Dr. Árni Ingólfsson’s Special Lecture
“Japanese Music in Iceland, and the Influence of Japanese Music on Contemporary Icelandic Composers”
Abstract
Iceland has a short history of “Classical” music, which was only introduced there in the second half of the 19th century. Musical links between Iceland and Japan have an even shorter history, beginning in the 1960s with performances on the Icelandic Radio of music by composers such as Ikuma Dan and Tōru Takemitsu. At the same time, performances by musicians such as Katsuya Yokoyama opened the ears of Icelandic radio listeners for the sound-world of Japanese traditional instruments such as the shakuhachi.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Japanese influence can be clearly heard in the music of Iceland’s key modernist composers. Atli Heimir Sveinsson (1938–2019) referenced a Japanese sound-world in his award-winning Flute Concerto (1973) and Xanties (1975) for flute and piano. In his brilliant solo flute piece, Kalais (1976), Thorkell Sigurbjörnsson (1938–2013) asks for the flautist to remove the mouthpiece and play the final section of the work “shakuhachi-style”.
The most extensive example of Japanese influence in Icelandic modernist music is Sveinsson’s opera The Silk Drum (1980), which is based on the Japanese Noh play “Aya no Tsuzumi”. Premiered at the Reykjavík Music Festival in 1980, this opera was a great success and was seen as a landmark event in the history of Icelandic opera. The main gist of the story is the same as in the Japanese original, but the action is transferred from medieval Japan to the world of fashion in the modern West. An old man falls in love with a young and beautiful model, and the work thus becomes a cautionary tale of the modern world’s focus on superficial appearances rather than true substance.
In my lecture, I will discuss these works and their reception in Iceland, as well as the continuation of Japanese influence in the 21st century. This has taken place both through cultural exchange with groups such as the new-music ensemble Caput, which has worked closely with the Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, as well as direct influence, for example of the works of Ryuichi Sakamoto on composer Hildur Guðnadóttir (composer, Joker and Tár, Academy Award winner for best film score, 2020).
Event Outline
- Date and Time： April 26th, 2025 14:00-16:00
- Venue： Waseda University, Waseda Campus, Building 8, Conference room 303.
- Target： Open to the public
- Language： English (without translation)
- Organized by： Organized by the Institute for Research in Opera and Music Theatre, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan
Profile of Presenter
Árni Heimir Ingólfsson is an Icelandic musicologist and holds a PhD in historical musicology from Harvard University (2003). He is currently a senior researcher, Reykjavik Academy, Iceland. His primary area of interest is the history of Icelandic music from the Middle Ages to the present, and he is the author of several books on Icelandic music, including “Jón Leifs and the Musical Invention of Iceland” (Indiana University Press, 2019), which was listed as one of that year’s best books on music by Alex Ross of The New Yorker magazine. His most recent book is “Music at World’s End: Three Exiled Musicians from Nazi Germany and Austria and Their Contribution to Music in Iceland” (SUNY Press, 2025). As a pianist and harpsichordist, he has recorded several CDs and appeared in concert in Iceland, England, Germany, Italy, Canada, and the United States. Ingólfsson has twice been nominated for the Icelandic Book Award (academic/non-fiction) and is a two-time winner of the Icelandic Music Award (2008, 2011), for his CD recordings (with the Carmina Chamber Choir, which he founded in 2003) of music from Icelandic manuscripts from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Registration
Register for this conference
Contact
lecture-opera[at]list.waseda.jp
([at] = @)
