Duo YUMENO’s album on the Naxos label is released in January 2023 worldwide. It features the complete Heike Quinto, a five-part suite composed by Daron Hagen for koto, violoncello and voice. The set of pieces is inspired by the medieval Japanese epic, The Tale of Heike, and focuses on the female characters who search for salvation and peace during the time of war.
“Played with precision and deep feeling by the duo… the piece was a gripping, gorgeous narrative of the life of a woman in 12th-century Japan. Full of idiomatic flavor, it made compelling use of the techniques of the Western classical tradition, especially polyphony and formal design. Most impressive was how the music told a clear, succinct, and unsentimental story using vocal sounds without texts.” – New York Classical Review
Duo YUMENO. Cover art for the Naxos release of the Heike Quinto by Kasia Idzowska
About the Heike Quinto
Appassionato (2015)
In my concerto for koto and string quartet (later, orchestra) I essayed the classic Japanese story Genji. For this duo, I have embraced The Tale of Heike, an epic medieval chronicle, which was compiled from oral stories chanted by traveling monks who sang to the accompaniment of the biwa, an instrument somewhat like the lute. In the duo, the koto player chants “Hei,” an alternate reading of the first character of Taira, the name of the family that figures centrally in the story. The core theme of the chronicle is the Buddhist law of impermanence.
In The Tale of Heike, arrogance, and pride of power lead to the Taira family’s destruction. Helen Craig McCullough’s translation begins with this statement: “The proud do not endure, they are like a dream on a spring evening; the mighty fall at last. They are as dust before the wind.” The title “Appasionato,” suggested by Duo YUMENO, inspired me to juxtapose throughout overtly emotional, dramatic musical gestures and contemplative, static, otherworldly gestures.
Rather than attempting to craft an extra-musical narrative for the duo, I chose a single situation near the end of the story that manifested most vividly the work’s theme. I created three movements (Before, During, After) that addressed empress Kenreimon’s moment of truth: in the first movement, she remembers the glories of the Taira family. In the second, she describes a dream in which she saw Taira asking her to pray for the family’s salvation. In the final movement, she struggles to separate from this world, invoking Amida’s name, and is at last welcomed by Amida Buddha to the Pure Land. First performed 15 March 2015 at the Tenri Cultural Institute in New York City by Duo YUMENO, Yoko Reikano Kimura and Haikaru Tamaki.
Cantabile (2016)
For this work I chose another key character in the story. I have created three movements (Without, Cavatina, Within) that address the historical (and literary) figure Taira no Tokuko's three states of existence. Without is a portrait of her as, in turn, daughter, consort, and mother of an emperor. Cavatina is a portrait of her years as a recluse and Buddhist nun. The final movement, Within, is a setting of the following poem, said to have been written by the great lady in her twilight.
Ai-je jamais rêvé
Que je contemple la Lune
Ici, sur la montagne -
La lune que j'ai l'habitude de voir
Dans le ciel dessus le palais?
Did I ever dream
That I would behold the moon
Here on the mountain --
The moon that I used to view
In the sky o'er the palace?
Misterioso (2017)
This work tells the story of Kogō (portrayed by the koto), Takafusa, and the Emperor's man, Takakuna (both men are portrayed by the cello). Kogō was the most beautiful lady and the finest koto player in the palace. Takafusa’s love for her was deep and pure. When she was summoned to Emperor Takakura’s side upon the death of his beloved consort Aoi No Mae, she fulfilled her duty. Sadly, Takafusa was one of mankind’s saddest souls, for, as Gide observed: “Nothing thwarts happiness as much as the memory of happiness.” He could not let her go.
Movement 1 (Kogō and Takafusa) portrays the lovers in the moonlight, illuminated by their grief. Kogō sings the words of a poem Takafusa has dared to send her, which begins: When I think of you, / There is no end to my pain. Upon her honor, she cannot finish reading the poem. She discards it and pours her feelings out in the still night playing her koto, counterpointed by the sounds of the whistling night wind, the lonesome calls of the gulls, and Takafusa's cries.
Movement 2 (Kogō Alone) portrays Kogō, who has fled the palace, living in hiding in a humble cottage near the village of Saga. The Emperor’s faithful man Nakakuni is searching for her, this poem on his mind:
Here in the mountains
Near the village of Saga,
The fawns are crying.
A man is full of sorrow
In autumn, when night has come.
In Movement 3 (Kogō and Nakakuni), the story of Nakakuni discovering Kogō at the Hōrin Temple is told. He hears her playing the melody (I quote a fragment of it) of Sōfuren, which tells of a wife longing for her husband. Nakakuni draws his flute from his sash and plays with her. We hear his flute, her cries of anguish, her koto, his fists banging repeatedly on the door. She tells him that she cannot return with him to the palace. Arrested, she is forced, at age 23, to become a nun, her beauty imprisoned by a black robe, living in the wilderness of Saga. The words sung during the movement are those Nakauni had in mind when he set out to find Kogō. She remembers the words of Tokuko (“Here on the mountain, the moon I see the moon I used to view in the sky over the palace”) as she thinks of their shared destinies as nuns. At the end, she is alone, praying.
Grandioso (2018)
In this, the fourth panel of the quarto of works for koto and cello comissioned and premiered by Duo YUMENO portraying female characters in the great Japanese epic Tale of Heike, I found inspiration in visual images of Tomoe Gozen, a late twelfth-century female samurai warrior known for her nobility, bravery, and great beauty–particularly the 1899 woodblock print of her (shown above) with Uchida leyoshi and Hatakeyama no Shigtada by Yōshū Chikanobu.
In movement one, she prepares herself spiritually for the Battle of Awazu on 21 February, 1184. In movement two, she tames an "unbroken horse" through tenderness and strength. In movement three, Tomoe, in old age, having become a nun, recalls how Yoshinaka, (as related in the Tale of Heike) sent her out as his "first captain," clad in armor and bearing an oversized sword and bow. Although she fought bravely and honorably, the battle was lost and she was forced to flee. Years of spiritual searching and service have led her to the quiet grandeur known only to the most spiritually evolved. The composition ends with Tomoe in the final moments of her life, contemplating eternity.
Apotheosis (2022)
The final work in the Heike Quinto combines the live koto and cello with an electroacoustic soundscape (fixed media) derived from fragments of the preceding musical responses to The Tale of Heike in the works Appassionato, Cantabile, Misterioso, and Grandioso.
In it I have imagined the travelling monks who sang to the accompaniment of the biwa have fused with the ancient western storytelling of Homer in a sort of lurid deep dive into a collective subconsciousness that combines fragmented elements of both cultures as though to suggest that the stories told are universal, the witnesses to the tragedy and transcendence both humble and wise; that the story was in the telling: as Orson Welles observed, “Our songs will all be silenced, but what of it? Go on singing.”