<p> <i> Ondo</i> was written for my grandmother’s 88th birthday. The composition comprises six sections based on a popular folksong, called “<i>Tanko-Bushi</i>,” which can be heard in every Japanese town during the <i>Bon</i> festival. Obon is a holiday in August, when we return home once a year to pay respect to our elders and ancestors. “<i>Tanko-Bushi</i>” became popular in Japan around the end of the Second World War and was based on a popular song from the early part of the twentieth century, around the time my grandmother was born, and has taken many forms since; it continues to do so under varied contexts and the versions I encountered there as a child, while attending the summer festivals with her, would have been but a small sample of these. As I worked on <i>Ondo</i>, I tried to imagine what it might have been like to live through all of the changes that took place in Japan over the past century. I think of the composition as a commentary on the westernization that has been taking place there and on the orientalization of Japanese identity—as an act of harmonizing disparate values. Between and within the sections, I explore varying degrees of fragmentation as they relate to, or disrupt, unifying threads that run through the four main sections (1, 3, 5 and 6). Above all, I wanted the piece to be enjoyable for my grandmother to listen to. The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra gave a reading of the four main sections of <i> Ondo</i> on 28 January 2011 at the SPCO Center in Saint Paul, MN. Subsequent to the reading, two interludes (sections 2 and 4) were added as contrasting materials and as expansions upon the relationships explored between the diverse approaches to formal considerations in the piece.</p><p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:10809519 |
| Date | 29 December 2018 |
| Creators | Tanikawa, Takuma |
| Publisher | The University of Chicago |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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