The task facing a Western musician in approaching an alien culture and its aesthetic is always difficult. For me, the problems were mitigated somewhat by the fact that I have spent about twenty years of deep involvement with the traditional musics of Japan, Japanese culture in general, and with its language. This experience has helped me to bridge the awesome chasm that separates two vastly different views of music and the world. In Songs of a Thousand Autumns much of the tonal and rhythmic material (as well as melodic turns of phrase, cadence formulae, and the like) are drawn from various aspects of Japanese traditional musical practice. Even of greater importance, I have tried as much as possible to rely on the qualities of Japanese aesthetic values and states of feeling. This has been an entirely natural thing for me to do. On a miniature scale, this work pursues the practice followed in some of my Japanese-inspired works of the early 1970’s, particularly the large orchestral work Kyoto Landscapes and Of Love and Time (Ai to Toki ni Tsuite) for soprano and chamber ensemble. Filtering down to us out of the deep and magical past comes the knowledge that the poems such as those used in Songs of a Thousand Autumns were sung. But we have no music for them. It was lost in the turbulence of a culture under stress, one in which the aural tradition played a singular role. But we only have to turn to that supreme work of Japan’s tenth century The Tale of Genji (Genji Monogatari) to learn what an important role music played at the Heian Court. There are more than 2500 references to music and its intrinsic relation to poetry. Despite the loss of the music itself, several musical practices have survived more or less intact such as the music of Shintō ritual (Mi-Kagura) and the serene, ancient court music (Gagaku) imported to Nara from China’s T’ang Dynasty. But by the time the Court had moved to its new quarters at Heian-kyō the T’ang court music had been thoroughly Japanized and Kagura and Gagaku utterly intermingled. This marriage of musical ideas appears to have served as the basis of Heian court music for several centuries. Not until the time of the Tokugawa Shogunate (Edo Period, ca. 1635 – ca. 1868) do other musical materials enter the stream. Even then they turn out to be variants of an ancient practice.
