ART LIVES TORIDE Where Art Is Born

We offer flute, cello, violin and ancient instrument classes here. Both of us are working as independent performers; I play the cello and viola da gamba, an ancient instrument, and my wife, Yasuko, plays the flute and the flauto traverso, an ancient instrument. Some of the students are aspiring to be performers, while others are just enjoying themselves. Some people came to us by hearing about the viola da gamba on TV and wanted to learn it.

I was born in Kashiwa city. It was hard for me to take the Joban Line during rush hour with my instrument. The timing of our family’s move came by chance, so I suggested Toride as it is the first station that the train leaves, and eventually we moved to Toride. I started playing a musical instrument when I was in the third grade of elementary school, when my younger sister started playing the violin and I went to a concert of her teacher. There I was exposed to the sound of the cello and fell in love at first sight. I immediately asked my parents if I could learn to play the cello myself.

When I told my teacher that I wanted to be a cellist in the future, he told me I shouldn’t stay here. The school I went to taught us to play by ear without looking at the music score. I was told that if I wanted to be a performer, I had to read the music and express myself, and I think that is connected to my current way of thinking.

I have studied cello for a long time, but I have also been self-taught in many areas. I joined the New Japan Philharmonic right after graduating from college. I have had the opportunity to play in various places through the orchestra, and there is a kind of peer pressure in the classical music industry. I was stuck, so I went to Holland to escape. I also got stuck, so I went to the Netherlands to escape, studied there for three years, and opened this school after returning to Japan in 2018.

I first encountered ancient music when I was in the first grade of junior high school. I first encountered ancient music when I was in the first grade of junior high school. I was impressed when I heard music on a radio program called “Baroque in the Morning. It was Italian Renaissance vocal music. Even though I was a cello player, I listened to only those genres of music. Then I started to think that I wanted to play old nostalgic music.

I was first exposed to the viola da gamba in my second year at Tokyo University of the Arts and began studying as a secondary major. While the cello is an instrument that became popular in the later stages of Baroque music, that is, around the end of the 17th century, the gamba is an instrument that dates back to the Baroque period and has existed since the Renaissance, and has a very wide repertoire. The sheer amount of things to learn opened up a tremendous world. It was as if this was what was waiting for me, and I just fell in love with it.

It is not correct to play exactly as the teacher says, nor to imitate what someone else has played, but you have to try to take the information from yourself. When we, as performers, study and perform a musical work, it is important to reproduce what the composer wrote to the best of our ability.

Different bows, for example, produce different sound characteristics. While playing and studying with replicas of bows from the baroque and classical eras, not to mention viola da gamba, I have more instruments and bows than the average performer. I tell myself that it is research material and I have no choice. I believe that performing in the style of the period in which the composer lived is not something special, but the very basics.

In the French film “The Morning After” about a viola da gamba player in the Baroque era, the scene where the main character is holed up in his cabin composing music by the light of a single candle is very impressive. In this day and age, music is everywhere you go, and even at night you can hear the sound of cars and trains. But there was no noise in those days. It was probably just the sound of the wind and insects. I wonder how much sensitivity was sharpened to compose music in such an environment.
The period around 1730, for example, could be called the golden age of the Baroque era. The Palace of Versailles was flourishing, and Stradivarius were being made and purchased at great value. That was the era of Beethoven’s Ninth and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique a century later. There was a particularly dramatic change in that era. I do not want to decipher the score with my modern senses, but I want to perform the piece after knowing the historical background of the piece, what the composer was thinking when he wrote it, and to whom he was writing it for.