UC Santa Cruz

Since well before the twenty-first century, composers such as ChouWen-chung, Witold Lutoslawski, and Toru Takemitsu have extended non-musical elements into their music. While these composers have used painting techniques for inspiration such as brushing, writing, and color theory, there is still room for further exploration for translating fabric into musical practice. My contribution to this tradition is inspired by the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake, whose groundbreaking methods of creating fabric pleats with synthetic fibers into my musical language. In this dissertation, I present four approaches to integrating fabric pleats as a metaphor for musical composition. Inspired by the flowing movements of the fabric pleat, I created three new techniques for a percussion trio: the timbral arpeggio, pitch sculpture, and rhythmic chips illustrating a timbral wave, rhythmic idea, and harmony, respectively. I further developed the three concepts in the Stamp, written for pipa, percussion and string quartet. Another piece, Pleats • Play (for gayageum, violin, and cello), demonstrates how I translate the process of making synthetic fiber as the fiber is liquefied, extruded, extended, solidified, and spooled. A fourth piece, harkening back to Miyake’s original idea, Hidden • Apparent, interprets a unique way to assemble clothes. Hidden • Apparent, a composition for 25-string Gayageum, I create an ‘instructed improvisation’ to manifest the freedom of how to combine the pieces in Miyake’s designs. The process made me realize how much inspiration non-musical sounds can bring to music to provide broader, more inclusive musical content.