Program Notes

midaregami (Tangled Hair) is the title of a collection of poems by the Japanese poet Akiko Yosano (1878-1942).

This song cycle is all about the senses and spectrums: aural, olfactory, and psychological. The order of the selected poems (tanka) weave a loose narrative that follows the path of an affair: the beginning, the fleeting moments as it ends, the disappointment and anger that follows, and finally the sweet memories.

Yosano's works are from the period of the new school of tanka - the move of Yosano and her husband Tekkan to a more overtly sensual style of Japanese poetry.

Yosano's works are from the period of the new school of tanka ? the move of Yosano and her husband Tekkan to a more overtly sensual style of Japanese poetry. A tanka has a syllabic count of 5-7-5-7-7. There are 7 songs in this song cycle. The first and last songs are essentially a prelude andpostlude. The middle 5 are representative on the macro-level of a five-line tanka.

There are many metrical and rhythmic references to 5 and 7 throughout the work. Tanka were originally sung with their melodic line following a minor pentatonic scale. This is also the tuning of the koto, the instrument used to originally accompany the performance of tanka, which is featured in several of the poems.The main pitches of the tanka are used as the pitch centres for each song.

The spectrum of smell is used for the basis of the basic pitch selections. The accepted theory of smell is by molecular shape. Luca Turin has hypothesized and proved that it is in fact the frequency of the molecule that determines actual smell. He graciously provided me the frequency spectrum of rose geranium that Iused as the basic pitch structure/frequency spectrum for the pieces.

The role of the voice is quite syllabic and brief with minimal text repetition. This mirrors the brief and delicate nature of the tanka that presents epigrammatic moments in time. I have used the wonderful English translation by Sanford Goldstein. Mostly English is used with moments of the original Japanese creeping in.