The following Master's Thesis consists of the program notes written for my MA recital by the same title, Labyrinths, which took place in October 1st, 2009 in the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall of the University of California, San Diego.

Part of the intention behind the concert and the program note in question is to reveal the potential interconnection of such diverse works as Liszt's Sonate in h-moll, Boulez's

Constallation-Miroir from his Third Sonata and Ferneyhough's Opus Contra Naturam, through the influential morphological model of the labyrinth.This interconnection can ideally shed some light on the listener's perception of the works, as well as raise questions regarding: the linearity of musical time in the West; fragmentation and discontinuity as a dominant feature in modern (in a broader sense) musical composition; the nature of learning processes on the part of the performer; the creative interaction of music with other media, inclusing poetry, theatre and philosophy.

The idea of ma (間) is an ancient Japanese concept concerning space and time. Ma means“interval” or “gap” in Japanese, but it is a beautiful and philosophically nuanced word, which carries the implication of movements within silence or “empty” spaces. The concept has served as an essential element in people’s daily life in Japan, in traditional arts, such as brush paintings, ikebana (flower arrangement), and music for hundreds of years, and is often considered to be an original concept, unique to Japanese culture. Because of this perceived uniqueness, ma has, especially in the last few decades, been discussed and treated with a slight hint of a nationalistic mindset. However, I will argue that although the formalization of these ideas as “ma” is uniquely Japanese, the phenomenon described is more globalized. As a Japanese pianist who engages with Western classical and experimental music, I have witnessed ma-like elements in musical pieces from different geographic locations and time periods. My artistic interest has, thus, centered around finding ma-like structures in music from outside of Japan’s sphere of influence, with the goal of demonstrating that the concept of “charged stillness” is quite widespread. With this idea in mind, I recorded a piano solo album that includes pieces by Chinese American composer Lei Liang, 18th-century Austrian composer Joseph Haydn, Swiss composer Katharina Rosenberger, and 20th-century Greek avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis, as well as Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. These works are very different from each other, but I believe that they all embody ma-like ideas in their own ways. As a performer, one can then apply this ancient idea to the performance of a wide variety of musical situations to enrich their performance experiences.

This dissertation serves as an investigative attempt to connect musical thought to my work in performance art as well as poetry, drawing from Maurice Ravel’s Boléro and Jean Barraqué’s Sonata for piano. Using my performance Only Time, I trace how my early work embeds repetition within its structure, taking inspiration from Boléro’s formal design. Using my poem SIS TER, I show how repetitive elements become objects of fixation when presented as surface features of the work, taking inspiration from Barraqué’s use of recurrent pitches in his Sonata. This paper will trace this trajectory in chronological fashion, as I accumulate techniques through these musical influences.

Three Recitals is a thesis that discusses programming, technical, musical, and thematic issues involved in my three degree recitals for my DMA program in Contemporary Music Performance in Piano. My first recital consisted of music by Béla Bartók, Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, and Roger Reynolds, and explored issues of modernity, nature, machines, and mindfulness. My second recital explored music by Béla Bartók, Johannes Brahms, and Elliott Carter in a collaborative chamber program involving my friends and colleagues in the music program at UCSD. My final program involved music by Johannes Brahms, Claude Debussy, Luciano Berio, and Ludwig van Beethoven and explored issues of meaning, structure, and surface detail. Together, my recitals constitute a principled exploration of important musical and social ideas through the lens of music for solo piano and chamber groups from the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

This dissertation focuses on issues of performance practice in Helmut Lachenmann's Serynade for solo piano (1997/1998, revised 2000), particularly the technical and musical challenges faced when realizing this work. With its idiosyncratic notation, Lachenmann’s compositional language requires careful study prior to performance. As such, this paper discusses extended techniques and phrasing throughout Serynade and provides strategies for learning and performing this major work of the repertoire. In particular, this project provides insight into the production of shadow sounds, intricate use of the piano pedals, and playing inside the piano. Likewise, the unique nature of Serynade necessitates an approach to phrasing and interpretation that is characteristically its own. In addition to performance analysis, this discussion of Serynade will include notes from my meeting with the composer as well as recent research on Lachenmann and Serynade. This dissertation provides practical solutions and a window into the performer’s perspective when facing the many challenges encountered in Helmut Lachenmann’s Serynade.

In a number of Stuart Saunders Smith’s pieces, he calls upon the performer to compose dynamics, articulations, and phrasing atop the rhythms and pitches he provides. In my preparation of four of these pieces, namely Family Portraits: Self (in 14 Stations), Thicket, Palm Sunday, and Among Us, I chose to fashion my compositional process around placing myself in the role of a listener.

This involved the creation of a sequence of self-recordings. Beginning with recordings of the pieces devoid of musical nuance, I would listen back, take notes on what my ear desired in terms of dynamics, phrasing, and articulation, put those thoughts into practice, and record the pieces again. I repeated this process until I achieved interpretations of Smith’s works that I was satisfied with as a listener.

Given the numerous compositional possibilities Smith allows for in these circumstances, I was curious as to why my ear made the decisions that led to these finalized recordings of the four pieces. The process I employed seemed highly intuitive, but I found it difficult to discuss the nuances of my choices from an analytical perspective. This dissertation is an attempt to self-analyze my compositional process in these works. Through study of the final recordings against the scores, I hypothesize about the inherent facets of Smith’s music that influenced my compositional decisions.

These discussions orbit a number of larger thematic considerations. Firstly, I write about nuanced compositional decisions influenced by my ear’s desire for main voice or hauptstimme, and the impact that the density of Smith’s counterpoint, implied pitch and rhythmic hierarchy, and pianistic choreography have on the sounding results of the pieces at a microcosmic level. Secondly, I discuss macrocosmic compositional concerns regarding resemblances to classical musical forms, Smith’s calling upon prolonged use of the sustain pedal, the implications of repetition, and the evocation of changing tempo when such shifts are aurally difficult to discern. Finally, the dissertation concludes with theorizing on the relationship of one’s own education and performance background to the compositional process and results, relating Smith’s pieces to mirrors that reflect individual musical values back onto the performer.

The following essay gives an overview and my personal experience through thefour major recitals required towards completion of my degree.

When considering the creation of new musical compositions it occurs to me that there exists a variety of ways of relating to history. Many works call upon forms and harmonic languages spanning back hundreds of years. Some composers seek to eschew the past and present and imagine music of the future. Some composers ignore the issue entirely.

Music explicitly relating to the present time always fascinates me. Although one might respond to that notion by claiming that any piece of music ever written qualifies as "music of the present" upon its completion, my concern is not with the date of composition.

In this case I am concerned with music that embraces the cultural phenomena and innovations of the time during which it was composed. The Zeitoper pieces of Kurt Weill exemplify this concern wholly, as these pieces exploit current events and technological innovations as inspiration for musical content.

In this thesis I aim to highlight three other examples of "music of the present". Firstly, I will propose manners in which Edgard Varèse's Ionisation for percussion ensemble might be understood as related to the electrochemical process of ionization and the Neils Bohr model of the atom, proposed in 1913. Secondly, I will discuss Internet latency, a parameter inherent in telematic performance practice, as a usable compositional tool. Finally, I will discuss my recent composition, Microscope, with regards to its relationship to popular culture idioms and to the placement of musical and non-musical "hooks" throughout the work.

My disseration Wavicles serves as a review and critique of my work spanning the course of seven years and centering around the four solo performances given during this span of time. Larger topics, such as creativity, concert programming, trends in contemporary music, for example, are touched on briefly as they become relevant to the concert under discussion, or as they feed into my concluding thoughts about the nature, meaning, and experience of live music and how that informs my past, current, and future projects.

This brief essay acted as program notes to a recital, entitled "Posing Nothing," given April 12, 2013. The recital juxtaposed performances of scored contemporary music with movement-based improvisation. This essay situates the use of physical movement in my musical performance with artists in other disciplines who use movement as part of their practice, ultimately demonstrating the implicit nature of movement in many artistic fields and how it can be treated explicitly.