The Japanese composer Mamoru Fujieda has written an extraordinary set of pieces called Patterns of Plants (1996-2004).  He hooked up an apparatus called Plantron to read the bio-electric fluctuations of various plants, to try and understand their "voices."  Then he transformed the sonic data into the melodic patterns of these beautiful pieces, which are dedicated to Lou Harrison.  I had been performing them all over the country (the Freer Gallery, Spoleto Festival USA, Lincoln Center) for about four years when out of the blue I got an e-mail from him.  He invited me to the first Pacific Crossings Festival in Tokyo in the summer of 2004, to play his own music along with Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, Pauline Oliveros, and others.  Then a month later, he presented another concert in the Tokyo Summer Festival, in which I played an hour of Patterns of Plants in the Jiyugakuen Myonichikan, a small school in Tokyo designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.  Mamoru's plan for the concert was inspired by Pauline Oliveros' concept of Deep Listening.  He asked me to breathe between pieces, to feel the collective breathing of the audience, to be aware of the total experience- the music, the piano's tuning, the audience, the chirps of cicadas outside, the building's architecture, how the crickets stopped singing at sundown (halfway through the concert), the silences between pieces.  For the concert, we used his old German upright, tuned in Werckmeister No. 3.  He asked a local artist to design an installation of light and shadow, which enhanced the geometric patterns of Wright's design.  This DVD is from that performance, and while the camera is fixed on the piano, it gives some sense of that memorable evening.

20 minute excerpt from the DVD: Broadband RealPlayer| Dialup RealPlayer Download