Visceral Mechanics premiere / thoughts

Suntory Hall Summer Festival 2026 — Luca Francesconi Composition Workshop
Visceral Mechanics for Violin, Viola and Cello

This started at the end of May, when I submitted Visceral Mechanics to the Suntory Hall Summer Festival composition workshop. Thirteen pieces were submitted, and three were selected.

Of course I was happy to be chosen, but looking back, that was not the most important part.

The important part was that a piece that had existed mostly in my head and in Dorico finally had to survive contact with reality.

The score was full of things I was interested in at the time: dense rhythms, tapping harmonics, slaps, glissandi, friction sounds, and physical gestures that felt mechanical on the surface but psychologically tense underneath.

Once real players started working on it, I quickly learned that “possible in theory” and “worth doing in performance” are very different things.

First rehearsal

After the first rehearsal on July 31, I changed a lot.

Some sounds worked better than I expected. Others looked interesting on the page but mostly created unnecessary difficulty. I rewrote several passages, adjusted tempi, accents, harmonics, pizzicato, slaps, and bowing.

That rehearsal made one thing very clear:

A score can work on paper without working in performance, and something can be playable without necessarily working musically.

I also realised that I sometimes care too much about how rich the score looks. More information does not automatically mean better music.

Second rehearsal

The second rehearsal was on August 16, the same day I returned to Japan. My flight was supposed to land at 13:30 and rehearsal started at 16:40, so I had already arranged for a conductor friend to help in case I was delayed.

Airport, luggage, Tokyo — and then immediately back to tapping, bowing, tempo and ensemble balance.

By then, though, I had stopped treating the original score as something sacred.

If a passage did not work, I changed it. If 120 BPM was unrealistic, there was no reason to force it just to prove that the original notation could be done.

I became much more interested in a different question:

What does this piece actually need to keep, and what is simply something I happened to write first?

The performance

The concert took place at Suntory Hall’s Blue Rose on August 25.

The first half was a talk between Luca Francesconi and Toshio Hosokawa. Francesconi spoke about living, line, fragmentation, technology, and micro/macro listening — all things I was genuinely interested in.

The interpretation, however, was frustrating. At times I was not even sure whether the original meaning had survived the translation.

My strongest reaction was simply:

Next time, I would rather speak English directly.

The performance itself was completely different.

Sounds that had existed for months as notation — tapping, impacts, friction, mechanical gestures — finally became physical sound in a real space.

No playback can replace that.

Francesconi’s comment

The comment I remember most was essentially:

There are many ideas in the piece. Perhaps choose one and go deeper.

It matched something I had already started to notice during rehearsal.

Whenever I find a new sound, technique, or visual shape that interests me, my instinct is often: why not use it?

The problem is that one idea may barely establish itself before another one arrives.

I used to think of this mainly as richness.

Now I think richness and accumulation can be very close to each other.

At the same time, I do not want to respond by reducing everything to a single material. Visceral Mechanics is, after all, about tension, instability and constantly shifting attention.

So the real question is not simply how many materials there are.

It is whether their relationships are strong enough for the listener to feel that they all come from the same psychological mechanism.

What the performers taught me

The most valuable part of the workshop was not one comment from a composer, but the rehearsal process itself.

Some techniques were less mature than I thought. Others, which I had only been able to imagine before, genuinely worked.

So my conclusion is not that I should use fewer extended techniques.

I will keep using them.

But each one needs a musical reason, and I need to think more seriously about physical transitions, tempo, the body of the performer, and the actual resulting sound — not just the technique as vocabulary on the page.

Reactions after the concert

The next day I started reading audience responses.

One listener, Oshima Motoki, described the piece as “very finely written” and liked the opening relationship between the quiet, detailed figures and the more foregrounded gestures. His criticism was that, as more ideas appeared, the identity of the opening gradually disappeared.

Another review, from Daigeikai, heard almost the opposite. The writer understood the quiet opening as a kind of suspended state before an idea forms, and the later proliferation of fragments, rhythms, harmonies and extended techniques as a burst of emergence.

That contrast was useful to me.

Perhaps the issue is not simply that there are “too many materials.” The real task may be to make their relationships clearer without losing the instability and unpredictability that belong to the piece.

Looking back

From submission, selection and preparing parts, through rehearsals, revisions and finally hearing the work at Suntory Hall, this was probably the first time I experienced the complete process of a piece moving from “my work” into public sound.

Once a piece leaves the computer, it passes through performers’ bodies, rehearsal time, the concert space, listeners and critics.

At that point, it no longer belongs entirely to me.

I like that.

Competitions, calls for scores and workshops all contain some mechanism of being selected or rejected. But composers are not racehorses. Not every opportunity needs to be understood as a race.

What remains is whether a piece was played, heard, and able to generate interpretations beyond the composer’s own.

Visceral Mechanics has many things I would change now, but I do not see it as an unfinished or failed version.

It documents very accurately where I was as a composer in the summer of 2026: greedy for sound, curious about technique, drawn to density and physicality, but still learning when to stop adding and go deeper into one thing.

I want to carry that directly into my next piece.

Not by suddenly becoming a different composer, but by asking:

What happens if I keep writing the sounds I like, but with less richness for its own sake, and more necessity?