Analysis of "Waka" by Michiko Toyama: Cultural Influence on the Creation of the First Electroacoustic Music by a Japanese Woman

Michiko Toyama (1913-2006) was the first Japanese woman composer of electroacoustic music. Yet she has long been unrecognized and sometimes even ignored in the history of music in Japan and the world. Toyama led an unusual life. She was born in Osaka and began her formal piano performance studies in early age. In the 1930s, she went to Paris to study piano with Henri Gil-Marchex. In 1936 and thereafter, she studied composition with Nadia Boulanger at École Normale de Musique de Paris. As a result, her ensemble piece "Yamato No Koe (The Voice of Yamato)" was selected for the Fifteenth ISCM World Music Days in Paris in 1937. Toyama became the first Japanese composer to be chosen for this prestigious festival of contemporary music. After World War II, she studied composition with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory, where she met Pierre Schaeffer and learned about the creation of musique concrète. Later, she moved to New York in 1956 as a visiting composer at Columbia University. She studied with Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening, who had been creating electronic music since around 1951, long before the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center was formally established in 1958. At the CPEMC, Toyama composed two electroacoustic tape pieces, "Waka" and "Aoi No Ue," in 1958 and 1959, respectively. "Waka" may be regarded as one of the earliest electroacoustic fixed music compositions by women. But "Waka" was initially planned to be a piece for a narrator on stage, accompanied by electroacoustic music. The score was written in standard music notation for flute, cello, and a narrative component. Her music shows sensitivity in the transformation between timbres and intonation in the phrases. This research focuses on how the score, representing what Toyama imagined, was realized in the 1960 recording for Smithsonian Folkways Records. The piece's cultural influence will also be closely examined.