Masao Ohki was born on 3rd October 1901 in Iwata, a small provincial city on the Pacific coast in central
Japan, and grew up in the larger nearby city of Shizuoka. His father was a teacher at a girls’ high
school and he spent his childhood during a period when
westernisation was bringing an interest in western
music, with operas and orchestral concerts occasionally
heard in big cities like Tokyo. The circumstances in
provincial cities were different. There were only a few
pianos in Shizuoka and not even a small orchestra.
Musical interest was mainly in Japanese traditional
works. Ohki’s father liked to play the shakuhachi, a
bamboo flute, and Ohki himself played it from his
childhood. With unstable pitch and a mysteriously‘cloudy’, somewhat husky timbre, the instrument has
especially been associated with asceticism and Zen
meditation. The experience of shakuhachi music was to
exert a significant influence on Ohki’s own work. At the
same time he had some experience of western
instruments, and was able to hear recordings of classical
Chinese operas and arias from Bizet’s Carmen, as well
as a variety of Japanese traditional music. The basis of
Ohki’s melodies was always the shakuhachi music and
the recordings he heard, and, above all, Japanese
traditional music.
After completing his junior schooling in 1910, Ohki
went on to technical senior high school in Osaka and
majored in chemistry. He was now able to study the
shakuhachi with master-players, and formed a male
choral group with his classmates. At the same time he
had an opportunity to hear Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5
and Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812’ Overture. This was his first
encounter with full-scale orchestral music. Deeply
impressed by these works, he wished vaguely to write
orchestral music, but lacked the means to pursue this
ambition. He therefore started by studying vocal music
more minutely and by writing nursery songs.
Graduating in 1921, he began work as an engineer
for a factory in Tokyo and continued his studies of vocal
music, but soon came up against the limitation of
Japanese singers singing in foreign languages with
pronunciation and intonation essentially different from
those of the Japanese language. Leaving his job, he
moved to Ueda, a small city in the mountainous area of
central Japan, to teach at a girls’ school, and then finally
made up his mind to devote himself to writing
orchestral music.
Believing that music should possess power to affect
society and that good music could contribute to the
pursuit of happiness of the people, Ohki took
Tchaikovsky as his model, seeking to make the most of
Japanese traditional music represented by the
shakuhachi. To realise his dream, he returned to Tokyo.
Working part-time to keep himself, he allotted as much
time as possible to the study of composition, working
under Giichi Ishikawa, who had studied music in
California from 1906 to 1920. Under his guidance, Ohki
studied music theory from the beginning. In addition to
Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, he was attracted to
Mussorgsky’s earthy melodies, the precise
orchestration of Rimsky-Korsakov and Ravel,
Debussy’s sensitivity and the fusion of popular and
modern sonority found in Stravinsky’s L’oiseau de feu.
From around the 1930s Ohki started to conduct his own orchestral works and in 1939 won first prize in the
Weingartner Competition, when his co-winners
included Shukichi Mitsukuri, Hisatada Odaka and
Humiwo Hayasaka (Naxos 8.557819). His prizewinning
works were Five Fairy Tales (1934), inspired
by Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and Idea of
the Night (1937), in which he attempted the
orchestration of shakuhachi music. The outbreak of war
prevented the performance of these works in Europe,
which were to have been conducted by Felix Weingartner.
--Based on notes by Morihide Katayama
English Translation: SOREL
