Marty Regan: Selected Works for Japanese Instruments. Vol. 4, Lost Mountains, Quiet Valleys (review)

Reviewed by: Marty Regan: Selected Works for Japanese Instruments. Vol. 4, Lost Mountains, Quiet Valleys Devon Osamu Tipp (bio) Marty Regan: Selected Works for Japanese Instruments. Vol. 4, Lost Mountains, Quiet Valleys. MSR Classics, produced by Marty Regan, 2016–17. Released 2020. One CD with liner notes (1 hour, 14 minutes, 31 seconds), $14.95. Composers in the twenty-first century are increasingly interested in concepts of intercultural hybridity and opportunities provided by writing new music for non-Western instruments. Since the early 2000s, Marty Regan, a Professor of Music at Texas A&M University, is one of these composers, creating his own hybridized music for Japanese instruments. His 2020 album, the fourth volume of Lost Mountains, Quiet Valleys: Selected Works for Japanese Instruments, continues to explore the intercultural possibilities of writing for traditional Japanese instruments. Regan’s music creates “hybrid musical soundscapes that reflect the age in which we live, an era based not necessarily on globalization, but on partnership based on global cultural interaction.”1 Regan was coauthor and assistant to composer Minoru Miki, who wrote the landmark monograph Composing for Traditional Japanese Instruments and is a well-known figure to composers who work with Japanese instruments. His musical language is informed by his time studying Japanese music at the Tokyo College of Music and features pitch content familiar to Edo period chamber music and luscious harmonies sometimes reminiscent of film music and often romantic in feeling. The album opens with “Silent Cry of a Heron” for clarinet and shakuhachi, a plaintive composition that creates an expansive listening space. Composing for Western and Japanese instruments in the same composition is often challenging but represents virtually endless opportunities for new unique timbral fusion and musical synthesis. Regan’s own shakuhachi training and experience is evident in his shakuhachi writing, and the formal armature of the duo feels like a natural extension from other traditional shakuhachi duos such as Shika no Tōne. Regan’s duo instead features sustained sound from both the clarinet and shakuhachi, whereas in Shika no Tōne the emphasis is placed on trading phrases from one performer to another in an extended call-and-response pattern. Regan’s excellent use of dovetailing between instruments is enhanced by Thomas Piercy’s and Shōzan Tanabe’s performance. [End Page 131] Regan’s “Withering Chrysanthemum” for 13-string koto was composed after a year-long brush-painting course. Entirely instrumental, this work features a restrained harmonic language that may recall danmono, a compositional form akin to a theme and variations that become progressively more intricate over time. Sahoko Nozawa’s performance is excellent, yet I struggle to see the particular influence of calligraphy on the composition. Perhaps the way sounds decay into silence before new sections of the work will make a listener think about how ink flows off a brush onto the page or can spread even after the brush has left the page. The titular “Lost Mountains, Quiet Valleys” for shakuhachi trio was written and inspired by Regan’s experiences as a 2015 Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Fellow in Taos, New Mexico. Regan “conveys a rich contrapuntal tapestry” that attempts to evoke the “bountiful natural scenery of the American Southwest” (liner notes). Regan presents a constant flowing melody of three harmonized shakuhachi that—with the exception of a 90-second solo interlude—through regular harmonization transmogrifies the trio into a sort of hyper shō (Japanese mouth organ of the gagaku orchestra), indeed conveying a sense of expansive fields, mountains, and lush deserts. “Silence,” scored for a consort of Japanese and Western instruments, seems to construct its materials from musical fragments heard in the Edo period sankyoku repertoire of shamisen, koto, and shakuhachi. Set to the poetry of Shuntarō Tanikawa, “Silence” alternates between instrumental interludes and sung poetry accompanied by instruments. Perhaps because of Regan’s syncretic use of harmonic and melodic choices that evoke Edo period music, use of punctuating metal percussion, or use of an operatic voice, “Silence” feels to these ears almost like an ersatz jiuta-sōkyoku2 composition, and the use of Western strings and percussion distracts somewhat from Tanikawa’s poetry. “You Left Me, Sweet, Two Legacies,” composed in 2015 and...