WCRB | By William Peacock
PublishedOctober 23, 2024 at 4:00 AM EDT
Takashi Yoshimatsu is perhaps one of the most enigmatic composers Japan has produced. With no degree in music, an affinity for composing art music but a disconnect from contemporary aesthetics, and a strong penchant for Pink Floyd and other progressive rock bands (he was even a keyboard player for some in his younger years!), Yoshimatsu somehow both surpasses and dismantles expectations at every turn.
After growing up in Yoyogi, a neighborhood in northern Tokyo, where he enjoyed Beethoven symphonies and albums by The Ventures and The Walker Brothers in equal measure, Yoshimatsu then studied engineering at Keio University. There, he met composer and poet Teizo Matsumura, who took Yoshimatsu under his wing, further enmeshing him into the contemporary classical music world. Later, after a professor of music at the Tokyo University of the Arts convinced him to study harmony and counterpoint, Yoshimatsu began music lessons but gave up and left school only a few months later, with no degree in hand.

Naoki Hashimoto
But the end of his formal music education gave Yoshimatsu more room to explore as a keyboard player for progressive rock bands in the area, while he continued to compose art music in his spare time. In fact, progressive rock would inform his musical practice throughout all of his career; more on that later.
The premiere of his work Forgetful Angel in 1978 debuted his career as a composer, though he was not paid for the composition, and many rejections from applications to competitions followed (something I’m keeping in mind while I’m still in my twenties). In 1980, his piece Dorian was selected for a competition which brought some small success, but the 1981 serialist-bent Threnody to Toki would be the piece that earned him his first taste of global attention on his music and work.
Shortly following the success of Threnody to Toki, Yoshimatsu abandoned serialism and atonality in his compositional practice altogether. Much like Arvo Pärt with Tintinnabuli in Estonia in the ‘70s and Steve Reich with the minimalist movement in America in the ‘60s, Yoshimatsu became disenfranchised with the avant-garde and used his musical vocabulary and compositional voice to create something new with the old. Yoshimatsu calls this aesthetic “New Lyricism,” a style that seeks to refine contemporary classical music by stripping away the rougher edges of the avant-garde, making music that’s beautiful for beauty’s sake. For Yoshimatsu, this often means simpler chord progressions and more conventional harmonies that he carried over from his progressive rock interests (this is the “more on that later” I was referring to), and an emphasis on the timbre and texture of a composition as a means of expressing beauty.
But Yoshimatsu’s music is not just beautiful; it is expansive and soaring, yet delicate and intimately expressive at the same time, and often takes on themes related to nature. And Birds Are Still…, one of Yoshimatsu’s more popular works and the piece that introduced me to his music, is a concise example of this:
And Birds Are Still... excerpt
While scored for strings alone and only about 8 minutes long, And Birds Are Still… is a stunning showcase of the range of expressivity that can be coaxed out of a string ensemble. More than that, through its various yearning and sighing gestures, bird calls, warbling effects, and delicately layered textures, And Birds Are Still… expresses in music a profound journey that is nearly impossible to describe in words. This piece is truly a gem.
Continuing on the theme of nature but with the addition of flute and harp, White Landscapes paints a picture of the gentle stillness of snowfall, and the bittersweet feeling of its disappearance:
White Landscapes: II. Stillness in Snow excerpt
Even the addition of just two more instruments to the ensemble brings an infinitude of expressive possibilities through its orchestration, and Yoshimatsu uses all of them to his advantage - but not just as a flashy bag of tricks. Contrasting with And Birds Are Still…, White Landscapes evolves much more gradually and subtly (despite its short, multi-movement structure), while safely preserving Yoshimatsu’s characteristic delicate touch to orchestration.
But the crown jewel of the album, to my ears, is the namesake of the album, Yoshimatsu’s Piano Concerto, “Memo Flora”, with each movement exemplifying characteristics of flowers:
Piano Concerto, "Memo Flora": I. Flower. Andante Tranquillo excerpt
“Memo Flora” represents the absolute summit of Yoshimatsu’s “New Lyricism,” making use of the full range of color available in the orchestral palette. While it is a flashy and virtuosic concerto in its own right, Yoshimatsu really pulls out all of the stops for the sake of one goal - beauty. And this is a beautiful concerto; romantic enough to give Rachmaninoff a run for his money, expressive enough to confuse the sound of the orchestra for the outdoors at times, and novel enough to reward repeated listening with its rich spectrum of sonic variation. I’ve listened to this piece alone maybe fifty times, and I still hear something new with each additional listen.
All of Yoshimatsu’s catalog is worth investigating (though non-Japanese speakers might have some trouble finding all of his output), but this album is an excellent display of Yoshimatsu at his best and in his element; musing symphonically on nature.
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