As a composer, Minao Shibata presented very important problems on the Japanese music scene, and he was moreover an active figure in the fields of music criticism and musicology. He was also known as a total supervisor of the Japanese edition of the New Grove Dictionary.
Shibata was born in Tokyo on September 29 in 1916. His father was a chemist and his grandfather supported the beginning of the Japanese Pharmacopeia, which provided the standards of pharmaceutical products. Minao Shibata learned to play the piano from his mother, a pupil of Kōsuke Komatsu, and he was close to music under the influence of his cousin, Yasumoto Tokunaga, who loved music and who today is known as a linguist of Hungarian. Shibata furthermore studied the piano under Sadamaro Iwai and James Dun, the cello under Fumio Suzuki, and harmony, counterpoint, and methods of composition under Midori Hosokawa and Saburō Moroi.
In 1936, Shibata was admitted to the Botany Department of Science Faculty in the Tokyo Teikoku Daigaku (Tokyo Imperial University). At university, he participated in the university orchestra as a cellist, and was active as a member of the Seijō choir. For two years from 1939, he worked in Tokyo Kagaku Hakubutsukan (Tokyo Science Museum, now National Science Museum), but he re-entered Tokyo Teikoku Daigaku and majored in aesthetics at the Department of Aesthetics and Art History of the Faculty of Literature. He worked at the Riken Physical and Chemical Research Science Film Institute for a year from 1943 to 1944. From 1944, Shibata worked in the Japanese Music Culture Society.
The earliest works of Shibata was composed in the first half of 1940s where he completed the following pieces: nursery rhymes “Yoru no Oinori (Pray in the Night)”, “Otokonoko to Onnanoko (Boys and Girls)”, songs “Fujiryū”, “Tsubame no Uta (Song of the Swallow)”, song collection “Umi Yon-shō (4 Pieces of the Ocean)”, instrumental music “String Quartet No. 1”, “Variation for Piano” and “Piano Sonata”.
In 1946, he established ‘Shinsei-kai’ with Yoshirō Irino, Kunio Toda and Sadao Bekku, and this group provided a place for presenting his works until 1950. From the same year and the following seven years, Shibata arranged many songs for choir as a part-time worker at Tokyo Ongakushoin. In 1947, Shibata explained about “Pelléas and Mélisande” composed by C. Debussy on the NHK radio program ‘Meikyoku Kanshō no Jikan (Time for Appreciation of Great Music)’. After this first radio broadcasting, Shibata became in charge of the second broadcasting of the NHK program ‘Ongaku Nyūmon (Introduction of Music)’ and he had a profound influence on the Japanese music world in those days. Shibata co-founded the ‘Music Class for Children’, which is the predecessor of the current Department of Music at Tōhō Gakuen Daigaku, with Motonari Iguchi and Hideo Saitō in 1948. Shibata also began to write his ‘Treatise on Bartók’ which was published as a series of articles in the magazine ‘Ongaku Geijutsu’.
In the latter half of 1940, Shibata composed “Yasashiki Uta (La bonne chanson)”, which counts as one of his most important pieces, and he completed a string quartet and a choral work during the same period.
Shibata deepened his study of the twelve-tone technique with Yoshirō Irino around 1950, using the writings of composers such as R. Leibowiz and P. Hindemith. Shibata established ‘The Institute for 20th-Century Music’ with Hidekazu Yoshida and a number of musicians in 1957 and he started being active as a standard-bearer of avant-garde music. The representative works composed by Shibata using twelve-tone technique include “Asa no Uta (Morning Song)” (1952), “Kitazono Katsue ni yoru Mittsu no Shi (3 Poems by Katsue Kitazono)” (1954-58), and “Symphonia” (1960). “Yoru ni yomeru Uta (Song sung in the night)” (1963), “Mihotoke no Haru (Spring of the Buddha)” (1966), and “Improvisation for Piano No. 2” (1968) were composed by adopting aleatoric techniques and processes of indeterminacy.
Shibata’s educational activity began in earnest around 1950. He acted as a chairman of Tōhō Girls’ High School from 1952 and became a lecturer at the Music Faculty of the Department of Education at Ochanomizu Joshi Daigaku (Ochanomizu Woman’s University). For ten years from 1959, Shibata also taught at the Department of Musicology at the Faculty of Music in Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku (Tokyo University of the Arts).
In 1969, he resigned his teaching position and focused thereafter on composing and music criticism of records and concerts as well as research on classical music and Japanese folk songs. Shibata won the Otaka Award with the piece “Consort of Orchestra”. From this time onwards, the compositional works of Shibata changed from a ‘Practice of Western music’ or ‘Training of Western compositional style’ to a more poly-stylistic music integrating Japanese folk and traditional music.
“Oiwakebushi-kō (Reflections on ‘Oiwakebushi’)”, which is one of the most famous pieces of Shibata, was played in 1973 and two years later “Yuku Kawa no Nagare ha taezushite (The Flowing River Never Stops)” was performed, putting the Japanese music world of the Showa era upon his transition of compositional style. From 1975 to 1980, “Manzai Nagashi (Strolling Comedian)”, “Hokuetsu Gifu (Play Songs of Hokuetsu District)”, “Nenbutsu Odori (Buddhist Dance)”, “Shunie-san (Tribute to Shunie)”, “Uchū ni tsuite (About the Space)”, and “Furubeyurayura” were composed. A series of theater pieces presented after 1973 made use of material from Japanese folk entertainments and the musical performances of shrines and temples. These works can be considered progressive pieces because they made us reconsider the concept called music itself. Shibata received the Suntory Music Award in 1982 for the performance of four theater pieces. He received the Medal with Purple Ribbon the same year.
For six years from 1984, Shibata worked as a
professor at Hōsō Daigaku (The Open University of Japan). His lecture series ‘The History and Theory of Music’ was radical in the sense that it disregarded the, at that time, conventional view of music history which placed Western music at the center and instead juxtaposed Western music with East Asian and Japanese music. Shibata was commended as a Person of Cultural Merits in 1992 and promoted in 1996 to Senior Fourth Class and granted the Second-rank Order of the Sacred Treasure. However, Shibata passed away on February 2 in the same year.
When Shibata devoted himself to his creative practice, the avant-garde ‘era’ came to an end and changed to the ‘era’ of the post-modern. With his keen insights, Shibata reconstructed each era and their musical styles comprehensively. His works, applying techniques of ‘quotation’ and ‘intertextuality’, allow us to reflect upon the act itself called the ‘composition’.
