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

http://daryljamieson.com

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.