Cosmos Haptic II (1986)
by Joji Yuasa
This music, the sixth of solo composition for piano, was composed at the request of pianist Aki Takahashi and premiered at her Yokohama recital in February 1986.
Cosmos Haptic II is based on a modal arrangement of twelve tones, a kind of custom ‘dodecaphony’, and it comprises six parts of different characters. I intended throughout to write a music that can come to life only on the piano, developing to the utmost the characteristics of this instrument, especially the sonority from its massive, reverberant body. In this work, the transformation of reverberation, blended by the use of pedals, rather than the arrangement of notes themselves, should be the continuous focus of attention—along with the passage of time.
This is the second instantiation of Cosmos Haptic, which I composed in 1957. “Haptic” is a word employed in Icon and Idea by Herbert Read, used to explain the way that painters of such primitive art as that found in the Caves of Altamira grasped the idea of the cosmos.