UC San Diego

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.