Pop Corn

Akira Yuyama was a Japanese composer (Tokyo University of the Arts) whose marimba and piano music has been a staple of the Japanese teaching repertoire for half a century. Confections: A Piano Sweet (Okashi no Kuni) is a set of eighteen miniature character pieces, each named for a sweet — the cycle is a Japanese-twentieth-century parallel to Schumann's Album for the Young. Pop Corn closes the set: a quick, witty, percussive C-major sketch.

Technically the piece tests percussive articulation and rhythmic precision in a Japanese twentieth-century idiom — closer to Bartók than to Debussy. Both hands carry sharp staccato lines that interlock; the dynamic profile is bright and spiky; the harmony moves through modal and chromatic colours that need to be played as colour, not as expressive moments. There are hand-crossings and small leaps.

Two pitfalls. First, students play the staccato with a tight wrist; the percussive writing needs free wrist motion or the tone goes brittle. Second, the chromatic colour notes are pointed at rather than allowed to slip past as part of the sound-world.

Listening: Yuyama's marimba concerto and piano pieces have been widely recorded in Japan; PD reference points are scarce for living/recent composers. For the percussive-twentieth-century idiom, listening to PD Bartók Mikrokosmos recordings calibrates the touch.