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R. Dittrich - Konju-Raku - Full Piece Recording 

Composer: Piano Arrangement by Rudolf Dittrich (1861-1919)

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Dittrich was an Austrian composer who was hired by the Meiji government of Japan to be the first Art Director of the Tokyo School of Music.  He lived in Tokyo from 1888-1894.  Dittrich published two volumes of Japanese folk music when he got back to Austria.  His mistress, the shamisen performer/teacher Mori Kiku, helped him with the transcriptions and translations. 

Dittrich seems to have led and interesting life; check out this article on him.

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This score I used was published in Willeke's Violoncello Collection in 1909 and lists this song as an "Old Chinese Dance" which, given Dittrich's connection to Japan and his other publications, seems like an obvious error by Wilhelm Willeke.  (And a "yikes," though sadly probably not a surprising one from a German-American at the turn of the 20th Century.)

"Konju-Raku" is not in the first volume of Dittrich's folk song arrangements, but I can't find a list of songs from the second, so I don't know if it was originally published there.

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Date: 1909

Original Instrumentation: Cello, piano​

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Why this one:

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I was intrigued by doing both a piano / cello duet, as well as an arrangement of a non-Western song.  Of course, I initially thought it was a Chinese folk song, despite having a seed of doubt given the song's very not-Chinese sounding name.  I was still getting my feet wet with the piano for this project and, sweet summer child that I am, at first glance I thought it wouldn't be too difficult. (Spoiler: I was extremely wrong.)  At least it's short?

"Konju-Raku" was published as part of a set, along with another song called "Botaku-Raku" but I can't find the sheet music for that one.

I don't speak Japanese so I don't know what the title means, though after some searching around "raku" might mean "pleasure."

(Side note: Google translate tells me that in Slovenian "Konju Raku" means "horse cancer."  This confused the hell out of me until I realized Google had autodetected the starting language incorrectly.)

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Description:  

Key:  D

Time: 4/4  BPM= 55

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The structure of this short piece is a little elusive to me, maybe because I am not versed at all in the musical vocabulary of Eastern folk melodies.  It does make sense that it wouldn't obviously adhere to Western music structures.

Structure aside, the piano part by itself does sound in line with Western Romantic era music from a harmonic standpoint.  There are lots of accidentals in parts which gives it some strong tension and release.   The cello part, which plays the actual folk melody, has a different feel  which to my ear works with the Romantic style piano in a really interesting way.

The piece is marked "molto adagio" which means "very slowly."

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Performance:​

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Oh wow this piano part was difficult.   There's lot of motion, simultaneous jumping around in both hands, and my sustain pedal skills were really rusty.  I was trying to ease myself into piano, given what a basket case piano player I am and the fact that I'd barely touched a piano in the past 4 years, but I very much ended up in the deep end of the pool with this one.  I'd say I was a victim of hubris, but I felt over my head the entire time I was preparing.  So this was less being humbled by hubris and more a fatalistic "Charge of the Light Brigade"situation.

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For the  mandocello part, I tried to stay on the same string as much as possible and slide into  notes to gesture at what music played on a shamisen, which is fretless and played with a pick of sorts, sounds like.   

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Errata:

I keep saying I was trying to make the cello part sound more like a shamisen, but there is a bowed Japanese traditional called a kokyū which does use a bow.  I don't have a good sense of which instrument was more commonly used for these traditional songs, but I've seen a shamisen played at a traditional instrument show in Japan, so that's the instrument that I had in mind when I was playing this.  

A bowed cello would be more in line with a kokyū, where a picked mandocello would be closer to a shamisen.

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Album Art:

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This is a picture of Rikugien Gardens in Tokyo that I took in 2019.