 Welcome to the show meeting interesting people today my guest Miyuki Tsurutani and John Tyson welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you. So we give our viewers first some sketch of the portraits of Artists like you and I would call you as a musicians magicians so Miyuki is originally from Japan. Yes, so you graduated Japanese Conservatory yes Osaka Osaka. Yeah, yeah, so and Miyuki played Hapsichord, so that was your major Piano well My major was a musicology, but the musicology students have to Non-historical instruments right so that's yeah, that's why I studied a recorder and oh recorder too Oh, and then Hapsichord. Oh, okay Yeah, and then I know that you play organ also right organ. I started Five years ago six years ago. Yeah, because some of my acquaintance they wear the concert where you perform an organ Yeah, so they remember that so and John of course John is their Boston recorder orchestra director and Participate in tremendous amount of groups you play So how did you start with music in general like when you were a child or yeah the Grew up in a very small town And in the country and the only music program that was available was the school band So I played clarinet in the band. Oh, and that was fun Mm-hmm liked it it went off to a music conservatory as a clarinet major and Played in the band played in the orchestra played in the jazz band played some saxed a little bit of everything But as I was when I was there I discovered recorder Because we I had seen you know recorders in schools, but I never really thought about it right and I've met some people at the conservatory who were good recorder players and Got interested in in the instrument Mm-hmm got interested in early repertoires because it was something we kind of studied in our history books Yes, but it was like, you know They didn't really bring it a lie and I was just blown away at how much repertoire there is so we do a lot of we do a lot of Contemporary music to do a little bit of everything But we do a lot of early repertoires Partly because there's just so much and it's so amazingly beautiful. It's like an actor They might do a lot of different things, but they usually want to do Shakespeare because it's so great, right? Or check off or check off, you know exactly, right? Yeah, so so I got really seduced away from clarinet because I like the recorder so much and because I liked the Variety the richness of the repertoires Okay, so and what about the rena sonic? That's the another group or yeah, I so I run a group called rena sonics We have some CDs and that's right here. Yeah, and We which includes string players violin cello it includes dancers a lot of the time and It's a it's a funny group It's really kind of my one of my favorite things and in my whole life to do because it's kind of what We're primarily renaissance music. We do some other things, but mostly renaissance music and in renaissance music It renaissance music is a funny kind of middle ground in Western music. It is Unassailably high art, you know, it's the age of Leonardo's range of Shakespeare. You have as great music and Composers as any other period but it because it was their living repertoire. They didn't feel like they were doing Classical music, right? They were doing the music right there. They are good daily music Yeah, and so renaissance music has this funny quality of being Incredibly high art and popular music kind of all at the same time Merge and I one of the things that really seduced me to playing Renaissance music more and more is that I could play great chamber music by great composers, right? And improvise at the same time. Mm-hmm, and it's not what we think about in a lot of our classical music But you have in renaissance music a kind of freedom to Express yourself and to be Individuals in very much the way you would be in a pop band Even though you're playing kind of art music, right, right? And of course you're teaching I teach at the New England Conservatory of Music and travel around as a teacher And I know it's coming to a ride to Europe. You said yeah, yeah, we're leaving next week. So we run a annual workshop recorder workshop in Tuscany nice and Usually do other concerts in France Spain Germany Italy so so in Japan often. Oh, yeah, so how much interest here? To play recorders like do you have a lot of students? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's and it's really more all the time It's becoming a generation or two ago people on the new recorder as a school instrument Right, right, and now there are well-known jazz recorder players Everybody knows the Beatles played recorder rolling stones played recorder. It's becoming a kind of normal part of our Composers are writing for recorders and orchestras more all the time. So yeah, well, I know I Actually met you like I think 20 years ago. Yeah, when you were playing for renaissance dances, right? I was really missing. Oh, yeah Well recorders probably the most played instrument in the entire world I because it's used for just all kinds of music in all Repertoirs and everything like that and we know that Miyuki has more talents because she is an incredible cook I remember that period when you were sharing with us your cooking during the renaissance dances And even you have a website right website. It's in Japanese. Unfortunately. Yeah, but you said some recipes in English Right. Yes, so I think we will add that website than people can see we have some Arlington Japanese community or school So they probably will be watching it and interested to learn something. It's a big good cooking site in Japan. Yeah so Okay, I think we will start present some music you play in And before you just can give a little History of this display. Mm-hmm. Well, these are some of our recorders one of the Fun things about recorder is if you can play one, it's very easy to change around Right on you can do it on other instruments, but a good trumpet player is not necessarily a good tuba player I was you it's different muscle training, right, but recorder where you're basically just blowing. Yeah It's a very easy instrument for beginners It's a very easy instrument for people to play all their lives just like everybody can sing a little bit Right, you can do that easily all the time. So recorders because they're used all over the world And you can buy the really good plastic ones very cheaply. It's the most played instrument in the world It's also the biggest family of instruments. There's more different sizes of recorder Than any other instrument if you if you think about if you looked at a couple of recorders and already you see this Design here. It might remind you of an organ pipe. Yes. It's the same. It does. Yeah The sound-producing mechanism is exactly the same and just like in organ How many different sizes of organ pipes are there? You can do that with recorder. So we only have 13 today Yeah, but we'll play the the big country because your collection. Oh Gosh we because we play Like guitars right if you if you play rock you have several different kinds of guitar if you play classical you do If you're playing all-time blues, you have different guitars. Yeah, so and recorders We usually buy whole sets of recorders I see so that if you're doing Renaissance you have different ones than Baroque and then romantic then Modern modern experimental designs. So we probably have 50-something handmade instruments at home. Okay, so tell us Before we start preparing For you to play life just tell us What kind of music you will be playing just general and then you will set you You will prefer like do some small presentation explanation of each piece So we really end up doing we have the pleasure of being able to do a lot of different kinds of repertoires from Renaissance through through every everything that we I play with a pop band called universal village playing recorder mic'd up Hamming it up there and playing jazz and pop stuff like that Renaissance does Renaissance music. I play with Baroque orchestras We we play a lot of modern music that's written for us a lot of experimental things and crazy things So for those you need several different sizes for each repertoire. Okay, so we end up with an awful lot of different things but we're going to play Renaissance music today because the Boston recorder Orchestra plays mostly Renaissance music music also Our group Renaissance plays Renaissance music and and partly because of the Renaissance repertoire is so big There's all kinds of things. There's happy dance music. There's wild and crazy carnival songs Yeah, there's elegant church music and chamber music so we're going to give you a little bit of play of maybe four or so duets of Renaissance music and One of the things what we'll talk a little bit about and you'll hear is Renaissance music in a way It sounds normal. It just it's very pretty tunes uses the same notes We do it nowadays But one thing's different in most of the music that we play and we hear nowadays There's usually a melody and then accompaniment, right? So if you hear a string quartet Very often the first violins playing the main melody and everybody else is kind of playing accompaniment in Recorder I mean in Renaissance music everybody gets to play the melody It's a kind of composition called polyphony many voices and what it is is something that's kind of You could think of it as normal. You could think of it as outrageously radical but the composer writes for everybody who's playing he writes their own individual melody and Magically it fits together. It's a little bit like having different soloists all playing together But they knew what they were doing. Yeah, and it sounds wonderful But if you listen to it, you realize oh, she's telling the story this way And he's telling the story that way and they might be playing a lot of the same notes and echoing each other But everybody has the freedom to be kind of what we would expect with a pop singer Everybody expresses their own personality and you hear this wonderful kind of kaleidoscope of different voices Thank you. We're ready for the concert We do a lot of different kinds of music, but we'd like to play some Renaissance music for you today partly because it's a huge and beautiful repertoire and Partly because there's so many different things going on in here we're going to play one short piece written by Thomas Morley the composer for Queen Elizabeth the first of England and He's called this the chase and it kind of demonstrates what's going on in Renaissance music that We're playing two different parts, but we both have the melody. There's not really just one melody and one accompaniment here and in this chase we literally chase each other and you'll hear us saying sometimes the Exactly same musical things at different times one person running away one person chasing and vice versa the chase Instruments here recorders are the biggest family of instruments of all so we have a lot of different sizes That we can play with different sounds and different colors Definitely the biggest family of instruments. We're going to play another Renaissance piece by One of the great composers of Western music Orlando di Lasso We don't know his name so much, but he wrote wrote in all kinds of styles. This is actually a piece of Church piece benedictus and we're going to use Because it's written for low voices. We're going to use low recorders on them So the great bass and the contra bass recorder Who's on here and there's actually a couple of sizes even bigger than this one surprisingly Simon and Garfunkel recorded this piece of Renaissance music Like to give you an idea of kind of that the wonderful rhythmic quality of Renaissance music When I first started playing Renaissance music, I was blown away by the complexity of the rhythms They're writing basically songs all the time, but since they're writing very Independent voices you get these combined rhythms that are more complicated than the vast majority of what you hear in most Any other repertoire? This is a funny piece. It starts off this way mucus part is Great composer really one of the greatest composers of all Western music. Josquin de prey wrote this and He wrote just one melody And he says okay, you play your part the second part come in one note later play Exactly the same thing one note higher as if that's not complicated enough he goes through some amazing rhythmic changes in Both both parts imitating each other getting more and more rhythmically complex Since we do all kinds of music. We'd like to play one contemporary piece for you by a esteemed composer colleague of ours named Zeran Sieg is a young German composer But he's traveled extensively in Africa and a great deal of the music He writes for recorders and for other instruments is inspired by traditional African music You hear a lot of the same scales that would be used in African music and certainly African rhythms This piece is called umlanjana, which means the small stream Or piece of renaissance music, but a very different kind of music We're going to do some dance music and I'm going to bring out a new instrument here So I'm taking a drum. I have a different kind of recorder There's many different kinds of recorders all over the world every single culture has some kind of recorder kind of instrument This is a three-hole recorder and it works Like other recorders you can get different notes by moving your fingers, but it can play more than three or four notes Think of it like a trumpet with only three vowels. You get different notes by moving fingers But also by playing the overtone series playing the harmonics So you put it all together and with only three holes And it leaves one hand free to do something else and it's Really a popular instrument all over the world It's the national instrument of Provence in the south of France of the Basque peoples of some eastern European peoples of some Pacific Island people that these the flute and drum in many different combinations is is pretty widespread And it was a very popular Renaissance instrument for popular music court music we're going to play a Dance and even in the dance music you'll hear that we're both playing our own independent melodies With different rhythms and you can still dance to it