Shakkei 借景 (2019)
Title | Shakkei 借景 (2019) |
Year | 2019 |
Composer | Daryl Jamieson |
Instrument/s | kannel, 13-string koto |
Commission | arrangement commissioned by ISCM World Music Days Estonia |
First Performance (date, performers, venue) | 2019-05-07 Avro Pärt Centre, Laulasmaa, Estonia, premiered by Kristi Mühling, Naoko Kikuchi |
Contact Info | |
Note |
arrangement of 2015 piece. shakkei is a term from Japanese gardening. It means ‘borrowed scenery’, and it describes the way that master gardeners use naturally occurring features – rivers, mountains, etc – to enhance their garden. By designing their garden to work in harmony with the surrounding environment, both the garden and the environment are enhanced. In this piece I treated the two instruments – koto and guitar, both 20th century versions of instruments millennia old – in a relationship akin to the garden and the mountain: their musical lines are independent to a certain extent, but they also complement each other and bring out a certain beauty that would not exist in each of the parts played on their own. The shakkei metaphor will also work another way: that of the immovable mountains of very different and very temporally distant traditions being used as a conceptual background to enhance the music I write today. |