This wasn’t the type of place you’d expect for a meeting about a newly commissioned piece of music for a professional orchestra. Two composers, one poet, one conductor, and one CEO took off their shoes and walked in bare feet through soil that had been tilled for generations by Japanese American immigrants. There, on a bright February day, amid a crowd of fruit trees with burgeoning blossoms, they planted a cutting from a 50-year-old grapevine.
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” says Rei Hotoda, music director of the Fresno Philharmonic, remembering the 2023 visit to the Masumoto Family Farm south of Fresno. “I thought to myself, Oh, no, I’m hurting this plant.”
David Mas Masumoto, who wears many sun-resistant hats—poet and memoirist, Martha Stewart collaborator, Julia Child Award-winning author of “Epitaph for a Peach,” entrepreneur, former board member of the National Endowment of the Arts, and organic farmer renowned for his peaches, apricots, nectarines, and grapes for raisins—reassured the conductor. “No,” he told her gently, “you have to cut the old vines for them to grow.”
The five at the farm that day also included Hitomi Oba and Erika Oba, Japanese American sister composers, and Stephen Wilson, executive director and CEO of the Fresno Philharmonic. It was the first meeting between the Oba sisters and Masumoto, whose life and writings about his Japanese American immigrant roots and four generations of women in his family serve as the inspiration for the new piece. Masumoto wanted them not only to see the farm but put their hands in the soil, smell the heavy scent of the blossoms, retrace the steps of his grandparents and parents. A 5,000-word essay he wrote for the project titled “Music of Ghosts” muses about time, nature, and memory, and he wanted them to do so, too.
By getting their feet dirty, the “meeting” attendees were kicking off a two-year collaboration unlike any in the Fresno Philharmonic’s 70-year history. The goal: produce a commissioned piece that truly represents the community. The endeavor would include generous local donors willing to take a chance on new music, and a city with an arts sales tax willing to contribute public money. It would feature the work of a local visual artist, Chieko Delgado, who would illustrate Masumoto’s special-edition book, titled “Shadow Music,” produced for the concert. It would elevate the musicians of the orchestra, who participated in three workshop rehearsals and whose feedback helped shape the piece. The orchestra even arranged for a special “Philharmonic Peach” flavor at a local premium ice-cream shop—made from peaches picked by Fresno Philharmonic board members on a visit to the Masumoto farm at the height of summer’s harvest.
Most important, the piece would remember things both good and bad, from the juicy plentitude of the fall harvest to the anniversary of the infamous presidential order interning Japanese Americans in camps during World War II.
The result was the 16-minute “Meguru: Dreams of Harvest.” Commissioned by the Fresno Philharmonic in collaboration with the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, the piece premiered Feb. 15 and 16 at two sold-out performances of the Fresno Philharmonic at the Paul Shaghoian Concert Hall in Fresno.
Masumoto was at every workshop, rehearsal, and performance, becoming increasingly entranced by the idea that his words and story could be translated into another art form. “One thing that struck me was I realized they weren’t writing a soundtrack of my story,” he told an audience at a community conversation held a week and a half before the concert at the United Japanese Christian Church of Fresno. “They’re actually transforming the story into something else.”
“Sister composers” is not a common term in the classical music world. For the Oba sisters, the questions at public events in the days leading up to the concert about their collaboration on “Meguru” often focused on the novelty of the arrangement: How can two people write one piece of music together? More than that, how can sisters do it without murdering each other?
A few days before the concert, they sat in the lobby of Shaghoian Hall in Fresno, waiting while the orchestra finished rehearsing Shostakovich’s 9th Symphony before getting to their piece. Just how did they deal with conflict? Did each of them get three vetoes? “Oh, we should have done that,” Erika says. “That would have been a good idea.” Hitomi picks up the thread. “Most of it was negotiation. And I think one of the advantages of having the relationship that we have, which is familial, was that we could work through our conflicts. Because we have practiced our whole lives working through our conflicts.”
Growing up in Berkeley, the sisters took advantage of that city’s generous musical education infrastructure, at one point enrolling in a youth program for low-income composition students. Both gravitated toward jazz. Hitomi, a saxophonist, teaches at UCLA and is co-founder of LA Signal Lab, a new-music collective. Erika’s instruments are piano and flute, and she is a private jazz piano instructor for UC Berkeley’s Music Department. Living in different cities, their writing of “Meguru” was mostly done remotely. “So much Zoom, and so much Dropbox,” Erika says. And this was a true collaboration: They didn’t divide up writing different movements, say. They went measure by measure.
Most exciting for them was the chance to workshop their unfinished work. Rather than following the model of solitary composer toiling alone and delivering a finished product to an orchestra, the writing process was much more like the way a Broadway musical is workshopped through numerous stages, with lots of writing, shaping, changing, and cutting along the way. The Oba sisters estimate that they threw out 90% of their early work on “Meguru,” and the piece is much better for it.
Their mentor, Gabriel Lena Frank, is increasingly a champion of this “readings” model of commissions. “Not just for this project, but in the new-music world in general,” Hitomi says. “She has enough clout that she can ask that of the symphonies that commission her. It’s been different for her process to have access to that. I think she’s trying to pass that on to the next generation.”
At the concert, Hotoda wore a refashioned family heirloom kimono that was repurposed into a conducting jacket by New York designer Jenny Lai. “This kimono was originally made by a member of my family, and it meant a lot to me to wear this piece in our concert to signify myself as a Japanese American and my family history behind this kimono,” says Hotoda, who came to the U.S. from Japan at age 5.
Divided into five movements, the piece begins with the oppressive heat of a Fresno summer, when Masumoto’s relatives arrive in the country, a slow pulsing in the orchestra representing the breath of these immigrants as they do their backbreaking work. There is a shift to the giddy, dance-like promise of autumn, and then, signified by angst-ridden chords, the harshness of winter, representing not only dormancy but the painful legacy of the internment camps. The storm breaks with spring and then the lush, pulpy bounty of the summer harvest.
Hotoda told the audience: “Much like the vast, bountiful farmlands of Fresno, that have been built and still are cultivated by our immigrant community—growing the food of life that sustains us through best of weather or the harshest of times—we must embrace who we are and where we came from. Understanding that we must not turn away from our past. We must recognize it, no matter how difficult or challenging, and look toward the future with hope and resilience.”
The concert and associated community events are first in a series planned by the orchestra titled “Cultural Crossroads: Kisetsu” (“seasons” in Japanese.) The series builds upon the Fresno Philharmonic’s pledge to incorporate new music—particularly by women and people of color—into the culture of the orchestra and, perhaps, the ethos of the city itself, something evidenced by a slew of such pieces over the past eight years programmed by Hotoda.
For Masumoto, who relished every step of the transformation of his story into music, the series is already a success. To him, a true collaboration isn’t between peers; it’s about different forces coming together.
Two years ago, at that first meeting on his farm with the composers, he asked them: “What is the sound of a blossom opening? Is it a pop? Is it a crackle? Is it just this kind of simmering sound? It’s this idea of, just what is the sound of life?”
And as for that replanted vine, it already started producing grapes.
