On May 10th Rei Nakamura will perform work by John Cage, Yukiko Watanabe, Andreas Eduardo Frank and Johannes Kreidler at the Gare du Nord venue in Basel. This will be to celebrate and to help officially launch her book (published by Wolke Verlag), which was written in collaboration with a vast range of composers, musicologists, and performers. The main editors were Rei, Simon Tönies and Marion Saxer, and so my inclusion in this project—to translate the German texts and to edit those written in English—came at a much later date. After her performance there will be a short interview between Marcus Weiss and Rei Nakamura.
Rei has steadily established herself as an internationally acclaimed concert pianist specialising in the performance of contemporary music, in particular in combination with live electronics and visual-media. Together with composer Annesley Black in 2007 she began her interdisciplinary project ‘Movement to Sound, Sound to Movement’. Since then she has commissioned work that directly engages with these means. The book Movement to Sound, Sound to Movement – Interpreting Multimedia Piano Compositions contains chapters by Nakamura and by the composers who wrote for her and with whom she collaborated/performed with. This book offers a treasure trove of observations made since 2007, these comprise aesthetic discussion, challenges for piano technique, and the, often hidden and time consuming, technical challenges encountered when working with AV digital computer software. Amongst the composers who either have their work discussed or who have themselves written about their work are: Annesley Black, Stefan Prins, Christoph Ogiermann, Orm Finnendahl, Johannes Kreidler, Ida Lunden, Yukiko Watanabe, Michael Beil, and Federico Reuben, to name really only a few.
As such this book will be useful for the musiciolgist, or composer interested in this combination, and also for performers (not only for pianists) wishing to follow in Nakamura’s footsteps with this work. For those interested in seeing/hearing these pieces performed, this Vimeo page has been set up especially for this. (https://vimeo.com/user5788275)