written may 10, 2009

My father, Masao Tokito, loved classical music from a young age and apparently hoped to become a professional violinist. My older brother Akimasa played classical guitar and sang well. My second brother, Naohiko, took up the clarinet early on — ours was what you'd call a thoroughly musical family. As for me, Kazuo, in my early childhood I was musically hopeless. I was completely absorbed in plastic models and model airplanes (engine-powered ones) and showed no musical promise at all — so much so that one day my brother Akimasa bought a pair of castanets and told me, "Even you should be able to keep time for my guitar with these."

When I turned 14, an older student from my middle school who lived nearby said to me, "Why don't you play trumpet in the brass band I'm in?" That was finally my entry into music. Once I started, I found it quite interesting and intended to keep at it, but ran into a problem: the school's trumpet was so old and full of holes that it had to be held together with wire just to be playable. I asked my father, "Please buy me a trumpet for Christmas," and he looked deeply troubled and said, "Wouldn't French horn or flute be better than trumpet?" We went to a secondhand shop, and while there was no French horn, there was a flute — and that became my introduction to the flute. I soon began serious study under Shōgo Komatsu-sensei, and finally became a true member of my musical family.

After middle school, I entered Hokusei Gakuen Boys' School. Since there was no brass band there yet, I asked the music teacher, Mr. Sennari, and we formed a nine-member band — I learned to play trumpet, of course, but also trombone, euphonium, sousaphone, clarinet, and more, first teaching myself and then teaching friends. Through Chinari-sensei's introduction, shortly before I turned 17, in the summer of my second year of high school, I went to the Interlochen National Music Camp in Michigan, USA, for eight weeks. What struck me immediately upon arrival was the extraordinarily high level of the students. On the very first day, a combined orchestra of Division I and II students sight-read Sibelius's Symphony No. 2 — and they played it so beautifully that my jaw dropped. (At that rate, I thought, I won't even be able to play my flute properly.) Next came Rimsky-Korsakov's Capriccio Espagnol, with every instrument's solo cadenza performed flawlessly — I realized I had truly arrived somewhere serious. At that camp, there were 32 flutists just in the high-school orchestra division alone.

They divided us into two orchestras, but before doing so, they held a "challenge" where students played two at a time competing for seating, and this determined the seating order. As a result, I placed second — but second from the bottom, meaning 31st counting from the top. Back in Sapporo I had been first flute in the HBC Junior Orchestra and had probably been getting a bit full of myself, but this experience knocked all that out of me completely. Still, rather than being discouraged, it seems to have spurred me on.

When I discovered that this camp, outside of summer, became a special arts high school — the Interlochen Arts Academy — I made up my mind about something. I found a metaphorical stone to bite down on and told myself, "I'm staying right here to study music." I planned to have my return airfare refunded and cover tuition and living costs, staying as long as it took — even through February or March if necessary. A fellow camper, a Japanese percussionist named Tsutomu Yamashita, translated for me as I went to the academy office to convey my intentions. The staff were thrown into a panic and immediately called my father in Sapporo to discuss it. My father asked me whether I truly wanted to stay, and with my one-word "Yes, absolutely," the matter was settled. It later turned out that once the school term had begun, the return ticket I'd purchased in Japan couldn't be refunded within the US — but apparently moved by my determination, the school never turned me away, and two years later I graduated from that school.

Let me share one episode from that time. Early in the camp, on a rather hot day, I saw a kid eating pale-colored ice cream in front of an ice cream stand and asked what it was called — he told me "vanilla ice cream." After waiting in a long line, I finally said, "Vanilla ice cream, please" — but it came out as "banana ice cream," and I was told, "We don't have banana, next please," and left without any. What I learned from this: first, that "va" wasn't "ba" but "va" — I hadn't even been able to hear the difference. Second, and more importantly, I couldn't pronounce "L." Japanese "ra" sits between English "ra" and "la," but it's never heard as "la" — always as "ra." I gradually realized that if you touch the tip of your tongue to the back of your upper front teeth before saying ra, ri, ru, re, ro, it sounds like "L." I proposed a notation using small hook marks on the katakana ラリル to distinguish the "L" sound in Japanese dictionaries — half in jest, as a way to help readers' English pronunciation.

Compared to the summer camp, the Academy had far fewer students, but it still had a full-size orchestra. Conducted by Dr. Saul Johnson, we gave weekly subscription concerts, tackling a heavy program including Mahler's Symphony No. 2 and No. 5. On one occasion Aaron Copland himself came to conduct the Academy orchestra; one of his pieces required alto saxophone, and since I was the "jack of all trades," I ended up playing it. By that point I was also playing piccolo without any hesitation. Dr. Johnson recognized my piccolo playing and later invited me to play piccolo with the Green Bay Symphony Orchestra in Wisconsin, which he conducted. The principal flutist there was my Academy teacher, Gary Sigelrenzon.

After graduating from Interlochen Arts Academy, I returned to Sapporo for the first time in two years. I considered attending a Japanese music school for college, but since I'd graduated from an American high school, it made more sense to attend an American conservatory. On the recommendation of teachers from the Academy, I sent an audition tape to Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. Happily, I was accepted with a scholarship, so I ended up going back to the US once again.

At Oberlin, I studied flute with Robert Willoughby. He was a man of remarkable intellect who taught me about the logic and structure of music, and how to apply and express that understanding in performance. Both my grandfather and grandmother had moved from Kagoshima to Hokkaido, so perhaps because of the "Satsuma samurai blood" running through me, my music when I first arrived at Oberlin was driven largely by raw emotion — rough and unrefined, I suppose. At first I strongly resisted my teacher's approach. Young as I was, I thought: "Music isn't made of logic — it's built from soul, heart, and emotion. Are you trying to crush that with theory?!" But then it suddenly struck me: "With this kind of resistant attitude, I won't be able to learn anything over the next four years." So I pictured a box in my mind of a modest size (the kind a pair of shoes comes in), put my emotions inside it, and tucked it away on a shelf.

After that, everything my teacher taught sank in smoothly and became second nature. A few years later, in nearby Cleveland, I had the chance to hear a wonderful shakuhachi performance by Tatsuya Yokoyama. On the cover of that concert's program, written in beautiful calligraphy, were the words "ichi-on mushin" ("one note, no-mind"). Yokoyama's performance was exactly that, and it moved me deeply. It struck me then that Japanese music — shakuhachi music especially — allows one to lose oneself completely in a single note, whereas Western classical music might be described as "sen-on tekiri" (a thousand notes, all fitting perfectly) — where even a thousand or fifty thousand notes are all logically justified.

I studied at Oberlin from 1968 to 1972. At the time, the Conservatory was deeply engaged in the study and performance of contemporary music — from the twelve-tone music of Schoenberg and Berg to figures like Stockhausen and Xenakis. Exposed to this "atonal music," I began thinking about many things, which I'd like to write about here. I divided my thinking into two broad areas. One was discovering the structure of atonal music itself. The other was reexamining the true nature of "tonal music" — encompassing the Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods. It was rather like only truly seeing your hometown once you've left it. Let me start with the second question.

Among Hindemith's teachings is an observation about the relationship — the pull — that exists between two notes, based on the interval between them. The interval where this pull is most clearly felt is the perfect fourth and fifth. With a perfect fourth, the upper note pulls more strongly; with a perfect fifth, the lower note pulls more strongly. This is rooted in the physics of sound — the structure of overtones. For instance, if low C is the fundamental, twice its frequency gives the C an octave up, three times gives the G above that, and four times gives C two octaves up. This G sits between the tonic C's, pulled toward the C a fourth above and also drawn to the C a fifth below. Add harmony, and this pull becomes even clearer: in C major, the dominant chord G–B–D is pulled toward, and inevitably resolves to, the tonic chord C–E–G. I came to understand this as "the gravity of sound."

Today, space shuttles and the world of space travel are commonplace, and I think music resembles this quite closely. Tonal music, which relies on a tonic center and this gravitational pull of sound, is much like living on Earth's surface, governed by gravity. Atonal music, by contrast, is like the near-weightlessness experienced aboard a space shuttle. (I say "near" because even while floating freely inside the shuttle, the shuttle itself still orbits the Earth under its gravitational pull. Likewise, no matter how "atonal" music claims to be, as long as it uses sounds created by vibrations in air, it can never fully escape the pull of overtones. I think this is a very apt parallel.) But the human mind has its limits, and without conscious effort, we often fail to notice things we've simply grown used to.

Recently, in a lesson, I picked up a nearby chair, tilted it about 45 degrees balanced on two legs, and asked a student, "If I let go, which way will this chair fall?" Before the student even had time to think "oh no, here he goes again with something odd," they'd carefully consider left or right and answer. What happens here is this: normally, a student looking at an ordinary chair feels nothing particular about it — but tilting it makes them consciously aware of the pull of Earth's gravity. The same thing happens in music. Unless we consciously heighten our awareness, we miss the gravitational pull of sound entirely. Once you can perceive this pull, you begin to understand the destination of a melody, the momentum driving toward it, and the emotional movement that arises from it.

Now, back to the first question — uncovering the structure of atonal music itself. As I touched on earlier, analyzing this near-weightless music reveals a sound arrangement in which gravitational pull is deliberately hard to feel. The twelve-tone system is a good example: if all twelve semitones are used equally, none of them can easily become a tonal center. Composers avoided the intervals with the strongest pull — perfect fourths and fifths — and instead favored minor seconds, major sevenths, diminished fifths, and similar low-pull intervals, lining up dissonant harmonies. This raises the question: if you strip music of its gravitational pull, what's left? At the time, "experimental music" was in vogue, so every conceivable style existed. A few examples: music with no form; music with no tonic and no consonance; music with no melody; music with no rhythm.

Taking this to its logical extreme, John Cage wrote a piece called "4′33″," in which a performer — say, a pianist — sits at the piano and plays not a single note for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. If you strip away the elements of music one by one, is this where you inevitably arrive? Of course, Cage himself was interested, at that moment, in every sound occurring within the concert hall.

In this way, once you strip away all the elements of music, what remains is a space of time. Within that space, you can discover the "sculptures" formed by the shapes and groupings of sounds. Then you begin to see the relationships and balance among those sculptures. It seems that in any well-crafted piece, regardless of style, there is a beautiful sense of balance. Looking at the great classical composers — Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and others — through this lens, I discovered their works achieve perfect balance.

That reminds me — around my senior year, I finally took out that box I'd tucked away on the shelf, blew off the dust, and opened it up. My heart inside was still very much alive and well. I took it out and placed it into a new home — not the old makeshift shack, but a proper structure with a real foundation (though still under construction) — and it was overjoyed.

Kazuo Tokito