Jo Kondo
A Shape Of Time / Strands III / Duo / Still Life
This 1983 collection on ALM compiles what is generally considered to be one of Jo Kondō's last linear pieces - "A Shape Of Time" - which he describes as a "duo" for piano and orchestra. The classification is appropriate since the overall concept is focused on basic dynamic arc applied to individual pitches or sound-blocks. In this way each of the individual 'linear' sound-events is started out by the group of orchestral instruments which play crescendo part of the dynamic shape - piano to mezzo …
Mr. Bloomfield, His Spacing = ブルームフィールド氏の間化
A masterpiece album released in 1976 by the Japanese contemporary musician Yuzuru Kondo, whose main contributions to the sombre labyrinths of post-1960s musical modernism is something that the composer conceptualised as 'linear music' (or line and shadow as "Sen no ongaku' is sometimes translated). Then there's beautiful piano solo puzzle "Sight Rhythmics" that's a bit like Messiaen's total serialist one-off “Mode de valeurs et d'intensités". Plus semi-concrète essay "Summer Days" where muffled…
Homo Audiens (Book)
Jo Kondo – one of Japan’s most celebrated living composers – sets out his conception of music as a ‘shared object of listening’, an ultimately hopeful vision of music as a purposeless – non-instrumentalised – activity that brings together composers, performers, and audiences as equal partners in the shared creativity of listening. At once an exploration and critique of the aesthetics of absolute music from German Romanticism to the present day as well as an argument for diversity in both interpr…
Satoko Inoue Presents Jo Kondo's New Works For Piano
The second album of piano works from Japanese composer Jo Kondo performed by pianist Satoko Inoue--a noted interpreter of solo works by Feldman, Ferrari, and Cage--here presenting all of Kondo's works for solo piano written from 2001 to 2012, alongside two early works from 1975, exploring a wealth of harmonic, rhythmic, and conceptual ideas from a diversity of projects.