Piano Works of Jo Kondo
KM28, September 24, 2026
with kind support from The Japan Foundation
Program
Jo Kondo (1947-)
A Dance for Piano “Europeans” (1990)
Metaphonesis (2001)
Trochaic Thought (2009)
Three Winter Months (2019)
A Contemplation (2013)
Sight Rhythmics (1975)
Interlude (2017)
Pomegranate (2020)
Satoko Inoue (piano)
with kind support from The Japan Foundation
Program notes by Jo Kondo
A Dance for Piano “Europeans” (1990)
A Dance for Piano ‘Europeans’, an original composition for solo piano, was written for Satoko Inoue when she asked me a new composition for her recital in Tokyo in 1991. The piece was composed very quickly on Christmas Day 1990, almost in an extemporaneous fashion, improvising not on the keyboard but directly on music paper. This is perhaps reflected in the rather capricious character of the music. The subtitle comes from the fact that I was reading Henry James’ Europeans at the time. This is all that relates this piece to the novel, with no further connection either in content or structure. The piece is purely abstract music, with a touch of dance flavor due to its rhythmic character.
Metaphonesis (2001)
‘Metaphonesis’ is a composition based on a single melodic line, even if it sounds more ‘harmonic’ rather than monodic. The title of this work is a neologism, made from Greek, to express ‘making a sound a sound about the sound’, and at the same time the obscurity of its very meaning (or, putting it in a more positive way, an obscurity that allows room for interpretative manoeuvre). However, looking back and trying to recall what I intended to mean by the word some forty years ago, I only find everything dimmed by the grey mist of time. In any event, the determining reason for my choosing the word ‘metaphonesis’ as the title of this piano piece is that I found the sound of this word beautiful.
Trochaic Thought (2009)
‘Trochaic Thought’, a short rhythmic study, rhapsodic in nature. The basic rhythmic material of the work derives, as the title suggests, from trochee, a metrical pattern in classical rhetoric, i.e., a note of longer value is followed by a shorter one.
Three Winter Months (2019)
Since the early 1970’s, I have been composing music based on a single melodic line. Three Winter Months is not an exception, although it may not sound so to the listener’s ears, due to the nature of the melodic line that spreads out over a very wide range. The continuity of the melodic line is made ambiguous intentionally in this piece.
After the first ‘phrase’ of the melodic line is sung, the first and second halves of the phrase are played again but somehow combined simultaneously (in other words, the phrase is ‘folded’). Then, the second phase is treated in the same way, followed by the third, and so on. In the ‘folded’ section of each ‘phrase’ repetition, the continuity of the melodic line becomes even more vague. What I am interested in when writing the piece is the threshold of perception, at what point scattered notes become a line (or melody), and at what point a melody transforms into ‘sound texture’ without melodic legitimacy in our aural perception.
It took me three winter months to write the piece.
A Contemplation (2013)
This tiny piece was a gift to my German friend composer Hauke Harder for his 50th birthday, whose work is characterized by contemplative calmness and the sonorities and temperament of just intonation. This piece consists of the repetition of a single chordal unit above the unchanging drone of C, each repetition is a minor third higher than the previous phrase so that the last repetition reaches an octave higher than the original. This entire process can be repeated as many times as the pianist wishes.
Sight Rhythmics (1975)
‘Sight Rhythmics’ was originally written for five instruments: violin, steel drum, banjo, electric piano and tuba. The work consists of six short movements that sound very much alike. These movements seem almost identical, but careful listening will soon reveal their differences. I call this device pseudo-repetition, and it could be placed somewhere between literal repetition and variation. Literal repetition is in itself static, heading nowhere. Pseudo-repetition is almost as static as literal repetition, but at the same time becomes a vehicle for hidden change and motion. Perhaps the best term to describe this fluid situation, contradictory though they may seem, are the words ‘dynamic stasis’. We could liken the listener’s experience of dynamic stasis to the way we experience our everyday life. Each day seems very similar to the previous one (daily routine), but today is never exactly the same as yesterday.
Interlude (2017)
The title ‘interlude’ suggests that the music I write (indeed any of my compositions), even if sounding as an autonomous, self-sufficient, independent entity, stands in-between two eternities, the past and the future: the things that have gone, and the things that will come.
Pomegranate (2020)
The form of this work is based on the responsorial plain chant, in which a cantor sings first and then the chorus responds. That is to say, a single melody is played, and then the melody is repeated along with other notes (in other words, with added thickness of sound). This repetition occurs twice (unlike in the case of responsorial chant), and the second repetition is with an even denser texture than the first. However, we cannot necessarily recognize that they are repetitions of the same melody because the original melodic line is buried in the chordal textures (i.e., the chord-colorings to each individual note that constitutes the original melody) which grow thicker with each repetition. Thus, the second repetition may be heard as a transformation of the melody into thicker sound aggregates.
In any case, after a melody is repeated a total of three times in this way, it is followed by a new melody. The entire form of the piece is based on the repetition of this process of three repetitions of each melody.
There is no particular reason why I named this piece ‘pomegranate’. When I finished writing the piece, the name simply came up into my mind – that is the sole reason.
Some time after I sent the completed score to Satoko Inoue, whom the piece was written for, I happened to learn that pomegranate is one of her favorite foods. That said, you may imagine that there might have been some unconscious connection. But, of course, it’s only a delusion.
Satoko Inoue (piano)
Satoko Inoue is a leading interpreter of contemporary solo piano music. Since 1991, after her career as the member of “Musica Practica Ensemble,” she has been engaged in solo activities. Her repertoires mainly include the works of Jo Kondo, Morton Feldman, John Cage and Luc Ferrari as well as those of other Japanese composers. Her activities have been worldwide, as she has played at international contemporary music festivals; ISCM (Romania), Buenos Aires Contemporary Music Week (Argentina), Festival für aktuelle Klangkunst (Germany), Contempuls (Czech Republic), etc., given solo recitals in Europe, North and South America, and the Middle East; and made lectures for Master Classes of universities; Lille University, Cairo Conservatory of Music, California Institute of the Arts, Guildhall School of Music, Pristina University, etc. From 2018 to 2022, she was involved in the ‘Experiment of piano music to be handed down to the future’ on extended piano techniques project. She has recorded solo CD albums on HatHut Records (Switzerland), Emec Discos (Spain), ALM Records (Japan) among others. She has recorded all of Jo Kondo's piano works up to 2020 on three CDs for HatHut Records. Satoko Inoue was Professor at the Kunitachi College of Music in Tokyo until March 2023.