Reverie is a collaborative sound research work developed by KUBO & YAMADA that explores listening as a relational and temporal practice. Conceived as a tribute to Olivier Messiaen and Toru Takemitsu, the work takes as its point of departure the historical and aesthetic relationship between the two composers, shaped by Takemitsu’s encounter with Messiaen’s music and, in particular, by the lasting impact of Turangalîla-Symphonie on his thinking about time, color, and sound as lived experience. Rather than referencing their music stylistically, Reverie engages with these shared concerns through sound itself, approaching duration, resonance, and perception as intertwined and unstable phenomena.

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This lineage is understood not simply as a historical reference but as a situated position from which the work unfolds. For Tomomi Kubo, the ondes Martenot, which plays a central role in Turangalîla-Symphonie, functions as both instrument and memory and carries a legacy of expressive gesture and sonic ambiguity. For Reiko Yamada, working as a Japanese composer within Western art music traditions, Takemitsu’s position between cultural worlds provides a resonant framework for thinking about translation, inheritance, and displacement. Reverie thus becomes a space where these questions are explored through listening rather than citation, allowing influences to surface as perceptual conditions rather than stylistic markers.

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At the center of the work, the ondes Martenot is approached as a liminal instrument whose electronic sound production remains inseparable from embodied gesture. Its continuous pitch control, subtle timbral modulations, and spatial modes of projection foster a way of listening that resists stable reference points. The piece unfolds through transitions, thresholds, and moments of suspension, foregrounding sound as something that emerges and dissolves in time rather than progressing toward resolution.

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The compositional process for Reverie developed through iterative experimentation between structured material and improvisation. Analog synthesizers were treated not as accompaniment but as a responsive sonic environment, shaping and being shaped by the gestures of the ondes Martenot. Decisions regarding pitch, resonance, and density emerged through attentive listening rather than predetermined trajectories, allowing the work to remain open to contingency and variation.

Reverie functions as a foundational point of departure for the current project. It initiates a set of questions around listening without arrival, the role of liminal instruments, and sound as a situated and culturally inflected practice. These questions continue to unfold across subsequent research contexts.

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Reverie: A Tribute to Messiaen and Takemitsu for ondes Martenot and analog synthesizers  was
premiered as a musical work by Tomomi Kubo (ondes Martenot) and Reiko Yamada (analog synthesizers) at TECSMUC 2024 in Barcelona.

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