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September 7th, 2008
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Thoroughly modern Tomoko

An avant-garde pianist launches her newest project in Prague
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By Frank Kuznik
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
February 27th, 2008 issue

COURTESY PHOTO
Mukaiyama has given her music new dimensions by performing in unusual settings.
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Tomoko Mukaiyama

When: Thursday, Feb. 28, at 8
Where: Divadlo Archa
Tickets: 250-350 Kč, available at the venue

Touring musicians come through Prague by the boatload, but it’s rare to find one doing something genuinely different. Pianist Tomoko Mukaiyama brings the promise of a unique performance and more.
Trained in her native Japan as a classical piano player, Mukaiyama never quite fit the mold, starting with her first audition. “There were thousands of pianists at the conservatory, and they were all playing the same concerto,” she says. “Starting two weeks before the audition, you couldn’t avoid it — if you went to the toilet or to the cafeteria, you heard the same piece everywhere. It was like a factory of music-making.”
That drove Mukaiyama to the library, where she found a contemporary music piece to play instead. Over the next six years, she studied both traditional and modern classical music, which didn’t endear her to her instructors.
“For the exam, they wanted to hear Bach or Beethoven, but I was playing American composers like George Crumb or Frederic Rzewski,” she says. “I was sort of an outsider. But it was a good situation, I felt very nice about it.”
Mukaiyama moved on to Indiana University in the United States for another two years of studies, and then to Amsterdam, where she has carved out a career as an iconoclastic performer of modern music. For a while she was happy playing challenging works by the likes of John Cage and Louis Andriessen. But several years ago she had an epiphany, after the revered Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini played in Amsterdam and received scathing reviews for his rendition of a Beethoven sonata.
“I was really shocked,” Mukaiyama recalls. “He’s a very, very important artist, but still he’s criticized for his interpretation of this composer. That made me think: What am I doing? I mean, I can’t be a slave to the composer for the rest of my life. So I started thinking that I wanted to create something by myself, and my old interest in the visual arts came back.”
Since then, Mukaiyama has staged a number of works in unorthodox settings: playing for an audience of one, playing behind a screen so that the music was audible but she remained invisible, playing on a stage festooned with hundreds of hanging plastic bags, each filled with water and a goldfish. She’s also performed with video accompaniment and, last year, in a 20-meter-long dress that was part-clothing, part-art installation.
Along with changing the visual context of her performances, Mukaiyama has also changed the aural content, essentially borrowing a visual arts technique to construct “collages” of disparate pieces that take on new meanings through unusual juxtapositions. “I take small parts of pieces and make a mosaic,” she explains. “You might hear Chopin, but because I put Chopin between Thelonious Monk and Sergei Zagny, the identity of Chopin disappears.”
She will be using that technique for her Sonic Tapestry piece at Archa this week, zigzagging from Chopin and Debussy to Monk and Ligeti, with original improvisational passages serving as transitions. No visuals for this performance; instead, the centerpiece is a Fazioli piano. “I’m not making a commercial about it, but it’s a favorite of mine, a beautiful Italian instrument with singing tones and gorgeous harmonics,” Mukaiyama says.
And the performance will serve as the kickoff to a major project that she’s planning to stage in Prague next year, titled “wasted.” It starts with an exhibition of 12,000 white silk dresses — the number representing the amount of sanitary napkins a woman uses in her lifetime — which 12,000 female volunteers will be asked to take home and “imprint” with menstrual blood. After they document the event in text, sound or images, Mukaiyama will work with the results to create a new multimedia work that she will debut here.
“It’s ambitious — getting 12,000 women will not be easy,” she concedes. “But I hope it’s going to be a very impressive exhibit.”
To learn more about “wasted” and volunteer for the project, go to www.wasted.nl.

Frank Kuznik can be reached at fkuznik@praguepost.com


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