Satoko Fujii’s Suite for String Ensemble

Yesterday Libra Records released two new albums, which may be called “husband and wife” recordings. The first of these, Altitude 1100 Meters, will be the first work of written music for string ensemble by Satoko Fujii. The second, What happened there?, features her husband, trumpeter Natsuki Tamura. My original intention was to write about both of these in a single article, but the Fujii release is such a major departure from her previous albums that it deserves to be addressed strictly on its own merits. Because both of these albums are on the Libra label, the best venue for purchase is the CD Store Web page on the Web site for Libra Records.

Satoko Fujii conducting the members of her GEN ensemble (photograph by Shigeko Sekiguchi)

Altitude 1100 Meters is a suite in five movements, which Fujii wrote to celebrate her 65th birthday. It was composed for the group GEN, which is the Japanese word for string. Akira Horikoshi is the drummer, and the other performers perform on string instruments of one form or another. Fujii’s instrument is, as usual, piano; but the other four players perform with bowed instruments. These are violinists Yuriko Mukoujima and Ayaka Kato, Atsuko Hatano on viola (but doubling on electronic gear), and bassist Hiroshi Yoshino. The five movements basically account for the passing of a single day:

1. Morning Haze
2. Morning Sun
3. Early Afternoon
4. Light Rain
5. Twilight

The title of this suite was inspired by the fact that Fujii composed the work during the summer of 2023. She had moved to the highlands of Nagano with her parents to escape the city heat. She was inspired by how the air itself was different at an altitude of 1100 meters. It would be fair to say that the music itself does not specifically reflect on altitude. However, Fujii’s creativity seems to have been inspired by (in her words) “how the air made me feel.”

As might be guessed, Fujii took advantage of the violins and viola to explore glissando passages. At the other end of the spectrum, so to speak, Yoshino’s bass work often serves to provide a drone. As might be expected, Fujii brings her own intensity to her piano playing; but her equal-tempered instrument serves as a “baseline” against which she explores microtonal the intervals of the string players.

I must confess that I have not yet fathomed the logic behind her approach to microtonality, so I would like to riff a bit on my own past experiences. At the risk of sounding too simplistic, there are basically two ways in which microtones can be deployed. The simpler of these involves basically adding rhythm to glissando passages. The other is what I learned from my composition teacher, which is that an equal-tempered scale of 72 notes to the octave (dividing the semitone into six equal “subintervals”) allows a composer a more refined capacity to capture the frequencies of overtones beyond the 5:4 ratio of the major third. Since Fujii’s creativity tends to go beyond any concept of a scale, my guess is that her own work tends toward the former option!

I have come to expect that every new Fujii album will offer a journey of discovery, but Altitude 1100 Meters charts are journey more adventurous than I had anticipated!