Igor Stravinsky and Kósçak Yamada: Their Waka-Songs in Modernist Context

Igor Stravinsky and Kósçak Yamada: Their Waka-Songs in Modernist Context

Dr. Hideto Tsuboi - Professor, International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Nichibunken

Thursday, May 2, 2019 - 4:00pm to 5:30pm
Room 218, Sterling Memorial Library See map
120 High Street
New Haven, CT 06511

In the 1910s at the same time that the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky used large-scale orchestras to compose ballet music, he also wrote short songs of extremely minute organization. Among these songs were “Three Japanese Lyrics” (1913), a collection of temporally brief songs based on the text of Japanese waka that represented an experiment of one kind of modernist technique in miniature form. In these songs the modernist methods and modalities from the dawn of the twentieth century come together as Japonisme. Yet these tendencies did not belong to Stravinsky alone.  As this paper will show, amidst the cases of intersection between Japonisme and modernism that pertain to waka-songs (waka kakyoku) we may compare them with the experiments of the composer Kōsaku Yamada (Slavic spelling Kósçak Yamada) in Europe at this same time and afterwards in Japan, who introduced the genre of ballet to Japan.


Hideto Tsuboi, Dr. is a Japanese literary and cultural scholar, Professor of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto. Professor Tsuboi received his B. A. and M. A. in Japanese Literature from the Nagoya University, and completed his Ph. D. in Japanese Literature at Nagoya University. He has written extensively on the issue of the other in modern Japanese literature. His publication include Koe no Shukusai: Nihon Kindaishi to Sensō (Fest of Voices: Modern Japanese Poetry and War), University of Nagoya Press, 1997., Kankaku no Kindai: Koe, Shintai, Hyōshō (Modernity of the Sensibilities: Voice, Body and Representation), University of Nagoya Press, 2006., and Sei ga kataru: 20 Seiki Nihon Bungaku no Sei to Shintai (Sexuality Speaks: Sex/Gender and Body in the Literature in Twentieth-Century Japan ), University of Nagoya Press, 2012.

Region: 
Japan