Toshi Ichiyanagi died on October 7, 2022, aged eighty-nine years in Tokyo, Japan. Ichiyanagi was an experimental composer known for combining Japanese and American musical styles and instruments, blending discordancy and randomness into strange harmony. “Japan has a long history of adapting the practices of Western culture and assembling [them] into their own,” he explained. In total, Ichiyanagi wrote more than two hundred works, including operas, string and wind compositions, percussive, interplay, and piano solos. He is remembered for his influence in the avant-garde movement and his work for the Kanagawa Arts Foundation, where he served as artistic director.
Ichiyanagi was born in 1933 in Kobe, Japan, and raised in Tokyo by two musical parents. He played piano at an American military base after Japan surrendered in World War II, where he was introduced to American jazz and the stylistic freedoms it afforded. The impact of the war is clear in his work, especially in his ninth symphony which one critic called “a wrenchingly meditative commemoration of the third anniversary of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster and the 70th of Hiroshima.”
Later, Ichiyanagi studied at the Juilliard School in Manhattan and was influenced by the New York Fluxus Movement, particularly by avant-garde composer John Cage. When studying at Julliard he met Yoko Ono, with whom he eloped in 1956 and stayed with until 1962. Ono went on to marry film producer Tony Cox and subsequently John Lennon of The Beatles, while Ichinayagi never remarried.
The main characteristics of his music are randomness, discordant sounds, and techniques that use tension to convey intense and complex emotions. He is notable for his seemingly random musical progressions, reminiscent of dadaism and other forms of abstract art. For instance, in his piece “Music for Piano No. 4” written in 1968, he used squeaking sounds that one reviewer compared to turkey calls. In “Another work, Distance” (1961), he required musicians to play their instruments from at least three meters away, using rods or other tools. One of the wildest examples of Ichiyanagi’s experimentalism was his composition “From the Works of Tadanori Yokoo” which flows between several seemingly unrelated elements: a Japanese folk song, a simple piano melody, an electric drone, a fascist march song, sexual moans, croaking frogs, Bach excerpts, and church bells.
His works also pushed technical boundaries. Many of his pieces seemed to lack both a time signature and a key, such as the piano solo “Piano Poem” (2003) and “Music for Electric Metronome” (1960), in which musicians were asked to completely improvise an ending to the piece. Nomi Epstein, a professor at Berklee College of Music, wrote that Ichiyanagi required performers to do “much more than interpret a score, but rather make decisions about structure, pitch, density, color, and sonic activity.” Ichiyanagi also often decorated his sheet music (now held in New York’s Museum of Modern Art) with geometric patterns, swirls, and creative instructions for musicians.
Although Ichiyanagi has a very small following in Western musical spheres, he was an incredibly influential and important figure in Japanese composition. His famous work, “Sapporo” (1963), allows the fluid score to be freely interpreted by performers in any way they wish. A QR code to the song is included below, in the hopes that more people can experience his creativity and unique expression.