There must be countless thousands of Yamaha motorbikes in Thailand and every one of them carries a musical connection. If you look at the Yamaha logo closely, you’ll see that it’s an image of three overlaid tuning forks. You might recall that a tuning fork is a two-ponged U-shaped metal device that when struck, resonates with a pure tone of fixed frequency, usually 440 Hz – the musical note “A”. The device was invented in 1711 by a British musician and trumpet player, John Shore. Most string players carry this device (or used to) as part of their standard equipment though the tuning fork has been partially replaced by electronic tuners. Before an orchestral concert, the oboe player strikes the tuning fork, listens to the sound and then plays the exact frequency for the orchestra. This task traditionally falls to the oboe player because the sound of the instrument is penetrating enough for everyone in the orchestra to hear.
The tuning fork logo might seem a curious choice for a motorbike, but when Torakusu Yamaha established the company in 1887 it produced pianos and reed organs. It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that it branched into electronic equipment and motor bikes. Oddly enough, the tuning fork logo didn’t appear on Yamaha products until 1967. Yamaha makes splendid domestic and concert pianos and today produce a wide range of fine saxophones, brass and woodwind instruments which are especially popular with students and professionals. In recent times, Japan has become the producer of top-or-the-range woodwind instruments including saxophones from Yanagisawa and flutes from Miyazawa and Nagahara. You may be interested to know that one of the Nagahara professional flutes is made of 18K gold and comes at the eye-watering price of $33,000.
For some reason, we don’t seem to hear much music from Japanese composers, although there are plenty of them. Since the latter half of the nineteenth century, Japanese composers have looked towards western musical culture, often drawing on elements from Japanese traditional music. The incredibly prolific Toshiro Mayuzumi composed more than a hundred film scores and if you’d like an entertaining musical experience, seek out his Concertino for Xylophone and Orchestra. Kunihico Hashimoto was one of the leading Japanese composers in the twentieth century, whose music reflects elements of late romanticism and impressionism, as well as of the traditional music of Japan.
Yasushi Akutagawa was a student of Hashimoto at the Tokyo Conservatory of Music and later in life became friends with Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian and Dmitri Kabalevsky. His 1950 Music for Symphony Orchestra certainly owes a debt to Shostakovich and the Triptyque is a spiky work which shows influences of Stravinsky and Prokofiev. It’s attractive music and easy on the hear but even so, shows some personal trade-marks of the composer’s style. Incidentally, Akutagawa was one of the few composers who was also a popular presenter of television shows.
Takemitsu is Japan’s best-known composer but his fame came about by someone else’s mistake. When Stravinsky visited Japan in 1958, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation NHK arranged for him to hear some of the latest Japanese music. A recent recording of Takemitsu’s Requiem for String Orchestra was played by mistake but Stravinsky insisted on hearing it to the end. He greatly admired the work and later invited the young composer to lunch. Takemitsu later received a commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation, no doubt thanks to Stravinsky who must have put in a good word for him.
Takemitsu was virtually self-taught and began to compose at the age of sixteen. He gradually acquired orchestration skills and learned how to combine elements of Japanese and Western ideas, creating a sound which was entirely his own. This work was commissioned by Carnegie Hall in celebration of its 100th anniversary. Although it is effectively a concerto for percussion it is not intended as the composer explained, “to show off the virtuosity of the soloists. The ruling emotion of the work is one of prayer.”
The title comes from a poem by Makoto Ooka, a Japanese poet and friend of the composer. And incidentally, you’ll need to give the piece some time to get going, but when it does, you’ll enter Takemitsu’s highly personal and evocative sound-world, perhaps inspired by the music of Messiaen and Ligeti. He uses some exotic instruments too but if so-called “modern music” isn’t normally your idea of fun, do give this compelling work a try.
But to return to the three Yamaha tuning forks, I sometimes wonder how many Yamaha motor bike owners have the remotest idea what the logo represents. Not many, I suspect.
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