On Time and Space

In her works, the Tokyo-based Japanese composer Yu Kuwabara (b. 1984) seeks to bridge the gap between contemporary composition and traditional Japanese art and music. In 2017, she was selected by Wolfgang Rihm for the Lucerne Festival Academy’s Composer Seminar. At the Forward Festival two years ago, she presented Hidden Melody, a piece she composed for Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s Ligeti-inspired project “In Search of György Ligeti’s Lost Melody”. This fall, her virtuoso ensemble piece Time Abyss will receive its Swiss premiere.

In Time Abyss, you consider the concept of time. More precisely: you manipulate the musical parameter “tempo” in order to make us think about how we perceive time (and that of the musicians). How does this process work in detail in the three movements?
In Time Abyss, I have devised three unique time fields: “Nested Time,” “Slanted Time,” and “Twisted Time.” “Nested Time” is made by piling up many ritardandi [gradual decreases in tempo] that decelerate into repeats that are twice as slow as at the start. In “Slanted Time,” the tempo is intentionally set to be slow, creating an enormous space within each beat. This space results in fluctuations and gaps in each performer’s sense of tempo, making it challenging to synchronize. As a result, performers are forced to count carefully and to focus on maintaining pressure before producing sounds. This means they should pay more attention to each sound than usual. Consequently, the energy of each sound accumulates, resulting in a more stable and durable quality when released. In “Twisted Time,” the beats constantly change on each bar. These three kinds of time fields keep unfolding individually in a circle. I tried finding a “form” by modulating between them. This composition is like listening to three kinds of music while changing these channels.

You write that you were inspired to do this by your involvement with traditional Japanese music and art. In what way?
For me, composing is a way to think about who I am, or, to be more specific, why I was born in Japan as a Japanese, and I always try to capture the essence of Japanese sound, Japanese time, and so on. My music is organic in the sense that the transition of energy associated with breathing and the “voice” rooted in the body’s sense of movement is manifested in and through the sound image – not as an analogy but as it is. The sense of time formed by the accumulation of small things does not correspond to the usefulness-bound time according to which we usually live; this quantitative sense of time is destroyed through the alternation and inter-mating of the three temporalities. What emerges instead is a different, experiential, phenomenological, lived, qualitative time experience that exists under the vertigo of usefulness that covers our life as organisms.

The word “Abyss” in the title of your work already makes it clear that the dimension of space is added to the dimension of time in your composition: the 17 musicians are divided into two groups, and both groups are also tuned differently. How are the two dimensions – space and time – musically connected in Time Abyss?
To me, time and space are almost synonymous and ambivalent. Thus, sound/music is already time and space. My work is created by listening to the interplay between the two sides of the equation, capturing the qualities between them at the most subtle level possible, and then gradating between them. The division of the 17 players into two groups is based on the need for sound quality and timbre. However, there is indeed an intention here to explore the boundaries between the two defined worlds as well.