AsianForum 142th "indigenous Indian software & traditional Japanese hardware in music: Indian raga on Japanese instruments koto & shakuhachi"

142th
Asian Forum
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
14:00-15:00
Honkan 402Tim Hoffman
Native of USA, with 4 decades in Asia (Japan, India, Sri Lanka, other) as musician, professor and NPO director. Graduate of 4 universities in USA, Japan & India. Lecturer in Japan’s Keio University & Musashino Music Academy. Trained by masters – in piano by Grace Mundorf Myers (USA); Japanese shakuhachi flute by Yamaguchi Goro (Tokyo); Hindustani vocal music by Pandit Ganesh Prasad Mishra (Lucknow); also Indonesian gamelan and Korean music. Awards from U.P. Chief Minister, Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan, East-West Center, American Institute of Indian Studies, other. Founder/Director of Indo-Japanese Music Exchange Association (estab 1989) – www.ijmea.com

indigenous Indian software & traditional Japanese hardware in music:
Indian raga on Japanese instruments koto & shakuhachi

The arrival in Japan of sound culture from the Indian subcontinent predates by some 1300 years the contact with Western music that transformed the musical environment of Japan. However, Japanese acuity in visualtactile observation has shielded from audible view many important features of sound shared between India and Japan, e.g, in the visibly different scripts and instruments used in language and music of the two cultures.
Following decades of extensive musicological research and practical trials in Japan and India, both the fiveholed flute shakuhachi and the 13-stringed koto of Japan have in India been officially deemed suitable for Indian raga — essentially, successful application of Indian ‘software’ to compatible ‘hardware’ of another Asian culture. As such, visible and audible factors operate integrally in complementary formulae.
The ideal in arts of crossover based on judicious selection of viable partners for collaboration, as opposed to the unpredictable dynamics of random experimentation characterizing the popular process of fusion, facilitates further stages of development in agreement with the nature of both/all contributing parties.
Challenging assumptions of what “contemporary” has connoted for millennia — East-West exchanges which have dominated cultural, political and commercial encounters worldwide — this North-South confluence suggests many latent prospects in intra-Asian co-development within and across disciplines and professions.

Poster

Lecture in English