Credits:

Aikawa Yumi

Description:

A centenary tribute: tracing the roots of Akira Ifukube”Yours is not a soprano voice – your real strength lies in the lower register.” So Akira Ifukube told Yumi Aikawa when she was a soprano student in the graduate school of the Tokyo University of the Arts. At first she could not understand the words of the composer who was both her teacher in the Ainu language and the master she looked to in music, but they became the starting point of her journey into ancient Japanese song.”A people’s sense of beauty does not change in one or two thousand years”, and “without passing through the sense of beauty of one’s own people, one can never arrive at anything truly international” – for the teacher who impressed these ideas upon her over a quarter of a century, was that “sense of beauty” the Ainu music he had known intimately during his years in Hokkaido? Yet he also said that “a composer must speak his