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Gentrification真っ只中チャリティショップで見たもの
またしばらくアップデートさぼっていてすみません。
この夏は手術をしてずっと休養しておりました。
それでそろそろ元気になってきて夏休み恒例の洋服の整理などして着なくなった服を寄付しにRSPCA(動物愛護のチャリティ団体)が運営する近所のショップに行ったのですが。。。

私は東ロンドンの同じ場所にもう20年以上住んでいるのですが
最初は移民が多く、物価も安い、フレンドリーな、その一方治安はあんまりよくない、とされていた場所でした。実際同じ通りで殺人事件は何度もあったし、自分の住んでる建物にもポリスが来るのは日常茶飯事、自分の家も一度空き巣が入り、車(いつもホンダ)のエンブレムやカーステ盗まれたりしたこともありました。
しかしミュージシャンをはじめとしてあんまりお金がないけどある程度便利なところに住みたい(うちはZone2)アーティストはもともとたくさん住んでいました。
それがいつの頃からかだんだんに住んでいる人たちの様子が変わってきて、治安もよくなってきたのです。
それが始まったのを感じたのは近所の商店街におしゃれなカフェができて、そこに行くとなんだかStoke Newington(わりと近くのすでにGentrificationが進んでいた地域)みたいな教養のありそうな小金持ちみたいな若い親子連れみたいのがいるのです。そこである時小さな女の子が床に寝っ転がってわんわん泣きわめいて何かが欲しいとだだをこねている。。。その欲しいものというのが何と「オーガニック・キャロット・ケーキ」!! ちっとも美味しそうじゃない、クリームも何にもついてない、単に茶色い代物です。私はこんなもん泣き叫んで欲しがるなんて、その子が不憫になりました。と同時にこの地域も終わったな、と。笑
それから道ゆく犬がどんどん高級化しました。昔は単なる雑種か、でなければピットブルテリアみたいな危ない系の犬だったんですが、今はラブラドゥードゥル(ラブラドルレトリバーとプードルのミックスですごくおっきくてカールのかかった毛の犬)とかシベリアンハスキーとか大きくてかわいいやつか、チワワのすっごいかわいいやつとか。もうテレビのドッグショーでしか見たことなかったみたいなやつばっかり歩いてる。
それから昔は週に何回かしかごみの収集がなかったのが1日朝晩2回!!
地元のGPも病院もなにやらカスタマーサービスが良くなってハムステッドかどっかみたいだし。
今まではWaitroseに行かないと買えなかったヨーロッパのチーズが近所に出来たデリで量り売りで買えるし、PUKKAっていう日本では成城石井で1000円近くするみたいなハーブティーが近所のスーパーで1.99ポンド(安い大手スーパーより安い)だし、オーガニックチョコレートのGREEN&BLACKがどのコーナーショップでも買えて、それもスーパーより安い。。。挙句の果てはお店で焼いてる1個2ポンドもする北欧風ペストリーのアルチザンブレッドの店が大繁盛。。。どうなってんの。。。
それで今日、着ない服を寄付しにRSPCAに行ったんですが、そこで見たもので完全に衝撃を受けました。。。昔ロンドンに来たばかりの頃、高級住宅地のチャリティショップに行けば一流ブランドの服がものすごく安く買えるって読んだりしてたのですが。。。なんとヴェルサーチxH&Mのコラボのシルクのプリーツスカートが15ポンドであったんです!!サイズが小さすぎてだめだったけど、合ってたら買ってたと思う。eBayで売れば何十ポンドにもなりそうなもの、タダで寄付しちゃう人がこの近所にいるなんて。。。もっともeBayに出すのって最近は特にめんどくさいし、そんな努力と時間かけて何十ポンドにするより、さっと持って行って動物のために15ポンド寄付することになったらそれでいいよね、ってのもわかる。
というわけで、ああ、Gentrifictionもだいぶ極まってきちゃってんだなあ。。。とつくづく思ったのでした。今ぐらいならまあいいけど、これから物価とかあがっちゃったりして住みにくくなると困るなあ。。と少し心配になっています。

# by YumiHaraCawkwell | 2017-08-26 06:48 | Others その他
2017年11月下旬-12月上旬
年末にむかっての予定ですが

2 Dec 2017, Sakedelic Space Shuyukan, Oumi Hachiman, Yumi Hara, Chris Cutler & Tim Hodgkinson
3 Dec 2017, Takamatsu, Yumi Hara, Chris Cutler & Tim Hodgkinson

だけ日程決定したところです
ホジキンスン先生何十年ぶりかの来日となります
11月24日ごろから12月4日ごろまでのスケジュールを考えています
私事の事情で7月に入ると全く仕事ができませんため、今から今月末ぐらいまでには日程固めてしまうつもりですのでオファーはお早めに!!

# by YumiHaraCawkwell | 2017-06-15 08:35 | Performance ライヴ関係のお話
Half the Sky: Music of Lindsay Cooper
Half the Sky: Music of Lindsay Cooper_c0129545_06211771.jpg
22 June 2017, Cafe OTO, London, 19.30 https://www.cafeoto.co.uk/events/half-the-sky/

25 June 2017, Avantgarde Festival, Schiphorst, Germany, 14.15 http://www.avantgardefestival.de/TICKETS.html

Half the Sky: Music of Lindsay Cooper (Yumi Hara, Chris Cutler, Miwazow, Wataru Ohkuma, Mitsuru Nasuno, Chloe Herington, Dagmar Krause)
plus DJs (at Cafe OTO only)
James Larcombe (North Sea Radio Orchestra, William D. Drake, Stars In Battledress etc)
Marina Organ (The Other Rock Show)

‘… a solid ensemble with the music perfectly rehearsed but also with an unusual warmth ...…a very emotional finale to the festival...' Victorio Calvo

ABOUT LINDSAY COOPER:Lindsay Cooper (1951-2013) brought the bassoon and the compositional techniques of 20th century art music into the world of ‘70s experimental rock. She was a musical polyglot, equally fluent in classical, rock, jazz, and free improvisation and the author of many film and theatre soundtracks. She was a member of the groups Comus, Henry Cow, National Health, David Thomas and the Pedestrians and the Mike Westbrook Orchestra. She co-founded News from Babel and the Feminist Improvising Group and led her own projects Music for Films and Oh Moscow. She lived for many years with multiple sclerosis, which eventually forced her to retire from performing in the 1990s.

PROGRAMME:A selection of Lindsay’s compositions for the groups Henry Cow and News From Babel and Music for Films, 1978 – 1982.

ENSEMBLE:
Yumi Hara: arrangements, piano, keyboards, lever harp, voice (The Artaud Beats, you me & us, Jump for Joy! etc)
Miwazow: koto, ching-dong percussion, voice (CICALA-MVTA)
Chlöe Herrington: bassoon, soprano sax, melodica (Knifeworld, Chrome Hoof, VÄLVĒ)
Dagmar Krause: voice (Henry Cow, News from Babel, Slapp Happy etc)
Wataru Okhuma: alto sax, clarinet (CICALA-MVTA)
Nasuno Mitsuru: bass (Korekyojinn, Altered States, etc)
Chris Cutler: drums (Henry Cow, News from Babel, The Artaud Beats, etc)

HISTORY:
In 2013, soon after Lindsay Cooper passed away, Matthew Watkins made a call for arrangements of her mini-composition Slice for a special edition of his podcast ‘Canterbury Sans Frontières: Episode 8’. I made a transcription of the piece and recorded it for solo clavichord. Chris Cutler and I also played it in Japan and NY. A little later, inspired by the three memorial concerts Chris Cutler organised in 2014 with the original bands, I put Half the Sky together to play Lindsay’s music in Japan. The gender split follows Lindsay’s general practice and the example of the original bands - Henry Cow (50% female) and News from Babel (75% female).

SOURCES:
With the exception of Slice, it was only after - and because of - the 2014 concerts that any working scores for the Henry Cow pieces became available, having been painstakingly assembled from Lindsay’s notebooks, original band-members’ surviving parts and careful analysis of the recordings. A handful of the News from Babel songs – none of which had ever been performed live – had already been reconstructed for the memorial concert by Zeena Parkins; the rest I had to work out from scratch – as well as rearranging everything for a mixture of occidental and oriental instruments. This programme is approached very much as a music of the present - and not as an academic reconstruction. (YH)

photos and audio/video recordings policy for Half the Sky:
Members of audience are allowed to take photos and make audio/video recordings as long as they:

don't use flash and make any shutter sound
don't cause any disturbances for other members of audience (i.e., no standing and walking around)
give us raw data immediately and allow us to use the data whatever we like for no charges
don't sell
if they want to upload on the internet, they must let us know and if we don't like, they must take them down



‘Women hold up half the sky’ Mao Tse Tung

https://www.facebook.com/halfthesky


At our forthcoming London (22 June) and Schiphorst (25 June) performances, we will be playing UK/Germany premieres of News from Babel pieces including Dry Leaf, Arcades, Heart of Stone, Banknote and Auschwitz/Babel which were transcribed by myself and specifically arranged for Half the Sky which includes Japanese instruments (koto and ching-dong percussion) and three parts vocal harmony by Dagmar Krause, こぐれ みわ and myself, not only truthfully recreating the original multi-track recording, but also extending it...you have never heard anything like this...don't miss!!

Now we are very pleased to announce that we will have brilliant DJs to set the mood and atmosphere, before, after and in between our sets...and not too loud so that the music will not intervene your socialising (well, this will surely become a big socialising opportunity for our audience!) ... Please welcome Marina Organ of The Other Rock Show (Resonance FM) and James Larcombe of Stars In Battledress, North Sea Radio Orchestra, William D. Drake, etc! Expect music that you want to hear but "The music the record companies don't want you to hear", of course
# by YumiHaraCawkwell | 2017-06-13 06:24 | Half the Sky
Japanese Gardens and Sounds
Japanese Gardens and Sounds
Yumi Hara


I decided to put some pieces of information and my thoughts together here because the research process itself would be interesting, I thought, and I could add information easily as I find.

Chris Cutler asked me, for his podcast series ‘Probes’:
‘interested in a source for the philosophy of garden/water sounds in japan and a condensed history if such a thing exists - or whatever you can tell me..’

It took me a couple of email exchanges to find out exactly what he wanted to know…clarifying what he meant by ‘garden/water sounds in Japan’ to begin with. So I asked him whether he was talking about these things:
suikinkutsu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suikinkutsu
shishiodoshi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shishi-odoshi

and his reply was ‘yes, but is there a firm tradition, with a philosophy behind it? are there rules?’

I still wasn’t quite sure, so I asked:
‘do you mean musically/sound aesthetics-wise? (such as the sound must be like this, rhythms have to be like this, etc?) or construction? (how to build and where they are placed) both?’

And his reply:
‘yes, those things but more importantly is there a philosophy - a why it is good to do this and what aspect of the sounds for instance, is beneficial; what purpose does it serve? what tradition does it belong to? where did it originate and why?’
‘maybe these are wrong questions or questions that can’t be answered…’

I got an idea more or less, and as for most things Japanese, I did know of these and how they sound, how they look like, how they work and how people appreciate them, but no idea about ‘philosophy behind’ them, probably because they are just there, like the sound of cicadas and crickets, also wind chimes in summer…This reminded of me Tadanobu Tsunoda’s theory…Japanese speakers (n.b. not genetically Japanese, but people whose first language is Japanese) perceive and process nature sound such as water sound and insect by the left (language) brain (see Yumi Hara Cawkwell Identity, Ethnicity and the International Music Scene: Oriental composers and Western expectations pp.23-26). This theory has been controversial, but I guess everyone would agree, at least, that people in Japan do appreciate and enjoy these sounds to the extent that no other culture does. It is so culturally embedded…onomatopoeia of these sounds appear in songs for children and we grow up with these. They appear in classic and modern literature. The Ministry of Environment designated ‘100 Soundscapes of Japan’ to hear such sounds in 1996.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Soundscapes_of_Japan

On the following day Chris asked me, David Toop was mentioning in his Facebook entry that the background ‘music’ in a Japanese restaurant where he was dining in Tokyo was the sound of ‘suikinkutsu’. I don’t normally see the word that often…probably once every 10 years or so…

One of good things living in foreign country: people ask you about ‘your own culture’, and you'd have to find out about it and ended up gaining more knowledge than living in home country, although sometimes I’m not quite sure whether some things actually belong to ‘my own culture’ or not. Japan is a big country and actually very diverse. Anyhow, I did know about these and became curious, I decided to gather some information for Chris and write this little article so he can refer to, as these things are easier to find in Japanese language, and not a lot of them are translated in English.

And I am really amazed that the first thing I found was that:
the first ever suikinkutsu unearthed and properly researched exists within walking distance from where I grew up in Tokyo, the same area as the rehearsal studio Half the Sky used in 2015. It was built in a garden of a large house now is part of local history museum http://www.city.shinagawa.tokyo.jp/jigyo/06/historyhp/en/hsindex.html

Apparently suikinkutsu was long forgotten device until prof. Hirayama published an article in a gardening specialist journal in 1959, at that time there had only two suikinkutsu been found, neither of them produced any sounds. His article was the first ever mentioning the term ‘suikinkutsu’. He heard about it in 1920s and actually saw one in Tottori prefecture in 1937, then in Shinagawa ward in Tokyo (the one I mentioned above) in 1956. In 1981, Shinagawa ward local authority commissioned Tokyo Agricultural University to research it, and it was reported in Asahi Shinbun (national newspaper), then in 1983, the paper mentioned it twice, from then on, it became known to wider Japanese public. In 1986, suikinkutsu in Gifu prefecture was discovered and reconstructed, and a documentary TV programme was made and NHK broadcast nationwide, since then it really came to public knowledge and nowadays there are many newly created suikinkutsu in Japan.

It seems like most of the research and articles are in the field of gardening and acoustics (how it produces sound), and discussions have not been done in philosophical or musicological way. So below are rather random findings I have come across, but may be of interest:

Hikaru Tamura, maker of modern suikinkutsu and gardener, says 'suikinkutsu itself is not visible, only the tiny sound is heard, that’s wabi-sabi aesthetics. Most of the unearthed suikinkutsu are from Edo period, and there is no literature found from that time, so probably it is thought to be not that popular and the skills to built it was kept secret which is probably why it was forgotten and no tradition was passed down. (pp8-9, Nihon Suikinkutsu forum journal vol.7, 2003, translation by Yumi Hara, originally in Japanese) http://www.suikinkutsu.com/suitoha.htm

Ryoichi Ohashi, an owner of newly built modern suikinkutsu, says ‘there is no water in my garden so I wanted this instead. I guess that was one of the functions of it: imagining water by hearing the sound of water which should be in Japanese garden’. (NHK 'Bi no Tsubo: Mizu no aru Niwa', translation by Yumi Hara, originally in Japanese) https://www.nhk.or.jp/tsubo/program/file172.html)

Japanese gardens tend to represent the nature, so water is one of the important elements. Even if there isn't any, there is a desire to express water (karesansui in Ryoanji, for example).

Another reason why water is important in traditional Japanese gardens is that the guests need to wash their hands before tea ceremony, so there must be hand washing facility at the entrance of gardens…there came suikinkutsu idea. The excess water from the wash basin was utilised to make the sound.

According to Asahi Shinbun, crock (which was used in suikinkutsu) was also buried under Noh stage, Buddhist temple bell and even Judo gym. I guess it must have been used as amplifier with 'effect unit'.

Since the rediscovery and construction of modern version of Suikinkutsu, it has already been used for collaboration with musical instruments such as shakuhach and (western) harp, and soundscape community is showing interests.

In contrast to long-forgotten suikinkutsu, shishiodoshi (‘device to scare lions’) seems to have much clearer aesthetical idea from the very beginning of the introduction to Japanese gardens. The first person who introduced this to garden (it had been deterrent for wild animals), Jozan Ishikawa
(1583–1672), stated that 'If there was no sound, silence is not impressive, but the sound of bamboo tube hitting the stone emphasise the silence in between the sounds' (NHK 'Bi no Tsubo: Mizu no aru Niwa', translation by Yumi Hara, originally in Japanese) https://www.nhk.or.jp/tsubo/program/file172.html

Jozan Ishikawa's garden is in Shisendo temple in Kyoto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shisen-dō

I haven’t found any comprehensive literature about sound and Japanese gardens in Japanese language. In English, although I haven’t actually read it, probably this may be the most comprehensive book about the matter: http://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-2568-4/sound-worlds-of-japanese-gardens

# by YumiHaraCawkwell | 2017-04-30 12:19 | Others その他