mizukikajihara

[mizukikajihara]

Sweet Dreams

In the video, I embarks on a journey from my residence in Athienou towards the abandoned village ruins of Petrofani, situated at the buffer zone of Cyprus, playing a lullaby song on an electronic player embedded in a stuffed animal. However, during the journey, the music player’s battery runs out, causing the music to distort and ultimately fail to continue playing towards its intended destination.

[mizukikajihara]

Headed for the Moon World

Photo by Kohei Maeda

In 1777, Franz Joseph Haydn composed the opera "The World of the Moon". It is a comedy in which a fake astronomer blurts out that "there is a wonderful world on the moon" in order to marry a rich man's daughter, but it also offers a glimpse into the development of astronomy at the time and the interest of ordinary people in space. Nearly 200 years later, in 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon for the first time in human history, and people became more excited about "space development" than ever before. The "moon rock" brought back by Apollo 12 became the centerpiece of the 1970 Osaka World's Fair, and many visitors still lined up to get a glimpse of it. The overture to Haydn's "The Moon World" is performed in 102 hours, 45 minutes, and 40 seconds. This is exactly the same time it took Apollo 11 to reach the moon. The performance times of all the notes are listed in the table, including those that will continue to be played while the gallery is closed. In an age when we have already approached the "faraway" from the moon, or from an age when we had to make efforts beyond our common sense and everyday senses to capture something unrecognizably far away, this work is an experiment to regain distance from it again.

medium : electronic piano, 50g weight, music score for 102 hours 45 minutes, and 40 seconds

[mizukikajihara]

Nocturn of Ibaraki Wanderings

I developed an interest in the Ibaraki folk song “Isobushi,” regarded as one of the three great folk songs of Japan, due to the history of its transmission. At the end of the Meiji period, the singing virtuoso Sekine Anchu undertook a nationwide tour with the sumo wrestler Hitachiyama Taniemon and performed the song. The pair were the medium through which what was once a work song became widely known like it is today. As I continued to speak with experts, however, I came to learn that “Isobushi” is an example of something established as “music” for the purpose of performing. Encompassing the countless numbers of simple rural songs originally passed down orally and other songs that were never recorded and eventually vanished without a trace, the term “folk song” that became popular after the war denotes a range of singing styles so wide and diverse that we cannot possibly comprehend them in their entirety. Moreover, these songs were previously inseparable from lifestyle and work. With the development of industrialization, the purposes of the songs were eventually forgotten. The rhythms born out of the soil and the rhythms of breathing ceased to fulfill their original functions and seem left behind today only as “music.” Do such songs closely tied to lifestyle still exist? With that question in mind, I embarked on a journey around Ibaraki’s coastal towns. I memorized the melodies of songs I heard from people along the way and created a new song by putting them together. With the help of a folk song performer in Moriya City and locals, I have added musical accompaniment and lyrics. This is a process of reconsolidating, passing on, and recording orally transmitted information, with myself as the medium.

Supported by ARCUS Project Performance by Ogasawara Kai

medium : 7inch EP record

[mizukikajihara]

The Return to Life or…

Louis Hector Berlioz's masterpiece commonly known as the "Symphonie fantastique" is famous for his technique called Idee-Fix and it is an important position in Western music history. He inspired by the experience of personal heartbreak, then wrote the symphony that is consisted of 5 part, and the sequel. In each work, the phrase “A lover(Harriet Smithson1800-1854)” wich was specifically defined by himself is appears while changed many time.The way of identify music and a motif clearly was very similar to the role played by language, and was a revolutionary expression for people at the time. In this project, the representative phrases used in "Symphonie fantastique" are conveyed like a telephone game, and I will record all performance.First I play this phrases, and ask a person to listen to it. She or He play while relying on his(her) memory.I make a music score of this play, And then repeat the same act again to another person. The phrase would be change depend on the person,or by land and environment, or by the language used by the person. Usually, in a telephone game, as the number of people increases, it’s difficult to specify where the change has occurred. It can be said that the difference in perception of each human being and the difference in the connection between language and motif are also affected.

Artist in Residence Program in Paris 2020/2021 Supported by : Osaka Chishima Foundation for Creation, Kyoto Art Center, Villa Kujoyama, Institut français Photo : "No home radius 20,000km" Exhibition view / 2022

[mizukikajihara]

Due to the structure of my body, I can only produce this sound.

It is said that a newborn human can only produce the sound "A". In the beginning of "In Search of Lost Time " by Marcel Proust, a half-asleep "I" is talking incessantly. This project is to read the entire novel with the "A" sound.

medium : sound

Mizuki Kajihara · Due to the structure of my body, I can only produce this sound.

[mizukikajihara]

bolelo

During the 17 minute,  the drum repeats only one motion by  follows a crescendo. This is a characteristic of “Bolero” (composed by Maurice Ravel), which is famous for ballet songs. I’m interest in this “repetition of simple motion”, and learned how to play drums. Through playing the instrument, I was trying to consider about the relationship between physical motion and the dynamism that appear in proportion to them.

I focus on the process in which the same motion significantly changes with the passage of time, I recorded the traces of the movement as a picture scroll using Japanese paper about 20m. While carrying the paper at a constant speed on a conveyor belt, It had kept hitting by the stick soaked with Japanese ink. The movements that are performed without accents are transformed into unexpected shapes due to ink bleeding or impact, and are abstractly musicalized. The loudness of the sound, the vertical movement, and the physical movement that accompanies the performance, how do they appear as reality? “Exercise: 1” is an experiment that attempt to visualize that simple movements can significantly change to something.

medium : japanese paper / ink

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Simple and soft, but not so slow.

Jonny Heykens (1884-1945) was a Dutch composer who was active in Germany. 

Since most of his works have disposed after the war, Op.21 Serenade was uniquely recognized only in Japan, well-known for a long time from war-period radio and Japanese National Railways. I was interested in knowing how this work came to Japan from Holland, then performed this piece at designated train stations along a certain railway line. 

That is the "Akatsuki" sleeper express, and it's considered first started using this song as train announcement.

I visited all the stations where these Japanese National Railways trains stopped from Kyoto to Nagasaki, and played the songs.

By looking at the relationship between war and music, as well as music and railways, which are a symbol of economic recovery, I tried to explore the nature of music itself.

Mizuki Kajihara · Hykens

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The Libertine Punished or…

Mizuki Kajihara · The Libertine Punished or

Mizuki Kajihara · The Libertine Punished or

In September 1787, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was traveling from Vienna to Prague for the premiere of opera “Don Giovanni” without completing its composition.Eventually, the Overture was unfinished till the night before.

By this project, I had moved from Vienna to Prague by bicycle while playing the Overture of “Don Giovanni” by Kazoo and follow the root  same as Mozart as much as possible.In order to physically experience the relationship between the speed of music and the distance.

As the prelude consists of 292 bars, and the distance between Vienna and Prague is 289 kilometers. I decided a rule to play one bar for each kilometer.

However the playing length for each kilometer is expanded and contracted depends on the topography and own physical condition.

I have reduced this 17 hour and 32 minute performance to about 6 minutes, the length of the original overture.

[mizukikajihara]

BWV1068

An orchestral piece composed by Johann Sebastian Bach, commonly called “Aria on the G line”, is able to play by only one string, as the name implies. Taking this characteristic into account, I held a performance wich walking one road while playing the first chord of this song repeatedly by harmonica. It is an attempt to bring the laws of sound established in the history of music into real lands with one’s own body. Apri 2018