Kotoka Suzuki’s Impressive Diversity

A little over a week ago, Starkland released the first CD devoted exclusively to the music of Kotoka Suzuki. Suzuki received her Bachelor’s degree in composition from Indiana University. She then went on to graduate studies with Jonathan Harvey at Stanford University, where she received her doctoral degree in composition. She is currently Associate Professor in Music at the University of Toronto Scarborough and Associate Composer at the Canadian Music Center.

The title of her new album is Shimmer, Tree. This is also the title of the last of the seven tracks, composed for piano and electronics as a memorial tribute to Harvey. She is seriously adept when exploring the interplay between acoustic and electronic sonorities, but the album also includes both the purely electronic and the purely acoustic.

Most interesting in that latter category is “In Praise of Shadows,” which she performs on a collection of paper instruments of her own creation. However, the composition seems to allow for more than one performer, as can be seen in this photograph of the piece being performed by Eighth Blackbird:

courtesy of Starkland

The other instrumental offering is the string quartet “Minyo,” performed by the Spektral Quartet. Both of these compositions present Suzuki’s attentiveness to elemental sonorities, rather than more conventional approaches to thematic material. On the album this piece is coupled with “Automata” (given the subtitle “Mechanical Garden”), whose elemental sonorities are concrete but subjected to a diversity of electronic transforms.

During my own student days, my creative efforts were focused almost entirely on tape music, including recordings of computer-synthesized sonorities. These days I suspect that it would be hard for me to listen to any of it without blushing (a criterion introduced to me by way of Roger Sessions’ Norton lectures). All seven tracks of Shimmer, Tree are products of a far more confident hand (and mind) than my own.

Nevertheless, these days I am more aware of the divide between performance and synthesis. Furthermore, my preference for performance is one of “experiencing the act,” rather than listening to a recorded document. As a result, I would rather have the opportunity to be part of the audience for a composition like “In Praise of Shadows” being performed than confine myself to the limitations of an “audio only” experience.