Music can be a passive history lesson. Sometimes, it can take us on a fantastic, aural journey, as with Japanese composers active before World War II who reflect in their music nearly half a century of tumultuous, societal change.
A concert Tuesday featuring works by Yasuji Kiyose (1900-1981) provides a rare chance to hear Japanese history. The program of Kiyose's songs, chamber works and short piano pieces written during the prewar years of 1932-1940 and in the postwar years between 1949-1966 reveals both the musical side of the volatile 1930s and the shift toward the internationalism of post-Olympics Japan.
Kiyose, hailed as one of the godfathers of modern music in Japan, was a rare combination of entrepreneur and creative artist. He was a romantic dreamer with roots in rural Oita Prefecture. With no formal music training, he moved to Tokyo in his 20s to try his luck as a professional musician and found gainful employment as a piano accompanist. In 1930, Kiyose and his friends formed the Newly Rising Composers Federation to foster the growth of Japanese styles of composition that would "equal or surpass" Western archetypes.