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Japan-USA Music Goodwill Mission Concert
Presented by MCEC INTERNATIONAL, Inc.
Genshu Kai
Lady’s Harp
Richard Hartley and the Haven House Choir
Carnegie Hall
www.carnegie.org
Nikolas J. Lund
March 14, 2007
Program:
Lady’s Harp
Hisako Yano, Director
Kanashii Sake
Furusato
Tokyo Ondo
Tohge no Wagaya
Genshu-Kai
Genshu Kurachi, Director
Fuusetsu Nararetabi
Banba no Chutaro
Uso (with Genshu Kai and Takashi Kurachi)
Uewomuite Arukou
Kitaguni no Haru
Mikan no Hana Saku Oka
Hisako Yao, Director
Kawa no Nagare no Youni
Richard Hartley and the Haven House Choir
So Glad That I’m Here
Total Praise
I Can See My Blessing
Praise His Name
King Of Kings
Testify
Kawa no Nagare no Youni
This concert was a total wildcard.
The Carnegie website said only “Japan - US Music Goodwill Mission Concert: “Concert featuring traditional and popular Japanese and American music.” And yet, this was enough to lure me out. Traditional and popular Japanese music. How can I resist such promising ambiguities?
I showed up with no expectations and didn’t bother to read through the program notes. “Let it all get lost in translation”, I snarked to myself. I heard Japanese language around me in the audience and saw lots of bright super-modern t-shirts. I heard cell phones going off too, somehow ringing with a brighter and richer polyphony than any American handheld ever would.
The concert was introduced by a gentleman wearing maybe the coolest t-shirt of all. Something or other was said about America and Japan being like “the Sun and the Moon” and about how the concert too was going to be “Sun and Moon” too, and then I think also something about “saving the children”…which I finally decided MUST be the aim of this event. I didn’t wonder too hard about the Sun and/or the Moon line though.
Then the concert began. Eight women wearing matching blue dresses and one man in black came out and sat at three long tables rising to aft of the stage. They brought with them flat table-top string instruments of some kind, which, when each plugged into a central amplifier, hidden somewhere behind the stage, filled the hall speakers with a sound which really is best described as the sound of an equal number of electrified mandolins being played with plastic picks by a corresponding number of women wearing matching blue dresses.
The music was the essence of an unnamable familiarity. Something entirely within a musical temperament one knows from so-called Western music and yet completely concealed in its foreignness behind a Japanese title (read over a loudspeaker before each began) that yielded nothing to my Western ears. Every bar was part of some endlessly reflecting anthem of perfect themes. Parts of it seemed like the distilled substratum of some music begging the development of the basic motif from which it steadfastly would not diverge. It was music that was instantly forgettable. And when I tried to commit myself to “following” the themes I found instantly upon application of my attention that there was actually practically nothing to follow. That it constantly melted away into itself.
It was like every animated movie soundtrack I had ever heard playing at the same time.
And after playing their identical but different songs they bowed and exited. And then 15 women wearing matching black dresses came out and played some more of this music. And this went on for some time. The number of women changed throughout, at one point reaching 45, while the dresses changes from black to green and back to blue again. The songs remained inscrutably simple and shimmery. Like so much pink candy.
And yet for all of its candy-like taste, it did not sicken. One simply got lost in the sound and sensation it sustained so precisely through every song. Drifting off a bit and watching the sound bounce around the gilded ceilings of Carnegie Hall, I confess there may have been a moment or two in the suspended animation where I felt that I was at the end of history. But the fantasy sounds eventually came to a final refrain, as perfectly composed as every other moment, no more or less climatic or beautiful. The women bowed and exited for the last time, and stagehands came to break down their popular-music-apparatus and clear the risers for the next act.
Which turned out to be a Brooklyn-based gospel choir. This truly beautifully adorned choir filed out into their two rows. The back-up band was totally hot and was already building up a fierce rhythm when the choirmaster came out in a single-piece robe studded in the wrists and neckline with such fabulous Bling as I never have seen.
When the leader raised his bejeweled arms and the singers opened their mouths, the immensity of the sound was extraordinary. It pushed the limits of poor Carnegie’s constrained resonance, and yet exhilarated all the more for it. After letting the mind idle for so long in the glistenings of the Japanese harp-ladies, the force of this choir brought tears to my eyes. It was undoubtedly the greatest sound I have ever had the pleasure to hear in this hall. The sound of the voices with the band smacking away behind was superb, but the rare moments of unaccompanied chorus were devastating. The sound of those voices alone revealed a diabolically precise ecstasy of intonation unlike anything I have ever heard.
While the choirmaster gesticulated wildly along with the choir, yelling wild benedictions and calling for hallelujahs, people danced and shouted back. Much of what was screamed on stage was all but inaudible, but everyone certainly understood when the man cried “This is Church!” Indeed. Even some of the harp-ladies, now relocated to the balconies—but still seated by dress color—had joined with some modest swaying and clapping of their own.
The room was spinning by now.
At the end there were no straight lines to be drawn in this concert. Or I’m inclined, let’s say, to keep the Sun and the Moon in their respective places. Goodwill nevertheless certainly seemed in abundance at this “Goodwill Concert,” and I suppose that I was just happy to have finally heard someone use speakers in the hall and make the most of the space. I was feeling a lot of goodwill towards amplified sound, certainly.
Otherwise my emotional state following all these juxtapositions was totally incomprehensible. I literally stumbled away from this one. Definitely one of the best concerts I’ve heard at Carnegie.
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