I composed Interrupted Dreams just after the birth of my son in Tokyo in Autumn 2010. At that time, life in the typical Japanese flat with a living space divided by means of sliding doors of minimal sound proofing, would hardly allow any concentration for composition. I recall I often watched my son when he was about to fall asleep. One thing I noticed was how easily his sleep would get disturbed by the minutest noise I would cause, in a similar way my composition was interrupted by my son’s crying for milk and attention. The acknowledgement of our mutually connected disturbance surprisingly allowed me not only to focus back to composition but also to transform the very reason of interruption and fragmentation into the main feature of the work. That explains the organisation of the musical material as a group of thematically unrelated brief segments of varied durations divided by rests. In a sense, the piece is a reflection on the importance of vital space ‘ma’ and the expressive potential of the wabi-sabi characteristics of incompleteness and fragmentation.
First performance: Sunday, 2 April 2017 Miller Theatre, Columbia University, The 12th Annual concert of Japanese Heritage Music, Mayumi Miyata (sho), Yumi Kurosawa (20-string koto)