Patriotic Music

 Memorial Day in the United States commemorates its military personnel who died in defending their country. Music is often played in remembrance: the national anthem, “Taps,” “God Bless the USA,” “America the Beautiful,” “This Land Is Your Land.”

Music can also reflect political flows and tensions. Mid-nineteenth Meiji curiosity about Western culture included absorption of foreign classical and religious music. The first piano wasn’t heard until the opening of Japan, but by 1875 the Japanese were manufacturing their own pianos and other Western musical instruments. On the bureaucratic side, the Meiji government created the Music Study Committee, which encouraged Western music. They wanted Japanese composers to write in the Western style, and the committee the German model of music instruction for all students. The committee also led to the founding of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, which Tomoko attended.

Just as often, Japan co-opted Western music to advance their own patriotism. One propaganda strategy during World War II was singing. As part of Japan’s growing nationalism, the government commissioned lyricists to write patriot words to Westernized music or traditional folk tunes, which became a required part of each grade’s curriculum. Tomoko was in elementary school at that time, and sang those songs. Besides promoting Japanese superiority, these songs also encouraged adventurousness. One of the songs ended with a verse that suggested, “I want to put a boat in the sea and go to another country.” Who knows if those lyrics waited in Tomoko’s subconsciousness to be awakened years later when she set her heart to come to America? 

European Influence on Japanese Music

Tomoko’s favorite piano music continues to be European classical compositions. That taste was started early in her life as she heard European classical music on the radio and the organ pieces that her brother played. These habits reflected the earlier Japanese interests in Western   (generally European) music.

Traditional Japanese musical tonality differed from its Western counterparts; it uses a Phyrgian scale of E-F-A-B-C-E instead of C-D-F-G-A. The Phyrgian scale is also used in modern blues minor keys. The oldest forms of Japanese music include Buddhist chant and orchestral court music. Traditional folk music included religious songs and songs for gatherings, work songs, and children’s songs. Typical instruments were stringed instruments, drums, flutes, bells. The first piano wasn’t heard until the opening of Japan, but by 1875 the Japanese were manufacturing their own pianos and other Western musical instruments.

Emperor Mutsuhito, who adopted the title Meiji – or Enlightened Rule – in 1867, pushed for modernization with an eye to the West to avoid becoming dominated by other countries. In 1868, the government issued the Charter Oath: a five-article document outlining the principles of the Meiji administration. It declared that “knowledge shall be sought throughout the world.” Meiji curiosity about Western culture included absorbing foreign classical and religious music. On the bureaucratic side, the Meiji government created the Music Study Committee, which encouraged Western music. They wanted Japanese composers to write in the Western style, and the committee required the German model of music instruction for all students. The committee also led to the founding of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, which Tomoko attended. 

Combining Western and Japanese music could be challenging though. For instance, Christian religious tended to be Western based, which was sometimes hard for Japanese to intonate. And when missionaries tried to translate their hymns into Japanese, they found it hard to match the rhythm to Japanese text. 

The tension between Western and Japanese music and their currents continued to flow through Tomoko’s families. During World War II at school Tomoko’s class sang nationalistic music with Japanese lyrics set to European music. Tomoko’s mother played and sang Christian songs, and Tomoko’s brother became a composer in the more Japanese mode. 

Nevertheless, Tomoko brings her Japanese sensibility as she performs music from around the world.

Singing Sibelius

Sibelius was one of the featured composers at Tomoko’s November concert. Miwako Isano sang soprano, and Tomoko accompanied her.

Sibelius is considered Finland’s greatest composer and helped develop his country’s national identity, even though his songs were written in his mother tongue Swedish. He drew upon the Finnish landscape in his tone poems, and he captured the spirit of Finland in his patriotic works. 

Jean Sibelius was born in 1865 and died in 1957. Sibelius’s family vacationed on the coast each summer, which started his love of nature: picturesque, primitive and sublime. 

Although he started with piano, Sibelius turned to the violin and considered going professional, but he chose to become a composer instead.

Varen flyktar hastigt (Spring flies fast), Opus 13 No. 4 was one of a set of seven songs with lyrics by Runeberg, published in 1982; the opus was his first publication with his name on the title page. The song elegantly captures the essence of Nordic seasons. Sibelius had just returned to Finland from Vienna, and wanted to express Finnish culture in his music through incorporating the tonalities of traditional folk music such as natural-minor tonics and accentuating Finnish language rhythms. At that time Finland underwent a national romanticism, partly in protest to Russia’s looming preoccupation of the country.

The end of the 19^th century marked the most productive time for Sibelius in composing songs that were performed the most often in Europe at the time and globally since then. The songs were generally melancholy and even chilling in effect.  

The duet performed two songs from the 1899 Opus 36: Demanten pa massnon (The diamond on the March snow) and Säf, säf, susa (Reed, reed, rustle). The former uses a diatonic approach to express the transition of seasons. The latter bemoans the cruel treatment of a young woman in love, using a metaphor of crashing nature. 

Their final selection was the last song in the Opus 37 five-series set, published in 1901. Flickan kom ifran sin alskings mote (The girl returned from meeting her lover). The song expresses a traditional sense of lost innocence and sexual change. It also became one of Sibelius’s most celebrated pieces. 

Even though Sibelius touted Finnish nationalism, his songs resonate universally.

The Musical Soul of Europe

Tomoko has always had an eye on European music, which is not surprising. The Germans were particularly prominent in the early 20^th century, several of whom resided in Japan and lectured at the Tokyo School of Music. On their part, some Japanese composers were intrigued by Western art music, and incorporated those tonalities into their pieces.

Europe has always been part of Tomoko's musical soul. Even before staring school, classical European music was part of early family experience as her mother sang hymns, her father played violin, and they listened to classics on the radio.

As part of her schooling Tomoko remembered the importance of children’s songs. In the late 19^th century, the Japanese Ministry of Education reformed  music education by developing a music textbook that included Europe and American hymns and folk songs set to Japanese lyrics. Tomoko and her peers regularly sang these songs, which taught moral behavior and national pride.

During the war, Japan was largely isolated from the Western musical world, but the reputation of European music endured. Tomoko remembered attending a concert of Bohemian pianist Rudolph Serkin the early 1950s; “It was the most gorgeous feeling in the world.” Tomoko yearned to enter that society.

It wasn’t until 1967, though, that she had that opportunity. Her first flight to Europe was made possible through support of friends associated with the Conservatory of San Francisco. Tomoko took a chartered plan from Oakland to Frankfurt, where she performed and networked with musical illuminaries. Later that year she participated in the Long-Thibaud International Piano Competition and Paris, and in the following year she performed at the Queen Elizabeth International Musical Competition in Brussels.

Even after Tomoko curtailed competing internationally, she touristed in Europe, taking advantage of the long legacy of music. She visited Beethoven’s Viennese home, played an antique harpsichord in a Medici house, and perform Chopin’s Raindrops Prelude in Majorca in the museum dedicated to him.

Tomoko’s personal life also incorporated Europe. In Salzburg Tomoko married her husband, Desy Handra, who was an Hungarian medical doctor. And it was in Europe twenty years later that Tomoko helped her daughter navigate the international competitive skating scene.

Europe has served as a cultural gateway to music for Tomoko, which she passes onto her students, some of whom are Europeans themselves.