BIVALENCE XV，for Two Recorders（2019）

Shinji Yoshie acted in an advisory capacity for the Choral Club at my senior high school，Tokyo Metropolitan Shinjuku Senior High School. He was an art teacher who，as a painter，was a member of the Issuikai group，but he also had a great love of music. I was often summoned to the teachers’ room to play Baroque music as part of a recorder ensemble. I’d never played the recorder when I was a child，and so that was about the limit of my awareness of the instrument. I occasionally made use of the recorder much later on in my music for the cinema and the theatre，but the only independent piece I had previously composed incorporating the recorder was Webern (1997) for female choir accompanied by two recorders based on a poem by Shuntar? Tanikawa (published by Zen-On Music).
Shingor? Tanabe from Niigata Prefecture，who I had known for some time in connection with choral music，told me that he would like to commission a work for recorder，he himself being the leader of a group of recorder players. I have spent many years working on a series of pieces for two instruments of the same kind，and I had the idea of composing a new work in this series for two recorders. But Mr Tanabe suddenly fell ill and passed away before he had had the chance to perform the piece.I had hoped in vain that he might be able to attend the first performance of the piece in the concert ‘Contemporary Works for School Instruments’，the fifth in a series of concerts entitled ’Shin-ichiro Ikebe Complete Works Project’ sponsored by Tokyo Concerts，the agency to which I belong.
My idea was to shine a fresh light on the recorder as a modern instrument. This is the fifteenth work in the Bivalence series of pieces for two of the same instruments. I have since added another two works to this series，which thus now consists of seventeen pieces.