The Wondrous Midi Compositions
of Yo Kubota

by Douglas Milburn

It’s the rare site that can do all these things at once. We have located one of these gems: Strange Music Archives, the creation of Yo Kubota.

Working within the challenging limitations of the midi computer-music interface, Mr. Kubota has pulled off an extraordinary feat. As a sensitive arranger, he has given new life to very old music. As a composer and programmer, he has created lively new music.

His arrangements of old music are accessible and easy to appreciate. The new music perhaps would benefit from a bit of background. (Click here to skip our introduction and go directly to a page of examples of Mr. Kubota’s work.)

The Tyranny of the Tonic
Buddha spoke often of the dangers of "wrong thinking." Living in a pre-media age, he unfortunately had no reason to speak of "wrong listening," or "wrong performing."

Alas for them.

The reality of music, as opposed to the theory, is that it exists in a smooth continuum of sound from which one culture selects one set of notes, another selects another. Musicians play within the selected "box" and for listeners in that culture, those sounds become "music." Chinese ears are happily at home in a pentatonic scale, European ears in an eight-tone scale, and so on.

Today, with so-called "world music," plus the eclectic explorations of so-called "serious" composers, our listening is not quite as "wrong", not quite as narrow and provincial, as it was just a few decades ago.

Even now we remain very much victims of bad listening and performing habits that we might call the Tyranny of the Tonic. Our ears generally still expect a piece to begin and end in a "correct" way, that is, on the first note of a given, easily recognizable scale.

In the West, the flight from this tyranny first began with Scott Joplin and rag music, the early days of jazz at the end of the 19^th century. Though confined to the rigid notes of the piano keyboard, Joplin and others could suggest harmonies that didn’t "fit" and could indulge in syncopation and halted rhythms which at the time were viewed by many as the work of the devil.

As this new music moved onto instruments with greater sonic freedom (not confined to the fixed tunings of the piano’s strings), musicians began to explore the notes between the notes, articulations that came to be called "bent notes."

Though new to Western ears, these bent notes were a seductive siren call into the vast aural world of microtonality, a reminder that all music is a reduction, partly rational and partly arbitrary, from that smooth aural continuum.