Yasunao Tone

Relocating to the United States in 1972, he has since gained a reputation as a musician, performer and writer working with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Senda Nengudi, Florian Hecker, and many others.

[4] Under Shigenobu’s guidance, Tone and his classmates translated Maurice Blanchot’s La Part du feu over a two-year period.

Kurita, on the other hand, taught Tone about Bataille as well as introduced him to critics and poets of his own generation such as Yoshiaki Tōno, Kōichi Iijima and Makoto Ōoka.

[4] Tone, meanwhile, continued to seek out prewar Japanese avant-garde culture in journals such as “Shi to Shinron,” “Ge.Gjgjgam.Prr.Gjmgem,” “Bara●Majutsu●Gakusetsu,” and “Fukuikutaru Kafu-yo” and through the work of Tomoyoshi Murayama and his Mavo group.

[5] Tone then wrote his thesis on Dada and Surrealism, interviewing many of the prominent figures of the 20th century avant-garde in Japan in the process such as Katsue Kitazono, Shūzō Takiguchi, Kōichi Kihara and Sansei Yamanaka.

[7] Mieko Shiomi, Genichi Tsuge, Mikio Tohima and Yumiko Tanno also joined, making Tone the only member not enrolled at Geidai.

[7] The group’s experimental endeavors were further informed by the young ethnomusicologist Fumio Koizumi, who became a part-time faculty member at Geidai in September 1959.

[10] As Marotti points out, this emphasis on chance was part of Tone's and the group’s exploration of a Surrealist-inspired automatism in opposition to artistic egoism.

[12] Among his early influences, Tone has cited Concrete Music, John Cage’s experiments with sound, Jackson Pollock’s action painting, and Art autre/Art informel.

[16] Dasha Dekleva describes the score, writing that it “is populated with small white and black circles and dots, and with random whole numbers (positive and negative) along the top and left edges.

[15] In 1961 Tone also produced Geodessy For Piano in which he “experimented with the inevitable indeterminacy of a precise execution of sounds,” according to art historian and curator Alexandra Munroe.

[22] Acquiring the stereotype mold of the Yomiuri newspaper (the exhibition sponsor) published that day, Tone rendered the news in plaster.

For this text, Tone, along with Naoyoshi Hikosaka and Yukio Akatsuka, compiled a history of Japanese contemporary art, published in Bijutsu Techo.

Tone’s role as an influential theorist for young Japanese contemporary artists can be observed in his relationship Hikosaka more generally, to whom he introduced the works of Fluxus and John Cage as well as the philosophy of Edmund Husserl.

Performed and juried by: Kosugi Takehisa, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Okuyama Jūnosuke, Yoko Ono, Akasegawa Genpei, Nakanishi Natsuyuki, Takiguchi Shuzo, Takeda Akimichi, Ishizaki Koichiro, Shinohara Ushio, Hijikata Tatsumi, etc.

[15] Tone created a piece for a two-day Cunningham event, Clockwork Video (1974), which used a pulley system to put in motion three turntables.

The piece comprised a text, a notation for two amplified string instruments (derived from the tablature of ninth-century Chinese pipa music, and a gated audio system.

[37] Tone describes the process for producing his album Musica Iconologos as such: “first, the material source of the piece was derived from the poetic text of ancient China and each character of the text was converted into photographic images according to the ancient form of the Chinese characters which are closer to images than the modern form.

[39] A similar method was employed for Musica Simulacra, debuted in 2003, which took the Man’yoshu collection of poems of the 7th and 8th centuries as its source material.

[39] This particular project shows Tone’s multi-disciplinary concern in that it necessitated study of the obscure grammatology of the characters used (and sometimes invented) in the writing of the Man’yoshu anthology.

Tone used these analog patterns, in addition to an artificial three-part structures, in 'Musica Iconologs' to reduce the listeners awareness off repetition. [40] His collaboration with Florian Hecker, Palimpsest, also transliterated Japanese Man'yōshū poems to sound.

[43][44] Tone's CD-player-based works employ a process of "de-controlling" the device's playback so that it randomly selects fragments from a set of sound materials.

[43] Tone placed scotch-tape with small perforations on CD-roms of classical and popular music, causing the player to misread and information on the CD.

The result was a unpredictable sonic distortion, uniquely generated by Tone’s intervention into the CD player’s specific technological mechanisms.

Tone recounts discovering the process in an interview: “I called my audiophile friend, who owned a Swiss-made CD player, and asked him about it.

[It] was a perfect device for performance.”[45] In March 1986, Tone performed Music for 2 CD Players at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York using this method.

[49] Music festivals featuring Tone include All Tomorrow’s Parties in London, Sonic Light in Amsterdam, and Spectacle Vivante at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.