https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/28/arts/music/toshi-ichiyanagi-dead.html

By Neil Genzlinger
Oct. 28, 2022

Toshi Ichiyanagi, an avant-garde pianist and composer whose works mixed international influences, made unusual use of musicians and instruments, and combined music with other media, died on Oct. 7 in Tokyo. He was 89.

The Kanagawa Arts Foundation, where he was general artistic director from 1996 until last year, said he died in a hospital. No cause was given.

Mr. Ichiyanagi came to New York from Japan in the 1950s to study at the Juilliard School. While there he met Yoko Ono, whose parents had moved the family from Japan to Scarsdale, N.Y., in the early 1950s. Ms. Ono was also interested in experimental music and had studied briefly at Sarah Lawrence College.

She and Mr. Ichiyanagi eloped in 1956 and immersed themselves in the experimental art and music scenes of the era, including the radical Fluxus movement. Mr. Ichiyanagi took a course taught by the composer John Cage at the New School (Ms. Ono sat in on the sessions), absorbing many of his Minimalist ideas.

....In May 1961 he gave a recital at Carnegie Hall. His program included works by Mr. Cage, Morton Feldman and others, as well as one of his own pieces.. Eric Salzman, describing Mr. Ichiyanagi’s performance of his work in a review for The New York Times, wrote that “a high, distant, cold glissando rubbed somehow out of the innards of the piano and a furious rumble of elbows and fists on the keyboard.”

He was gaining attention beyond New York as well.

“Tokyo music circles are buzzing about a recent concert which featured Toshi Ichiyanagi’s ‘IBM,’” The Star Tribune of Minneapolis reported in February 1962, “an electronic composition which had several novelties: a boy striking matches and dropping them into a bowl, which he proceeded to smash with a hammer; a man kicking a chair and scraping it on the floor; and finally another man stringing paper tape about the stage and into the audience, making a giant spider web.”

....In 1966 Mr. Ichiyanagi joined with the conductor Seiji Ozawa and the composer Toru Takemitsu to create Orchestral Space, an annual festival that introduced new, mostly experimental works in Japan.

“The experience called ‘Orchestral Space ’68’ mapped some new territory for the audiences,” Edmund C. Wilkes of The San Francisco Examiner wrote of that year’s festival in Tokyo. “Not all of it is habitable, but there were prospects that pleased.”

Mr. Ichiyanagi’s works were not all experimental. As his career advanced he wrote operas, orchestral and chamber pieces, and other more conventional works. He also took an interest in traditional Japanese music, and in 1989 he began touring with his Tokyo International Music Ensemble — the New Tradition, a group that performed contemporary compositions played at least in part on instruments like the koto, an ancient member of the string family...

Genzlinger also wrote:

"In 1963, he married Sumiko, a writer, and they had a son, Kei, in 1964, who survives him. Ms. Ichiyanagi died in 1993."

What's bizarre is:

1. I searched on Sumiko's name and couldn't find ANY other references to her.

2. Both Wikipedia and the Washington Post said he never remarried!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/13/toshi-ichiyanagi-composer-yoko-dies/

Excerpts:

....They eloped in 1956 after Ono dropped out of college, angered that her cosmopolitan and wealthy parents disapproved of Mr. Ichiyanagi’s more humble roots.

....(John Cage's friendship) was a lifelong bond. In 1958, Mr. Ichiyanagi began studies as one of Cage’s proteges at the New School for Social Research. Cage also helped Mr. Ichiyanagi land a job as pianist at the dance studio of choreographer Merce Cunningham, and opened doors to meet visual artists including Andy Warhol, Frank Stella and Jasper Johns as well as the futurist R. Buckminster Fuller.

At the time, Mr. Ichiyanagi’s marriage with Ono was fraying. They were living separately. Mr. Ichiyanagi returned to his home country in 1960, inviting Cage and Tudor to perform in Tokyo in a groundbreaking moment for experimental music in Japan.

Ono performed some of her music pieces in conjunction with the Cage concerts, but she was dour. “Who was I,” she was later quoted as saying, “but Toshi’s wife and John Cage’s friend?” They divorced in 1962, and Ono had what was described as a “nervous breakdown” about the time their marriage collapsed. She stayed in Tokyo, marrying film producer Tony Cox who had come to visit her...