水野みか子

haar/haar (her/hair)
by Mikako Mizuno (composer/ assistant professor of Nagoya City University)

Tomoko Mukaiyama, a modern music expert who lives in Amsterdam, is also a community-conscious pianist and recently has been giving several outreach performances. She is always particular about the style of her performance. This program, Sonic Tapestry II; is played in the style of interspersing ad-libs with a variety of music, together with images and noises. The subtitle concept haar/haar (her hair); is realized through the collaboration between technology, piano and body; In a rectangular floor space with seats in front and behind, a piano is placed so that the right and left sides of Mukaiyama’s body are facing the audience.
On the two walls in front and back of the piano are hanging two big screens, upon which are projected images created by Mukaiyama herself. However, something is projected on the screens for only a few minutes. The images are not intended to produce a direct effect, such as addition of a different dimension through visual stimulation. In Sonic Tapestry II, there is no structural time flow in which a piece of music is born, grows and ends within a certain time frame. This style corresponds with the fact that the visual images of her hair have no spatial impression. Mukaiyama intentionally leaves the time experience incomplete by her consecutive sixty-minute performance. The beginning, progression and ending of the performance are experienced by the fact that she appears on the stage, the fact that her muscles are brutally vibrated by the intense performance, and the fact that she then disappears. What  is impressed upon the viewer is not a time experience of music, but a spatial experience created by Mukaiyama’s presence and absence. SPACE is created by a dispersed auditory time, whereas TIME is sensed by the visual element of silent images. This can be named the parameter exchange between time and space.

This article was published in Aichi Arts Center PR magazine, www.aac.pref.aichi.jp