Shamisen Works by Colleen Christina Schmuckal: Performed by Tetsuya Nozawa

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shamisen Works by Colleen Christina Schmuckal: Performed by Tetsuya Nozawa Marty Regan (bio) Shamisen Works by Colleen Christina Schmuckal: Performed by Tetsuya Nozawa. Kokoro Records, KKR-010 (2016): One CD-ROM (64 minutes). US $27. Released in 2016 in collaboration with shamisen1 performer Tetsuya Nozawa, this compact disc is composer Colleen Schmuckal's first. It features five works for shamisen in combination with various traditional Japanese instruments and voice. Colleen Schmuckal graduated from Northern Illinois University in 2008 with a bachelor of music in composition and bassoon performance and first began her shamisen studies under the auspices of a Monbukagakusho grant from the Japanese embassy in Chicago in 2009. In 2013 she received her master's in teacher education from Yokohama National University. She is currently pursuing her PhD in musicology at Tokyo National University of the Arts, focusing on developing new analytical methods and compositional techniques for traditional Japanese music and musical instruments. She currently works as a lecturer at Tokyo National University of the Arts and Rikkyo University and is a member of the Hōgaku Composers Alliance 2010,2 an organization dedicated to supporting new music for traditional Japanese instruments. Her works are frequently performed at new music concerts in Tokyo. All works on this compact disc feature shamisen performer Tetsuya Nozawa.3 Nozawa began his studies of the shamisen in 1997 with Akiko Nishigata and graduated from the Institute for Contemporary-Traditional Japanese Music, affiliated with Senzoku Gakuen College of Music, where he currently teaches. He has won a number of awards, including first prize at the Tokyo Traditional Music Competition in 2005. A strong proponent of new music for shamisen, to date Nozawa has commissioned and recorded more than 150 new works from up-and-coming composers on 15 compact discs. Scored for solo shamisen, The Ethereal Wind Dance (2012) was awarded second prize in the prestigious sixth Makino Yutaka Composition Competition. As Schmuckal writes in the liner notes, "The wind is linked to a shapeshifting crow from Japanese folklore, the tengu. The invisible wind takes a form we cannot grasp or define. At times it murmurs, dances playfully, rages, and curls around warmly. While both violent and calming, wind's shape is as [End Page 160] unfathomable as a tengu still dwelling somewhere within an untouched forest. No matter how much the world modernizes around us, it's possible that deep within the forest the tengu is still dancing with the wind" (liner notes, 2). The first movement, "Untouched Forest," is pensive and mysterious throughout. The pitch collection for this movement is unexpectedly bright for the shamisen, utilizing a traditional gagaku4 tuning known as sōjō, which represents spring in gagaku music theory. A single pitch repeats methodically and functions like a melodic drone, from which various composite melodies slowly emerge. The movement ends quietly and introspectively. The work becomes more playful and rhythmically animated in the second movement, titled "Tengu Step." This movement highlights a number of idiomatic shamisen techniques, including left-hand pizzicato, portamento, and reverse arpeggio. The third movement, "Clouds Float By," plays with the listener's expectations. Several times there is a sudden increase in tempo as well as rhythmic and dynamic intensity, only to be quickly thwarted. This helps prepare the listener for the highlight of the entire work: the fourth movement, titled "After the Storm." This movement features an array of compositional gestures, motives, and virtuosic techniques that dazzle the listener with their sheer intensity and technical prowess, although at times the performance comes across as somewhat mechanical. In the final coda, there is a reprise of playful motives encountered in "Tengu Step," rounding off the entire work. Scored for two shamisen, in Terra's Mirror: The Spirituality of Celestial Being (2013), the two instrumentalists "embody the scientific and romantic relationship between the earth and moon" (liner notes, 3). The title is based on a selection from "The Spirituality of Celestial Bodies," written by the composer's younger sister Diana Schmuckal. Characterized by jagged, agitated, and unpredictable rhythms, the two shamisen twist and turn around each other in a web of thick, relentless contrapuntal activity. A more relaxed middle section characterized by space, economy...