[English Translation]

Nobuyuki Nakajima’s Clair-Obscur
Interviewed and written by Yoshihiro Narita

The fateful encounter with one piano

Pianists are curious beings indeed. Whether it be for a concert or for a recording session, basically you will never find them dragging around their own instruments with them. They simply comply with whatever piano prepared for them wherever they go. Perhaps that’s why there are no breeds other than pianists who pay so much intense attention to the way the instrument, which they are just about to play, sounds. That goes beyond describing the situation as simply ’holding a dialogue’ with the instrument, and musicians are often given perfect inspirations as if playing with a new band for the first time.

“What I enjoyed most when writing this piece was the inspiration I felt from the piano. The piano I used was originally owned by Aldo Ciccolini and then handed down personally to piano technician, Makoto Kano. It has a rather distinct quality, and as the memory of playing it lingered in my hands and fingers, I repeated the process of playing a phrase, listen and give a thought to it, and then give it another layer of sounds to the section, as if laying transparent sheets of paper one by one to create the piece of music. It’s not that I had an image or vision from the beginning, but the track is more a result of an accumulation of incidental elements.”

Nobuyuki Nakajima Clair-Obscur Spiral(2014)

The album starts off with the 2 new tracks inspired by the sounds of the piano that, to Nakajima, ’sounds like the tinkling of a bell’, and brings the curtain down with the 2 pieces “Clair” and “Obscur”, that also form the title of the album. It is easily the greatest composition that sheds light on the grace and beauty of the resonance created by performer Nakajima, more than any other of his past works. Unmissable also is the fact that even though this album is again recorded as a solo piano album, just like his previous album, Cancellare, the overall style is incredibly different on this latest work.

“I was flicking through my scores at home one day, and found some old scores. There was something that unexpectedly struck me when I tried it after all this time. And at the same time, it made me wonder how it would turn out if I composed a piano solo piece based on that now. The compositions on the previous album were more geared towards a jazz style, like centering the music on a certain melody following certain chords, but when I was in my early 20s, I was transcribing every single tone on the notesheets, making any alteration impossible. How it would compare to back then if I carried out my compositional works in that method today, -perhaps that was one theme I had when working on these new pieces.”

Compared to the past works that had somewhat song-like melodies, his latest album is made up with more ’instrumental’ sounding refrains. The melody has a wider range, and the music ’sings’ more freely. Some tracks seem like they are an amassment of tiny particles, as if they have been ’stippled’, while others seem like they have been written unicursally, leaving blank spaces intentionally. 

“I love playing in tiny sounds, I think that is something this album can get credit for. Actually, I made some of the tracks just for that.” Aiming for the subtle brink of audible and non-audible, the recording also seemed to have been a pursuit of limits to what one human ear can perceive.