Kanazawa, Japan
Yuki Hasegawa‑Moore
Eight Rooms
Yuki wrote eight short pieces for cello and tape, each recorded in a different room of one house.
Every room in that house had its own voice. I just had to listen.
Yuki Hasegawa‑Moore
The summer
Yuki Hasegawa‑Moore had played the cello in concert halls for fifteen years and had started to find them all faintly the same. The house in Kanazawa she shared with her partner had eight rooms, each with a different ring, and she proposed to write one piece for each.
She moved her cello through the house room by room, from the bathroom to the attic, writing each piece to suit the sound of the space. The bathroom was bright and unforgiving, while the tatami room swallowed the lower strings and asked for slow, thin lines. She wrote in pencil, standing up, and rewrote the attic piece four times.
She recorded at the same hour each day so the traffic outside stayed constant. A tape recorder sat in the corner of the room and a second one held the playback of earlier pieces, so that each room answered the one before it. Her mentor listened to every take and chose, by ear, which pieces belonged together.
The order was the hardest question. Yuki had placed the two kitchen pieces next to each other, and her mentor, a composer, asked her to separate them by the cupboard under the stairs. She resisted for a week. In the end she moved them, and she says the set only made sense after that.
The finished set lasts twenty-two minutes and was first played in the house itself, to eleven people sitting on the stairs and in the hall. Eight Rooms can be heard on the fellows page, and the house is still her home.
