November 22, 2024
“From when I was at school, we would always talk about the harvest, and this idea of rich abundance at the end of summer: potatoes, pumpkins, fruit and, in Japan, it’s the rice. Autumn is this incredibly rich season when we harvest all of these incredible vegetables to see us through the winter, and I wanted to portray that through music, sound and the instruments I used”
For most of us, Autumn summons thoughts of rustling leaves, bare branches on trees and cold snaps ushering in a darker season. What, perhaps, is sometimes overlooked is the idea of Autumn as a time of abundance. As summer’s sunshine nurtures greenery and growth, Autumn is a time to reap the rewards of the previous season. For thousands of years, the harvest has been celebrated through ceremony, tradition and - indeed - music. For example, the Gaelic festival of ‘Samhain’ celebrated the end of the harvest and the beginning of the darker half of the team, eventually being adapted into ‘All Souls Day’ and then, ‘Halloween’.
Whilst the ancient tradition of the Anglo-European Harvest Festivals may seem a million miles away from Japan, it’s poignant to realise that many of these same instincts are felt in Japanese culture. In Lake Towada, for example, Autumn attracts many visitors to the region resulting in its busiest season, with the vivid colours of the leaves creating a natural patchwork across the region. Autumn in Japan sees the harvest of rice, as the rice fields turn a golden hue and celebrations take place across the country to honour this time of year. From his lakeside studio in Lake Towadako, the birthplace of ‘The Towadako Series’, Nick Wood shares with us his thoughts on the season: “Towadako Autumn was inspired by the magnificent season that takes place in Towada from mid-October, towards the end of October. It’s quite spectacular and vivid, the area goes a yellow, deep red, brown; the colour scheme is really vivid, extreme, really animated and beautiful. It’s probably the most popular season for sightseeing, it’s when you see the most visitors, and fishing is incredible popular right now around the lake, lots of Japanese fishermen and women hoping to catch the elusive Princess Trout that live in the lake. Beautiful fish, really tasty, like a land-locked Salmon, not farmed, wild, but hard to catch.”
Towadako Autumn’ is a celebration of this time of year, an opportunity to explore this vivid season through music and sound. For Wood, this latest chapter of the five-season collection felt like an opportunity to compose something distinctly Japanese. Perhaps the harmony between England and Japan’s relationships to the harvest, and his own striding of these two cultures, has inspired this chapter to lean more towards a Japanese sound than previous iterations. Wood explains, “Because of the really vivid colour scheme and the power of this season, I wanted to reflect that in the music and make this one quite a Japanese-inspired theme. So, unlike the other season, I would say I approached this more with Japanese instruments as my sound palette, as sonic features, including Koto and Shō, which is an old imperial instrument, sounding a bit like a harmonium, almost like a church organ, it’s really difficult to play and there are not many musicians who can play it, but we found a young lady in Tokyo who is really amazing.”
Alongside instrumental appearances from Miho Yoshiba (Koto) and Haruna Higashida (Shō), with returning appearances from Sean Halley (Guitar) and Alexander Motovilov (Piano), vocals play a significant role in ‘Towadako Autumn’. Echoing a theme of vocals and vocalisations throughout the ‘Towadako Series’, Wood looked to long-time collaborator Yoko Ueno, whose signature breathy vocals add texture and harmonies to the piece. Wood and Ueno have collaborated for over 30-years, and her voice has an instrumental quality, as Wood explains, “Yoko Ueno has this great ability to sing amazing harmonies and has a very breathy skill. She knows how to make her voice sound breathy, and to me, that was a great way to express the feeling of wind in a musical way. So, that is I think the fundamentals of Towadako Autumn: Japanese instruments and Yoko’s voice, and using the voice to portray this feeling of wind.” The personification of vocals is a thread throughout the ‘’Towadako Series’, with vocals taking on elemental qualities to express the seasons.
This concept of wind is crucial to ‘Towadako Autumn’, being something of an instrument in itself as it passes through the crisp leaves across the Hachimantai Forest. Wood and the Syn team used field recordings to capture the sound of the wind, conveniently recorded directly outside Wood’s lakeside studio. The sound of water lapping against the shoreline captured the personality of the lake itself; as Autumn brings both still serenity and choppy breakers to the shoreline. Accompanying these powerful sounds is a chorus of insects, heard in the evening all over Japan, but particularly present in Towada. The song-like quality of these cicadas, called Suzumushi or Koorogi in Japanese, adds both a percussive and vocal-like element to the composition, paying tribute to the natural symbiosis of Lake Towada. As Wood prepares to leave Lake Towada for a trip back to Tokyo, he captures on his iPhone the sounds of Swans and Geese migrating south on their annual pilgrimage. This part of the world is truly an unspoilt listening-glass through which to experience the natural world. Listeners to ‘Towadako Autumn’ will notice the addition of chanting in this chapter, performed by Vice Abbot at Ryosokuin Temple in Kyoto, Toryo Ito. Nick Wood and Toryo Ito spent time together in Kyoto during the composing of ‘Towadako Autumn’, the results of which have become part of the ‘Towadako’ story. Wood posed the question to Ito-san, “Is there a Buddhist Chant celebrating the harvest, or the rice?”. Ito-san responded “No, but there is a beautiful chant about the full moon in Autumn”. This immediately resonated with Wood, and weaves in and out of the piece in a hypnotising and cyclical way. Ito-san’s chant added a new dimension to ‘Towadako Autumn’, encouraging Wood to look for inspiration upwards and include the harvest moon in this season’s musical story.
How does Nick Wood continue to innovate and explore new territory in this fourth chapter of ‘The Towadako Series’? As a composer of music-to-picture, used to the familiarity of composing to visual cues, ‘Towadako’ was a freeing experience for Wood. Breaking the barriers of the traditional 30, 60 or 90-second formats of composing for commercials, Wood was able to embrace patience and repetition in this series, a process in which he found freedom: “I think I’ve learnt a lot on this project and this series, I have come from a world of working to 15-second, 30-second, or 2-minute cues for movies, and it was a quite challenging discipline to break out of. Having that amount of freedom made me wonder if 16-bars going to be too repetitive? No, it’s not actually, it needed to be 100-bars of one section. So that’s been great breaking out of those barriers and those boundaries, and breaking out of my own limitations in terms of the craft I’ve been working on for the last 30 years.”
On November 9th, ‘Towadako Autumn’ was released worldwide, mixed in Dolby Atmos by David Levin in Los Angeles. This brings us to the penultimate release of ‘The Towadako Series’. Soon, we will be able to look back across the year and reflect on the seasons as one singular collection. Until then, as you listen to ‘Towadako Autumn’, consider the unattributed saying, “Autumn shows us how beautiful it is to let things go.”
