Yasunao Tone in Concert with Barbara Held

Concert
January 19, 2023, 8pm
Artists Space, New York City

As part of the retrospective Yasunao Tone: Region of Paramedia, Artists Space is pleased to present a special concert with legendary sound artist Yasunao Tone and flutist Barbara Held. For this rare performance, the pair will perform four pieces Tone originally composed for Held—Trio for a Flute Player (1985), Aletheia (1987), Lyrictron for Flute (1988), and Zen and Music (1990).

Throughout the 1980s, Tone and Held performed several pieces that challenge traditional notions of composition; namely, the role of composer and performer, the legibility of a score, and the perception of sound as “music.” The point of departure for each of those featured in this performance is a found text—the seventh-century Man’yoshu anthology of poems (Trio for Flute Player), an ancient Chinese dance score (Aletheia), Tang dynasty flute tablatures (Lyrictron for Flute), and ancient Japanese shakuhachi flute music (Zen and Music). From these sources, Tone’s scores embark on an open-ended translation across media, technology, and writing systems. In Trio for a Flute Player, for example, musical staves printed on transparencies are superimposed atop calligraphic renderings of poems in Classical Japanese, with twentieth-century English translations included on each sheet. Transforming the written notation into sound, Held reads the poems in English through the mouthpiece of her flute while fingering the keys of her instrument, their position determined by a reading of the Japanese characters as they appear on the staves as tablature. Her instrument, which she calls her “Tone hacked flute,” is modified with foam pads placed on the keys that, when pressed, alter the strength of an electric current running through an oscillator and cause unpredictable variation in the pitch and intensity of the sound.

In performing these pieces, Held reads each text-based score faithfully and without interpretation. Focusing on a literal translation of the score’s instructions, the performer loses any sense of the text’s original meaning and the impulse to play according to her own classical training. What follows is undirected and uncontrolled sound modulated by the vacillating noise of Tone’s technical interventions.

On the occasion of this exhibition and performance, the audio engineer David Meschter has restored the Lyrictron system he created for Tone in 1988, which will be used in the eponymous performance. Lyrictron consists of a computer program that converts flute pitches into words recited by a computerized voice and expressed as impromptu haikus on a monitor.

Yasunao Tone: Region of Paramedia is on view at Artists Space January 13 – March 18, 2023.

 BARBARA HELD, HUAN SHAO-CHING, YASUNAO TONE

Saturday, March 9, 1985

Previous Performances

Trio for Flute Player uses three sound components, sound from the flute itself, the flutist’s voice and electronic sounds, all to be performed by the solo flutist.  These components are based on a single source, poems from the 8th Century Japanese anthology, the Manyoshu.

The curvy line of calligraphy of the poem, overlaid by a musical staff, does not correspond with pitches or any tonalities but with the player’s finger placements.  (Note that a flute player uses nine fingers, coinciding with the number of lines and spaces of the staff — five lines and four spaces.)

Fingering, with its movement and pressure, triggers an electronic sound, varying in pitch and intensity, which is generated by an oscillator with a capacitor.  The poems, translated by Sid Corman in “The Peerless Mirror”, are read through the flute mouthpiece.

The sound of the original Manyoshu poems, the other part of the “signifier” of the poem, serves as the substructure for the rhythm and intensity of performance.  The poems are not interpreted but transformed into sound.  The electronic system was designed by Yoshi Saito and slightly revised by David Meschter.  The piece was commissioned by Barbara Held and was made possible by funding from the New York State Council on the Arts’ Commissioning Program.

from Upper Air Observation, a CD published by Lovely Music, Ltd.