later

In 2011, I made a solo concert named SCORES, in which I played several scores of graphic notation by Morton Feldman, Christian Wolff, Gayle Young and James Tenney, as well as works of altered score readings by Tomomi Adachi and Tomoko Hojo. The whole two-hour performance was so composed as to be a musical work itself.

It was at this concert that I first performed my own series of Performance Studies. The performer is free to choose the score but should play it following the instructions which vary-placing the score sheet upside-down, deferring the designated part by one bar to the other, playing the right-hand part in the opposite direction to the left-hand part, and so on. Doing each task becomes a work of performing art.

Where the semiautomatic flow from score-reading to hand-moving gets disrupted and reestablished anew, the player is bound to create sounds that are totally different from the sound she would normally produce. Devoid of any images that she would normally have pre-loaded by reading the score beforehand, the player is faced with a kind of instantaneous execution, being forced to play each note "on the spot." The sounds that come out will be filled with inner struggles, hesitations, awaiting, and a sense of emptiness where the process of cognition simply stops.

One day, 8 years after I first played the Performance Studies, I had the idea of recording the whole series. When everything was recorded and listened to, I could positively hear and feel the presence of unfamiliar sounds, different kinds of sounds than I would normally expect from listening to music. It became clear then that, rather than just making music, I had made a documentary of my music performances.

The meanings of the pieces I had written long ago was finally revealed to me.

Midori Kubota