it also didn’t seem uniquely “Japanese,”] they were rather confused. . . . When I
went to the US, I was impressed by those experimental composers, such as Cage and
Feldman, who immediately recognized the value of my music.29

After returning to Japan and realizing that Cage’s writings were largely unknown in

Japan, Kondō decided to translate several of his articles in collaboration with the composer,

ultimately publishing them in Ongaku no reido (Zero Degree of Music) (1980), the first book of

Cage’s writings in Japanese.30 It sold well not only as a music book but as a philosophical text,

introducing artists, intellectuals, and general readers to Cage.31

27
Jō Kondō, interview by the author in English, Kanagawa, Japan, March 16, 2018.
28
Typescript letter from John Cage to Naoyuki Miura, November 18, 1977, John Cage Correspondence,
1901–1993, Northwestern University Music Library.
29
Jō Kondō, interview by the author in English, Kanagawa, Japan, March 16, 2018.
30
John Cage and Jō Kondō, Ongaku no reido: John Cage no sekai [Zero degree of music: The world of
John Cage] (Tokyo: Asahi Shuppansha, 1980).
31
Jō Kondō, interview by the author in English, Kanagawa, Japan, March 16, 2018.

138
Aki Takahashi (1944–)

Another fundamental figure is Aki Takahashi. When Cage and Tudor visited Japan in

1962, she was in high school and did not attend their concerts. But Aki watched Cage’s

performance on TV. “Seeing Cage carrying a lid of a pot, making sound and noise through

writing, I felt shocked by this scene,” Aki recalled.32 At that time, she already had doubts about

the fact that the Japanese were performing European music of two-hundred years ago without

seeming to question this situation. She felt inclined to Cage’s musical philosophy because it

reflected contemporary questions about classical music and allowed the musician to exert his or

her own creativity in producing music. She discovered her own interest in performing

contemporary music and collaborating with her creative contemporaries when she saw

Ichiyanagi and her brother Yūji Takahashi’s performance of George Brecht’s Drip Music at the

1963 New Direction concert and Yūji’s performance of Xenakis’s Eonta (1964) at the 1966

Orchestral Space contemporary music festival. Lacking hands-on experience, Aki was invited by

Maki Ishii (1936–2006) to perform Takemitsu’s Corona and Makoto Shinohara’s Tendance at

the Japanese-German Festival for Contemporary Music in Tokyo in February 1968, her debut as

a contemporary music pianist. Because almost no one in Japan could perform graphic notation

after her brother Yūji went abroad, Aki was in demand. Through her future husband Akiyama,

she worked with the members of Jikken Kōbō, such as Takemitsu and Yuasa, even during the

late 1960s, when there were not as many opportunities to practice cross-genre collaboration. As

interest in avant-garde arts ebbed, Aki continued to promote avant-garde music in Japan. In

32
Aki Takahashi, “Jiyū e no nagai michinori [A long way to freedom],” Eureka 44, no. 617 (October
2012): 76.

139
1972, she formed the quintet Sound Space Ark to perform music featuring indeterminacy, chance

operations, and graphic notation, besides traditionally notated scores by contemporary western

and Japanese composers. The group, which performed nationally and internationally, remained

active until 1991.

Aki met Cage in 1976, when Cage was in Japan. (Akiyama had known him since the

1950s.) In March 1980, they met again at her performance of Cage’s HPSCHD at the State

University of New York, Buffalo, where Aki was one of the two last Creative Associates at the

Center for the Creative and Performing Arts. Cage was in the audience for the performance and

saw Aki playing one of the most difficult parts among the six harpsichordists, playing two

different Mozart Sonatas with her left and right hands at the same time. Aki recalled: “The chaos

of the performance reminded me of the crowd in Shinjuku (Tokyo). And I remember Cage’s big

smile at the performance.”33 A month later, Aki went to New York to give a recital at the Japan

Society, playing three of Cage’s pieces among others. At the reception after the recital, Aki told

Cage, who had just attended her recital, that she and Yvar Mikhashoff were planning to hold a

“Satie=Cage concert” to celebrate Satie’s birthday in May. In response, Cage proposed to write a

piece for two pianos, to be played by Aki and Mikhashoff. The next day, Aki was invited to

Cage’s house and witnessed how Cage completed his piece Furniture Music Etcetera (1980) on

that day using a computer-generated chart: “Cage calculated the chart of the chance operation

[for twenty minutes] and then applied the result to the score. He even told me that: ‘This kind of

thing may seem silly, and no one will want to do this. Therefore, I am doing it.’”34 Based on the

result of chance operations, Cage juxtaposed and superimposed the piano arrangements of Erik

33
Aki Takahashi, interview by the author in English, Tokyo, Japan, May 16, 2017.
34
Aki Takahashi, Parlando: My Life as a Pianist (Tokyo: Shunjūsha, 2013), 38.

140
Satie’s Furniture Music with the two piano parts of Cage’s own orchestral piece Etcetera (1973),

specifying the timing for each pianist to play certain materials. Upon Cage’s completion of the

piece, Aki knew, “after that, we [the performers] have to work! It’s not the traditional way of

composing at all.”35

Through collaborating with Cage, Aki grasped that the key to performing indeterminate,

graphic scores is preparation. After returning to Japan in 1980, she became one of the few

specialists in performing the music of Cage and the experimental New York School. She not

only gave the Japanese premiere of Furniture Music Etcetera with Ichiyanagi in Tokyo in

December 1980 but also gave public lectures on Cagean experimental music and graphic scores

in Tokyo in 1983. During Cage’s fourth and fifth visits to Japan, Aki had more chances to work

with Cage. In 1981, Cage visited Japan to participate in the Marcel Duchamp Exhibition

Memorial Concerts at Takanawa Art Museum at Karuizawa on August 1 and 2, which were also

part of the Music in Museum Festival, directed by Ichiyanagi. For Aki, the most valuable

experience was preparing the piano with Cage:

Everybody believes that when preparing the piano, one should follow the measurements
suggested by the composer precisely. Actually, when Cage composed Amores (1943), he
might have used a smaller grand piano. Therefore, we have to measure the piano strings
and decide where to put the nuts and bolts (choose a harmonic sound) by our ears. This is
what I learned at that time through preparing piano together with Cage. When Cage
prepared the piano, he made adjustment instinctively [with his ear] without following his
own score strictly.36

In early June 1982, Cage was invited to Japan again by Takemitsu to participate in the

Music Today festival, which celebrated Cage’s seventieth birthday. Aki vividly remembers the

anecdote that in the rehearsal of Cage’s prepared piano piece Three Dances (1944–45) at the

35
Aki Takahashi, interview by the author in English, Tokyo, Japan, May 16, 2017.
36
Ibid.

141
Seibu Theater in Tokyo, Cage, standing behind Aki, said that “this music sounds really like

African music,” and then started to dance with the rhythm, hands waving in the air.37 Even more

informative to Aki were her private conversations with Cage. Regarding Aki’s uncertainty about

how to perform Etudes Australes (1974–75), Cage suggested that Aki used chance operations to

decide the dynamics of Etudes Australes. During their meal near the Seibu Theater, Cage used

his work Music of Changes (1951) to illustrate how he decided the dynamics by chance

techniques. Through Cage, Aki learned new ways of preparing to perform Cage’s indeterminate

works according to Cage’s particular experimental methods.

Observing the growing rift between avant-garde music and the Japanese public, Aki

launched into organizing the concert series New Ears, hosted by the Yokohama Education

Cultural Center, which lasted from 1983 to 1997. Aki drew the title from Cage’s new year

message to NHK in 1964, “Happy New Ears!” She especially wanted young musicians to

discover musics with clean, new ears, according to Cage’s precepts. The performance of Cage’s

music, such as Music for ____ (1984), was one of the important parts of the series, showing not

only that Cage continued to inspire Aki but continuing in some small measure the performance

of Cage’s music in Japan.

During his final years, Cage’s friendship with Aki crystallized in a piece that Aki

commissioned Cage to compose. After recording eight CDs of Erik Satie’s music, Aki initiated

the recording project “Hyper Beatles” with the Toshiba company in 1989. To capture the

diversity of contemporary approaches to the Beatles, Aki invited several experimental composers

to compose pieces based on their favorite Beatles tunes. Encouraged by Akiyama, Aki invited

Cage to join her project while they attended the same concert in New York and happened to sit

37
John Cage, quoted in Takahashi, Parlando, 161.

142
next to each other. Even before intermission, Cage had a plan.38 The resultant piece is The

Beatles 1962–1970, which Cage composed in August 1989 for multiple pianists or solo pianist

with other parts on tapes, superimposing six piano parts. Cage drew melodies and

accompaniments by chance from an arrangement of twenty-seven Beatles songs and set them in

seven flexible and one fixed time brackets with tempo left to the performer(s)’ discretion. The

simple notation of The Beatles 1962–1970 is common in Cage’s contemporaneous number

pieces. Cage suggested in his letter to Aki that it would be more interesting to have the

performers playing each part without listening to others—the same as his suggestion for

performing his Furniture Music Etcetera—so there will not be a coincidence of meter.39 After

receiving Cage’s clarification on how to perform the piece, Aki recorded the piece and released it

on the album Hyper Beatles (1990), an album which Cage expressed his excitement to see when

he met Aki at the Kyoto prize ceremony in 1989.40

Japanese Reception of Cage in the 1980s

In the 1980s, the connection between Cage and Japanese musicians deepened thanks to

Cage’s five visits to the country and the further availability of Cage’s music and ideas in Japan.

More scores, recordings, and information on Cage than ever before were imported or published

in Japan. For instance, Teruo Akiyama arranged the publication of Cage’s Pour les oiseaux

38
Takahashi, Parlando, 107.
39
Handwritten letter from John Cage to Aki Takahashi, December 31, 1989, John Cage Correspondence,
1901–1993, Northwestern University Music Library.
40
Takahashi, Parlando, 107.

143
(1976) in Japanese with the publisher Seidosha in 1982.41 In the same year, scholar Susumu

Shōno wrote the entry on Cage in the Japanese music dictionary Ongaku daijiten (1981–83),

recognizing the historical significance of Cage, and helping spread Cage’s musical thought in

Japan.42 Tetsuo Iwasa translated Daniel Charles’s book Gloses sur John Cage in 1987.43

Recordings of Cage’s music were sold at shops such as Art Vivant in Tokyo, spurred by Cage’s

presence at the 1982 Music Today festival, sponsored by the Seibu Group, which prompted the

director of Art Vivant, Shinya Takahashi, to import many Cage-related products to the shop.44

Cage’s visits to Japan reached a record high in the 1980s. Having been away from the

country since 1972, Cage now provided artistic inspiration for the new generation of Japanese

who understood him by reputation only. For example, Cage’s visit in 1981 extended his

reputation outside the concert hall since the Marcel Duchamp Exhibition Memorial Concerts

took place at Takanawa Art Museum.45 In his concert, because the museum setting could not

accommodate electronics, Cage decided to make an acoustic performance of Variations IV that

would use the entire museum space. Following a performance map of Variations IV created by

41
John Cage and Daniel Charles, John Cage kotoritachi no tameni [For the birds], translated by Mami
Aoyama (Tokyo: Seidosha, 1982).
42
Shigeo Kishibe, ed., Ongaku daijiten [Music dictionary] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1981–83).
43
Daniel Charles and Tetsuo Iwasa, John Cage (Tokyo: Kaze no Bara, 1987).
44
Art Vivant, the museum shop of the Seibu Art Museum in Ikebukuro, was one of the first museum shops
in Japan. Art Vivant not only sold western art books, records, and scores but also produced events and concerts and
published the art magazine Art Vivant. According to Susumu Shōno, Art Vivant was a place for people who were
interested in contemporary music to meet and exchange information. Frequent visitors included Jō Kondō, Yoriaki
Matsudaira, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Yūji Takahashi, Kuniharu Akiyama, and others. From 1975 to 1997, Art Vivant,
along with the Seibu Art Museum, played an important role in popularizing contemporary arts in Japan. Susumu
Shōno, interview by the author in Japanese, Saitama, Japan, August 22, 2019.
45
The Marcel Duchamp Exhibition was in celebration of the relocation of Takanawa Art Museum (later
renamed as Sezon Museum of Modern Art) at Karuizawa in 1981. It is possibly through the connection of
Takemitsu that Seiji Tsutsumi, the Chairman of the Seibu Department Store chain and later founder of the Saison
Foundation, could invite Cage to attend the reopening exhibition. Akira Nagae, Sezon bunka wa nani o yumemita
[What Saison culture dreamed of] (Tokyo: Asahi Shinbun Shuppan, 2010), 253.

144
chance, Cage moved the performance from inside to outside the museum concert hall, with the

performers and audience following him, collecting sounds from outside the auditorium. The

performance in the museum was personally astonishing to Miyuki Sugaya, the owner of Gallery

360°, who had no musical background and was seeing Cage performed for the first time. Sugaya

recalled that she was sitting in a seat from which she could see the score of Ichiyanagi’s Sapporo

when it was performed:

There was nothing written on it. No notes. In place of it, there were vertical, horizontal
and diagonal lines here and there, and Cage was conducting from it. It was completely
different from what I had learned in school, and I was thinking, “Why is music playing
when no notes [sic] are there?” However, the performers [seemed to] understand [the
score], and a beautiful performance was being created, so I realized, “There must be one
promise among the music world that I don’t know of, and that is how music happens.”46

Stimulated by Cage’s concert, Sugaya decided to devote her career to contemporary avant-garde

art. In 1982, she opened a gallery in Tokyo, handling contemporary art from abroad that

celebrate the artistic spirit of Cage and Fluxus—incorporating “art into [daily] lives”—as the

principle of her business.47

A year later, Cage returned to Japan as the birthday honoree at the 1982 Music Today

festival. The two-day “Works of John Cage” concert series was sold out, and it was especially

popular with young audience members.48 In comparison to their elders’ reaction to Cage’s

Japanese debut, they greeted a full performance of Cage’s three-hour-long piece Etudes

Australes by Grete Sultan (played over two days) calmly, some even cordially. Critic Nobuhiko

Fujimura commented that “although it is a boring piece for me, I admire the continuous drive in

46
Miyuki Sugaya and Ryokō Kuwahara, “DIY Issue: Interview with Miyuki Sugaya from GALLERY
360°,” NeoL, entry posted July 17, 2018, http://www.neol.jp/art-2/70900/.
47
Ibid.
48
“Tenbyō: Inshōdzuketa mizumizushi-sa—John Cage sakuhin ensō-kai [Sketch: Impressed freshness—
‘Works of John Cage’ concert series],” Asahi Evening News (June 10, 1982): 5.

145
this piece.”49 Artist Masuo Ikeda and scholar Yukinobu Kagiya also discussed the value of

“boredom” after the concert, concluding that “being bored” was an important element in

contemporary music and life. Later, Cage’s lecture-performance “Composition in Retrospect”

(1981) inspired some young audience members who had never seen Cage’s performance before.

Critic Masashi Miura felt stimulated to see that Cage read his poems in the lecture and felt that

Cage’s soft and sweet voice itself, which moved up and down gently like “a mysterious living

creature,” constituted a beautiful piece of music.50

In December 1986, Cage returned to celebrate the opening of Suntory Hall in Tokyo, for

which his Etcetera 2/4 Orchestras (1985) was commissioned, launching the series Suntory Hall

International Program for Music Composition. The idea might have come from Takemitsu, the

first artistic supervisor of the series, who had received numerous international commissions and

felt a need to establish a series of commissions made in Japan. Utilizing his connections in the

world, Takemitsu made the first series possible by commissioning the world-class composers,

Cage, Iannis Xenakis, Isang Yun, and Sylvano Bussotti, all of whom visited Japan during the

four-month period between October 1986 and February 1987.51

Etcetera 2/4 Orchestras premiered on December 8 and showed the Japanese audience

Cage’s conception of modeling orchestral performance on his vision of an anarchic society. An

interesting element is that there are four conductors—Hiroyuki Iwaki, Ichiyanagi, Yuasa, and

49
Nobuhiko Fujimura, “Kyō no ongaku 10—seibugekijō [Music Today 10—Seibu Theater],” Ongaku
gendai 12, no. 8 (1982): 201.
50
Masashi Miura, “Tōmeina torikago—John Cage ni tsuite [A transparent cage: On John Cage],” 21 seiki
hanga 3, no. 11 (November 1992): 42.
51
It was also the Japanese economy, which grew rapidly in the 1980s before the economic bubble burst in
1992, that made such an expensive project possible. Yūji Numano, “History of ‘Suntory Hall International Program
for Music Composition’ Series,” Suntory Foundation of Arts, entry posted August 2015,
https://www.suntory.com/culture-sports/suntoryhall/global/composers/numano.html.

146
Toshirō Mayuzumi. Each conducted a group from the Tokyo City Philharmonic Orchestra.

While the conductors created the orchestral pulse in an extremely slow, non-rhythmic manner,

the orchestral players were free to play under the conductor or to perform solo materials without

following the conductor. The resultant atmosphere of the piece was calm and anarchically

harmonic, surprising the critic Reiko Tsukada, who concluded her review with the observation

that the era of disruptive Cagean revolution seemed to have passed.52

At the premiere of Etcetera 2/4 Orchestras, Cage witnessed the great effort that

conductor Iwaki made to perform his music. After the premiere, Cage sent Iwaki an etching that

he created as a thank-you gift and a poem “[Hiro]Yuki Miracle,” praising the miraculous

performance of Iwaki.53 Their friendship not only extended for several years but also inspired

Cage to work on one of his last projects in Japanese theater. At the dinner after the opening

concert, when Cage mentioned that his Europeras 1 & 2 (1985–87) might not be able to be

premiered because a fire had destroyed the Frankfurt Opera House, Iwaki jokingly asked Cage

whether he would be interested in composing a “Japopera” (Japan+opera) for the new music

theatre Tokyu Bunkamura, which would be opened in Tokyo in September 1989 with Iwaki

himself as director.54 Cage replied that he would rather like to make a Noh-opera. Later, Cage

came up with the idea of centering the Noh-opera on five works of Duchamp in 1988 when he

received the instructions manual for Duchamp’s Étant donnés and found that Étant donnés was a

52
Reiko Tsukada, “Tada soko ni aru oto o kakunin—John Cage ni yoru konsato [Just confirm the sound
there—concert by John Cage],” Yomiuri Evening News (December 15, 1986): 9.
53
Hiroyuki Iwaki, “Adoriakai no aoi sora—John Cage no omoide [The blue sky of the Adriatic Sea—
memories of John Cage],” Ongaku geijutsu 50, no. 10 (1992): 39.
54
Ibid., 40.

147
piece of music.55 Cage’s initial proposal, which involved world first-class singers and noh actors,

was too expensive.56 Possibly due to Cage’s busy schedule and the extra time that Iwaki needed

to negotiate the budget with the theater, the project progressed more slowly than expected.

In November 1989, Cage visited Japan for the last time to receive the Kyoto Prize in

Creative Arts and Moral Sciences in the field of music.57 The Kyoto Prizes, established in 1984,

are given each year by the Inamori Foundation, recognizing significant contributions to the

scientific, cultural, and spiritual betterment of mankind. Kazuo Inamori, a celebrated Japanese

philanthropist and entrepreneur, established the award to encourage those who have strived for

the greater good of humankind and the society.58 The 1989 award citation described Cage as “a

prophet who has foretold the spirit of the coming era.”59 It also pointed out the significance of

Cage, from a Japanese point of view, in establishing “a new style of contemporary music by his

new concept of chance music and non-western musical thought” which transformed “all

European music,” which had viewed music as merely a vehicle for human feeling, “into the past

tense.”60 The Kyoto jury conferred on Cage not only a certificate of recognition and a gold

55
Letter from Cage to Teeny Duchamp, March 3, 1988, quoted in John Cage and Laura Diane Kuhn, The
Selected Letters of John Cage (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2016), 282.
56
Working on his Nohopera had become a priority for Cage in 1992. In Cage’s letter to Teruo Akiyama in
May 1992, Cage rejected Akiyama’s commission to compose a piece for the fifteenth anniversary celebration of the
Tanakawa Art Museum, explaining that “what I really would enjoy doing in Japan is Nohopera.” Handwritten letter
from John Cage to Teruo Akiyama, May 22, 1992, John Cage Correspondence, 1901–1993, Northwestern
University Music Library.
57
Before 1989, Cage toured with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to Japan in 1987. Cage was the
second composer, after Olivier Messiaen in 1985, who received the Kyoto Prize in the field of music.
58
Kazuo Inamori was the chairman of Kyocera Corporation, a Japanese ceramic manufacturer, and Japan
Airlines.
59
“John Cage,” Kyoto Prize, https://www.kyotoprize.org/en/laureates/john_cage/ (accessed December 24,
2018).
60
Ibid.

148
medal, but also an award of 45 million Japanese yen, the equivalent of about $380,000 in US

dollars, an amount then second only to the Nobel prize.61

To receive the prize, Cage visited Kyoto and Nagoya from November 9 to 15. As Takashi

Funayama remembered, at the award ceremony in Kyoto on November 10, Cage wore a crested

kimono, a traditional Japanese garment prepared by the Foundation, which made him stand out

among the Japanese in attendance who all wore morning coats and tuxedos.62 Cage also attended

several social events arranged by the Foundation to meet the public. On November 11 and 12, he

lectured on his music career to the general audience and participated in the workshop “John Cage

in Kyoto” with leading Japanese scholars and experts, such as Akiyama, Ichiyanagi, Mayuzumi,

Arata Isozaki, and others. The highlight of his stay in Japan was the premiere of his One3 = 4'33"

(0'0") + [G clef] (1989) in conjunction with the award ceremony at the Nagoya City Museum on

November 14. Instead of performing his 4′33″ (1952), as the concert organizer Yutaka Fujishima

requested, Cage composed a new silent piece to match the state of the world in 1989. As its

complex title indicates, One3 was built on some features of his previous silent pieces—the

absence of intentional sound in 4'33" and amplifying of unintentional sound in 0'00". Cage told

Fujishima to bring up the level of amplification in the auditorium space to the maximum level

before feedback occurs.63

61
According to Ichiyanagi, Cage enjoyed financial freedom in his last years because of the prize. Later, he
used the money from the award to establish his own foundation. Toshi Ichiyanagi and Arata Isozaki, “Kakyō sareru
60-nendai ongaku shīn [Bridge-building from the 1960s music scene],” InterCommunication 26 (Autumn 1998):
108.
62
Takashi Funayama, “Daigokai Kyoto-shō o jushō shita John Cage [John Cage, who won the 5th Kyoto
Prize],” Ongaku geijutsu 48, no. 1 (1990): 74.
63
Fax from Mimi Johnson to Yutaka Fujishima, October 19, 1989, Cage Trust Archives.

149
 When the piece began, Cage stepped on stage. After the sound system reached the

feedback level, Cage then returned to the audience, listened to the electronically amplified

ambience, and timed the piece for 4 minutes and 33 seconds following his “inner clock” (i.e.

feeling the time without measuring the time). Three microphones, set in the museum, picked up

the environmental sounds such as the noises or footsteps of people who were looking at the

paintings on the second and third floors. Throughout the performance, the sound engineer was

actually the person who had the unnerving experience of keeping the amplification on the edge

of feedback. When the time was up, Cage returned to the stage, bowed, and ended the

performance. The length of time 4'33" in Cage’s inner clock actually lasted for 12 minutes and

15 seconds in real time. Although One3 might sound like just a more complicated version of

Cage’s silent pieces, the piece was centered on demonstrating the perilous circumstances that

Cage saw in the current world. Cage stated in a 1990 interview with William Fetterman that the

obligation he was fulfilling to others in his performance of One3 was “showing that the world is

in a bad situation, and largely through the way we misuse technology.”64 Although Cage never

further specified what the “bad situation” was in his mind, scholar James Pritchett suggested that

it relates to the global concern about nuclear proliferation in the 1980s.65

Mamoru Fujieda (1955–)

Mamoru Fujieda first became interested in Cage’s music in his twenties. He learned

many experimental pieces by foreign composers, including Cage, from his friend Satoshi

64
John Cage, quoted in William Fetterman, John Cage's Theatre Pieces: Notations and Performances
(Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996), 95.
65
James Pritchett, “Silence Changed: One3,” The Piano in My Life—James Pritchett on Music & Writing,
entry posted October 1, 2018, http://rosewhitemusic.com/piano/2018/10/01/silence-changed-one3/.

150
Ashikawa, a staff member of Art Vivant who introduced Fujieda to the latest recordings and

scores sold at the shop, where Fujieda often visited after school. As a composition student in

college, Fujieda had been deeply influenced by Cage.66 Fascinated by Cage’s idea of returning to

sound itself, he experimented with different means for treating sound materials without intention.

Later, Fujieda chose to focus on Cage’s concept of purposeful purposelessness in combination

with the style of minimalism, which was becoming popular in Japan in the early 1970s. His

Falling Scale (1975) includes countless repeated descending lines with slightly different patterns

each time. He described this kind of repetition as similar to falling raindrops, which repeatedly

and automatically leave diverse patterns on the ground or window. By imitating the repetition

mechanism of nature, Fujieda aimed to offer a piece of music produced as if automatically

without human sensibility or expression involved.67 His Inlaid Song (1977) shows the influence

of Cage’s early works such as String Quartet in Four Parts (1950).

After experimenting with Cage’s compositional ideas for a period of time, Fujieda found

a new interest in developing alternative temperament systems—something that neither Cage’s

prepared piano nor his aleatoric music has explored. When going abroad to study for his PhD at

the University of California, San Diego, in 1982, Fujieda learned about many other American

experimental composers besides Cage. He found that Lou Harrison and Harry Partch had focused

on exploring temperament and tuning systems other than equal temperament, which aroused his

interest immediately. It was also in the US that Fujieda came to realize how narrow Japanese

knowledge of American music was. Because Ichiyanagi introduced Cage’s music in 1961,

66
Mamoru Fujieda, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, October 1, 2018.
67
Mamoru Fujieda, quoted in Nihon Sengo Ongakushi Kenkyūkai, Nihon sengo ongakushi ge [History of
postwar Japanese music, II] (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2007), 46.

151
Fujieda observed, Japanese understanding of American music is almost synonymous with Cage’s

music, especially his works linked to Zen, indeterminacy and chance procedures. “Even today,

not many people know other American composers such as Lou Harrison,” Fujieda told me.68

During six years of study in the US, Fujieda immersed himself in the American

experimental tradition and figured out his own way of combining Cage’s musical ideas with

Harrison’s alternate tunings. Returning to Japan, he collaborated on his Patterns of Plants series

with botanist and artist Yūji Dogane between 1995 and 2011. Working with the data that Dogane

acquired from measuring the electrical fluctuations on the surface of the leaves of plants with a

device called “Plantron,” Fujieda converted the data into sound using the Max programming

system. In addition to applying a different temperament system to each selected pattern of data,

he explained that his way of composing—listening for pleasing musical patterns in the data of

plants and grouping them into pieces—was very Cagean:

In the process of composition, I try not to express my inner idea but to find out certain
relations (i.e. patterns) in the outer world. My art is not “found object” but “to find
something out” from things other than myself. . . . By using patterns to compose, I do not
mean that I generate something new from the patterns but rather I transform the patterns
into musical materials. . . . Although my music must reflect my own taste, I don’t like the
idea of “composing my own music” but prefer composing music that does not belong to
me.69

Rather than composing a piece as his self-portrait, Fujieda was more interested in setting up a

situation to show in sound the organic processes happening between diverse entities in nature

around him. Although he did not renounce his control of music or open up his composition

process to the performers’ or the audience’s participation as Cage did, Fujieda imagined himself,

68
Mamoru Fujieda, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, October 1, 2018.
69
Ibid.

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the composer, as merely a medium in nature who happens to be there to transform information

from the external world into musical materials by chance.70

Japanese Reception of Cage after 1990

On August 20, 1992, Cage passed away a few days before his eightieth birthday, when

there were many birthday celebrations going on all over the world, including in Japan. Iwaki

recalled that it was while he was acquiring financial support from Seiji Tsutsumi for Nohopera,

that he learned Cage had passed away, leaving his lavish tribute to Duchamp unrealized.71

Shortly after Cage’s death, performances and exhibitions of Cage’s works abruptly increased in

Japan. For example, the first memorial concerts for Cage in Japan, held in Suntory Hall on April

8 and 10, 1993, were originally planned to be a celebration of Cage’s eightieth birthday in 1992.

The concert presented to Japanese audiences several late works of Cage, such as Thirty Pieces

for String Quartet (1983) and Organ2 (1987), for the first time. Later, Cage’s Freeman Etudes

(1977–1980/1989–1990) was premiered at the opening concert for the exhibition

“Rolywholyover A Circus by John Cage” (1994–5) at the Mito Art Museum, Ibaraki. Akiyama

commented that the unprecedented opportunity to listen to so many of Cage’s works which had

not been performed before in Japan opened a new page in the Japanese performance history of

Cage’s music.72 Fujieda, who held an “Ear Forum” in memory of Cage at Art Vivant, also

70
Ibid.
71
Seiji Tsutsumi, the Chairman of the Seibu Department Store chain, opened the Seibu Art Museum in the
Seibu Department Store, Ikebukuro, in 1975. Interested in contemporary art and music at that time, Tsutsumi
sponsored many contemporary music and art events in Tokyo, including the concerts of Takemitsu and Ichiyanagi,
those Japanese composers centering around Cage. Iwaki, “Adoriakai no aoi sora,” 40.
72
Kuniharu Akiyama, “Ongaku ni okeru sōzō e no jissen—'John Cage memoriaru konsāto' o kiite
[Carrying out creation in music—listening to the ‘John Cage Memorial Concert’],” Ongaku geijutsu 51, no. 6
(1993): 77.

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confirmed that there were many people from the younger generation experiencing Cage’s music

and ideas for the first time because of Cage’s death; for a short period of time, Cage’s music and

ideas were again fashionable.73

Motoharu Kawashima (1972–)

Composer Motoharu Kawashima observed that because no one could see Cage perform

in person after his death, Cage no longer influences Japan as suddenly and directly as he did in

the 1960s. Instead, Japanese composers in his generation learned about Cage indirectly from the

works of Cage-influenced composers, such as Ichiyanagi and Kondō. Kawashima first listened to

Cage’s music on the radio in junior high school at the time that he started to be interested in

other contemporary music. Before entering the Tokyo University of the Arts and becoming a

student of Kondō, he had read widely on contemporary music, including Akiyama’s and

Kondō’s writings on Cage. Kondō’s books explain how his own compositional method was

inspired by Cage. As Cage passed away in 1992, Kawashima got to see many performances of

Cage’s music at the memorial concerts and events in his college life. In 2001, he and two other

members—composer Tomoko Fukui and clarinetist Nozomi Ueda—founded the contemporary

classical music ensemble Next Mushroom Promotion, aiming to promote contemporary classical

music in the Kansai region of Japan. The group name is a homage to Cage, whom they

considered an important musical philosopher and promoter as well as an expert in mushrooms. In

2002, the tenth anniversary of Cage’s death, Next Mushroom Promotion held a half-day event

“Happy NewEAR!!” to perform and lecture on Cage’s works from the 1930s to his late years. It

73
Mamoru Fujieda, Hibiki no seitaikei: Dīpu risuningu no tameni [The ecosystem of sound: For deep
listening] (Tokyo: Film Art, 2000), 195.

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is in preparation for this event that Kawashima got to study Cage’s entire repertoire in depth. He

became an expert on Cage and organized more Cagean events in Tokyo in the subsequent

years.74

When studying at the Tokyo University of the Arts, Kawashima developed his

composition method “Action Music” in reaction to his teacher Kondō’s method “Linear Music.”

Similar to Kondō, who was inspired by Cage to perceive each individual sound in music as a

single autonomous event, Kawashima was inspired by Cage to see each single action as the basis

of his “Action Music.” “I turned to focus on the action of the body in music through Cage’s

works,” Kawashima said, “for example, in Cage’s 4'33", the musician basically plays nothing, so

the audience would turn their attention to the body movement of the musician onstage. Cage’s

0'00", too, focuses on amplifying the movement of body.”75 In many of his works, Kawashima

provided textual and figural instructions about the performer’s actions alongside the staff

notation. In his Dual Personality I for solo percussionist and orchestra (1996), for example, there

are instructions for the percussionists to hit the tam-tam with the martial art style back-kick and

for the marimba player to play tremolo in the air and then freeze in a certain posture at the end of

the piece. Although he never uses chance operations to compose, Kawashima said that he was

influenced by Cage in terms of accepting the resultant sound of a performer’s action as

something outside his control.76

74
Some of Kawashima’s representative projects on Cage after 2002: concert “The Entire Performance of
Cage’s Solo for Piano” in the contemporary music series eX. 6 on October 16, 2007; concert “Cage In” on
December 16, 2017, in honor of the 25th anniversary of Cage’s death, presenting selections of Cage’s works
spanning six decades.
75
Motoharu Kawashima, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, January 18, 2019.
76
Ibid.

155
 Besides the idea of action, Kawashima carried on Cage’s and Kondō’s idea of being an

active listener and went on to invite his audience members to be active perceivers, who use

multiple senses to experience how the musicians perform the music. “Having a shared

experience with the performance in front of you in a shared space of sound vibration is an

essential aspect of music,” Kawashima wrote.77 To enhance his audience’s shared experience

with the performers, Kawashima uses a method that he calls “the structure of laughter” to

highlight the singularity of every moment in his works. After studying various successful works

that arouse laughter, he found that laughter emerged when shared cultural assumptions are

disrupted by a departure from the norm. Kawashima pointed out that Cage’s performances also

had the structure of laughter: “Although Cage always looked serious when he performed, his

extraordinary ‘musical’ performances were often surprising and unexpected. The contrast

between his serious attitude and hilarious performance constitutes the structure of laughter.”78

Similar to Cage, Kawashima, too, has a calm and serious personality, which contrasts with his

own performance of his own work, where he can behave unexpectedly on stage. For example, at

the premiere of his Invention IV for vocal, trumpet, and contrabass (2005), he acted as a puppet

who unconsciously imitated the sounds of trumpet and contrabass. After being manipulated by

the sound of instruments for a period of time, the puppet received consciousness and wanted to

dominate the two instrumentalists. At the end, the puppet went crazy, shouted, became out of

77
Motoharu Kawashima, “Enjiru ongaku, warai no kōzō [Action music and the structure of laughter],”
Shunjū 533 (2011): 6.
78
Motoharu Kawashima, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, January 18, 2019.

156
control, and collapsed on stage. “I was truly exhausted at the end of performance and was almost

carried off the stage by staff in my collapsed state,” Kawashima reflected.79

Applying the structure of laughter to his music, Kawashima sees his role as a composer to

design a scheme that makes the audience fully engaged in every singular moment of the music,

which is meaningful only if the audience respond to it. Kawashima’s Flotenkonzert

(cond.act/konTakt/conte-raste II) (1999) exemplifies one such scheme. Considering conducting

as the best medium to share a common physical experience of music with others, Kawashima

assigned the conductor to be a cond.actor—a conductor and an actor.80 The instrumentation

includes a quintet, a cond.actor, who wants to perform a contemporary piece, and a flutist, who

continuously interrupts the cond.actor’s plan by playing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s flute

pieces. The fierce battle between the cond.actor and the flutist breaks the usual expectation that

the conductor has the superpower to direct the musicians. Laughter was therefore aroused at

several unexpected moments, for instance, when the cond.actor is himself conducted by the

music of the flutist, and when the cond.actor exits the stage alone, letting the flutist sneak in and

direct the ensemble.

In addition to questioning the conventions of musical performance with his compositions,

most recently, Kawashima has been working on challenging the assumptions we make about

performing Cage’s music. Living in the time after Cage’s death, Kawashima felt that the image

of Cage has been fixed by the recordings of Cage’s or Tudor’s performances of Cage’s works. In

2017, Kawashima collaborated with the Japanese electronic band macaroom, who was interested

79
Motoharu Kawashima, “4 Inventions,” Motoharu Kawashima Jōhō-kan, entry posted November 27,
2005, http://www.komp.jp/invention.html.
80
Kawashima first learned the idea of conductor as an actor in Dieter Schnebel’s Visible Music I (1960–
62), which he had performed in his freshman year.

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in performing Cage’s music in a pop style. To make the pop-interpretation possible while

following all of Cage’s instructions, Kawashima helped macaroom make the album cage out (out

= out of the prototype of Cage’s music) with Cage’s Branches (1976) and Rozart Mix (1965),

two works that consist solely of performance instructions. In Track 1, macaroom used the

amplified plants specified in Branches to create pop rhythms and accompaniments for four

pieces selected from Cage’s Song Books (1970) which have plain melodies that can also be sung

in a pop style. In Track 2, to realize Rozart Mix, macaroom first drew materials from the tracks

of their remix song “ame” to create loops of magnetic tape and then mounted and unmounted

these loops on tape machines. Although they did follow Cage’s instructions, the result of these

two tracks sound completely like macaroom’s own pop pieces. Kawashima served as the

collaborator on the album and commented that “to sound completely not like Cage’s pieces is

also a result that Cage would like to see, and this is the idea of ‘Cage out’ that I want to

emphasize.”81

“John Cage Shock” Is Not Shocking

In the 1990s, several important Japanese musicologists began studying Cage. Susumu

Shōno published Chōshu no shigaku (A Poetics of Listening) in 1991, which is the first Japanese

book that systematically examines Cage’s music and philosophy.82 The magazine Music Today

(no. 18, 1993) and the literary magazine Eureka (January 1994) dedicated special issues to Cage,

drawing upon the recollections of Cage from his associates in Japan. In addition, American

81
Motoharu Kawashima, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, January 18, 2019.
82
Susumu Shōno, Chōshu no shigaku: J. Cage kara, soshite J. Cage e [A poetics of listening—from J.
Cage, and to J. Cage] (Tokyo: Keiso Shobō, 1991).

158
experimental music scholar Toshie Kakinuma, after returning to Japan from the US along with

her husband, Mamoru Fujieda, completed a translation of Cage’s Silence in 1996. Among these

publications, one important book project reveals the divergent opinions about the idea of “Cage

Shock”: Kagayake 60-nendai: Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no zenkiroku (Shining 60s: The Complete

Records of the Sogetsu Art Center).83 The book, compiled between 1996 and 2002, is a

comprehensive record of all avant-garde events at the SAC from 1958 to 1971. In the section in

which several SAC-related people reminisced about Cage’s 1960s presence in Japan, composer

Shūkō Mizuno, a member of Group Ongaku, made a striking statement to counter the standard

narrative of “Cage Shock.” For him, Cage and Tudor’s 1960s performances were not shocking at

all; he wrote, “we [Group Ongaku] had already tried out all kinds of [avant-garde] ideas and

were thinking about what to do next” before Cage arrived Japan.84 For Mizuno, it was Cage’s

experimental music that lagged behind avant-garde trends in Japan at the turn of the 1960s.

Rebutting conventional wisdom, he claimed that the so-called “Cage Shock” phenomenon was

merely noise made by some journalists and Cage’s followers.85

Indeed, Mizuno was not alone in speaking out against the term “Cage Shock,” created by

Hidekazu Yoshida in 1969, around this time. In my interviews, a number of composers,

musicians, and artists who had witnessed the “Cage Shock,” claimed that they felt no shock

whatsoever after Cage’s Japanese debut. These include Yoriaki Matsudaira, Yūji Takahashi, Jōji

Yuasa, and some members of Group Ongaku, who had already been exposed to Cagean

experimental music and had experimental perspectives on music similar to Cage’s own well

83
“Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no Kiroku” Kanko Iinkai, Kagayake 60-nendai.
84
Shūkō Mizuno, “John Cage ga yatteru koto wa mezurashiku mo nantomo nai [What John Cage is doing
is not rare at all],” in Kagayake 60-nendai, 163.
85
Ibid.

159
before Cage’s first landing in Japan. They argued that the term oversimplifies the multifaceted

reactions of Japanese musicians to Cage’s music and concepts, and only describes the reactions

of some conservative composers, composers of the European avant-garde style, and the general

public who were not familiar with Cage. For instance, Matsudaira, who tried both the European

controlled and Cagean indeterminacies, revealed that “I didn’t specifically feel shock or

repulsion (like many conservative Japanese composers did) when seeing Cage’s performance.

Instead, I was very curious about Cage’s music.”86 Expanding on Mizuno’s ideas, Mieko Shiomi

clarified that, for Group Ongaku at that time, rather than a shock, Cage’s performance was more

like a confirmation from a mature, established composer that what they were doing—their own

experimental, multimedia performances—was correct.87 Instead of feeling compelled to adopt

Cage’s musical methods, she recalled, “through Cage’s performances, I felt Cage had indirectly

told me that I should explore my own way and establish new method and value which had not

been established by anyone [including] Cage [himself].”88

These “Cage Shock” witnesses were also concerned that the term has distorted the

reception of Cage’s debut in Japan. Yasunao Tone, who has stated that “the ‘John Cage Shock’ is

a fiction,” considered the term problematic because it could easily mislead people to see Cage’s

music and ideas as shocking and nothing more, thus distracting listeners from the fascinating

sounds and actions in Cage’s music.89 Further, the term may well have caused the

86
Yoriaki Matsudaira, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, February 5, 2017.
87
Mieko Shiomi, interview by the author in English, Osaka, Japan, October 16, 2016.
88
Ibid.
89
Yasunao Tone and Miki Kaneda, “Interviews: The ‘John Cage Shock’ Is a Fiction! Interview with
Yasunao Tone, 1,” Post: Notes on Modern & Contemporary Art Around the Globe, entry posted March 8, 2013,
http://post.at.moma.org/content_items/178-the-john-cage-shock-is-a-fiction-interview-with-tone-yasunao-1;
Yasunao Tone, interview by the author in English, New York, November 12, 2017.

160
misunderstanding that Japan had no avant-garde performance before Cage’s Japanese debut.

Speaking against this misconception, both Tone and Yūji Takahashi told me that Cage and

Tudor’s visit to Japan was actually well-prepared. Not only had the activities of Ichiyanagi, Ono,

and Group Ongaku at the SAC prepared Japanese audiences to receive Cage, there also had been

other local avant-garde movements that happened earlier in Japan. Takahashi said, “Takemitsu,

for instance, was experimenting in the early 1950s with the group Jikken Kōbō,” whose avant-

garde-ness was just as striking as Cage’s in Japanese music history.90 By emphasizing that the

Japanese avant-garde was thriving before Cage’s 1962 visit to Japan, Tone and Takahashi

attempted to restore the cultural balance between Cage and the Japanese and to replace the one-

sided narrative that “Cage shocked all of Japan.”

Reconsidering the term “Cage Shock” based on these new critiques, I argue that, instead

of reflecting objectively Japanese reception of Cage, “Cage Shock” functioned more as a media

buzzword. While Mizuno mocked the term as mere noise made by the press, Shiomi shared her

belief that the use of the term reflects a tendency for the Japanese public to be influenced by

foreign figures and by journalists, TV, newspapers, and the mass media. “When these mass

media said Cage is a great person and revolutionary musician,” Shiomi commented, “Japanese

people accepted it easily.”91 Ichiyanagi, the pioneering promoter of Cagean music, also agreed

with me that the term’s wide circulation through the mass media does not mean that every

Japanese unanimously felt shocked about Cage; it only shows the fact that Cage’s popularity had

expanded from a few Japanese avant-garde leaders to the greater general public. Ichiyanagi said:

“It is true that it [“Cage Shock”] is a media-like term, but it is not a bad term, isn’t it? I think

90
Yūji Takahashi, interview by the author in English, Tokyo, Japan, January 29, 2018.
91
Mieko Shiomi, interview by the author in English, Osaka, Japan, October 16, 2016.

161
there were many ways that people think about Cage’s visit to Japan. Nevertheless, Cage’s name

has been spread throughout Japan because of the term ‘Cage Shock.’”92

For the later generations, “Cage Shock” as a buzzword has continuously reminded them

the significance of Cage’s Japanese debut in the Japanese music history. Living in the post-Cage

Shock era, many musicians and composers of the younger generations, such as Shin’ichirō Ikebe

(1943–), Kondō, Mayumi Miyata (1950–), and Toshio Hosokawa (1955–), among my

interviewees, raised no objection to the term “Cage Shock” in describing Japanese reaction to

Cage. Even if some of them are aware of the critiques against the term, they feel no right to

question the term because they did not experience “Cage Shock” firsthand. Kawashima, who was

born a decade after “Cage Shock,” told me: “In my generation, we don’t know the real situation

of ‘Cage Shock’. . . . We can only read about it as a past event in the history book.”93 In reality,

“Cage Shock” is still commonly used by the mass media after 2000. For example, EM Records

in 2012 released three CDs of the original recordings of Cage’s 1962 performances in Japan with

the title “John Cage Shock,” showing that “Cage Shock” is still the most marketable term to refer

to Cage’s Japanese debut.

I often asked my interviewees whether they still found Cage’s influence in Japan

nowadays, mindful that the term “influence” can be controversial, since some believe that artistic

creation is influenced by external factors. Answering my question, some of my interviewees

replied yes, while some of them replied no or gave a vague answer. Particularly, it is those post-

Cage Shock composers, such as Fujieda and Kawashima, who are interested in Cage and still

92
Toshi Ichiyanagi, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, August 28, 2017.
93
Motoharu Kawashima, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, January 18, 2019.

162
actively engaging in Cage-related activities. They claimed positively that Cage has a certain

influence in Japan even nowadays. Kawashima explained: “Although Cage Shock was a one-

time event, there were people among the Cage Shock generation who cherished Cage’s music

and ideas;” “through them, we [composers of my generation] indirectly learned about Cage and

received influence from Cage.”94

Even among the Cage Shock generation, it is by the effort of those “who were

continuously interested in Cage” more than those “who were shocked by Cage” that Cage’s

music and philosophy have been passed down in Japan. Based on Kawashima’s words, I realized

that the term “Cage Shock” can only effectively capture how Japanese received Cage in a certain

period of time (while the “Cage Shock” generation still lives) since the later generations did not

experience “Cage Shock” firsthand and had no chance to see Cage’s performances in person.

Though being a controversial term, “Cage Shock” functions perfectly as an invitation for us to

look into the full story between Cage and Japan. From Chapter 1 to 3, the long chronicle of

Cage’s Japanese reception from 1948 to the 1990s has been centered on “Cage Shock” and its

aftermath. By contrast, the following two chapters turn to focus on parts of the story that extend

beyond the narrative of “Cage Shock,” that is, the story of those Japanese composers, musicians,

and artists who continuously felt drawn to Cage’s music and philosophy even after the waves of

“Cage Shock” had dispersed. Specifically, I will focus on the two major fields—traditional

Japanese music and sound art—where they found their niche by interacting with Cage’s artistic

ideas.

94
Ibid.

163
 Chapter 4 Bridging Traditional Japanese and Western Musics via Cagean

Experimentalism

As discussed in Chapter 2, the trend of composing mainly with John Cage’s musical

techniques in the second half of the 1960s went out of fashion among Japanese composers a few

years after 1970. Yet, the spread of Cage’s experimental ideas in Japan did not fade away with

his techniques. Outside the domain of western classical music, many Japanese composers

continued to respond to the concepts of Cage’s experimentalism, specifically his idea of

“spontaneity,” which encourages a search for alternative values that are denied by the dominant

culture.1 Accordingly, the field hōgaku, which involves Japanese traditional aesthetics and

instruments, came to the foreground.2 Cage himself had also noticed this new trend among

Japanese composers. As noted in the Introduction, Cage told Daniel Charles in an interview

several years after giving his first concerts with David Tudor in Japan:

I think that what we played for them [the Japanese audience] gave them the chance to
discover a music that was their own—rather than a twelve-tone music. . . . In fact, our
music, that is, the music David Tudor played for them, was the only music that could
afford them an appreciation analogous to their appreciation of traditional Japanese music,
something they couldn’t find in the different modern musics.3

The idea that Cage and Tudor’s performance in Japan had allowed Japanese composers to

reassess the value of their own tradition, might have come to Cage from Japanese friends with

1
For more about the aesthetics of spontaneity, see Fuyuko Fukunaka, “Re-situating Japan’s Post-War
Musical Avant-Garde through Re-situating Cage: The Sogetsu Art Center and the Aesthetics of Spontaneity,” in
Contemporary Music in East Asia, ed. Hee Sook Oh (Seoul: Seoul National University Press, 2014), 182–87.
2
The term hōgaku (traditional Japanese music) was coined as a result of the introduction of yōgaku
(western music) in the nineteenth century. For more, see Luciana Galliano, Yōgaku: Japanese Music in the
Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 58.
3
John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds (New York: M. Boyars, 1981), 200.

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whom he had kept in touch since the early 1960s. He might also have noticed this phenomenon

from seeing the performances of Japanese composers’ works in New York—for example, at the

concerts of the Japan Society or Music From Japan. In reality, Cage and Tudor’s performance

served as a catalyst for a local trend that had actually started somewhat earlier in Japanese music

circles.

In the first decade after the war, many Japanese composers absorbed European avant-

garde styles with less national color such as twelve-tone music and total serialism to help them

distance their music from pre-war nationalistic sentiments. After a period of assimilation, along

with an emerging social urge to reconsider Japanese traditions and cultural identity, some

composers felt a need to establish their own musical language, which would distinguish their

creative voices from the ones embedded in the European heritage. In the mid-1950s, Jikken

Kōbō tried to create cross-genre avant-garde works based on their own cultural traditions, such

as the metaphysical philosophy of Zen. Toshirō Mayuzumi used traditional materials not as a

continuation of the past but as an attempt to freely expand his imagination in his Nirvana

Symphony (1958), inspiring many young Japanese composers to reflect on their relationship with

traditional Japanese culture.

Around the same time, through the effort of Hidekazu Yoshida, Mayuzumi, Toshi

Ichiyanagi, and others, the eastern-inspired music of Cage was introduced to Japan. Unlike the

local instances, Japanese intellectuals saw Cage’s enthusiasm for Japanese philosophy as an

important cross-cultural recognition of Japanese traditional values. This type of situation, where

locals become aware of what they already have through the recognition of an esteemed western

figure, is known in Japan as gyaku-yunyū (逆輸入), or “reverse importation,” a powerful

phenomenon that has influenced Japanese society frequently throughout its history. Despite the

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mixed reception of Cage’s debut in Japan, many Japanese composers described their encounter

with Cage’s music as liberating them from the modernity of western Europe and allowing them

to use traditional Japanese elements in contemporary music. Cage’s radical view made them

realize that there is an alternative way to be avant-garde. And Cage’s re-contextualizing of

Japanese thoughts into aesthetic premises inspired Japanese composers to find new artistic

approaches from their own culture without becoming nationalistic or sentimental.

Cage’s legitimation of ideas that originated in Japan had far-reaching consequences. One

of these was the hōgakki boom, the increased use of Japanese instruments (hōgakki) by Japanese

composers trained in western compositional methods, from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s.

Cage contributed less directly to the boom than Tōru Takemitsu, for example. Takemitsu’s

November Steps, premiered in 1968 Japan with biwa and shakuhachi, initiated the boom and

attracted many followers. Still, Cage played an important role in inspiring the core figures of the

trend, such as Takemitsu and Makoto Moroi, to recognize the value of Japanese tradition. Most

importantly, Cage showed them the possibility of using traditional instruments in contemporary

avant-garde works through indeterminacy. Unlike most western music, traditional Japanese

music does not have fixed pitch and pulse. Even when there are multiple voices, they do not have

to be synchronized. For example, in gagaku (Japanese court music), there is no full score or

conductor. The performers play together by observing the breath and ma of the other musicians.

Therefore, through indeterminate procedures as well as graphic notation, which can

accommodate indeterminate parameters, Japanese composers found it possible to use Japanese

instruments as traditionally performed without being limited by western musical parameters such

as well temperament or regular beat.

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 Among those involved in this trend, Ichiyanagi, Takemitsu, Moroi, and Maki Ishii are

most representative of transferring Cage’s musical concepts into contemporary music involving

traditional Japanese instruments and aesthetics. The following sections unfold their individual

stories of encountering Cage and turning to explore the contemporary compositional potential of

traditional Japanese music. Later in the 1980s and 1990s, Cage himself joined this trend of

reconciling the Japanese and western musical traditions by collaborating with traditional

Japanese musicians. I argue that the efforts of the postwar composers mentioned in this chapter,

including Cage, who attempted to seek a confluence across cultural traditions, eventually

contributed to shake the asymmetric East vs. West musical dichotomy that had prevailed in

Japan since the Meiji Restoration.

Toshi Ichiyanagi

As Cage’s student and collaborator since their meeting in New York in 1958, Ichiyanagi

was influenced by Cage earlier than most of the Japanese musicians. Immediately after

Ichiyanagi learned about Cage, his viewpoint toward music changed. Instead of pursuing the new

musical techniques he had learned from European avant-garde styles, Cage encouraged

Ichiyanagi to consider philosophical questions—such as “what is music?” or “what does it mean

to make music?”—in his compositions.4 In addition, Cage inspired Ichiyanagi to see the

possibility of approaching traditional music from a contemporary point of view and approaching

4
Toshi Ichiyanagi, Oto o kiku: Ongaku no asu o kangaeru [Listening to the sound: Thinking about the
future of music] (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1984), 131.

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contemporary music from a traditional point of view.5 Ichiyanagi reflected in 1977 that “one of

the impacts that I got from Cage was that the non-European part of me has come under the

spotlight.”6 When Ichiyanagi was in the US, he was asked to talk about traditional Japanese

music on numerous occasions. Without enough knowledge of his own cultural music, he started

to make a systematic study on the subject. During his studies, he was surprised that traditional

music, such as shōmyō, nōgaku, and gagaku, was written using a system closely related to the

graphic notation he had learned from Cage. He came up with the idea of using the graphic

notation not with western instruments but with traditional Japanese instruments as a way to

connect the Cagean experimental music with his home country.

At Cage’s suggestion, Ichiyanagi composed his first graphic work for a Japanese

instrument, Kaiki (Recurrence) for koto in 1960 (fig 4.1). The score includes only textual and

graphic instructions. Without being constrained by the bar lines, he made the koto player use the

white space in between the events to determine the length of the silence or waiting period for the

previous sound to decay. Later in a piece called The Field for shakuhachi and orchestra (1966),

he used the same spatial notation with the vertical densities of the graphic patterns meant to

suggest the density of the musical events occurring at once. Through graphic notation, Ichiyanagi

was able to treat western and Japanese instruments equally on the platform of contemporary

music just as he had his Music for Piano No. 1–7 (1959–61).

5
Mark Swed, “A Dean of Japanese Music Talks Boundaries, John Cage and Life with Yoko Ono,” Los
Angeles Times, May 15, 2015, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-toshi-ichiyanagi-profile-
20150517-column.html.
6
Toshi Ichiyanagi, “Kodai to chō gendai e no kyori [The distance from the ancient to the ultra-modern
times],” Sekai 380 (1977): 95.

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 Figure 4.1 Score for Ichiyanagi’s Kaiki (1960). David Tudor Papers. Getty Research Institute,
Los Angeles.

In the 1970s, with the decline of the avant-garde and the growing desire to establish local

identity among Japanese composers, Ichiyanagi turned to composing in a less extreme style—

mainly with staff notation—than he had in the 1960s. Similar to Cage, whose music changed to

reflect his concern about society in the 1960s and 1970s, Ichiyanagi explained that his stylistic

change was based on his concerns about the position of Japanese arts in contemporary society:

[Japanese avant-garde] artists in the fifties and sixties were driven by a strong desire to
create something new that would negate the history that resulted in the stupidity of
war. . . . However, once we entered the seventies, we began to feel that we had taken this
too far. We had no foundation upon which to base our work. That was when I decided
that in order to progress, I would have to create some kind of a base, and this was why I
ceased to compose music at the frenetic rate I did in the sixties.7

7
Toshi Ichiyanagi, An Ancient Resonance in Contemporary Music, translated by Gavin Frew (published
privately, 2007), 130–31.

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To create a foundation for his works, Ichiyanagi thought of keeping Japanese traditional music

alive by composing pieces for traditional genres and instruments or for western instruments

based on Japanese aesthetics. Ichiyanagi observed, “Especially in the second half of the

twentieth century when European art music was reaching its limits [in terms of technique], I saw

a chance to enrich the field of music with non-western traditions” and a chance for Japanese

composers to enter the mainstream of contemporary music by “showing the world the

uniqueness of Japan.”8

One feature of Japanese music that Ichiyanagi emphasized during this period involves the

interrelatedness of space and time. In the late 1950s, Ichiyanagi had become interested in the

concept of space through Cage’s works such as 4'33", which drew the audience’s attention to all

sound happening in the space. Many of Ichiyanagi’s graphic works in the 1960s, such as

Sapporo, Kaiki, and The Field, show his application of the spatial concept to notation or to

performers’ movements onstage. In his later studies of Japanese and eastern arts, Ichiyanagi

came to realize the essential concept that space and time are inseparable in eastern philosophy.9

To explain the concept, Ichiyanagi took the difference between the western and Japanese gardens

as an example:

The western garden is usually symmetrical. One can easily see the whole structure of the
garden from a high place. Yet, the whole structure of Japanese gardens such as those
designed by Enshu Kobori cannot be surveyed easily at a glance. When entering into a
Japanese garden, it takes time for people to walk up and down along a narrow path and

8
Toshi Ichiyanagi, quoted in Masaharu Taniguchi, Sennen no hibiki: Shōsō-in gakki fukugen to ansanburu
orijin [Resonance of the millennium: The restoration of instruments in Shōsō-in and its original ensemble] (Tokyo:
Shogakkan Sukuwea, 2006), 178; Toshi Ichiyanagi, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, August 28,
2017.
9
Although Cage had learned the same concept from Zen and might have influenced Ichiyanagi, Ichiyanagi
seemed to place greater emphasis on this concept from his own exploration of the eastern arts and philosophy.

170
 gradually get to know the entire space as time goes by. That is how one can experience
the space in time.10

Based on this concept, many of Ichiyanagi’s works whether for western or for Japanese

instruments after 1970 allow the listener to experience the space in time. For instance, his Piano

Media (1972) began with the two hands playing different patterns with different speeds and

gradually merged them to play together with the same speed. As time goes by, Ichiyanagi

described, one can hear “the distance between the spaces of each hand become zero.”11 In works

involving Japanese instruments, such as the reigaku symphony The Shadows Appearing through

Darkness (1987) or Spiritual Sight for gagaku, reigaku, shōmyō and cello (1996), one can also

see how Ichiyanagi made heterogeneous spaces, represented by different instrumental groups,

coexist, compete, or merge in time.12

Though Ichiyanagi returned to staff notation after 1970, he still used some Cagean

techniques to present the features of Japanese music or aesthetics. In works such as Cloud Shore,

Wind Roots for reigaku and gagaku (1984), he sometimes mixed staff notation with simple

graphic notations (showing melodic contour, but flexible in pitch and rhythm) for hōgakki

players. As discussed in Chapter 3, Ichiyanagi had expressed his frustration that many young

western-trained Japanese musicians could not handle indeterminate music in the 1970s. In

contrast, he said that “hōgakki players are better trained in reading graphic notation than those

western-trained musicians and can better merge the composer’s imagination and the performers’

10
Toshi Ichiyanagi, quoted in “Sakkyokuka Ichiyanagi Toshi-san ‘gendai no ongaku’ o tsukuru [Composer
Toshi Ichiyanagi—composing contemporary music],” Nihon Keizai Shinbun Evening News, March 3, 2014,
https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGKDZO67631560S4A300C1NNSP00/.
11
Ichiyanagi, Oto o kiku, 95.
12
Reigaku is a subgenre of contemporary works for gagaku instruments. The works were mostly
commissioned by the National Theatre of Japan to revive the musical practices of the ancient instruments from the
Imperial Storehouse.

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free interpretation.”13 Even in his staff notation, he occasionally eliminated barlines to imitate the

natural musical flow of traditional Japanese music. In Spiritual Sight, there is no conductor; the

gagaku players exist independently without being unified into one ensemble; instead, they relate

to one another by observing other players’ sounds or use of ma. They also do not tune together

before the performance. The tuning may be distinct for each instrument, reflecting the principle

of gagaku that there should be no control of sound by human consciousness but only a freeing of

the sound to move along with nature.

In the 1980s, Ichiyanagi became interested in using renshi as a compositional method.

Renshi is an ancient form of Japanese poetry in which several poets completed a poem by

adding, in turn, a new verse to preceding verses. Because no poet can predict the result of the

whole poem, renshi has some qualities of chance and indeterminacy. Renshi is a collaboration

for multiple creators, so the process of creation is more important than the complete artwork.

Since the famous poet of renshi Bashō Matsuo (1644–94) often created renshi with his disciples

while they ate meals on their journeys, the renshi they composed involved many elements of

everyday life. Ichiyanagi probably favored renshi because it features art-as-life, which is also

essential in Japanese music (as well as in Cage’s music). He composed Wa for 13-string and 17-

string kotos, percussion, and piano (1981) to mirror the method of renshi. Without any leader,

each player performs their part based on observing and inheriting music from the preceding

player. In his symphonic poem Berlin Renshi for soprano, tenor, and orchestra (1988), Ichiyanagi

applied the essence of renshi to the modification or reflection of motives or phrases passed down

from one instrumental group to the other. Through the method of renshi, Ichiyanagi did not aim

13
Toshi Ichiyanagi and Shigeaki Saegusa, “Shōgen 1960 zen'ei ongaku no jidai—‘John Cage Shock’ no
motarashita mono [Testimony of the 1960s: The age of avant-garde music—the thing that ‘John Cage Shock’
brought],” Ongaku no tomo 59, no. 12 (2001): 95.

172
to establish a style emphasizing Japaneseness, but rather to raise questions about the

individualism or self-expression emphasized in the modern western European aesthetics.14

Tōru Takemitsu

After they became acquainted in 1962, Takemitsu became a close friend of Cage. The

influence of Cage’s artistic views, however, lasted longer than the influence of Cage’s music.

After all, Takemitsu only explored aleatoric techniques extensively for a few years in the early

1960s. Cage’s idea that silence is filled with an infinite number of sounds is similar to

Takemitsu’s thinking of sound as a stream: “sounds are always around us flowing like a stream,”

he wrote: “only when we subjectively listen to them, do we recognize the birth of sound.”15

Takemitsu’s recognition that Cage saw all sounds (even everyday sounds) as equal freed him to

compose in any way he liked:

[Cage had shown us that] there is nothing forbidden in music creation. I always plan to
create music in the way I like. Yet, whenever I tried to change my way of composing, I
was constrained by the traditional, unwritten rule of [western art] music. . . . It was Cage,
who could ignore all restraints and do whatever he liked, who helped me make up my
mind to get out of my own restraints.16

Specifically, Cage’s acceptance of all sonic phenomena and all types of music helped Takemitsu

look back on his cultural roots:

I must express my deep and sincere gratitude to John Cage. The reason for this is that in
my own life, in my own development, for a long period I struggled to avoid being
“Japanese,” to avoid “Japanese” qualities. It was largely through my contact with John
Cage that I came to recognize the value of my own tradition. In his own way, John Cage

14
Toshi Ichiyanagi, “Kichi no michi—renga-teki sōsaku no kanōsei [The unknown of known—the
possibility of renga composition],” Viewpoint 73 (December 25, 2015): 3.
15
Tōru Takemitsu, Ongaku o yobisamasu mono [Awakening of music] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1985), 58–9.
16
Takashi Tachibana and Tōru Takemitsu, Takemitsu Tōru: Ongaku sōzō e no tabi [Tōru Takemitsu: A
journey to the music creation] (Tokyo: Bungei Shunjū, 2016), 399.

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 was influenced by Zen through his encounters with the Zen master Daisetsu Suzuki. . . .
What is important in the long run is that it is possible for us to understand each other.17

Takemitsu recalled that when Mayuzumi’s Nirvana Symphony inspired many young

Japanese composers to reconsider their original musical culture in 1958, he was not interested.

His resistance toward traditional Japanese music did not disappear until Cage visited Japan.

Takemitsu stated that the term “Cage Shock,” coined by Hidekazu Yoshida, captured how

Cage’s openness about musical materials took away his reservations about engaging with

Japanese traditions.18 In fact, Takemitsu’s acceptance of Japanese tradition might not have

happened if Takemitsu himself had not recognized the beauty of traditional music in the same

year that Cage visited Japan. For many years, Takemitsu recalled, he had gazed single-mindedly

into the mirror of western music until,

One day [in 1962] I chanced to see a performance of the bunraku puppet theater and was
very surprised by it. It was in the tone quality, the timbre, of the futozao[sic] shamisen,
the wide-necked shamisen used in bunraku, that I first recognized the splendor of
traditional Japanese music. . . . From that time on I devoted a great deal of energy—as
much as possible—to studying Japanese musical traditions, with particular attention to
the differences between Japanese music and western music.19

The “tone quality” that attracted Takemitsu might be what musicians call sawari, a unique and

sometimes noisy quality of Japanese music. Among several different meanings, the term sawari

can refer to a single harsh sound or noise, produced by material objects coming in contact with

other objects. It can also refer to a component of almost all Japanese instruments that prevents

17
Tōru Takemitsu, “Contemporary Music in Japan,” Perspectives of New Music 27, no. 2 (Summer 1989):
199.
18
Tachibana and Takemitsu, Takemitsu Tōru, 448.
19
Takemitsu, “Contemporary Music in Japan,” 201.

174
the instrument from creating a pure sound without noise.20 In Japanese music, the ideal of sound

is that of sounds in nature, which contain elements of noise.21 When listening to Cage’s music in

1962, Takemitsu soon noticed that there was a lot of sawari in Cage’s music, for example in his

prepared piano works, where additional noise is made by the nuts and bolts that obstruct

vibration.22

Takemitsu also turned toward Japanese tradition because of his concern about the

isolation of contemporary western music from the lives of the public. Takemitsu agreed with

Cage that music does not belong to an individual alone but exists in the relation between people.

However, living in urban Tokyo, where he felt that people were alienated from each other,

Takemitsu wanted to make a direct connection with people around him. He came up with the

idea that by bringing noise into the realm of organized music or “giving meaning to the stream of

sounds that penetrates the world people live in,” “I am connected to the world. . . . I reassure

myself of my own existence in the world. . . . I don’t want to shape the sound but to become a

continuous part of the world.”23 Since Japanese music uses both sound and noise to reflect the

world, Takemitsu identified it as a rich resource for his compositions.

After adopting Japanese instruments in music for films and TV programs in the early

1960s, such as biwa in the film Harakiri (1962) and shakuhachi in Ansatsu (1964), Takemitsu

20
Tōru Takemitsu, Uta no tsubasa, kotoba no tsue: Takemitsu Tōru taidanshū [Wings of songs, canes of
words: Conversations with Tōru Takemitsu] (Tokyo: Tibīesuburitanika, 1993), 34.
21
Tōru Takemitsu, “Tōru Takemitsu, on Sawari,” in Locating East Asia in Western Art Music, ed. Yayoi
Uno Everett and Frederick Lau (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004), 201.
22
Takemitsu, Uta no tsubasa, kotoba no tsue, 35.
23
Tōru Takemitsu, Yoshiko Kakudo, and Glenn Glasow, Confronting Silence: Selected Writings (Berkeley,
CA: Fallen Leaf Press, 1995), 79; Tōru Takemitsu, Oto, chinmoku to hakariaeru hodo ni [Sound, measuring with
silence] (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1971), 45.

175
turned to use traditional instruments in concert pieces. Since he was less interested in

reproducing a traditional piece than exploring the commonality between the traditional and

contemporary music styles, he composed Eclipse for shakuhachi and biwa (1966), a unique

combination not existing in the traditional repertoire. Takemitsu had met both biwa player Kinshi

Tsuruta and shakuhachi player Katsuya Yokoyama when he composed music for the films

Ansatsu and Kwaidan in 1964. Listening to their performances, Takemitsu saw the possibility of

combining the two instruments with graphic notation without distorting the traditional idioms of

either instrument. In Eclipse, the notation for biwa is close to a tablature, indicating the required

music gestures (fig 4.2). The graphic representation in the notation for shakuhachi (fig 4.3) only

shows the rough melodic contours and the idiomatic instrumental effects, such as the half-holing

technique and changes in embouchure. Both parts have no rhythmic indications, allowing the

performers to create the flow of music in the way they know best.

Figure 4.2 Score for Eclipse (biwa). Paris: Salabert, 1981.

Figure 4.3 Score for Eclipse (shakuhachi). Paris: Salabert, 1981.

For the same Japanese musicians, Tsuruta and Yokoyama, and the New York

Philharmonic Orchestra, Takemitsu composed November Steps for biwa, shakuhachi, and

orchestra (1967). Although Takemitsu was not the first composer to compose for Japanese

instruments and western orchestra, November Steps is indeed the first fusion work in which

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Japanese instruments are not playing in the musical idiom of western instruments. In November

Steps, Takemitsu aimed at emphasizing the contrasts between the worlds of East and West. The

piece consists almost entirely of alternation between the soloists and the orchestra without much

overlap. Some exchanges between the Japanese instruments and the orchestra show imitation or

continuation of the musical materials, through shared timbre, central tone, or musical gesture,

exemplifying a form of communication between the two different cultures. To retain the

authentic music styles of shakuhachi and biwa, most of their notated parts have no barlines or

precise rhythmic values, so the two soloists are free to let their innate sense of timing dictate the

length of each note. For the shakuhachi and biwa cadenzas, Takemitsu continued to use the

graphic notation he designed in Eclipse. Takemitsu adopted no conventional form (except that

the cadenzas are located near the end of the piece, similar to a concerto) but composed on the

principle of shaping each sound as the focus of attention. For instance, in some extraordinarily

long notes for the shakuhachi, the microtonally inflected vibrato of the shakuhachi player leads

the listener to perceive the inner movement of one single sound. And in the tone clusters that

Takemitsu designed for the orchestra, the slightly different entries of each orchestral player

create an effect that numerous sounds move differently in one single sound, exemplifying

Takemitsu’s idea of “stream of sound,” or that every single sound in nature condenses the

infinite range of noise.24

After the premiere of November Steps, Takemitsu did not compose for Japanese

instruments again until 1973. Unlike November Steps, his Autumn for biwa, shakuhachi, and

orchestra (1973) demonstrated a high degree of integration between the two musical cultures. It

is possible that when writing Autumn, Takemitsu felt that Japanese instruments were not that

24
Takemitsu, “Tōru Takemitsu, on Sawari,” 207.

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different from western instruments and became interested in discovering the commonalities

between the varying cultures. In Autumn, there were more passages where the soloists and

orchestra play simultaneously, sharing and imitating each other’s melodic contour.

In the same year, Takemitsu started to compose his last piece for Japanese instruments

and also his only work for gagaku. In an Autumn Garden (1973/1979), which he did not finish

until 1979, uses unique Japanese elements absent in western music. Several instruments of a

gagaku orchestra play in a style distinct from western music but meant to be close to nature. For

example, the irregular beat of the Japanese drums and the ceaseless line of the shō characterized

the concept of time in gagaku as circular, unsynchronized, and multilayered, which is

comparable with the infinite cycle of life in nature. Furthermore, because of the diverse timbres

of gagaku instruments, when all gagaku instruments play the same melody, they do not form one

single sound but produce a heterophony where each instrument is distinctive, echoing a natural

but harmonious coexistence of heterogeneous entities. In an Autumn Garden is, in the words of

scholar Noriko Ohtake, “the first composition where Takemitsu reflects himself only in his

Japanese mirror.”25

Makoto Moroi

As mentioned in Chapter 2, Moroi’s drastic reaction to Cage’s Japanese debut brought

about an unproductive period in his career. When he resumed composing after the “Cage Shock,”

Moroi not only opened himself up to American experimental techniques but also turned to

traditional Japanese instruments. Although the huge change in his style from total serialism to

25
Noriko Ohtake, Creative Sources for the Music of Tōru Takemitsu (England, Aldershot: Scolar Press,
1993), 58.

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traditional music surprised many people, it can be explained by several reasons involving Cage

and others. One reason is that Moroi had been concerned about the extinction of western art

music even before he encountered Cage’s “destructive” music because he thought serial music

had reached an impasse. Yoshida explained that Moroi’s stylistic change resembled paths

traveled by many European serial composers during those same years.26 Apart from the few

composers who did continue composing with total serial techniques, such as Luigi Nono, many

European composers, such as Iannis Xenakis and Luciano Berio, felt constrained by total

serialism after adopting it for a period of time. Around the time that Cage visited Europe and

suggested his anarchic methods of composition, some leading composers of total serialism such

as Boulez and Stockhausen started to digest and adopt Cage’s ideas into their compositional

systems. Unlike these European composers, however, Moroi digested Cage’s music and came up

with the idea that indeterminate notation could be an appropriate method to compose new music

for Japanese traditional instruments. He was specifically interested in shakuhachi. He understood

that Cagean indeterminacy and the idea of letting sounds be themselves had turned the potential

disadvantages of the shakuhachi—non-well-tempered pitch, unstable sound quality, and irregular

beat based on one’s breath—into advantages in the context of contemporary music.27

The other practical reason for Moroi’s inclination to Japanese tradition is that he chanced

to meet the shakuhachi master Chikuho Sakai and his family in Osaka in the spring of 1964.

Listening to Sakai’s shakuhachi performance at the master’s own home, Moroi recalled: “I was

amazed by the unexpected modernistic sense and feeling in the tone and movement of the

26
Hidekazu Yoshida, Gendai ongaku o kangaeru [Thinking about contemporary music] (Tokyo:
Shinchōsha, 1975), 56.
27
Makoto Moroi, “Ongaku no shōmetsu [The disappearance of music],” Shisō no kagaku 6, no. 8 (1972):
43.

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melodies in this traditional music. I resolved to work on a contemporary composition for

shakuhachi the same night.”28 Indeed, his encounter with the shakuhachi master prompted Moroi

to reveal his lesser-known interest in traditional music. Moroi had experienced various types of

Japanese music since his youth. His father had brought him to a gagaku performance at the

Imperial Household Agency when it was first opened to the public during the postwar

democratization. His first composition teacher Tomojirō Ikenouchi, who was interested in haikai,

a Japanese poetic form, had also inspired Moroi’s interest in Japanese tradition. Later during his

study of twelve-tone technique, he had even tried to blend the features of traditional instruments,

such as nohkan (Japanese bamboo transverse flute) and hichiriki (double-reed Japanese flute),

into some of his serial works, such as Partita for solo flute (1952) and Albumblätter for solo

oboe (1953).

Encountering Sakai, Moroi finally got the chance to write for Japanese instruments. He

first composed Five Pieces for Shakuhachi Chikurai (1964) in a close collaboration with Sakai

and his son in Osaka that lasted for four months. Moroi wrote the piece in the style of honkyoku

(original pieces) for the Chikuho Ryū based on the most important feature of honkyoku—non-

metric beat, or rhythm based on breath.29 He also adopted some non-traditional techniques such

as consecutive rapid staccato tones that he felt would showcase the hidden capacities of the

instrument. After Moroi composed on staff notation, he worked with Sakai’s son to transcribe the

music into traditional shakuhachi fu-ho-u notation, so the score could be read by both senior and

young shakuhachi players. The traditional notation has fewer expressive markings and dynamics

28
Makoto Moroi, Five Pieces for Shakuhachi Chikurai (Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha, 1967).
29
Honkyoku refers to the repertoire of the original solo pieces for shakuhachi. The contrasting generic term
is gaikyoku (outside pieces), referring to the repertoire either transcribed from or played in concert with the
shamisen or the koto. Chikuho Ryū is a school of shakuhachi that was founded in Osaka by the first head, Chikuho
Sakai in 1917. Traditional shakuhachi notation is represented by Japanese characters.

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than the staff notation because many of the performance gestures are idiomatic for traditional

players. For instance, the shakuhachi player would customarily make a rapid fade right after each

loud attack, so this technique does not need to be notated on the traditional score.

However, Moroi did not find his ideal staff notation for shakuhachi until he composed

Five Dialogues for Two Shakuhachi in 1965. In Five Dialogues, he grafted graphic elements

onto staff notation (fig 4.4), which is closer to Cagean graphic works—indeterminate in pitch

and rhythmic value—than to European versions of indeterminacy. Contrary to the overly detailed

staff notation in Chikurai, the graphic figures in Five Dialogues allow the performers themselves

to visualize the distinctive features of shakuhachi such as the non-well-tempered pitch, subtle

portamento, nuances of breathing, and changes in tone quality. Through the indeterminate

quality of graphic elements, Moroi positioned his music for shakuhachi both as a new piece in

the shakuhachi tradition and as an avant-garde piece in which the modern sounds of shakuhachi

can catch international ears. Indeed, Moroi’s success in applying graphic notation to shakuhachi

encouraged many other Japanese composers to change their compositional preference from the

koto, featuring fixed pitch and stable sound quality, to the more challenging shakuhachi. As for

Moroi, he moved on to explore other Japanese instruments, such as koto, shamisen, drum, and

flute, using the same graphic technique in works such as Five Metamorphic Strata for

Shakuhachi, Sangen, Koto, and Jūshichigen (1969).

Figure 4.4 Score for Moroi’s Five Dialogues for Two Shakuhachi. Tokyo: Zen-on Music, 1972.

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Maki Ishii

Although Ishii never talked about Cage’s influence on his work directly, he composed a

series of works fusing Japanese and western instruments in conjunction with the concept of

indeterminacy. From 1958 to 1961, Ishii went to study composition in Berlin, taking courses

specifically on twelve-tone technique. Until the mid-1960s, Ishii continued to write in a post-

Webernian idiom. Sometime in the second half of the 1960s, Ishii happened to listen to

traditional Japanese music and re-discovered the beauty in it. He recalled that although he had

often heard the performances of gagaku, shōmyō, and nōgaku in his childhood, “it was long after

my return from Germany that I heard Japanese traditional music for the first time as ‘music,’ and

realized how much musical information was contained within.”30 At the same time, he noticed

that it was while the effect of “Cage Shock” was still strong in Japan that many of his

compatriots were inspired to search for their identities through Japanese tradition. Joining the

trend, Ishii composed his first work Expression (1967) for string orchestra with Japanese

traditional music in mind. Borrowing from Japanese traditional music, he designed sound groups

coexisting in heterogeneous temporal structures and fading in and out between the foreground

and background.31 The concept of heterophony that Ishii acquired from Japanese music was

further explored in his Kyō-sō (1969) for percussion and orchestra. Ishii noted that he was

particularly fascinated by the sound combinations of gagaku where individual instruments

present distinct sonic identities (different in timbre and musical time) throughout the music.

Therefore, in Kyō-sō Ishii assigned individual sound groups a kaleidoscopic range of colors and

30
Maki Ishii and Christa Ishii-Meinecke, Westlicher Klang—östlicher Klang die Musik Maki Ishiis,
Schöpfung aus zwei Musikwelten = Sounds of West—Sounds of East (Celle, Germany: Moeck, 1997), 156.
31
Ibid., 27.

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various types of time from eastern and western music—such as strict metrical time, non-metrical

silences, or metrical time blurred by indeterminate elements—to create multiple sonic layers.32

In 1970, Ishii started to apply his heterophonic style of writing to his first pieces with

Japanese instruments, Sō-gū (Encounter) (1970) for shakuhachi and piano and Sō-gū II (1971)

for gagaku and symphony orchestra. His attempt to combine musics of different cultures

proceeded according to the following idea: “The most effective means of highlighting the

differences between eastern and western music is to place musicians with different musical

attitudes in the same temporal and spatial setting.”33 Therefore, he decided to compose pieces for

each instrument group and then have them performed simultaneously. Sō-gū (Encounter) (1970)

is a simultaneous performance of Music for Shakuhachi (1970) and Piano Piece '70 (1970); Sō-

gū II (1971) combines Shikyō for gagaku (1970) and Dipol for orchestra (1971). Although his

idea was inspired by the simultaneous performance of shōmyō and bugaku in Buddhist

ceremonies, his method for letting the two disparate groups encounter each other has at its core

Cage’s concept of indeterminacy. “It is essentially within the indeterminate passages of each set

of two pieces that the ‘encounter’ I envisaged takes place,” Ishii explained.34 Since there is no

full score for these works, he left the encountering points in time to the discretion of the

performers (or conductor in Sō-gū II). “Although one could scarcely foresee the results,” Ishii

wrote, he believed that “this ‘encounter’ would generate some kind of meaning.”35

32
Ibid., 29.
33
Ibid.
34
Ibid., 39.
35
Ibid., 33.

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 Unlike Takemitsu’s approach to mixed ensembles such as November Steps, which

highlighted the heterogeneous sound worlds of East and West, Ishii considered that to establish

some points of encounter, it is necessary to achieve a certain degree of stylistic convergence

between these sound worlds, even if the piece involves indeterminacy. In his pieces for both

western and Japanese instruments, he did not intend a stark opposition between eastern and

western musical styles but meant the two groups to encounter each other according to certain

rules and to create a new sound world with a sense of unity or intimacy. In Sō-gū, he used the

proximity of avant-garde techniques and certain Japanese music elements to draw the two

instruments closer together. He mixed Japanese musical elements into the piano part, such as

non-metrical silences, while introducing western European elements, such as disjunct melodies,

into the shakuhachi. In Sō-gū II, because the gagaku ensemble has a similar division of

instrument groups—winds, strings, and percussion—to the western orchestra, Ishii found it

easier than in Sō-gū to find a point of encounter between the two musical groups. He therefore

used elements from both musical worlds in a manner that made the two sound worlds “conflict

yet at times miraculously blend with each other,” as Luciana Galliano described; for example,

strings and percussion overlap with the gagaku ensemble in some sections.36

In addition to the indeterminate relationship between Japanese and western instruments,

in Shikyō of Sō-gū II, Ishii opened some parts for individual string players within a sound group

to repeat their materials at their own speed and for whatever duration they like (fig 4.5). This

way of adopting indeterminacy to create a chaotic sound cluster is similar to Takemitsu’s

indeterminate style in Texture. It verifies Kōji Sano’s comment (see Chapter 2) that, more than

Cage or Ichiyanagi, it was Takemitsu’s moderately indeterminate works that showed many other

36
Galliano, Yōgaku, 252.

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Japanese composers how indeterminacy could be effective in “let[ting] the sound movement

happen spontaneously.”37

Figure 4.5 Ishii’s Shikyō for gagaku. Celle: Moeck Verlag, 1976.

Cage and Japanese Traditional Musicians

Some Japanese traditional musicians have also united Japanese and western music

traditions. Some of them noticed the compatibility of Cage’s concept of indeterminacy with

Japanese traditional music, and they sought to interpret Cage’s works using traditional

instruments. In March 1986, the director of the National Theatre Toshirō Kido proposed to Cage

37
Kōji Sano, “Nihongo de kataru ongaku e no kiseki [The trajectory toward music narrating in Japanese],”
in Takemitsu Tōru. Oto no kawa no yukue [Takemitsu Tōru in search of the river of sound], ed. Seiji Chōki and
Ryūichi Higuchi (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2000), 15; Tōru Takemitsu, quoted in Yōko Narazaki, “Cage to Nihon no
sakkyokuka [Cage and Japanese composer],” Art Vivant 27 (1987): 62.

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his project of performing Cage’s works with the newly reconstructed Shōsō-in instruments.

Since the 1970s, the National Theatre had embarked on pioneering projects aiming at revitalizing

the tradition of Japanese music. In 1975, the National Theatre began to reconstruct the ancient

instruments from the treasures of Shōsō-in, the Imperial Storehouse belonging to the temple

Tōdai-ji in Nara, and sought to feature the instruments on stage with existing or newly

commissioned pieces.38 With Cage’s consent and the help of Ichiyanagi, Kido arranged the

performances on the reconstructed instruments of a reigaku version of Cage’s Renga (1975–76)

in 1986 and Ryoanji (1983) in 1988. The graphic style of the two pieces made it possible to

interpret them with Japanese instrumental idioms and conceptions of time (with no regular beat).

Moreover, the lack of intention in Cage’s music matches well with the originally inexpressive,

anonymous style of music that the ancient instruments would have played. Many Japanese

traditional musicians, such as Mayumi Miyata and Kazue Sawai (1941–), therefore received the

opportunity to perform Cage’s pieces with their own instruments for the first time because of the

reconstructions. The result of fusing Cagean avant-garde works with the ancient Japanese

instruments seems to have been satisfactory considering that the Japanese instrumental version of

Ryoanji was later performed two more times in National Theatre in the 1990s.

In addition to Kido, the kotoist Kazue Sawai, who was known for performing a wide

range of repertoire outside the koto tradition and touring with her ensemble around the world,

approached Cage for the score of Three Dances (1944–45) in 1988. She had been impressed by

the timbre and vibrant energy of Three Dances when she first listened to it at the Bang on a Can

Festival on May 8, 1988. She therefore planned to arrange it for four prepared 17-string kotos

and premiere it in Tokyo in 1989. Although Cage’s instructions for Three Dances were specific

38
Bonnie C. Wade, Composing Japanese Musical Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2014), 123.

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for prepared piano, Sawai took Yūji Takahashi’s and Kosugi’s advice to adapt a preparation for

koto in a flexible way. While Takahashi told her that “even if you do prepare a piano following

all the instructions, the pitches are different every time,” Kosugi suggested her to “prepare the

koto in a manner most appropriate to the instrument.”39 Sawai therefore decided not to follow the

instruction—to prepare each string, which is difficult for koto—and tried inserting a number of

materials between the strings. Eventually she found that waribashi, the half-split wooden

chopsticks, produced the most interesting sound because the coarse wood could produce

complicated timbres. Sawai described: “When I did the prepared koto, I felt that it was a case of

stripping away that added-on information in a way that left only an essence of the instrument

itself. It was quite difficult finding a way to make a satisfying sound, but it was an interesting

experience.”40 Instead of serving to reproduce tradition, the preparation shows the originally

wide-range musical possibilities of the koto. After listening to Sawai’s arrangement of Three

Dances, Cage wrote a mesostic in appreciation, praising her for playing the piece “very

beautifully giving it new life,” and “zipping up the different sides of the pants the west ‘n’ the

east.”41

In the 1990s, the shō player Mayumi Miyata became the last Japanese musician who

collaborated closely with Cage. Although Miyata had learned Cage’s name when she was a

39
Kazue Sawai and Toshie Kakinuma, “Kazue Sawai's Koto Revolution—Interview by Toshie Kakinuma,”
Ear Magazine 15, no. 8 (1990): 32.
40
Kazue Sawai and Kazumi Narabe, “Artist Interview—Opening New Realms in Sokyoku: The World of
Kazue Sawai,” The Japan Foundation—Performing Arts Network Japan, entry posted March 12, 2013,
https://performingarts.jp/E/art_interview/1302/1.html.
41
A mesostic is a poem arranged so that a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text. Handwritten
letter from John Cage to Yasuyo Kondō, March 17, 1992, John Cage Correspondence, 1901–1993, Northwestern
University Music Library; John Cage, “for her and her koto ensemble,” liner notes to Three Pieces: Work of Koto,
Kazue Sawai, Yōko Nishi, Hideaki Kuribayashi, Etsuko Gunji, and New Japan Philharmonic, My Record COL-003,
1992, CD, n.p.

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piano major at the Kunitachi College of Music, she did not have a chance to perform Cage’s

music until she participated in the premiere of the reigaku version of Cage’s Renga (playing shō)

at the National Theatre in 1986. In 1989, Miyata joined the Tokyo International Music

Ensemble, a music ensemble led by Ichiyanagi, focusing on traditional Japanese instruments and

shōmyō Buddhist chanting. In late January and February in 1990, Miyata toured with the

Ensemble from the East Coast (New York, Washington D.C., etc.) to California. At the reception

of their concert in New York, Ichiyanagi introduced Miyata to Cage, whom Ichiyanagi had

invited to attend the concert. Enchanted with the sound of the shō during the concert, Cage told

Miyata that he was interested in writing music for shō and invited her to collaborate. When Cage

and Miyata decided to work together, Ichiyanagi sent the fingering positions for the shō to Cage

on behalf of Miyata on March 23, 1990.42 Later at the Darmstadt Summer Course in August

1990, Cage and Miyata had a one-hour meeting to discuss some shō fundamentals and

performance techniques.

It was not until July 1991 that they had a chance to sit down and work out the details of

the piece. During the one-week break between her performances in Italy and Switzerland, Miyata

flew to New York and helped Cage with the shō composition. After a half-day discussion, Cage

decided to compose with the I Ching computer program, a random number generator available

for personal computer.43 He first used the program to decide on the sounds, which consisted of

single notes and tone clusters. After Miyata played the initial result, they both found that some

42
Handwritten letter from Toshi Ichiyanagi to John Cage, March 23, 1990, John Cage Correspondence,
1901–1993, Northwestern University Music Library.
43
The I Ching computer program that Cage used is probably one called IC, developed by Andrew Culver.

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tone clusters sounded too thick. Cage then used the program again to remove notes from the tone

clusters, modifying them to much more satisfying sounds.44

A week later, Cage completed ten pieces for shō and named the group One9 (1991).

Similar to his other number pieces, each piece in One9 has ten flexible time brackets (decided by

chance operations). Since there is no indication of tempo, rhythm, or dynamic, the performer can

decide the length and expression of each sound and silence freely. Miyata recalled that what

Cage wanted was to have each sound performed as quietly as possible and for as long as

possible.45 Although One9 is different from a traditional shō piece which does not have many

intentional silences between sounds, Miyata finds Cage’s piece enjoyable because it helps her

feel that the sounds are being projected into a huge universe just as a traditional shō piece does.

In her words:

The sporadic sounds are like small universes of islands floating in the huge universe.
Between the silence (ma), each sound arises faintly and disappears. Sometimes a single
tone flows like a long tail of light. When the tones overlap [tone clusters], the small wave
arouses an effect like the light spreading out. . . . Cage’s work for shō [One9] gives me a
sense of space as huge as the universe.46

When One9 was completed, Cage and Miyata were thinking about writing an

accompaniment for One9. Miyata recalled that Cage first joked about accompanying One9 with

the sounds of traffic such as the trucks or ambulances outside his apartment. In the end, he came

up with the idea of filling conch shells with water and amplifying the sound of tipping and

making bubbles within the shells. The whole piece is called Two3 (1991) when One9 is played

together with the part for five conch shells. On January 18, 1992, Miyata premiered Two3 at the

44
Mayumi Miyata, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, March 20, 2019.
45
Ibid.
46
Mayumi Miyata, quoted in Hayao Kawai, Hito no kokoro ga tsukuridasu mono [What human mind
produces] (Tokyo: Daiwa Shobō, 2008), 177.

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Art Tower Mito Contemporary Art Center, Ibaraki. Unfortunately, Cage could not attend the

concert because he was busy organizing the exhibition “Rolywholyover A Circus” in Los

Angeles. Cage got the chance to listen to Miyata’s performance of Two3 later in the Church of

Sant’Angelo in Italy on June 24, 1992. During the rehearsal, Miyata asked Cage what he thought

about her interpretation and what performance style he preferred. Cage answered that Miyata

should just keep her own way of performance; his only advice was to play quietly and let one

listen to each sound for a long time. Following Cage’s suggestion, Miyata found that in order to

simulate the listener’s experience during the performance, she would decide on the performance

details according to the space, the atmosphere, and the audience’s reaction, in other words,

merging her sound naturally into the environment. Throughout the two-hour performance,

Miyata remembered vividly that Cage sat on the bench among the audience, listening to her

performance without moving at all. Cage’s concentration on listening soothed her nervousness

and helped her create the sound naturally.47

Conclusion

This chapter has examined the personal histories of several Japanese individuals’

interactions with Cage’s principles, specifically the idea of “spontaneity,” which encouraged

them to explore the contemporary potential of traditional Japanese music. As scholars Eishi

Kikkawa, Shigeo Kishibe, and Minao Shibata proposed (see Chapter 3), music in Japan has

periodically shown an alternation between styles based on foreign influence and those

incorporating indigenous elements, a trend of which the dichotomy between hōgaku (traditional

Japanese music) and yōgaku (western music) is a part. From the 1880s, yōgaku gradually

47
Mayumi Miyata, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, March 20, 2019.

190
outweighed hōgaku in the state-established music education programs as well as in the musical

preferences of the public. Although in the first half of the twentieth century, hōgaku had revivals

in various social and historical contexts, hōgaku was continuously viewed as Other within

Japan.48

Carrying on a local trend beginning in the 1950s, the composers mentioned in this

chapter, Cage, Ichiyanagi, Takemitsu, Moroi, and Ishii, were all engaged in subverting the

ideology of otherness and asymmetry in East-West power relationships through their musics.

Cage’s musical views drawing from eastern ideology suggested an alternative to the European

avant-garde at a time when many western composers felt constrained by total serialism.

Encountering Cage’s philosophy in the 1960s, Japanese composers saw one way to stop

following the European musical models. The key they found is the concept of indeterminacy.

With their goal of incorporating Japanese traditional instruments into their pieces, composers

such as Ichiyanagi, Takemitsu, Moroi, and Ishii all sensed that indeterminate notation could be

an appropriate method “to express the delicate nuances peculiar to Japanese traditional

instruments,” as musicologist Yūji Numano put it.49 By giving them a neutral context, traditional

instruments would no longer sound like Others (e.g. performing in the western music style) but

would be presented with their original characteristics. The listening attitude suggested by Cage

also allowed Japanese composers to discover a whole new field where the archaic sound of

48
Indeed, the majority of Japanese in the twentieth century, including the yōgaku composers and musicians,
knew little about traditional Japanese music. Particularly in eras such as the Taisho Era (1912‒26), marked by the
development of capitalism, people even considered that to be Japanese meant to be modern and international, which
is exactly the opposite of hōgaku. Michele Edwards, “Constructing Identity: Interplay of Japanese and Global
Elements,” in Musicology and Globalization: Proceedings of the International Congress in Shizuoka 2002, ed.
Yoshio Tozawa (Tokyo: Musicological Society of Japan, 2004), 291.
49
Yūji Numano, “Some Aspects of Indeterminacy since the 1970s: The Conjunction of Eastern and
Western Music via Indeterminate Notation,” in Musicology and Globalization: Proceedings of the International
Congress in Shizuoka 2002, ed. Yoshio Tozawa (Tokyo: Musicological Society of Japan, 2004), 334.

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hōgaku was rediscovered as a treasure chest in the contemporary sound world. Through the

concept of indeterminacy and a new perspective on listening, Japanese composers were able to

embed their music heritage, hōgaku, in a global context for both Japanese and international

audiences.

In a conversation happening in Japan in 1981, Cage and Ichiyanagi talked about the

common attitude toward tradition between Cage and some Japanese represented by Ichiyanagi.

Cage began:

When I went to Europe, people often told me that avant-garde had already gone. I told
them that I can always find something new. . . . Although it is important to continue
doing new things, it is also important to look back at the past. By looking back at the
past, one can find a new thing from the past or find the thing that can be connected with
new behavior.50

Appreciating Cage’s thought, Ichiyanagi expressed his agreement, “I think Japanese are all very

happy to hear what you just said especially because Japan is a country which cannot be cut off

easily from traditional issues.”51 Ichiyanagi’s words reflect precisely some Japanese ways of

thinking, such as those behind the recurrent hōgaku revivals in the twentieth century. Many

Japanese composers tend to emphasize the intrinsic uniqueness of their musical tradition to

reinforce their identity when encountering foreign cultures. However, it is undeniable that not all

Japanese composers and artists are interested in looking back to inherited traditions. Either in

response to the asymmetrical power relationships between Japan and the West or in response to

Cagean experimental music, a group of Japanese chose to work beyond the domain of music.

The following chapter tells the stories of these individual Japanese who were inspired by Cage to

carry out their careers in the field which is later called sound art.

50
Toshi Ichiyanagi and John Cage, “Chokugeki intabyū—Cage, waga ongaku o kataru [Direct interview—
Cage talked about Japanese music],” Ongaku geijutsu 39, no. 10 (1981): 52.
51
Ibid.

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 Chapter 5 From Concert Hall to Museum: Cage and Japanese Sound Art

Brandon LaBelle has explained the rise of sound art: “Since the early 1950s, sound as an

aesthetic category has continually gained prominence. Initially through the experimental music

of John Cage and musique concrète, divisions between music and sound stimulated adventures in

electronics, field recordings, the spatialization of sonic presentation, and the introduction of

alternative procedures.”1 The emergence of sound art, whose history intertwines with

experimental music and contemporary visual arts, parallels the development of Cage’s reception

in Japan, where his ideas have aroused interest from non-musicians. After almost every Cage-

related event in Japan, there were comments from non-musicians, such as artists, poets, novelists,

architects, and filmmakers. For example, at the 1961 Contemporary Music Festival in Osaka, the

Gutai Theater Group attended the Japanese premiere of the Cagean school of works. One of the

Gutai Group’s members, Sadamasa Motonaga, reacted positively to the concert, saying: “This is

the first time that I have heard music that is related to my art.”2 After the festival in Osaka and

Toshi Ichiyanagi’s 1961 concert at the SAC, an increasing number of non-musicians participated

in discussing chance procedures, graphic notation, and Cage’s artistic philosophy in general. In

the February issue of the SAC Journal in 1962, poets Kōichi Iijima and Makoto Ōoka, and art

critics Yoshiaki Tōno and Yusuke Nakahara, joined Tōru Takemitsu and Ichiyanagi in a round-

table discussion on Cage’s use of chance operations and the applicability of chance to the visual

arts.

1
Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum International,
2006), xii.
2
Sadamasa Motonaga, quoted in Toshi Ichiyanagi, Ongaku to iu itonami [Music and contemporary age]
(Tokyo: NTT Publisher, 1998), 84.

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 Later, when Cage and David Tudor first visited Japan, designer Kiyoshi Awazu was in

the audience for Cage’s performance of Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958). Although it

was a musical performance, Awazu was visually attracted by the mysterious space Cage created

by conducting like a chronometer on the podium whose arms simulated the movement of the

hands of a clock. “He [Cage] made me reconsider what I had done so far in art,” Awazu said, “I

have been doing design which, I thought, did not relate to music at all. . . . I was shocked that

Cage had tried to incorporate something which is not related to music into the concept of music.”

He concluded, “What Cage had done was expanding the concept of music.”3 In addition to

reactions from individual non-musicians, various non-music magazines such as Bijutsu techō,

Gendaishi techō, and Eureka started to publish Cage-related articles in the 1960s. Scholar

Susumu Shōno shared his experience that when he finished his master’s thesis on Cage in 1976

(the first Japanese academic research on Cage), he received successive requests for articles about

Cage mostly from magazines of aesthetics, philosophy, and literature.4

Non-musicians were always fascinated by Cage. But it is difficult to trace the spread of

his ideas beyond music because fewer non-musicians created works or responded directly to

Cage. Yet, in a group of Japanese artists who worked at the intersection of music, sound, and art,

we find a remarkable importation of Cage’s ideas beyond music’s borders. The protagonists are

sound artists who kept up with the aesthetics of Cage throughout their careers by exploring the

nature of sound in everyday objects and acoustic spaces. Some of them even maintained a

3
Kiyoshi Awazu, “Gūzenseinoongaku to hapuningu [Aleatoric music and happenings],” in Kagayake 60-
nendai: Sōgetsu Āto Sentā no zenkiroku [Shining 60s: The complete records of the Sogetsu Art Center], ed. “Sōgetsu
Āto Sentā no Kiroku” Kanko Iinkai (Tokyo: Firumu Āto Sha, 2002), 176; Kiyoshi Awazu and Yūji Takahashi,
“Gendai ongaku to kenchiku kūkan [Contemporary music and architectural space],” Eureka 10, no. 9 (August
1978): 89–90.
4
Susumu Shōno, interview by the author in Japanese, Saitama, Japan, August 22, 2019.

194
collaborative relationship with Cage for several decades. For a while, their works and

performances, which involved sound or commented on auditory cultures, were most often not

categorized as music. In the 1980s, their works started to fit into the newly invented category of

“sound art.” Their groundbreaking sound works were later seen as precursors for the

unprecedented popularity of sound arts in Japan in the 1990s when more and more museums and

art galleries threw open their doors to artwork involving sound. The opening of these non-

concert spaces to sound art and sound performance helped Japanese regain the multimedia

spaces that the SAC used to provide in the 1960s. Moreover, since the 1990s, the voices of these

sound artists have provided the richest reception of Cage’s ideas, more than the voices of the

classically trained musicians and composers, who had responded to Cage in the 1950s and 1960s.

The following sections elucidate the personal histories of the four Japanese sound artists

Kosugi Takehisa, Yasunao Tone, Keijirō Satō, and Akio Suzuki (1941–) and their life-long

interactions with Cage and his ideas. The chapter concludes with the Cage-related exhibitions

held in the 1990s, where Japanese across generations and genres connected with the Cagean

sound- and listening-based practice in a museum context.

Takehisa Kosugi

Until his death in 2018, Kosugi led an artistic life physically and philosophically close to

Cage—perhaps more than anyone else from Japan. Kosugi learned of Cage in the late 1950s

when he was active as a member of Group Ongaku. “I was not that interested in Cage at first,”

Kosugi said, “Because at that time I was repulsed by any music written on a score, I didn’t

resonate with Cage, who adopted graphic scores in his music, even though I understood that he

195
used graphic scores to create a chance performance.”5 He claimed that whenever there is a score,

the performer’s input would be restricted to interpreting the composer’s ideas. “Within myself I

knew that the sounds had to possess a bit more spontaneity,” Kosugi explained.6 Thus, in Group

Ongaku, Kosugi was searching for sounds that departed from the score and were as

instantaneous and spontaneous as possible. Unlike Cage’s works, Group Ongaku’s “automatic

improvisation” did not have any rules designating that the sound should happen in a certain

timeframe or structure. Neither did it use a method such as chance operations to exclude one’s

ego as Cage had done. According to Kosugi, Group Ongaku’s improvisations attempted to make

the performance behavior automatic by reacting instantaneously to each moment of sound

without a predetermined musical pattern.7

It was only after seeing Cage’s and Tudor’s performance in person in 1962 that Kosugi

felt drawn to Cagean experimental music. In Cage’s premiere of 0'00", Kosugi appreciated how

Cage transformed everyday behavior and objects into sound sources. He recognized that his

ideas about music coincided with some of Cage’s: expanding music creation beyond the

privilege of professionals and viewing art as play (for pleasure). By reconsidering the function of

an object, Cage drew out and showed his audience the playfulness of everyday life.8 For

example, amplifying the sound of drinking water can make a noise hilariously like thunder.

5
Takehisa Kosugi and Yukio Fujimoto, “Oto o kiku koto wa kūkan o kiku koto [Listening to the sound is
to listen to the space],” Bijutsu techō 54, no. 821 (2002): 76.
6
Takehisa Kosugi and Alan Cummings, “Catch a Wave,” The Wire 243 (May 2004): 34.
7
Takehisa Kosugi and Kuniharu Akiyama, “Kosugi Takehisa—catch wave no shisō [Takehisa Kosugi—
the thought of catch wave],” Bijutsu techō 25, no. 368 (1973): 116.
8
Takehisa Kosugi, quoted in Yoshiharu Suenobu, Kaisō no John Cage: Dōjidai o ikita 8 nin e no intabyū
[Reminiscences of John Cage: Interviews with eight people living in the same age] (Tokyo: Ongaku no Tomosha,
1996), 140.

196
Agreeing with Cage that music should be opened to various interpretations, Kosugi created

events such as South No. 2 (1964), which required the performer to pronounce the word “south”

in a minimum of fifteen minutes, showing his attempt to destroy the symbolic function of the

word. “Symbolic meaning is only a single function, but if experience is detached from its

symbolic function, every object can be transformed, made new, appearing from a completely

different side,” Kosugi explained.9

When staying in New York to perform with Nam June Paik and other Fluxus members in

1965–67, Kosugi started to add live electronic elements to his performance events. His latent

interest in electronics had been sparked in his childhood. Kosugi recalled that in junior high

school, he had experimented with building a crystal radio which uses no external power. The fact

that the crystal radio can receive a radio signal and produce sound using the power of the

received signal was a mysterious phenomenon for Kosugi as a youngster. “There were three

radio stations in Tokyo at the time, and they came through together, all mixed up. It’s already

music, like John Cage’s,” Kosugi recalled in a 1993 interview.10 His interest in invisible signals

in the air was later extended to the electronic circuits with the vacuum tube, in which he found

analogies with fishing:

In this vacuum space invisible electronic phenomena are going on. The filament inside is
like a little sun emitting light to the surrounding elements. And in between these things
the electrons are moving, carrying information or content. You can’t see the waves but
they’re there. It’s transparent. Everything has an invisible part. Rather like fishing. We
can’t see the fish in the water, but we catch it all the same. And electronics is like that.
It’s invisible, but with a certain setup we can catch this phenomenon.11

9
Takehisa Kosugi and Jud Yalkut, “The Look of Sound: A Slow Interview with Takehisa Kosugi,” Art
Magazine 42 (January 1968): 14.
10
Takehisa Kosugi, “Takehisa Kosugi—Sound Cuisine,” in Interviews with Sound Artists Taking Part in
the Festival ECHO. The Images of Sound II, ed. René van Peer (Eindhoven: Het Apollohuis, 1993), 56.
11
Ibid.

197
His idea of fishing for invisible waves eventually turned into his first live electronic piece Mano-

Dharma, Electronic “Catch-Wave” (1967), premiered at the “Mano Dharma Concert” in New

York on April 27, 1967. The work is based on the heterodyne effect that Kosugi had discovered

during his two-year sojourn in New York. Kosugi noticed that when an electric wave

transmission device and a receiver were placed in close proximity, the interference of two

inaudible high-frequency radio waves could produce a lower frequency audible to the human ear.

The sound changes as the distance between the transmitter and receiver varies, which is a

practical way to transform spatial movement in the environment into sound.

In Catch-Wave, Kosugi set up a simple electronic sound system with radio frequency

transmitters and receivers suspended with string from the ceiling (or with the transmitter on a

fishing pole in another version) (fig 5.1). The movement of the participants (walking in or out;

opening or shutting the door) in the performance space created random air currents, which

swayed the transmitters and receivers by chance and produced different noise signals. Kosugi’s

concept of chance in Catch-Wave is close to Cage’s. Although Kosugi did not use a

predetermined chance method, he saw chance as something inevitable. He opened his work to

the unforeseeable entrance of any unforeseeable event in nature. In Catch-Wave, the sound can

be manipulated not specifically by the composer, performer, or audience member, but by natural

elements including human beings who were present at the space (similar to Cage’s 4'33" in that

all participants are the contributors of the sound). There was also a visual element in Catch-

Wave, a projector hung from the ceiling, projecting a puzzling image of dinosaurs onto the wall.

The projected image would move along with the swaying of transmitters and receivers,

presenting not only the interaction of invisible waves but also a multisensory environment.

198
Figure 5.1 Kosugi’s 2003 drawing of the premiere of Mano-Dharma, Electronic “Catch-Wave”
at the “Mano Dharma Concert.”12

After returning to Japan, Kosugi co-founded Taj Mahal Travellers in Tokyo in 1969, a

band for mixed-media improvisation, with (at its largest) seven young talents from diverse

backgrounds. The band fused eastern and western instruments (acoustic and electric), electronic

media, and sometimes video projection. Building on Kosugi’s experience of experimenting with

sound in Group Ongaku and live electronic music in New York, Taj Mahal Travellers was

Kosugi’s ideal music band, which carried out the concept of art as life more than any other group

in which he had participated. Performing with Taj Mahal Travellers, he observed, “I was able to

rediscover myself with multiplicity.”13 Taj Mahal Travellers was different from Group Ongaku,

12
Takehisa Kosugi, Mano Dharma Concert, 2003, in KOSUGI Takehisa Ongaku no Pikunikku, ed. Kōji
Kawasaki, Takako Okamoto, and Takehisa Kosugi (Ashiya, Hyōgo: Ashiya Shiritsu Bijutsu Hakubutsukan, 2017),
64.
13
Takehisa Kosugi and Takashi Shinkawa, “Kosugi Takehisa—‘miru’ to ‘kiku’ wa bundan sarenai
[Takehisa Kosugi—‘view’ and ‘listen’ are not separated],” Bijutsu techō 48, no. 734 (1996): 63.

199
which Kosugi felt had too many conflicting egos and ideas. The members of Taj Mahal

Travellers basically improvised autonomously without influencing one another, just as “many

planets turn at their own speeds,” in Kosugi’s words.14 The band started by playing free jazz for

the audience at the jazz bar Pit Inn in Tokyo. Later, they performed more for themselves (without

the audience in mind) in various outdoor venues. They also began to sit and perform on the

ground; the members and the audience (if present) were free to come and go during the

performance. Electronic processing was ubiquitous in their improvisations. Above a

spontaneously improvised drone, improvised sounds from voices, objects, and acoustic or

electric instruments were all amplified or modulated. Similar to Kosugi’s Catch Wave, Taj

Mahal Travellers’s performances tried to avoid the interference of human consciousness. They

would set up the speakers far apart from them so that the amplified sound could be heard at a

distance, and they used the echo machine to reproduce the sound as a delayed echo. By listening

to the sounds from a distance (both spatial and temporal), they could hear the sound moving

away from their egos and becoming part of nature.

When traveling and performing their open-air events in Japan and abroad, Taj Mahal

Travellers always related their sound to the specific place. On December 27, 1970, Taj Mahal

Travellers set up a 300-meter electric wire along the Ōiso coast to the south of Tokyo,

performing a winter picnic concert that started before sunrise and lasted for over twelve hours. A

film of ocean waves had been frequently used in many of Taj Mahal Travellers’s performances.

In this case, the film was mirrored by the natural environment. “It was just after a major storm

had passed by and the waves were really high, great waves,” Kosugi recalled.15 Listening to the

14
Ibid.
15
Kosugi and Cummings, “Catch a Wave,” 36.

200
nonstop rolling ocean waves as a spontaneous drone, they enjoyed the discipline of nature while

coexisting with it. Although they were shivering as they were playing because of the low

temperature, Kosugi recalled “There was a sense of reality about the performance that had

nothing to do with how well we were playing,” but had something to do with “the relationship

between us and the environment.”16 Kosugi and the other members were all moved by the

passage of time and the point at which “the sun gradually begins to rise over the sea and you

gradually began to see through the darkness. And as the sun came up the movie [the film of

ocean waves] we had been projecting on the screen gradually faded from view . . . there was an

overlap. That relationship was marvelous, the audio-visual aspect.”17 During the long

performance, the members were free to do anything they chose—eating, drinking, sleeping,

going to the toilet, or listening to the echoes—just as in all of their performances. From 1971 to

1972, Taj Mahal Travellers continued to carry out the idea of art as life in their “traveling event,”

where they took an old camper van and performed across Europe, the Near East, and at the Taj

Mahal in India. According to Kosugi, “improvisation is itself like a small-scale trip, but doing

improvisation while actually traveling is even more real.”18

Although Taj Mahal Travellers were not active after 1976, Kosugi’s experience of

performing independently of others gave him a smooth transition from Taj Mahal Travellers to

working with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Already in 1962 and 1964, Cage, as the

music director of the Company, had seen some of Kosugi’s event performances and had been

impressed by his talent in multimedia. Moreover, the Company’s collaboration with Kosugi

16
Ibid., 37.
17
Ibid.
18
Takehisa Kosugi, Ongaku no pikunikku [Musical picnic] (Tokyo: Shoshifū no Bara, 1991), 211.

201
during its 1964 tour in Japan seemed to be a satisfactory experience; it led to another chance for

Kosugi to tour with the Company in Australia and Japan in 1976. When Kosugi decided to move

to the US again in 1977 and stayed in Los Angeles for two months, the Company happened to be

looking for a replacement for David Behrman. It is possible that through the recommendation of

Cage, Tudor, or Cunningham himself, the Company decided to invite Kosugi to be its resident

composer and musician. Starting in May 1977, Kosugi was based in New York, spending one-

third of every year touring with the Company until its final concert in December 2011.

During this time, Kosugi worked closely with Cage and Tudor, the other two musicians

in the Company. In a 1986 interview conducted in Japan, Cage commented on his collaboration

with Kosugi, saying: “When Kosugi was with us [the Company], we all had a great

experience. . . . Kosugi’s music has a lot of variety . . . such as electronics with amplified objects,

light effects, etc., which are all marvelous.”19 For the Company, Kosugi composed both electro-

acoustic music (with acoustic materials) and live electronic music (without acoustic materials).

He also performed live electronic works by Cage and Tudor. The Company’s principle of

treating dance and music independently fitted perfectly with Kosugi’s creative approach. He

could compose freely with only a few constraints—the length of the dance and the available

sound system and sound objects.

To create more variety in each performance, Kosugi applied chance procedures in

numerous ways. Because for the performance he had to give the engineer some instructions

about the sound system in advance, Kosugi came up with instructions that preserve the element

of chance. One of his favorite methods was to bring in the chance experiences that he met in

19
John Cage and Masao Yamaguchi, “Ongaku, jinsei, soshite yūjin-tachi [Music, life, and friends],” Kikan
heru mesu, second annual special issue (February 1987): 120.

202
daily life. For instance, one day when Kosugi walked around his house, he received a newspaper

with only the financial page by chance. He then decided to give the engineer the newspaper and

tell him to manipulate the sound effect according to a number in a graph in the newspaper.

Kosugi remarked that “this is a kind of chance encounter.”20

As for sound objects, Kosugi would also bring in objects he encountered in everyday life

by chance and try them out in front of the audience without any rehearsal. For example, in his

Assemblage (1986) for the dance Grange Eve, Kosugi used the bottle and teacup which were left

behind by the previous tenant at the apartment he had just rented in New York. He picked

specifically the objects which can produce what he called an anonymous sound—a sound whose

source cannot be recognized. (Or he would modulate the sound or attach other objects to the

object to make its sound unrecognizable.) In this way, people can listen to the sound of the object

as sound itself without thinking about its source.

Since the 1980s, the sound installation has become one important activity for Kosugi.

Some ideas or devices he used in the works for the Merce Cunningham Company also appeared

in his sound installations. For example, his sound installation Interspersion for 54 Sounds (1980)

adopted the same tiny oscillator used in his work Interspersion (1979) for the Company’s dance

Local, which would create a random sound similar to the chirping sound of a bird or some other

small creature. In Interspersion for 54 Sounds, the oscillators produced sound automatically—

departing from human control. In a garden, Kosugi buried three groups of eighteen oscillators

under one pound of sugar, salt, and sand respectively. Covered by diverse layers of materials

which function as the filters, the sounds of each group of oscillators changed according to the

quality of the materials, which would in turn be influenced by the humidity and temperature of

20
Kosugi, Ongaku no pikunikku, 201.

203
the environment. The work demonstrated how Kosugi used everyday materials and technology to

realize various sounds in space, which had been the heart of his improvisational performance and

sound installations since the 1960s.

Kosugi’s appreciation of the indeterminate nature of sounds and lifelong attempt to work

outside the conventional musical concepts drew his artistic path close to Cage throughout his

lifetime. In 1994, Kosugi became the first Japanese to receive the John Cage Award for Music

from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, which has been “made biennially since 1992 in

recognition of outstanding achievement in the arts for work that reflects the spirit of John

Cage.”21 According to Ichiyanagi, the award has been funded partially by the Kyoto Prize that

Cage himself had received in 1989.22 The transpacific interchange of the award evinces, from an

cultural capital perspective, the mutual respect between Cage and Japan.

Yasunao Tone

Another Japanese artist who has led an artistic life close to Cage is Tone. Because of their

similar views on the arts, Tone’s and Cage’s artistic paths crossed several times from the 1960s

to the 1990s. As mentioned in Chapter 2, Tone had learned the works of Cage and the

experimental New York School through Ichiyanagi when he was active as a member of Group

Ongaku. He met Cage in person when Cage visited Japan in 1962. During this visit, Tone

realized that “the sound details that Cage presented were quite interesting” and Cage, too,

recognized with surprise that Tone’s event Geodesy for Piano (1962) anticipated a composition

21
“The John Cage Award,” Foundation for Contemporary Arts,
https://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/grants/john-cage-award (accessed March 9, 2019). In 2018,
Ichiyanagi became the second Japanese to receive the John Cage Award for Music.
22
Toshi Ichiyanagi, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, August 28, 2017.

204
he himself had in mind but had not yet written.23 Again in 1964, Cage’s concert of live electronic

music in Japan inspired Tone to see the possibility of using electronic media for creation (instead

of mere reproduction), which became the focal point of Tone’s career from the 1970s on. During

the rest of the 1960s, Tone joined Fluxus activities in Japan, involving himself in a range of

intermedia practices. He also wrote several articles on Cage for Japanese magazines, though he

confessed in our interview that he did not understand Cage’s music and philosophy very well

until he moved from Japan to New York for the first time in November 1972.24

After arriving in New York, Tone soon departed for Paris to visit his artist friend Tetsumi

Kudō. While in Paris, Tone received a letter from Nam June Paik and Paik’s wife Shigeko

Kubota, informing him that Merce Cunningham was looking for him to work with the Company.

Tone later learned that it was Cage who had recommended him to Cunningham even though

Tone did not have any contact with Cage in the 1960s after they met in 1962. Indeed, Tone was

qualified for the position in the Company because he has had a similar experience with Group

Ongaku in Japan, creating non-relational music for the Kuni Chiya dancers in the early 1960s.

Excited by the news, Tone returned to New York and in early January 1974 presented his first

event Clockwork Video (1974) for the Company’s dances Event #82 and Event #83 in the

Cunningham Studio. In this piece, Tone mounted three video cameras with shotgun microphones

on three turntables, rotating individually at the speeds of one minute, one hour, and twelve hours

per rotation. The cameras shot the top, middle, and lower parts of the dancers respectively. Tone

put the turntables right next to the huge mirrored wall in the Cunningham Studio and let the

cameras shoot half of the real space and half of the mirror image. The audience members were

23
Yasunao Tone, interview by the author in English, New York, November 12, 2017.
24
Ibid.

205
free to watch the dancers through the reflection of mirror, the real dancers, or the monitors. Tone

explained that he had expected that the microphones would pick up the sound of dancing, but in

reality, they picked up the motor sound of the turntables only. In any case, Tone considered

Clockwork Video a piece of music since, for him, music means duration—similar to Cage’s idea

that everything which happens in a certain time frame can be heard as music.25 Tone’s mixed

media experiment perfectly fit the Company’s style, which focused on non-relational coexistence

and chance encounters between the dancers’ bodies, music, and the stage environment.

During the years that Tone collaborated with the Company, from 1974 to 1979, Cage

introduced Tone to many famous figures in the New York art scene, supporting the initial stage

of Tone’s career in the States. In June 1979, the American Dance Festival started a new program

Music and Dance, which, for the first time, commissioned both dance and music for the same

piece (instead of using ready-made music to accompany dance as in the past). Nominated by

Cage, Tone received a commission from the Festival and wrote Geography & Music (1979) for

the Company’s dance Roadrunners. Tone’s work involves live electro-acoustic music—

including piano (usually played by Tudor), the Chinese acoustic instrument qin, and a slow

reading (usually by Cage or Kosugi) of the ancient Chinese encyclopedia Taiping Yulan (AD

983). The uniqueness of the piece lies in the electronic PA system that Tone designed. In the

huge theater where the sound system is separated into two channels (left and right), the voice of

the reader was recorded by the two channels and came out asynchronously from two speakers.

Whenever the voice came into the channels, the voice switched off the instrumental sounds,

which were amplified by the same microphone systems. The result is that the sounds of voice

and instruments came out alternately, like ping-pong balls bouncing back and forth across the

25
Ibid.

206
whole theater. The piece became part of the Company’s repertory between 1979 and 1986. In the

initial version, there was only one reciter reading the text in either Chinese or English translation.

Fearing that the audience might follow the text and ignore the dance, Cage suggested in the later

performances that the piece should have multiple languages read simultaneously. The audience

could then shift its attention more easily between different focal points of the performance or

simply enjoy being surrounded by the dance, the streams of sound, and the stage environment.

The experience of working with Cage and the Company in the 1970s allowed Tone to see

not only the similarities but also the differences between Cage’s and his own artistic goals. Tone

is not interested in any traditional formulation of music-making. “The problem with traditional

notation—or even with tablature—is that what I get in the end is not my image of sound,” Tone

said.26 He understands that both indeterminate notation and chance operations are merely Cage’s

methods “to not determine notational components.”27 Tone prefers to use the indeterminate

concept in a broader sense, including methods such as the deliberate use of uncontrollability

without human agency. When Tone began to work as a solo artist in the late 1970s, he focused

on devising systems, with a wide range of tools, to transform a given input via unpredictable

processes to generate unexpected, seemingly random outcomes. To some extent, Tone’s

approach to indeterminacy is similar to certain aspects of generative art, in which, according to

Philip Galanter, the artist creates a “system, such as a set of natural language rules, a computer

26
Yasunao Tone, quoted in Roc Jiménez de Cisneros, Blackout-Representation, Transformation and De-
control in the Sound Work of Yasunao Tone (Radio Web Macba, 2009), 12.
27
Yasunao Tone and Jared Davis, “Yasunao Tone Interviewed by Jared Davis,” Un Magazine 2, no. 2
(November 2008): 12.

207
program, a machine, or other procedural invention, which is set into motion with some degree of

autonomy contributing to or resulting in a completed work of art.”28

Tone’s electronic works Molecular Music #1 (1982) and Molecular Music #2 (1983) are

two of his early experiments translating images into sounds. The pieces are based on Chinese

poetic texts from the Tang Dynasty and eighth-century Japan. Tone had first studied the

etymology of the Chinese characters of these poems grammatologically and filmed the images of

the Chinese characters he chose. In the performance, Tone projected the film onto a wall where

he had attached several photosensitive detectors. The detectors interpret the visual form of the

images and send information to the connected oscillators. In accordance with the changing

brightness of the projected images (which could also be affected by the lighting of the

environment), the oscillators create unpredictable sounds which would be different in each

performance. In Molecular Music, it is the unforeseeable and non-repeatable process of

transforming light into a sound that made the works indeterminate.

In the mid-1980s, as soon as the CD player first came out, Tone launched a critique of the

telos of the CD player as a medium. It is at this time that he applied the inspiration he received

from Cage’s performance in 1964, using electronic media for productive creation. In his live

performance Music for 2 CD Players (1986), Tone “prepared the CDs” (Tone’s term) by sticking

several pinhole-punctured pieces of Scotch tape on their undersides, “wounding” the CDs in such

a way that their binary coding was distorted and read in a completely unpredictable way. Tone

explained in an interview with Alan Licht: “The Scotch tape enables me to make burst errors

without significantly affecting the system and stopping the machine. The error-correcting

28
Philip Galanter, “Generative Art Theory,” in A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul (Hoboken,
NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2016), 151.

208
software constantly interpolates between individual bits of misread information, but if adjacent

bits are misread, a burst occurs and the software mutes the output.”29 By introducing error, Tone

disrupted the CD players’ function of playing the original recording back. Listening to the mad

stuttering and skipping of the CD players, one could hardly imagine what the original sounds

were; instead the CD players generate a new piece of music without a pre-existing score. Tone

called the concept underlying this system a “deviation of technology.”30 That is, when a new

medium appears, Tone saw a way to be creative by making it “deviate from the original purpose

of the medium and develop a totally new field.”31 Through active manipulation, that is, by the

CDs with the Scotch tape, Tone created a system whose product is not completely random but is

still indeterminate in the sense that one cannot know the exact way in which the CD players

would handle the wounded CDs. Unlike Cage, who used chance for decision-making, Tone’s

attitude toward chance is that he neither avoids nor seeks out chance operations as a

compositional tool but accepts it as a part of everyday life. Music for 2 CD Players is a result of

Tone’s acceptance of the mistakes that the CD players made by chance.

Tone remembered that when he performed Music for 2 CD Players at his own concert at

the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York in March 1986, Cage was sitting in the

front row. Several minutes after the performance, Cage burst into laughter and laughed

throughout the performance. Tone recalled: “I had no sooner finished the performance than he

29
Yasunao Tone, quoted in Alan Licht, “Yasunao Tone—Random Tone Burst,” The Wire 233 (September
2002): 32.
30
Christian Marclay and Yasunao Tone, “Record, CD, Analog, Digital: Christian Marclay and Yasunao
Tone,” in Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, ed. Christoph Cox and Daniel Warner (New York:
Continuum, 2004), 344.
31
Ibid.

209
[Cage] rushed up to me and shook my hand. I think he approved of my way of using the CD.”32

Indeed, as regards the recording medium and its reproductive process, Tone held a view similar

to Cage’s. Both Tone and Cage emphasized the continuity between music and the environment

in their works and did not like recording because they thought “the spatial element of a

performance was lost and the recorded sound was the engineers’ re-interpretation of the

performers’ interpretation of the music.”33 Furthermore, Cage disliked the repetition of the

known and only accepted the repetition if “each repetition must authorize an entirely new

experience.”34 Tone, as well, has been interested in the live, one-time performance since the

beginning of his career, considering his works unrecordable for a long time. Therefore, even

though he lives in the digital era, Tone never felt satisfied with recording “because it presupposes

to repeat the same sound over and over.”35

Seemingly contradictorily, both Cage and Tone did make recordings of their

performances at different moments of their lives. Tone noticed that Cage was always happy to

meet recording publishers who liked to publish his records even though Cage himself did not

have any recording equipment at home.36 Tone understood that Cage, as a pioneer composer,

was aware of his place in history and the merit of preserving his works through recording.

Because Cage’s indeterminate works are meant to be played differently each time, multiple

recordings of an indeterminate piece can keep one recording from becoming canonical and still

32
Yasunao Tone, “John Cage and Recording,” Leonardo Music Journal 13 (2003): 12.
33
Ibid.
34
John Cage and Daniel Charles, For the Birds (New York: M. Boyars, 1981), 80.
35
Yasunao Tone, quoted in Licht, “Yasunao Tone—Random Tone Burst,” 32.
36
Yasunao Tone, “John Cage and Recording,” Leonardo Music Journal 13 (2003): 12.

210
leave sufficient materials for people to study in the future. Tone, too, has benefited from the

recording of his live performances in the mid-nineties. In 1995, the album Solo for Wounded CD

became the first recording of his prepared CDs. Tone attached Scotch tape to the CD of his

earlier work Musica Iconologos (1993), a piece involving digitizing scans of the written text of

ancient Chinese poems and using a computer program to convert the data into sound.37 He sees

the recording of the uncontrolled outcome of the prepared CD of Musica Iconologos simply as a

documentation of a performance. However, the release of Solo for Wounded CD in 1995 made

Tone’s idea, which was conceived a decade earlier, widely known in the circles of sound art,

connecting the sixty-year-old artist to a new generation of younger sound artists.

In 2001, Tone extended his creative use of the electronic medium to an installation

context. Written for the exhibition Yokohama Triennale 2001 in Japan, his work Parasite/Noise

(2001) is a pseudo audio guide installed throughout the entire exhibition space of the Yokohama

Red Brick Warehouse. While the audience expected the audio guide would provide a

commentary on the works exhibited, listeners soon realized that the audio guide played only

synthesized sound and electronic noise which were completely irrelevant to the works they were

looking at. Indeed, the audio guide was actively performing a role, showing “the impossibility of

the decodification or deciphering of a work.”38 Tone wrote: “my headset makes the audience

interpolate between listening from the headset and seeing the other works. Then the audience is

no longer a passive observer and finds the headset to be a tool for use, like Marcel Proust’s

suggestion to consider his book as binoculars and Cage’s remark that he is a maker of cameras

37
The CD of Musica Iconologos was made by the process of data transformation instead of recording. It
does not preserve any pre-existing sound.
38
Yasunao Tone, statement on Parasite/Noise in Yokohama International Triennial, exhibition catalog, ed.
Nobuko Shimuta et al. (Yokohama: Yokohama International Triennial, 2001), 337.

211
with which the audience takes photography.”39 Through the pseudo audio guide, Tone stimulates

museum goers to synchronize what they see and hear, coming up with new meanings for the

works being exhibited.

Despite Tone’s indebtedness to the revolution Cage had created across the fields of arts,

which allowed Tone to “work in the music space that was opened up by Cage,” Tone

emphasized that his work has been distinctly different from the works of Cage or Cagean

musicians such as Tudor, Kosugi, or David Behrman since the mid 1970s.40 Indeed, Tone has

been uniquely interdisciplinary from the time he joined Group Ongaku to today. He admitted that

his works are “hard to categorize—it’s off-category” and tend to question the traditional

boundary between music and art.41

Akio Suzuki

Suzuki started his career as a sound artist partially inspired by Cage. When he graduated

from high school, Suzuki aimed to become an architect and worked in an architectural office in

Nagoya. One day in 1963, when he was assigned to draw a staircase, he came to realize that his

drawings were like the barlines of a musical staff. While writing numbers on each stair, Suzuki

described that it was as if he was hearing the sound of each stair ringing in his head, which

inspired him to design a staircase that would make a pleasant sense of rhythm when one steps

39
Ibid.
40
Yasunao Tone and Tetsuo Kogawa, “Paramedia art to wa nani ka—tekunoroji o koeru sōzō [What is
paramedia art—creation exceeding technology],” Subaru: Bungei kikanshi 13 (September 1991): 181.
41
Yasunao Tone, quoted in Licht, “Yasunao Tone—Random Tone Burst,” 31.

212
up.42 To design his ideal staircase, he felt an impulse to try out the sound of other staircases by

throwing objects down from the top steps. Soon he carried out his experiment at the staircase

leading to a railway station in Nagoya. When he threw a bucket of junk with various ringing

objects, such as a ping-pong ball, juice can, and tea canister, down the staircase, he found the

sounds were disappointedly dull. The huge gap between his conceptual sound and the resultant

sound made Suzuki realize his stair experiment was actually a twofold process—a concatenation

of throwing and following. That is, one does an action of projecting sound into a space with

conceptual concentration and then follows the phenomenon by listening intently to the

consequences of its resonance. Suzuki’s stair experiment, which was later named Kaidan ni

mono wo nageru (Throwing Objects Down a Staircase, 1963), initiated his series of self-study

events in the following years. Suzuki went on to study natural sounds and echoes in various

places with his goal of diminishing “the gap between music born out of concepts and actual real-

life noise.”43

It was around the same time as his stair experiment that Suzuki first learned about Cage

through Ichiyanagi’s 1962 article in the magazine Geijutsu shinchō.44 Reading how Cage

treasured the importance of listening to sound, Suzuki was surprised to find that there was

someone thinking in almost the same way that he did.45 “I felt shocked . . . and attracted by

42
Akio Suzuki, Ichirō Okumura, and Chinatsu Makiguchi, “Oral History Interview with Akio Suzuki,
Conducted by Ichirō Okumura and Chinatsu Makiguchi, March 22, 2009,” Oral History Archives of Japanese Art,
entry posted December 31, 2014, http://www.oralarthistory.org/archives/suzuki_akio/interview_01.php.
43
Akio Suzuki and Aki Onda, “Akio Suzuki with Aki Onda,” translated by Aiko Masubuchi, Issue Project
Room, entry posted September 2012, https://issueprojectroom.org/news/akio-suzuki-aki-onda.
44
Toshi Ichiyanagi, John Cage, and Daisetz T. Suzuki, “Zen'ei ongaku no hassō to tenkai [The concept and
development of avant-garde music],” Geijutsu shinchō 13 (November 1962): 106–11.
45
Akio Suzuki and Yutaka Tanimoto, “Suzuki Akio-san intabyū [Interview with Akio Suzuki],” The
Phoenix Hall, entry posted March 16, 2007, http://phoenixhall.jp/interview/2007/03/16/631/.

213
Cage’s musical ideas,” Suzuki said, “Cage made me think that there are some things that I want

to do that cannot be realized by architecture.”46 Because of Cage, Suzuki decided to move to

Tokyo and pursue a career not as an architect.

Since then, Suzuki has presented avant-garde sound events and installations in Japan and

abroad. In the 1970s, to explore unknown sounds and echoes, he created various objects, such as

an echo instrument Analapos (1970), featuring two metal cylinders connected by flexible, coiled

wire. In the 1980s, Suzuki applied his idea of “throwing” and “following” to a space for listening

in nature. From 1987 to 1988, Suzuki and his then-wife Junko Wada, with the assistance of their

friends, built an open-air listening space Hinatabokko no kūkan (Space in the Sun, 1988) with

two huge parallel walls in Kyōtango, a city near Kyoto (fig 5.2). After a year and a half of

construction, on the autumn equinox, September 23, 1988, Suzuki was finally able to sit down

and concentrate for twelve hours on listening to the sounds of nature reflected between two

walls. Listening to the eternal sound created by echoes bouncing back and forth, he realized that

“sound, which had been conceptually imprisoned in various spaces, is freed to circle the

world.”47 By attuning himself to his surroundings through the sound walls he made, Suzuki says,

“I acquired the skill to become one with nature, like the trees that surrounded me.”48 Suzuki’s

artistic practice, which constructed an immediate relation with sound, echoed Cage’s interest in

the presence of actual sound. Yet, unlike Cage, who used almost everything from a toy to a

cactus as an instrument for producing sound, Suzuki prefers listening to natural sounds. His

46
Suzuki, Okumura, and Makiguchi, “Oral History Interview with Akio Suzuki.”
47
Akio Suzuki, quoted in “Biography,” Akio Suzuki Web Site,
https://www.akiosuzuki.com/web/profile01-en.html (accessed February 20, 2019).
48
Suzuki and Onda, “Akio Suzuki with Aki Onda.”

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openness to the sounds of nature is based on a meditative stance that does not exclude the

subjective self as much as Cage did.

Figure 5.2 Akio Suzuki and Space in the Sun, September 23, 1988. Photograph by Junko Wada.49

In the 1990s, Suzuki further explored the listening side of his method of “throwing” and

“following” by creating soundless installations to question the specific location of music. His

famous soundless project Oto-date (listening points), first created for the sound art festival

Sonambiente in Berlin in 1996, showed him paying his respects to Cage as an inspiration. Over

the course of a month, Suzuki walked around numerous places in Berlin, searching for the best

echo points for listening to the special sound qualities of the city. Whenever he found a spot with

diverse or evocative sound sources, Suzuki would mark the points on the ground with a symbol

modeled on Cage’s own ears, rendered in white paint (fig 5.3). Suzuki explained that he got to

sketch Cage’s ear when he went to New York for the first time: “I spent time with John Cage and

49
Space in the Sun, September, 1988, digital image, The Wire, accessed February 23, 2019,
https://www.thewire.co.uk/news/49047/akio-suzuki-s-space-in-the-sun-has-been-demolished.

215
the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. We went to [put on] a performance in the Canary

Islands. While we were waiting in the Kennedy airport, I had the time to sketch John Cage’s left

ear. It was very important to me, so I always brought that sketch everywhere.”50 For his Oto-

date, Suzuki decided to use Cage’s ear as a visual reference point to suggest opening oneself to

the unexpected sonic, visual, and even olfactory experience of the city. Suzuki commented:

In regard to Oto-date, I was influenced by John Cage . . . especially his chance listening.
Oto-date is a musical piece. Normally, a musical piece is five lines and dots—a score.
My score is this big field where people come and stop and then they listen and compose
music by themselves with the surroundings. Each person hears something different and
there are many various ways of listening.51

Based on the common view that silence is full of sound, Suzuki’s Oto-date is similar to Cage’s

works such as 4'33" in that its soundless framework allows all sounds in nature to be involved.

Yet Suzuki goes farther than Cage in his concern for the instantaneous connection between the

listener and a specific site. He believed that by setting up these listening points, he could suggest

to the public a way to understand the city, which has diverse sounds and presences, without

hierarchical value judgments.

50
Akio Suzuki, quoted in Chris Kennedy, “Akio Suzuki: Stop and Listen to The World,” Musicworks 115
(Spring 2013), https://www.musicworks.ca/featured-article/featured-article/akio-suzuki.
51
Ibid.

216
Figure 5.3 The symbol Suzuki used for Oto-date. Photograph by the author, taken at the Museum
of Contemporary Art Tokyo on July 21, 2019.

Keijirō Satō

Satō changed his career path from a composer to a sound artist after he had a satori

experience at Cage’s Japanese debut. While he was a medical school student at Keio University

from 1945 to 1952, Satō started to take private lessons in composition with Fumio Hayasaka,

redirecting his artistic aspiration from writing poems to composing music in 1949. Invited by Jōji

Yuasa and Kazuo Fukushima, Satō joined Jikken Kōbō in 1951 and became active as a twelve-

tone composer. In Spring 1952, Satō started to read D. T. Suzuki’s books, which Yuasa had

given to him, and he found that he resonated deeply with Zen philosophy. As he studied Zen

more and more, Satō began to feel an incompatibility between the twelve-tone technique and his

Zen-inspired ideas—for example, the idea that musical sound should not be a representation of a

composer’s will but a phenomenon of the present.

While Satō was wondering whether there was anyone in the world who viewed music in

the same way that he did, he met his fellow traveler Cage in 1962. A week before Cage’s debut

217
concert in Japan, Satō had borrowed Cage’s Silence from his friend Yoshiaki Tōno. While

reading, Satō became convinced by the consistency and completeness of Cage’s artistic views

and his engagement with Zen. He felt excited about Cage’s visit to Japan. At the concert in

Tokyo on October 10, Satō listened to Cage, Tudor, and Ono’s performance of Cage’s Aria and

Solo for Piano with Fontana Mix. Satō said that he was deeply moved by the music and even

reached the state of satori, an initial awakening of Buddhahood, during the concert. He later

analyzed his experience of satori at Cage’s concert, stating that it happened quickly as a three-

fold process: 1) a surprising moment first came like the turning on of a flashlight; 2) a feeling of

unity with sound; 3) a moment during which he found himself not existing, or getting away from

the consciousness thought: “I am listening.”52 Satō also felt surprised that the noisy music that

Cage performed sounded so beautiful to him even though he would not have been able to bear it

just a week ago.53 He found that for him the key is the absence of expression: “because Cage did

not make the sound speak a word, I was able to see the essential movement of the things

[sounds].”54

After the concert, Satō approached Cage and asked whether he intended to present Zen in

his music. Cage answered no; however, when Satō told Cage that while listening to Cage’s

music, “I felt something in me just happened; I and sound. . . ,” before Satō could finish his

sentence, Cage finished it himself, adding to Satō’s sentence “I and sound . . . became one.”55

Cage’s quick response surprised Satō and led him to believe that Cage might have had a similar

52
Tsuneo Nakajima, Zen no sakkyokuka Satō Keijirō [The composer of Zen—Keijirō Satō] (Tokyo:
Tōkyōdō Shuppan, 2017), 251.
53
Ibid., 82.
54
Keijirō Satō, Taiken no arinomama [Experience as it is], Ongaku geijutsu 20, no. 12 (1962): 27.
55
Ibid., 28.

218
experience of becoming one with sound. Regardless of Cage’s denial, Cage’s closeness to Zen

affirmed Satō’s idea that music should not be a tool for composers’ expression but a framework

for the performers and listeners to discover the beauty and meaning of sound.56

After a period of ruminating on his experience of becoming one with sound at Cage’s

concert, Satō summarized his thoughts about listening in a note dated January 17, 1963: “To

reach the ideal state of listening, one has to accept that sound = environment and keep a balance

between self and the environment. . . . Although accepting all sound is absolutely passive,

intentional listening is absolutely active. . . . By keeping a balance between these two aspects of

listening, one could feel satisfaction.”57 Eventually, Satō moved away from composing with

traditional notation and moved to focus on the receptive state of the listener. Around 1965, Satō

began to make music outside the concert hall, building sound devices for showrooms or indoor

events. He invented the term “sound display” to illuminate his perspective on sound at the time.

He explained: “Cage’s visit to Japan is a big epoch for me. To describe my sound world which is

suddenly broadened [by Cage] in a short time, I adopt the word ‘sound display’.”58 The practices

of sound display that Satō carried out include setting up various speakers in the hallway or on the

floor of a building to draw the attention of the passersby, who normally pass through the areas

quickly. Instead the speakers caused them to notice the recorded bird sound that Satō had set up

in the space, in other words, making them conscious of the environment of the room through the

reverberation of sound. 59 At the same time, Satō also developed an interest in sound equipment

56
Nakajima, Zen no sakkyokuka Satō Keijirō, 83.
57
Keijirō Satō, quoted in ibid., 88.
58
Keijirō Satō, Keijirō Satō the Joy of Vibration, 3.22–4.2, 1974, Minami Gallery (Tokyo: Minami Gallery,
1974), n.p.
59
Keijirō Satō, quoted in Nakajima, Zen no sakkyokuka Satō Keijirō, 103.

219
and electronics. He invented an electronic instrument Electronic Raga (1967), which involves

the audience not merely as listeners but as participants in the creation of sound. When one

touches the circuit of the oscillator, one’s body, as a resistor, will become a part of the circuit,

making the Raga produce sound.

In the early 1970s, Satō moved from designing sound spaces and instruments to exploring

the physical phenomenon of the universe. He created kinetic art works which were made on the

premise of motion with materials such as ring magnets, vibrating rods, and water. For example,

one of Satō’s early works Otedama (1974) has a magnetic ring on each of sixteen acrylic sticks,

which stand upright on a round base. As autonomously as a living creature, the magnetic rings

move randomly close to (down) and away from (up) the AC magnetic field, powered by the

magnetic force. The movement of the magnetic rings on the acrylic sticks creates dry sounds

incidentally, making the chance quality of the physical phenomenon audible to the viewer.

In his work Gifu Susuki Clump '99 (1999) (fig 5.4), Satō used the vibration of rods to

cause the ascending and descending of balls. He put forty slender stainless-steel rods standing

upright on an elliptical base. Each rod has a small white ball that rotates and moves up and down

the rod continuously, powered by the vibrator at the bottom of each rod. Because the component

parts of the work were all handmade, all the balls move at slightly different speeds.

Unpredictable variation and autonomous movement are the key elements in Gifu Susuki Clump

'99 and Satō’s other kinetic art works. Although Satō is the creator of the work, what he intended

for in his kinetic art works is a performance done by nature and beyond his imagination. Similar

to Cage, who saw himself not as a composer but a facilitator of musical processes, Satō saw

himself as a mediator, whose existence is also the result of chance, mediating natural

components into an artwork.

220
 Figure 5.4 Gifu Susuki Clump '99. Photograph by Kunio Miyagawa.60

Cage beyond the Concert Hall

In addition to the performances of these four Japanese sound artists, other Cage-related

exhibitions or events held outside traditional classical music venues have become popular

gathering places for Japanese musicians and artists since the 1990s. Specifically, at these events,

sound artists in their twenties and thirties performed Cage’s works. From April to August 1993,

the performance space P3 Art and Environment, Tokyo, held the first exhibition of Cage in

Japan, “John Cage Sound Installation, ‘Writings through the Essay: On the Duty of Civil

Disobedience’” (hereafter “Essay”).61 In conjunction with Cage’s installation, there was a

60
Keijirō Satō, Gifu Susuki Clump '99, 1999, Stainless pipe, styrene ball, Collection of the Museum of Fine
Arts, Gifu, https://g-tokyohumanite.com/exhibitions/2019/0204/05.jpg.
61
The art director Takashi Serizawa (1951–) had visited Cage in New York and discussed the details of the
exhibition in March 1992. Cage had planned to attend the exhibition in Japan but passed away before that.

221
concert series of Cage’s music organized and performed by sound artist Keitetsu Murai (1962–),

Tatsutoshi Kawamura (1964–), who called himself a Cage fan, pianist Natsuki Emura (1965–),

sound artist Seiji Morimoto (1971–), and others. As a member of the generation who became

active after Cage passed away, Kawamura expressed that they felt obligated to inherit and

disseminate Cage’s music and musical ideas in Japan by following Cage’s philosophy correctly.

When organizing the concerts, Kawamura noted that they took on the challenge of performing

pieces by Cage that had seldom been performed in Japan, and they chose to have amateur

musicians, such as himself, on stage, to carry out Cage’s idea that music should be performed by

people at all levels of musical experience.62 At the end of the exhibition, more than half of the

participating performers continued to organize and perform Cage’s music or to realize Cage’s

artistic views in their artworks in the following decades.

A year and a half later, the Mito Art Museum held the exhibition “Rolywholyover A

Circus by John Cage” from November 3, 1994, to February 26, 1995, which was another huge

gathering of Cage’s Japanese proponents across several generations and genres in the years soon

after Cage’s death. “Rolywholyover,” planned by Cage in his last years, eventually landed in

Japan according to Cage’s wishes, after it had stopped in Los Angeles, Houston, and New York.

The exhibition had a format similar to “Essay.” Both exhibitions featured a dynamic display of

the pieces based on the result of chance operations throughout the exhibition period. Part of

“Rolywholyover” was a program of live events and performances, designed originally by the

Mito Art Museum and held in the museum’s Auditorium, in outdoor spaces, and on the street. In

addition to the performances by Cage’s well-known Japanese friends, Ichiyanagi, Kuniharu

62
Tatsutoshi Kawamura, “1992-nen no nikki [Diary of 1992],” http://tatsutoshi.my.coocan.jp/1992-.html
(accessed July 1, 2019).

222
Akiyama, Yūji Takahashi, Aki Takahashi, Kosugi, and Mieko Shiomi, there were multimedia

events and performances presented by artists and musicians of the younger generations, who did

not have much direct contact with Cage but were interested in Cage’s music and philosophy.

For example, on February 18 and 19, 1995, Mamoru Fujieda and botanist Yūji Dogane

installed their collaboration—the Plantron system, which would convert the electrical

fluctuations of plants into sound (see Chapter 3)—at the Auditorium. On November 27, 1994,

sound artist Shigeaki Iwai (1962–), as part of his event Chicken Farm and a Sound Artist,

released hundreds of chickens from a cage, aiming to depict the freedom that Japanese artists felt

when they were released from Cage’s ideology. On December 10, 1994, Seiji Morimoto, who

had gained experience performing Cage’s pieces in “Essay,” got to organize a concert of Cage’s

music with other young performers, such as Murai, Yoshiaki Inoue, and Tomomi Adachi

(1972–). He explained that the performance focused on the most experimental music of Cage

from the 1960s because he had a strong desire to know what these works sounded like (in the

1990s, Cage’s works from the 1960s were performed in Japan less frequently than his other

music). He saw himself as similar to “Cage, who never stopped at visualizing the sound in his

mind but would always try out the sound in order to experience the sound he wanted to listen

to.”63 Through experiencing Cage’s music in the early stages of his career, Morimoto says, “I

learned to listen to the ordinary sounds ( . . . birds, cars), sounds that can be found and not

composed [and I learned] . . . that one does not necessarily need notes to make music.”64 This

63
Seiji Morimoto, quoted in John Cage no rōrīhōrīōbā sākasu kirokushū [The record collection of
‘Rolywholyover A Circus by John Cage’], ed. Mito Geijutsukan (Mito, Ibaraki: Art Tower Mito Contemporary Art
Center, 1995), 22.
64
Seiji Morimoto and Marta Jecu, “Statement—Seiji Morimoto,” e-cart.ro 6 (August 2005), http://www.e-
cart.ro/ec-6/marta/uk/g/marta.html.

223
idea from Cage has laid a foundation for Morimoto’s later sound performances, installations, and

video works.

Similar to “Essay,” many participants in “Rolywholyover,” such as Fujieda, Morimoto,

Kawamura, Murai, Adachi, and Atsushi Nishijima (1965–, sound artist), continued to engage in

Cage-related events in Japan (or abroad) in the following years. From 2007 to 2012, Murai,

Nishijima, and Morimoto all worked together at the “John Cage 100th Anniversary Countdown

Event,” held all over Japan, organized by people from various backgrounds such as graphic

design, media art, photography, film, and theater.65 The solo performer and sound poet Adachi

helped organize the Japanese premieres of Cage’s Europera 5 (1991) in 2007, Water Walk

(1959) in 2008, and Variations VII (1966) in 2011. He also put together the chaotic outdoor

performances of Musicircus (1967) in 2012 and 2013, bringing together local performers (both

professional and amateur) from a wide range of disciplines against a backdrop of the everyday

working scene of the Adachi Fish Market in Tokyo.

Conclusion

In comparison to the musician-centered reception of Cage in the 1950s and 1960s, Cage’s

ideas after 1990 were embraced more by those artists who worked outside western classical

music and across the boundaries of music, sound, and art. The transition can be understood if we

look at the history of sound art in general. As Douglas Kahn explained: “Experimental music up

until the early 1970s accommodated what would now be called sound art, but by the mid- to late-

70s not only had art spaces become increasingly amenable to sound works, but musical venues

65
Murai, Nishijima, and Morimoto had also performed together at the concert “Chance music and
Performance” on January 29, 1998, as part of the “Special Program—John Cage,” held at the Aichi Arts Center.

224
and culture had grown more conservative (the rise of Phillip Glass being emblematic) and less

interested toward experimentalism.”66 Kahn’s explanation also applies to Japan. As discussed in

Chapter 3, interest in the avant-garde and Cage’s music generally declined among Japanese

composers in the 1970s, except among a handful of composers, who continued to draw on

Cage’s concept of indeterminacy to compose with elements of Japanese traditional music for the

purpose of establishing their own music language (Chapter 4). In contrast, Japanese artists who

worked with sound and were interested in Cage flourished in the 1990s. More and more of them

adopted the title “sound artist,” and their reflections on Cage started to outweigh the voices of

classical musicians and composers.67 Since Cage (along with composers of musique concrète) is

often credited as the precursor of sound art, it is not surprising to see Japanese sound artists

interact with Cage’s artistic philosophy.68 Their reactions to Cage are different from those of

Japanese composers in several ways. First of all, the sound artists mentioned in this chapter and

those who became active after 1990 did not emphasize their Japanese identity in their works as

much as those composers using traditional elements. Second, because many of them do not have

a background in classical music, their responses to Cage tended to be more conceptual than

technical, making Cage’s ideas more accessible to the general public. For example, Tone derived

from Cage the inspiration of using electronic media for productive creation; Suzuki resonated

with Cage’s interest in the presence of actual sound.

66
Douglas Kahn, “Sound Art, Art, Music,” The Iowa Review Web 8, no. 1 (Feb/March 2006).
67
Shōno surmised that another reason one heard for less about Cage from classical musicians and
composers might be the dwindling and aging of the classical music participants in Japan. According to his own
experience, concerts of classical and contemporary music in 1960s Japan were usually full of the young audience
members, while after 1990 there were comparatively more senior audience members at the concerts.
68
LaBelle, Background Noise, xii.

225
 When exhibitions and events of sound art became widely accepted in museums or art

galleries in 1990s Japan, those venues attracted Cage enthusiasts, whether for his music or

philosophy. They created more space for a new generation of Japanese musicians and artists who

did not have much experience listening to Cage to try out Cagean experimental music and their

own experimental projects. Those events held at the non-concert spaces also exposed Cage’s

name and music to a general public larger than just concertgoers. Although Yūji Takahashi

lamented in 1985 the lack of a successor to their avant-garde music in Japan, I found that these

sound artists of the younger generation have revived and passed on the spirit of Cagean avant-

garde music since the 1990s.69 Their connections to Cage’s musical ideas also respond to

Ichiyanagi’s ideal that Cage’s music in Japan “is accepted on the basis of the philosophical

questions that he proposed from the beginning instead of just relying on the techniques that he

used.”70 After the 1960s trend of composing with Cage’s aleatoric techniques, it is his

conceptions of sound and listening that have remained and continued to be reflected by Japanese

artists in various cross-disciplinary artistic forms.

69
Yūji Takahashi and Jun'ichi Konuma, Takahashi Yūji taidansen [Dialogues with Yūji Takahashi]
(Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2010), 308.
70
Toshi Ichiyanagi, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, August 28, 2017.

226
 Conclusion

In tracing the unknown cultural exchange between Cage and Japan, two sides of a

complex story have emerged. One is Japanese reaction to Cage, encapsulated as “Cage Shock,” a

term that simplifies the multifaceted voices of the Japanese. The other side is Cage’s personal

experience of learning about a country first through word of mouth and texts and later through

in-person visits and cross-cultural friendships. Now, we can see the ultimate goal of this project:

to delineate a local history that can show the geohistorical contemporaneity of avant-garde and

experimental practices—practices that were once considered unique to Euro-American music

culture. Art historian Reiko Tomii links local practices to global narratives through the concept

of international contemporaneity. Specifically, she proposes that we focus on “contemporaneity”

in the sense of simultaneity, not as a reference to the present (now).1 As she put it,

Geohistorical contemporaneity can be understood as seeing something occurring

contemporaneously with something else and living through it with that awareness. . . .
Geohistorical contemporaneity can serve as a strategy for decentering, for it is inherently
comparative and it enables a view from the periphery, not just the center. As such it
brings at least two (and potentially more) locales into discussion and generates a space
that is open for multiple viewpoints to operate in, prompting a reexamination of the
established narrative.2

Tomii’s concept of international contemporaneity illuminates the modes of connectedness

between Cage and Japan as well as between Cage’s reception in Japan and his reception in other

countries, for which this dissertation helps lay the groundwork. Although “contemporaneity is

formulated on the appearance of similarity,” Tomii wrote, seeking “similar yet dissimilar”

1
Reiko Tomii, Radicalism in the Wilderness: International Contemporaneity and 1960s Art in Japan
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 14.
2
Ibid., 14–15.

227
characteristics between two locales is the key to finding contemporaneous parallel practices.3 As

Tomii explained, while “‘similar’ allows us to see a global picture, ‘dissimilar’ anchors us to a

local manifestation.”4 Local histories are indispensable in constructing a transnational history.

With an eye to spotting “similar yet dissimilar” characteristics, historians can locate and

examine the type of “contact point” between locales. Tomii proposed that there are two types of

“contact points” or modes of connectedness. One is “resonances,” through which historians

retrospectively find conceptual similarities between two parties who had little actual contact or

awareness of each other at the time. The other is “connections,” in which two parties have actual

interactions, or when at least one party is aware of the other. To decenter a history, we needed to

identify both resonances and connections.

The fact that Japanese avant-garde music was thriving before Cage visited Japan can be

seen as resonant with the American avant-garde and experimental practices. The reception

history after Ichiyanagi introduced Cage to Japan marks the starting point of direct connection.

Specifically, the encounter of Cage and Japanese music circles, which has been characterized as

“Cage Shock,” had the power to arouse and transform resonances into connections. For instance,

regarding the relationship between Japanese artists, Luciana Galliano argues that Cage’s 1962

visit to Japan “was instrumental in bringing together people who recognized themselves as

participants in a similar artistic project.”5 Building on Galliano, I propose that it is starting from

Ichiyanagi’s introduction of Cage to Japan that the connections—the mutual awareness—

between the scattered local avant-gardists in Japan were strengthened. The distinction between

3
Ibid., 16.
4
Ibid.
5
Luciana Galliano, Japan Fluxus (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2019), xvi.

228
resonances and connections can also explain why the first postwar generation commonly spoke

against the “Cage Shock” narrative since they had developed similar yet dissimilar avant-garde

practices before knowing Cage. In fact, it was these similar yet dissimilar avant-garde practices

in Japan that drew Cage’s attention during his first trip to Japan and made possible the later

collaborations with Japanese artists such as Kosugi and Tone at the Merce Cunningham Dance

Company.

According to Tomii’s theory, influence can be understood as a particular kind of

“connection”—one that may generate new ideas but that can also build upon earlier, independent

“resonances.” Although influence can be problematic, some connections between Cage and

Japan reveals the fact that Cage has undeniably influenced some Japanese composers and artists.

As Christian Wolff wrote in his article “Under the Influence,” Cage himself never liked talking

about his influence on others, wary of the implications of power and control, along with what

Cage considered “a simple-minded, undialectic view of history.”6 Nonetheless, Wolff suggested:

“There are instances of influence for good. And for the influenced to declare themselves as such

can be an occasion for noticing congenial relationships.”7 For example, many Japanese

composers who were open to talking about Cage’s influence also found their artistic views were

already close to Cage’s own. However, the real difficulty is to define the type of influence they

received. Richard Taruskin once warned, “As one looks around at today’s music world, it is hard

to find evidence of [Cage’s impact]”; even though “a great many composers around the world

6
Christian Wolff, “Under the Influence,” in A John Cage Reader: In Celebration of His 70th Birthday, ed.
Peter Gena, Jonathan Brent, and Don Gillespie (New York: C. F. Peters, 1982), 74.
7
Ibid.

229
have dabbled with ‘indeterminate’ notation,” it is “only as an effect, an occasional blur.”8

Taruskin’s words apply only partly to Japan, where Cage’s impact is still felt. As we have seen

in Chapter 2, the “occasional blur” of experimenting with Cage’s aleatoric techniques did happen

among Japanese composers. Their period of experimentation ended when they realized that the

techniques Cage used were designed to deal with the social issues he was concerned with, such

as using indeterminacy to depict an ideal anarchic society. What has outlasted the “occasional

blur” is the fact that many Japanese composers continued to respond to the concepts of Cage’s

experimentalism, such as his idea of “spontaneity,” which encourages a search for alternative

values outside the dominant music trends.

In our interview, Ichiyanagi drew an analogy between Cage and Beethoven to explain the

fading away of Cage’s aleatoric techniques and the lingering popularity of Cage’s philosophy

among Japanese composers and artists:

For many people, what Beethoven did is connected to the universal value, so he has lived
for a long time in people’s minds. Even today people feel moved by Beethoven’s music.
If the composer only deals with the problem of technique without proposing questions
related to the entire humanity, one’s music will end when one’s life ends; one’s idea will
not continue reaching the audience after one has passed away.9

For Japanese (or at least for Ichiyanagi), beyond musical techniques, the universal value that

Cage and his music displayed was to make a world that is safe for creativity.10 As we have seen

in this project, many Japanese composers and artists felt liberated or encouraged by Cage to go

down the artistic paths they once hesitated to pursue. For instance, Cage’s re-contextualizing of

Japanese thoughts in his own aesthetic premises emboldened Japanese composers, such as

8
Richard Taruskin, The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009), 277.
9
Toshi Ichiyanagi, interview by the author in Japanese, Tokyo, Japan, August 28, 2017.
10
Kyle Gann, “No Escape from Heaven: John Cage as Father Figure,” in The Cambridge Companion to
John Cage, ed. David Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 260.

230
Ichiyanagi and Tōru Takemitsu, to engage creatively with Japanese traditions. Their experiences

correspond to what Wolff described as the liberating effect of Cage’s music, “The result tends

not so much to exert influence as bring about release, to be an encouragement to allow change, to

realize a climate of experimentation, because of his [Cage’s] eagerness for what is new and

because of his concern that whatever you did it should be simply what is (free of influence!).”11

The so-called influence of Cage is essentially the empowerment of the creator.

Across the countries that Cage visited, his long-term impact will always be difficult to

define. No matter where we look around the globe, Cage had a more powerful impact on musical

philosophy than on musical technique. However, what distinguishes the relationship between

Cage and Japan from other countries is the fact that Cage himself was fascinated by Japan’s

philosophy, music, culture, and people. His life-long conversation with the country has not only

created a wide range of meanings in Japan but also exemplified a transpacific exchange that

sheds light on Japan-US relations in the second half of the twentieth century.

11
Wolff, “Under the Influence,” 75.

231
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248
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249
 Appendix A—List of Formal Interviews by the Author

Fujieda, Mamoru. Personal interview in Japanese. Tokyo. October 1, 2018.

Hosokawa, Toshio. Personal interview in Japanese. Tokyo. November 13, 2018.
Ichiyanagi, Toshi. Personal interview in Japanese. Tokyo. August 28, 2017.
Ikebe, Shin’ichirō. Email interview in Japanese. December 5, 2018.
Kanno, Yoshihiro. Personal interview in Japanese. Tokyo. March 17, 2017.
Kawashima, Motoharu. Personal interview in Japanese. Tokyo. January 18, 2019.
Kondō, Jō. Personal interview in English. Kanagawa. March 16, 2018.
Miyata, Mayumi. Personal interview in Japanese. Tokyo. March 20, 2019.
Matsudaira, Yoriaki. Personal interview in Japanese. Tokyo. February 5, 2017.
Nakano, Kōji. Personal interview in English. Tokyo. April 1, 2017.
Sano, Kōji. Personal interview in Japanese. Tokyo. January 6, 2019.
Shiomi, Mieko. Personal interview in English. Osaka. October 16, 2016.
Shōno, Susumu. Personal interview in Japanese. Saitama. August 22, 2019.
Takahashi, Aki. Personal interview in English. Tokyo. May 16, 2017.
Takahashi, Yūji. Personal interview in English. Tokyo. January 29, 2018.
Tone, Yasunao. Personal interview in English. New York. November 12, 2017.
Yuasa, Jōji. Personal interview in Japanese. Tokyo. December 20, 2018.

250
 Appendix B—List of the Main Japanese Persons

Kuniharu AKIYAMA 秋山邦晴 (1929–1996): critic, member of Jikken Kōbō (Experimental

Workshop), first person to correspond with Cage from Japan

Mamoru FUJIEDA 藤枝守 (1955–): composer of Patterns of Plants series in collaboration with
Yūji Dogane

Toshi ICHIYANAGI 一柳慧 (1933–): composer, student of Cage, introduced Cage’s music to
Japan

Jō KONDŌ 近藤譲 (1947–): composer, compositional style sen no ongaku (linear music)

Takehisa KOSUGI 小杉武久 (1938–): artist, member of Group Ongaku, worked as a composer
and performer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Yoriaki MATSUDAIRA 松平頼暁 (1931–): composer of What’s Next?, Why Not?, and Where
Now?

Toshirō MAYUZUMI 黛敏郎 (1929–1997): composer, member of the Twentieth Century Music
Laboratory

Shūkō MIZUNO 水野修孝 (1934–): composer, member of Group Ongaku

Makoto MOROI 諸井誠 (1930–2013): composer, member of the Twentieth Century Music
Laboratory

Yoko ONO オノ・ヨーコ (1933–): artist

Keijirō SATŌ 佐藤慶次郎 (1927–2009): composer and artist, member of Jikken Kōbō

Minao SHIBATA 柴田南雄 (1916–1996): composer, member of the Twentieth Century Music
Laboratory

Mieko SHIOMI 塩見允枝子 (1938–): artist and composer, member of Group Ongaku

Aki TAKAHASHI 高橋アキ (1944–): pianist, premiered Cage’s Furniture Music Etcetera

Yūji TAKAHASHI 高橋悠治 (1938–): pianist and composer, premiered Cage’s Winter Music in
Japan

Tōru TAKEMITSU 武満徹 (1930–1996): composer, member of Jikken Kōbō, founded the
Music Today festival

251
Yasunao TONE 刀根康尚 (1935–): sound artist, member of Group Ongaku, worked as a
composer and performer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company

Jōji YUASA 湯浅譲二 (1929–): composer, member of Jikken Kōbō

Hidekazu YOSHIDA 吉田秀和 (1913–2012): critic, member of the Twentieth Century Music
Laboratory, collected the term “John Cage Shock”

252
 Appendix C—Cage and Tudor’s 1962 Performances in Japan

Concerts Performers Program

Oct 9, 6:30 pm Cage, Tudor, Wolff: For 6 or 7 Players
Tokyo Bunka Kaikan Ichiyanagi, Feldman: Atlantis
“Evening of John Cage” Kobayashi, Ono, Cage: Music Walk
Sogetsu Contemporary Mayuzumi, Cage: Atlas Eclipticalis with Winter
Series 17 Takahashi, Music [electronic version]
Takemitsu, Toshio
Kuronuma, and
others
Oct 10, 6:30 pm Cage, Tudor, and Cage: Aria and Solo for Piano with
Tokyo Bunka Kaikan Ono Fontana Mix
“Evening of David Tudor” Stockhausen: Klavierstücke X
Sogetsu Contemporary Wolff: For Pianist
Series 17 Ichiyanagi: Music for Piano No. 4
Cage: Variations II
Oct 12, 7:00 pm Cage, Tudor, and Wolff: For Pianist
Kyoto Kaikan Ichiyanagi Stockhausen: Klavierstuck X
“An Event of John Cage Cage: Winter Music [live electronic
and David Tudor” version]
Sogetsu Contemporary Bussotti: Five Piano Pieces for David
Series 18 Tudor
Cage: Cartridge Music
Oct 17, 6:30 pm Cage, Tudor, Cage: Aria and Solo for Piano with
Osaka Mido Hall Ichiyanagi, and Fontana Mix
“An Event of John Cage Kobayashi Stockhausen: Klavierstuck X
and David Tudor” Ichiyanagi: Music for Piano No. 7
Sogetsu Contemporary Cage: Variations II
Series 18
Oct 23, 6:30 pm Cage and Tudor Cage: lecture “Where Are We Going?
Sōgetsu Hall, Tokyo And What Are We Doing?”
“An Event of John Cage Cage: Theatre Piece
and David Tudor”
Sogetsu Contemporary
Series 19
Oct 24, 6:30 pm Cage, Tudor, Takemitsu: Corona II
Sōgetsu Hall, Tokyo Ichiyanagi, Cage: 0'00"
“An Event of John Cage Kobayashi, Ono, Michael von Biel: Composition II For
and David Tudor” Mayuzumi, Two Pianos
Sogetsu Contemporary Takahashi, and Wolff: Duo For Violinist and Pianist
Series 19 Takemitsu Brecht: Incidental Music
La Monte Young: Poem
Oct 26 Cage, Tudor, Schoenberg: String Trio
Sapporo Shimin Hall Ichiyanagi, Webern: Four Pieces for Violin and
Takahashi, Piano

253
Sapporo Contemporary Kobayashi, Xenakis: Herma
Music Festival Takemitsu, Ozawa, Takemitsu: Ring
Kuronuma, and Keijirō Satō: Calligraphy for Piano
others Ichiyanagi: Music for 12 Soloists
Cage: Music Walk
Ichiyanagi: Sapporo

254
 Appendix D—Cage’s Performances in Japan (1964–89)

Dates Purposes/Performance Locations

1964/ Tour with Tudor and Merce Cunningham Dance Company
Nov 10 & 11 Sankei Hall, Tokyo
Nov 12 Kōbe International House
Nov 16 Festival Hall, Osaka
Nov 20 Sōgetsu Hall, Tokyo
Nov 24 & 25 Sankei Hall, Tokyo
Nov 28 Sōgetsu Hall, Tokyo

1976/ Tour with Tudor and Merce Cunningham Dance Company

April 5 Kyoto Prefectural Gymnasium
April 8 NHK Hall, Tokyo
April 9–11 Seibu Theater, Tokyo
April 13 Hokkaidō Kōsei Nenkin Kaikan

1981/ Participated in the Marcel Duchamp Exhibition Memorial Concerts

August 1 & 2 Takanawa Art Museum, Karuizawa

1982/ Participated in the Music Today festival, which celebrated Cage’s

seventieth birthday
June 5 & 6 Seibu Theater, Tokyo

1986/ Premiere of Cage’s Etcetera 2/4 Orchestras in celebration of the

opening of Suntory Hall
Dec 8 Suntory Hall, Tokyo

1987/ Tour with Tudor and Merce Cunningham Dance Company

June 25–28 Nakano Sun Plaza Hall, Tokyo
June 30 Kyoto Kaikan
July 2 Osaka Kōsei Nenkin Kaikan
July 4 Kanagawa Prefectural Youth Center
July 6 Seitoku Gakuen Kawanami Kōjun Memorial Hall

1989/ Received the Kyoto Prize

Nov 10 Kyoto International Conference Center (award ceremony)
Nov 14 Nagoya City Museum

255
 Appendix E—Translation of the Titles of Japanese Journals

Japanese English translation

21 seiki hanga 21st Century Prints
Bijutsu techō Art Notebook
Geijutsu shinchō New Trends in Art
Gendaishi techō Contemporary Poetry Notebook
Kikan heru mesu Quarterly heru mesu
Kikan geijutsu Quarterly Art
Kōzui Flood
Ongaku geijutsu Musical Art
Ongaku gendai Modern Music
Ongaku kenkyū Music Research
Ongaku no tomo Friends of Music
Rekōdo geijutsu Recording Art
Sekai World
Shisō no kagaku Science of Thought
Shunjū Spring and Autumn
Subaru: Bungei kikanshi Subaru: Arts and Literature Journal

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