Brown-bag with Brown-bag with Steven C. Ridgely, Assistant Professor of East Asian Languages and Literature

Wednesday, April 18, 2012
12:00 noon to 2:00 pm
Room 460 Memorial Library (Memorial Commons)

Title: "Auditizing the Image, Temporalizing Space, Yuasa Jōji"

The postwar composer Yuasa Jōji, who got his start with Takemitsu Toru in Jikken Kōbō (The Experimental Workshop) during the 1950s, would by the end of that decade develop a compositional strategy based on concepts from the mathematical fields of topology and set theory. Yuasa traces his interest to a lay introduction to these fields by Toyama Hiraku called Mugen to renzoku (Infinity and connectivity, 1952), and this blending of theoretical math and music positions Yuasa amid what might be seen as a second wave of fascination with modernist science among non-sci-fi Japanese culture-producers (the first being the Einstein boom in the 1920s). In this presentation I will focus on several of Yuasa’s recently published graphic scores (correlated to performances of the compositions), particularly in their relationship to topological ideas of manipulation of plastic forms and Yuasa’s claim to an interest in “auditizing” or “temporalizing” images and ideas.