Yoshiaki Onishi - Works (2009–present)
All live recordings

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Tramespace, diptyque pour grand ensemble (2012~15)

0:00~15:12: Tramespace I (2012~2013)
15:12~32:58: Tramespace II (2013~2015)

Tramespace I:
Study Score: www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product…mespace-I.html

Asko|Schönberg Ensemble
Clark Rundell, cond.

Geertekerk, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2013, Opening Concert
September 2, 2013

Live recording made by Richard de Gruyl for Concertzender/VPRO during Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2013

Tramespace II:
Study Score: http://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p2065_Tramespace-II.html

Ensemble Intercontemporain
Pablo Heras-Casado, cond.

Kölner Philharmonie, Köln (Cologne), Germany
Acht Brücken 2015
May 9, 2015
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Départ dans... (2010) for five players
Wet Ink Ensemble, Yoshiaki Onishi, cond. 
Recorded January 25, 2012 
Issue Project Room, New York 
Gaudeamus/New York Festival
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Parti... (2012~14, rev. 2015)
-- Linda Jankowska, violin

Score: http://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p1901_Parti---.html
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Culs-de-sac (en passacaille) (2009, rev. 2010)
JACK Quartet
Recorded July 23, 2010
Orangerie, Darmstadt, Germany
Internationale Ferienkurse für neue Musik Darmstadt

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Envoi II (2016) for string trio
Momenta Quartet
(Alex Shiozaki, violin; Stephanie Griffin, viola;  Michael Haas, violoncello)
February 19, 2017
Scandinavia House, New York

Remastered by Yoshiaki Onishi

Score: https://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p2213_Envoi-II.html
Parts: https://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p2278_Envoi-II.html
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Tr (épilogue) - for violoncello solo (2012, rev. 2014)
Recording of the new, definitive version

http://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p1903_Tr---pilogue-.html

Kevin McFarland, violoncello
Ryan Streber, recording engineer

Columbia Composers Concert
Cary Hall, DiMenna Center (New York)
April 14, 2014
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Gz - A Vuza Canon for tenor recorder and shakuhachi (2017)
Tosiya Suzuki, recorder
Tadashi Tajima, shakuhachi
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Envoi I - for violoncello solo (2015) 
Two diff. performances:
Kei Yamazawa, violoncello
Anssi Karttunen, violoncello

Score: http://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p2062_Envoi-I.html
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Spargens (2012)
for trombone solo
William Lang, trombone

Score: http://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p1902_Spargens.html
December 12, 2012
Roulette (Brooklyn, New York)
Columbia Composers Concert
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Envoi III - twelve micro-strophes for ondes Martenot solo (2017)
Takashi Harada, ondes Martenot
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Palinody - for fourteen players (2010)
Wet Ink Ensemble
Yoshiaki Onishi, cond.
Recorded December 11, 2010
St. Peter’s Church Chelsea, New York, NY
Live Recording (Ryan Streber, recording engineer)

[Yoshiaki Onishi in nearly 3 hours]

Note: video footage of this performance can be viewed here: https://vimeo.com/89395213

Nieuw Ensemble
Yoshiaki Onishi, cond.

An Evening of Today II
January 16, 2014
Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Départ dans... (2010, rev. 2013)

Score: http://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?language=en&info=p1903_Tr--epilogue-.html

Recording of the new, definitive version

Kevin McFarland, violoncello
Ryan Streber, recording engineer

Columbia Composers Concert
Cary Hall, DiMenna Center (New York)
April 14, 2014
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When I wrote my Culs-de-sac (en passacaille) for string quartet in 2009, it was evident to me that I should develop the sonic soundscape that I have created in that piece. I have decided that I write a cycle of compositions for string quartet and its subsets.

Tr (épilogue) marks the second piece that I completed in this cycle. Its title has a precursor; Tr for violoncello and piano, of which I took the formal scheme as a point of reference for the solo piece. I took the duo piece, stripped away the piano part, and enlarged the piece by adding musical commentaries.

As the title may suggest, I intend that this piece conclude the cycle. In the spirit of concluding the cycle, my focus in this piece was to illuminate the gestures and situations of ‘farewell,’ in the sense that the envelope of the phrases has the conscious trajectory of fade-out.

Many thanks to Patrick McGuire who, in the symposium Creative Dialogue V, premièred the work-in-progress version as a part of Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Also thanks are due to Anssi Karttunen and Magnus Lindberg, whose commentaries and feedbacks were crucial to the development of the piece. For the revised version, a rather extended coda (Coda (à Séverine)) was added. I am indebted to Séverine Ballon, who kindly demonstrated a technique utilized in this coda.

Tr (épilogue) is dedicated to Pierre Morlet and Mark Andre.

- Yoshiaki Onishi

Tr (épilogue) - for violoncello solo (2012, rev. 2014)

Sabien Canton and Miriam Overlach, Harps (sHARP duo)
September, 2014 
Utrecht, The Netherlands

Gaudeamus Muziekweek, Sabien Canton, and Miriam Overlach asked me to compose a very brief piece, either for solo harp or for two harps. I chose the latter. This is the first installment of a miniature piece; I plan to write more. The French word 'ombreuses' refers to 'shadows'. It made me think of the acoustic properties of the harp. Specifically, its resonances. The piece is an imaginary musical dialogue between what is in the foreground and the background, which constantly attempts to come to the fore.

Ombreuses (une miniature pour deux harpes) (2014)

NOTE: The work "Tramespace" as a diptych has not yet been performed, but the two works that make up the diptych have now been performed. I have put the two recordings together, so as to form an impression of the diptych. 

Many excuses for the drop in the quality of the sound recording in "Tramespace II," as the sound becomes monophonic.
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0:00~15:12: Tramespace I (2012~2013)
15:12~32:58: Tramespace II (2013~2015)
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Tramespace I:
Study Score: https://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p1918_Tramespace-I.html

Asko|Schönberg Ensemble
Clark Rundell, cond.

Geertekerk, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2013, Opening Concert
September 2, 2013

Live recording made by Richard de Gruyl for Concertzender/VPRO during Gaudeamus Muziekweek 2013
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Tramespace II:
Study Score: https://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p2065_Tramespace-II.html

Ensemble Intercontemporain
Pablo Heras-Casado, cond.

Kölner Philharmonie, Köln (Cologne), Germany
Acht Brücken 2015
May 9, 2015

Tramespace, diptych for large ensemble (2012~2015)

05 - Yoshiaki Onishi: Envoi I

Tosiya Suzuki, recorder
Tadashi Tajima, shakuhachi

March 25, 2017
Yodobashi Church, Tokyo, Japan
Recorded live and mastered by Yoshiaki Onishi

Gz is an abbreviation of Gestaltzerfall, or “shape decomposition,” a psychological phenomenon where one experiences a temporary loss of the ability to recognize certain letters, particularly often experienced in Japanese Kanjis, or Chinese characters. The elements of loss, uncertainty, and doubt are the underlying motivations for composing this work.

Named after Rumanian mathematician Dan Tudor Vuza who researched it extensively, a Vuza canon is a rhythmic, tiling canon with some peculiar musical properties. Even at the maximal density of the canon where all the voices are playing, the overall perception is a continuous flow of the basic pulse unit (in this piece, it is an eighth-note). Furthermore, at that moment, each “pulsation” is enunciated by only one voice. In other words, when one voice is enunciating, the other voices are absent. The end result is something similar to a hocket.

While this piece does start as a 12-part Vuza canon compressed into two voices, its canonic structure becomes distorted little by little, and toward the end of the work, all dissolves into layers of breath sounds.

Commissioned by Tosiya Suzuki, Gz is dedicated to Tosiya Suzuki, Tadashi Tajima who premièred this work, and to Fabien Lévy, who introduced me to the fascinating world of the Vuza canons.

Gz - A Vuza Canon for tenor recorder and shakuhachi (2017)

Kei Yamazawa, Violoncello

Recorded live on April 13, 2017
Tiara Koto, Tokyo, Japan

Recording mastered by Yoshiaki Onishi

Written from August to October of 2015 as part of "Five Dialogues," project initiated by Anssi Karttunen, this work is dedicated to him. This work utlizes the clothespins attached to the strings, and this technique was first shown to me by Theresa Wong, composer and cellist while we were in the residency at Civitella Ranieri Foundation together. The "prepared sound" from this technique plays an important role in the development of the musical materials in this piece. Furthermore, the fact that the tuning of the instrument being identical to that of the Fifth Cello Suite by Johann Sebastian Bach is a way for me to pay tribute to the masterpiece; there is also a passage from the Sarabande of the Suite, encrypted and hidden within the piece.

Envoi I - for violoncello solo (2015)

Momenta Quartet
(Alex Shiozaki, violin; Stephanie Griffin, viola;  Michael Haas, violoncello)
February 19, 2017
Scandinavia House, New York

Remastered by Yoshiaki Onishi

Score: https://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p2213_Envoi-II.html
Parts: https://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p2278_Envoi-II.html

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Commissioned by Music From Japan (New York).

When I wrote my Culs-de-sac (en passacaille) for string quartet in 2009, it was evident to me that I should develop the sonic soundscape that I have created in that piece. I have decided that I write Les six aspects du néant, a cycle of compositions for string quartet and its subsets.

Envoi II marks the fourth piece that I completed in this cycle. Envoi is another series of pieces I have been working on since 2015. In this piece, these two cycles intersect in their compositional and affective senses.

This piece relates itself to the cycle Les six aspects du néant, for its compositional materials are taken from the pieces within that cycle that I have already written. These materials have been then worked out once again in order to compose this piece.

In its literary sense, an envoi (or envoy) is an author’s concluding words, or a short stanza that concludes a ballade. In modern French, it is a word frequently used to denote the action of “sending off” (packages or letters) or simply “sending” (one’s best wishes, etc.). While its author is specific, the recipient could be, depending on the context, open-ended. It may be to someone alive, or it may be to a fictional character, or someone deceased.

As I started to write this piece, I received the news that James Deitz, percussionist whom I have been privileged to know since my time during the graduate studies at Yale University, departed from this world. This piece is dedicated to his memory.

Many thanks are due to Prof. Fuyuko Fukunaka, musicologist at Tokyo University of the Arts who extended the opportunity to write this work for the Music From Japan Festival 2017, Mr. Naoyuki Miura and Ms. Mari Ono, organizers of Music From Japan (New York), and the members of Momenta Quartet.

- Yoshiaki Onishi

Envoi II - for string trio (2016)

(British premiere)

Linda Jankowska, violin
University of Huddersfield (Huddersfield, England)
September 15, 2017

Parti… for violin solo (2012~14, rev. 2015)

Takashi Harada, ondes Martenot
October 1, 2017
Nagoya, Japan

Written at the request of Miyuki Ito for her concert series NymphéArt No. 13 in Nagoya, Japan, this work is dedicated to Takashi Harada, ondist, and Tristan Murail, composer and one of my teachers, who celebrates his seventieth birthday this year.

Envoi III - twelve micro-strophes for ondes Martenot solo (2017)

Culs-de-sac (en passacaille) (2009, rev. 2010)
JACK Quartet
Recorded July 23, 2010
Orangerie, Darmstadt, Germany
Internationale Ferienkurse für neue Musik Darmstadt
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Culs-de-sac (en passacaille), written between the fall of 2008 and early 2009, was the first piece I completed after I started my doctoral residency at Columbia University.  Working on this piece initially plunged me into a bit of a crisis, because of the enormous historical weight that the instrumental medium, string quartet, possessed.  Composing this piece was a moment in my life as a composer in which I had to reconsider, from ground-up, what it meant to write for each of the instruments.  This process of reconsideration would soon have a tremendous impact for me to arrive at the question of my “being” as a composer.  Thus the title "Culs-de-sac," or multiple impasses, is a metaphor for the crisis.  

Passacaille, or passacaglia, is a musical form in which there are series of variations on the same ground bass.  Here, I took the term more liberally, and it is attributed to the notion of a metrical scheme that recurs throughout the piece.  The perception of such a metrical scheme is obscure, even futile; nevertheless, it still suggests something, perhaps the imagery of "something unseen/unheard is going on behind the curtain."

Therefore, the title as a whole suggests a kind of recurrent attempts to break away from the crisis or to make a dialectical turn from the crisis in order for a new beginning to emerge.

This work was written for JACK Quartet, and dedicated to the 65th birthday of my father, Shinzō Onishi.  Also, this forms one of the six works of the cycle written for string quartet and its subsets, entitled: "Les Six Aspects du Néant" (The Six Aspects of Nothingness).

- Yoshiaki Onishi

Culs-de-sac (en passacaille) (2009, rev. 2010)

28/78 New Music Ensemble
	Andrew Lu, flute
	Scott Pastor, clarinet
	Thomas Hubel, trumpet
	Joshua Dunsford, trombone
	Tyler Golding, percussion
	Diego Bustamante, piano
	Sabrina Boggs and Micah Vogel, violins
	Anne Plescia, viola
	Malcolm King, violoncello
	Tristen Collinsworth, electronics

Yoshiaki Onishi, cond. 

February 2, 2019
Stockton, California, United States

28/78 New Music Festival
Conservatory of Music, University of the Pacific

Live Recording by Jeffrey D. Crawford (Owen Hall Recording & Video Studio)
Remastered by the composer

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I: L'antienne acoustique 1
II: Mouvements
III: L'antienne acoustique 2
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Antefenas is a spelling variant of an Old English word, antefn, meaning an “antiphon,” “anthem,” or a “hymn song sung in alternate parts.” No religious connotation is intended in this piece; however, throughout the piece I focus on the physicality of alternating sounds. In particular, I am interested in the kinetics of one sound responding to another, eventually forming the perception of a dialogue. Throughout the piece, dialogue is implied in various ways.

In the first part, L’antienne acoustique I (The acoustic dialogue I), an exchange between real and virtual acoustics takes place: the live musicians play short sounds through their instruments that would highlight the acoustics of the room or the hall where the piece is being played. The electronic part responds to these live instrumental sounds with sounds that are passed through impulse responses, artificially generated reverberations that simulate a “virtual” room. In the second part, Mouvements (movements), the electronic part is absent, and the focus is on the activities on the instrumental parts. “Movements” here refer not only to the fast passages that dominate this part, but also to the movements of the sounds that are exchanged from one instrumental group to another. The last part, L’antienne acoustique II, is essentially an inverse of the first part, where the live instrumental parts simulate the acoustics that the electronics produced in L’antienne acoustique I by producing the airy and hissing sounds that quickly decay in volume. The electronic part predominantly produces sounds with dry acoustics. New to the revised version, fast delays are added to the electronic sounds that bounce off left and right. Such sounds are put together with the live instrumental sounds to create a more immersive experience. The electronic part also plays a series of bell-like chords, which come from the residues of compositional materials that did not make their ways into the second part, Mouvements. I think of them as a signifier of the irreconcilable past. I find them particularly poignant, considering how turbulent the world has been for the past few years. Indeed, working on a now two-year-old piece makes the passing of time so visceral and palpable.

Antefenas-Studies was commissioned by and written for University of the Pacific’s 28/78 New Music Ensemble and Andrew Lu, in partnership with the Conservatory of Music. I dedicate this piece to Robert Coburn, in gratitude for introducing me to the world of Max/MSP while I was an undergraduate at the university, which has proven essential for creating the electronics component of this piece.

  --- Yoshiaki Onishi

Antefenas-Studies, for ensemble and electronics (2018)

Yoshiaki Onishi - Envoi II (2016) for string trio

live recording from 2018 Trieste Prima Festival
performed by Distractfold Ensemble:
Linda Jankowska - violin
Emma Richards - viola
Alice Purton - cello

Yoshiaki Onishi - Envoi II (2016) for string trio

December 11, 2010
Wet Ink Ensemble
Yoshiaki Onishi, cond.
St. Peter’s Church Chelsea, New York, NY
Live Recording (Ryan Streber, recording engineer)

=================
Palinody is a now rare word, derived from the Middle French word, palinodie. The Oxford English Dictionary defines palinody as: “An ode or song in which the author retracts a view or sentiment expressed in a former poem.” Here, the former “composition” refers to my 2008 piece entitled Wound Sky (i.e., past participle of the verb “to wind”), which was a work that I wrote just before coming to New York to start my residency at Columbia.

“Whenever we hear sounds, we are changed. We are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds,” was the maxim that German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen once declared. As my life seems to have changed in these past two years, what I thought I aptly expressed two years ago no longer appeared valid to me. I found it necessary and inevitable, therefore, to destroy the work entirely. I took little of what was salvageable from my Wound Sky, disintegrated it into pieces, and I wrote a new piece over them. In this way, the original context of Wound Sky is lost. In this piece, the destruction of Wound Sky is not represented by the absence of the work, but rather by a collection of subconscious memories whose origins are obscure. However, in this present piece Palinody, the spectators ultimately assimilate those “nomadic” memories in their own terms.

With the apparition of Palinody, the work Wound Sky is hereby withdrawn from my catalogue of works.

Written in the autumn of 2010 for the musicians of the Wet Ink Ensemble, this piece is dedicated to them.

       - YO

Palinody - for fourteen players (2010)

Yoshiaki Onishi
Spargens (2012)
for trombone solo
Score here: http://www.editiongravis.de/verlag/product_info.php?info=p1902_Spargens.html

William Lang, trombone

December 12, 2012
Roulette (Brooklyn, New York)
Columbia Composers Concert

Spargens was commissioned by trombonist William Lang. Its title, “spargens,” is a Latin word meaning “scattering.” It is a piece about a musical continuity being affected by various interferences, thereby creating paradoxically scattered sonic images out of such continuous musical gestures.

Many thanks are due to George Lewis for his initial inspirational remarks on trombone writing at the time I started to work on this piece. Also many thanks to the Civitella Ranieri Center in Umbertide, Italy, where the creative process on this piece truly blossomed.


Spargens - for trombone solo (2012)

Work commissioned by the Sheldon Arts Foundation in St. Louis, Missouri

Yoshiaki Onishi, bass clarinet
Leigh Muñoz, bassoon

March 6, 2020
The Sheldon Concert Hall
St. Louis Classical All-Stars

Yoshiaki Onishi - Gz III (2019-20) for bass clarinet and bassoon

Yoshiaki Onishi is a Japanese-American composer, conductor, and clarinetist. As a composer, he is interested in exploring a wide range of instrumental timbres and finding ways to incorporate them in musical syntaxes and forms that disrupt the sense of expectation. He has worked on commissions that have come from such festivals and organizations as Klangwerkstatt Berlin, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Takefu International Music Festival, and Gaudeamus Muziekweek, and his music has been performed by ensembles worldwide, including New Japan Philharmonic, Asko|Schönberg Ensemble, Klangforum Wien, Nieuw Ensemble, Distractfold Ensemble, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Quatuor Diotima and JACK Quartet. He is the recipient of the 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2018 Fromm Commission, and the Gaudeamus Prize 2011. Edition Gravis in Berlin, Germany publishes his music. As a conductor deeply engaged in promoting the music of today, he is Co-Director for the Mizzou New Music Ensemble and was one of the founding members of Ensemble Exophonie Tokyo. Other ensembles he has worked with as a conductor include Nieuw Ensemble of Amsterdam, ECCE Ensemble, Wet Ink Ensemble, Columbia University Orchestra and the University Philharmonic Orchestra of the University of Missouri. Increasingly active as a clarinetist and improviser, he has collaborated with composers George Lewis, Carolina Heredia, Oswald Huỳnh, Bret Bohman, and Andrew Crossley. Together with Santiago Beis, he plays in the Onishi-Beis Duo, an electroacoustic improvisation duo. Onishi received his doctorate in music composition from Columbia University in 2015. He is currently Assistant Professor of Music Composition at the University of Delaware School of Music. 

Profile Photo © 2015 by Stefaren.