I first met Yasunao Tone at a party at Phill Niblock’s New York loft. Phill introduced us, mentioning Tone’s recent piece for organ and block of ice, so when he offered to write a piece for me, it felt natural. What resulted was the elegant Trio For Flute Player (1985). During our years of collaborating, I had the privilege to be part of Tone’s radical and unique compositional process and his ways of translating things into musical performance, that has continued to develop into his more recent works of pure noise.

The Trio score is based on the ninth century Man'yōshū, the first known collection of poetry to be transcribed in the time of a very early development of written Japanese, a complex and playful process using pictograms, puns and riddles and the phonetics of Chinese characters. In the performance of this piece, the poems are not interpreted but transformed into sound by reading the curvy line of calligraphy with staff lines superimposed as a sort of tablature, breaking up learned finger patterns/note relationships. The keys of the flute are connected to an oscillator, which further converts finger movements into an unpredictable, noisy and oddly melodic second voice, rather like the way sensors that are triggered by the light of projected film images in Tone’s Molecular Music (1982-85) play electronic sounds that approximate the spoken rhythm of the poetry.

It was not only exhilarating to turn flute into noise, but I loved being part of the world of these poems, the only ones I know by memory: “Oh my dear of so much heart, what way there is is no way”.
We first performed Trio at Roulette in New York as a work in progress without electronics, on a programme before a small audience that included John Cage, who later told me what a “lovely concert” it had been. I recently found fragments of a recording of the concert, and was so moved to hear the still, calm beauty of the music, beyond the levels of conceptual and philosophical sophistication.

Writing about Musica Iconologos, a project that began a transition in Tone’s work as he translated text and images directly to CD, bypassing the spatial element and recording altogether, Robert Ashley refers back to earlier works such as Lyrictron For Flute (1988) with flute to haiku converter. Ashley noted the importance of the element of play in Tone’s music, and ideally in the performance of almost any notation. Himself a great magician with words, Ashley described Tone’s process in composing Lyrictron, a piece in which the flute plays modern transcriptions of Tang dynasty flute tablatures, triggering the computer to turn random lines from a ‘dictionary’ into Haiku poems, and recites them in the Commodore’s synthesized voice – similar to the Surrealists’ ‘cadavre exquis’ method of writing a chance-determined poem. “The letter-images in an archive of letter-images (a text) are arranged by communications from a flutist in performance and computer software translates that arrangement into a musical “form,” a macro-arrangement of sound from the computer.” (Robert Ashley, Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language, 25 March 1993, Errant Bodies Press)

Other found scores that we explored, such as a chart that tabulates an academic’s attempt to decipher an ancient dance notation, served as the basis of Aletheia (1987) which we performed in collaboration with choreographer Nancy Zendora. Using the breath to follow instructions for the expressive shape of dance gestures, the flute triggered small hammer robots on the strings of an open grand piano, shaping the space of the performance.

Few scores offer a performer a chance for such depth of immersion in the unknown. Zen And Music (1990) gave me the difficult task of learning to read shakuhachi score notation, in Japanese, that is barely compatible with the western silver flute. This process was accompanied by Tone’s reading of stories about Fuke – everyone’s favourite rascal monk – who founded a school of Zen that used the playing of the shakuhachi flute (while wearing a basket on the head, as I recall) as a form of meditation.

Working across media, technologies, and writing systems, Tone welcomed the collaboration of a wide range of musicians and performers of many generations. He composed two pieces for the harp, both iconic and unique additions to the harp repertoire. Origin Of Geometry: An Introduction (2006) for text, feedback, voice and acoustic harp, was premiered by Zeena Parkins at Experimental Intermedia in New York City. The score is a complex geometric diagram for the structure of sound/silence, using Derrida’s text and densely interlocking strings and electronics.

Rhodri Davies commissioned Ten Haikus Of Matsuo Basho (2006) for a harp of which every string is prepared with crocodile clips and pieces of wood. It was first performed at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and it has become one of the most played pieces in Davies’ repertoire. In the programme notes, Tone wrote that, “European music has existed alongside European languages. I would like to create music that represents something outside of this tradition.”

Listening to Rhodri’s performance, I feel the difference from Cage’s prepared piano (which Tone named as what gave us the possibility of “sound art”. The note that is played is not the expected scale pitch, but a noise). Tone’s piece transforms and condenses the voice of the harp, and the spaces between the sounds.

The last time I met Tone was again in the famous kitchen at Phill’s loft, not long after our performance together as part of the wonderful show curated and produced with love by Gabrielle Jackson and the team at Artists Space, who worked intimately with Tone to create Region Of Paramedia (2023).

He was radical and uncompromising, a sage with the presence of a rock star. Spontaneous, a transgressor of rules, I relied on him to know what was true. When my son was a little boy navigating the restrictions of school, family and tradition, Tone took him by the hand and they ran together fully clothed into the Mediterranean.

I hope that Achim Wollscheid doesn’t mind that I quote from a pure Tone moment that he experienced: I asked “Yasunao, what are you good for?” and he said, “Maybe I’m a good noise.”

Read The Wire’s tribute to Tone in The Portal here.