Hibiki: Resonances from Japan

[caption id="attachment_8012" align="alignright" width="153" caption="Mayumi Miyata"][/caption] Curator Akiko Yanagisawa brings the Hibiki season to London, a bold initiative to reclaim the true traditions of Japanese music for a new audience. Akiko Yanagisawa’s personal journey could stand as a metaphor for what her Kings Place concert series ‘Hibiki’ – ‘sounds’ – is all about. Born in Tokyo, she was brought up listening to Western classical music, and this has remained her passion. Invited in 1997 to study arts management at London’s City University, she focused on orchestral music. ‘But then I found myself starting to listen to Japanese traditional music. When you are away from home, you begin to ask who and what you are. And I realised that what I really wanted to do was not promote Western music, but my own, because I’d found that it was very patronisingly presented over here.’ She researched a thesis on ‘the perception of Japanese music in Britain’, and then began to put her conclusions into practice. First she brought the work of the celebrated manga artist Tetsuya Chiba to the ICA, spicing it up with a synthesiser, a Japanese singer, and a performer on the koto, which is Japan’s ancient version of the zither. Then she promoted a larger group of Japanese performers on traditional instruments, and took them to the WOMEX World Music Expo, where they were a notable success. Read more about the Hibiki season in the Kings Place programme Concert series and workshops programme