Incense

Kaoru Watanabe

I created a solo project called Incense during the pandemic featuring myself playing Japanese flutes, percussion, and koto zither, along with voice and some looping/live recording and playback technology with video components. The compositions are about looking at music styles and eras of Japan and bringing them to the contemporary world through the lens of modern-day politics and society. For example, I use the sound of a prepared koto to emulate the sound of the Zero fighter, the airplane used in kamikaze attacks. The piece recognizes that the elegant design and craft  Japanese culture is renowned for can also cause incredible death and destruction. Another composition came out of a collaboration with the tap dancer Tamangoh. He sent a video of himself running in circles and dancing in his apartment that was in slow-motion and moving in reverse. I added a video of myself performing with incense burning in the foreground, also moving in reverse so that the smoke was traveling downward and getting sucked into the burning incense stick. The resulting video explored how our perception of the passage of time was so skewed and altered during the pandemic, and was an expression of the anger, the frustration we felt collectively during the pandemic, the BLM movement, and the rise in Asian Hate Crimes. The title of the project and that piece, Incense, plays on the dual meaning of the word – both the calming and meditational aspects of burning incense and making someone extremely angry – to become incensed.

With this Seeds commission, I would like to expand on the show, developing a new repertoire – music inspired by different religions and regions performed on Japanese instruments.  

With the guidance of knowledgeable teachers and advisors, I will study and interpret melodies, rhythms, songs, and texts to create a repertoire that respectfully draws inspiration from those traditions. The performance and accompanying information of the historic, metaphoric background of the different pieces will simultaneously celebrate the diversity of culture and the shared traits, i.e., the use of incense, traversing geography, epochs, and beliefs.  

 I plan to perform this music in temples, mosques, churches, shrines, and other places of worship and cultural centers because of the significance of place to ritual and ceremony, and because I can burn various incense in those spaces during the concert, whereas most music venues don't allow that.

 When Buddhism from India was introduced from China to Yamato (ancient Japan) through the country of Kudara on the Korean Peninsula, along with Buddhist scriptures, incense was included as a religious item. At the time, the emperor of China (Zui) considered this fragrant wood more desirable than gold. Although the fragrant wood was commonly used in China, it was produced in the Malay Peninsula and India and brought across land and the maritime Silk Road. Shaving and burning the fragrant wood, considered gifts from Buddha, was done to purify the soiled human mind and spaces of this world. The Japanese, accustomed to purification rituals in Shintoism, quickly adopted these Buddhist practices to their everyday lives, to the point where the appreciation of fragrance was elevated to high art and was used as a tool to communicate among members of the aristocracy. In the violent, war-torn Sengoku era a few centuries later, incense was burned in armor to calm the warrior before battle and cover the stench of blood.  To the ancient Japanese, incense wasn't "smelled" but was instead "listened to." "Hearing incense" was to open one's mind and heart through appreciating fragrance. Incense was used across the Silk Road and the rest of the world for similar reasons. Whether Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus or Native Americans, and other indigenous cultures, incense is burned worldwide to calm and purify people's hearts and has created diverse and complex incense cultures spanning religions and countries.  The sense of smell is the most animal-like sense of the five human senses, and it instantly stimulates the part of the brain that controls memory and emotions. Like music, incense smoke evokes deep memories that connect ancient to modern times, east and west, religion, culture, and the relationship between humans and God.  

About Kaoru Watanabe
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