Intermezzi II by Misato Mochizuki
Makiko Goto - koto
Thessaloniki Concert Hall, 7 June 2016
From the composer's programme note:
My work series ‘Intermezzi’ is inspired by the thoughts of fragments by French philosopher and literary critic, Roland Barthes (1915-1980). Barthes stated that by writing many themes which seems to be unrelated to each other in fragmentary forms and then gradually the connotation in between them appears on the surface. He referred to the rhetoric of haiku which attempts to express emotions and feelings in brief and simple language as an ideal image text of it.
I composed ‘Intermezzi II’ at the commission of ‘Langspuren’, Swiss Music Festival in Tirol. Their request was “compose haiku with koto”. I was inspired by Barthes’s thought; “The fragment has its ideal: a high condensation, not of thoughts, or of wisdom, or of truth but of music: ‘development’ would be countered by ‘tone’, something articulated and sung, a diction: hence it is timbre which should reign.” Thus I tried my best to create ‘haiku’ or ‘renju’ that consists of six-haiku (intermezzi) in music with the rhetoric of timbre that can bring listeners imagination to the maximum.