Frederic D'Haene: Music With Silent Aitake's

The interface between Western and East Asian orchestral music has enjoyed a brief yet diverse history. From Toru Takemitsu to Lou Harrison, modern composers have found ever more inventive ways of creating a shared vocabulary between disparate cultures. This album – an extended piece divided into five parts – sees Belgian composer Frederic D'Haene combine Germany's Ensemble Modern with a Japanese gagaku ensemble – an ancient orchestral form, with roots in Shinto ritual.

D'Haene's piece is an exercise in a compositional technique he calls ‘paradoxophony’ – the combination of two (or more) musical worlds in which neither takes over the other. As such, it deliberately attempts to avoid the Orientalism and exoticism to which compositions of its type could potentially succumb, carefully creating an organic relationship between the two ensembles.

In some instances, D'Haene requests that some of the Western instruments be tuned microtonally, in order to properly resonate with the gakaku ensemble. With regards to form, the piece is very much influenced by that of traditional gagaku – a gradually evolving, churning mass of drones that repeatedly builds into climax before dissolving into silence. D'Haene finds just the right points of confluence between Western and Eastern notions of consonance and dissonance, and tension and resolution.