Tokyo College of Music: Here to Make Music and Traditions

Can you talk a bit about internationalization in terms of your college studies and music studies in Japan?

The college was founded 117 years ago, and since then, the spirit of internationalization has been a fundamental feature or keyword of our mission. Still, I think before we talk about the university, we need to talk about the market, which must become more accessible. It has to be opened, and the atmosphere needs to be nurtured. That’s very important.

For example, if we think about orchestras, compared to twenty years ago, the number of non-Japanese musicians who perform regularly in orchestras has increased. Still, compared to Europe and North America, the number of non-Japanese performers is about half their level. Japanese society hasn’t reached that point, but we have the possibility of getting there in the future. It is increasing gradually, and speaking of this college, the number of non-Japanese professors is increasing, so I think we will eventually get to that state.

When we think about internationalization at the university, we need to think of Western music in Japan in a context unique to Japan because we only have a short history of Western music here; it’s only a bit over 150 years. Because of that, I want to encourage our Japanese students to study abroad. I really want them to experience Europe firsthand because it is where Western music was born. We want students to experience life there and understand the environment where music was born. We also want Japanese students to see their own country from a different perspective as a result of that overseas experience. By going abroad, Japanese students will learn who we are, what kind of mindset and thoughts we have, and what kind of music we create. By going overseas, we can learn those things so well.

On that topic, ten years ago, it was a one-sided situation whereby Japanese students went overseas, but as a university, we hope that direction becomes two-way. At Tokyo College of Music (TCM), the Music Liberal-Arts major now has a semester system, with new students joining in September. This semester system will make it easier to accept non-Japanese students and to send Japanese students overseas.

We have significantly increased the number of non-Japanese students, and we are committed to making the flow of students go both ways. In fact, I can’t say the number of foreign students is large, but it is on the rise, so we are also getting students from Europe who want to study here. For example, tomorrow, I'm going to give a lesson to a student from Hungary. This person is studying composition at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music. Still, this person has also studied in Istanbul and Estonia and then came to Japan, so he has this desire to learn and experience various cultures. It makes me realize that especially students who come to Japan from Western countries look for something more than just Western music taught in Japan. What they expect from Japan is something that cannot be experienced in other regions as well as our unique culture, so experiencing Western music within the bounds of the Japanese context is insufficient.

For another example, last year, I looked after a student from Birmingham, England, who was studying contemporary music, but she was also interested in jazz, pop, synthesizers, and many other areas. This really made me consider what the needs of non-Japanese students and what they expect from us will be in the future. It’s not just Western music we need to think about. As a university, we must be prepared or have the attitude to provide exposure to the various cultural aspects of Japan. I think that attitude is going to be important.

Japan should be a very attractive place for students to come study. The universities have excellent facilities. There’s an increasing ability for students to learn through English, and the weak yen makes it cost-effective for students to come here. But when you look at the ratio of international students in Japan, it’s just 5%. In the UK, Australia, and Europe, that number is about 20% to 30%. What sort of changes do you think Japanese universities need to make in order to attract more foreign students to come here and study in Japan?

First, we must provide a quality education that is considered to be worth the investment. Second, more promotion is necessary because the international marketing capabilities of Japanese universities are still under development and are not strong enough yet. Third, we must provide a diverse program. At TCM, we have a program for ethnic music, where students can learn Asian instruments. For example, we have a class for traditional Indonesian music gamelan. That’s going to be one of the important parts of the future of our university because we must provide a diverse, high-quality program; otherwise, those who are interested in learning will not find it interesting.

We must increase the number of students from Asia as well. Asian students are looking to us to learn Western music here, just like Japanese students wanted to go to Europe to study Western music twenty years ago, so we must develop ourselves in this area as well. To give you an example, we just had an information session on Zoom with Indonesian student candidates, and then we had a master class. A number of Indonesian students showed strong interest. In general, we need to strengthen the relationship between Southeast Asia and Japan.

As for the internationalization of our university, we have collaborations with multiple music universities, and we update the conditions and nature of these relationships regularly. These collaborations with non-Japanese universities include exchange programs, and we are currently sending students overseas to Europe. When we do that, we hire an English tutor for our students going overseas, and we also hire a Japanese tutor at TCM to support foreign students' learning here.

The exchange program is not limited to students but also includes faculty. We invite a number of professors from overseas to teach master classes for both long and short programs, and we are getting a lot of support for this from various collaborating musical institutions. In fact, I just came back from France two days ago. I was there to talk with the École Normale de Musique de Paris and promote a collaboration agreement.

For students who want to study abroad, having choices of destination is very important, so we are going to enhance the number of choices. In music study, particularly, specific universities are often well known for specific instruments or professors, so having partnerships with more of these institutions is very important, and we’re focusing on that.

Can you talk a bit about the employment opportunities for graduates, including these international students?

At TCM, we provide very thorough career support. We have a career support center where the staff and counselors meet with students and help them find employment. We also provide that support for non-Japanese students, and we have many cases where they were successful in finding jobs. For example, graduates have found jobs at a gaming company, teaching music, or even selling musical instruments.

Japanese business practices, especially those involving hiring, are very different from other countries. Sometimes our career counselors mention that the non-Japanese students’ mindset doesn’t really match the Japanese business or hiring practices. For example, one of our students had an interview with an entertainment company and was asked where they saw themselves in the future: in one year, in five years, or in ten years. For non-Japanese students, this can seem like a silly question as the future is unknown, and they may wish to change jobs, but Japanese companies are looking for someone who can work for their company for a long time, so this is a bit of a mindset mismatch.

What we do at TCM to help non-Japanese students looking for a job is to have meetings with them at the career support center where counselors can offer guidance for interviewing and conduct practice interview sessions as well so that the students can learn about how to navigate the job search process in Japan. Some students may need to stay after graduation to continue searching for a job and to do that, the type of visa needs to be changed, and we can help with that. We also help students get letters of recommendation and provide support for improving their Japanese language skills.

You recently launched a Music Business and Technology (MBT) major, which was featured in April in The Nikkei. I find this course interesting because it teaches students not only about new technology but also how to use technology in business. Of course, we’re seeing an increasing use of technology and AI in music, be it digital mastering, sound design, etc. The challenge for a course like this is that the technology changes so quickly. How do you ensure that the curriculum and the faculty stay up to date with new developments?

Making progress by introducing new developments is very important for this Music Business and Technology major. Mr. Arima, an associate professor of MBT, is one of the experts in the evolution of technology and art over the past twenty years. He has been deeply engaged in most performances of Japanese and non-Japanese works using electronics in festivals and concerts in Japan. We managed to get him to teach his vast knowledge and experience at our college. Mr. Arima probably knows the whole history of the evolution of music and technology, both hardware and software and that such knowledge is very important to solve the issue of archiving. How to exactly reproduce music that used the technology of ten years ago is a challenge because when the software and hardware change, reproduction is not the same. If it is a violin piece from years ago, we can reproduce it today with another violin, but a piece of music using electronics is a different story.

There are two other key people in that program: Dr. Shibayama and Dr. Haneishi. They teach about computers from top to bottom, namely from visible parts to hidden aspects. What I mean by the top is man-machine interfaces, that is to say how humans operate a computer and obtain information from it. The bottom is about programming and how the computer works, so this course even teaches mathematics. We start with mathematics, which goes hand-in-hand with teaching everything about computers.

We only started this program this year, but 40 or 50 students have already shown interest and are enrolled, which makes me think that this was the kind of course students were looking for. Now, we need to provide support so that the students don’t feel like they are falling behind, which is a real possibility.

Of course, these students are interested in music and information and communication technology (ICT), but learning about music and technology alone is not enough. They need to learn about art, architecture, movies, and design, so collaboration in this field is going to be important. We are speeding up our efforts in this area. For example, we recently started a collaboration with Tama Art University.

As a music college, finding a good balance is very important because we have students who are learning acoustic instruments, so what I mean by balance is considering both acoustic and computer music. What’s important in music is developing the ear and nurturing the senses. If you ask about how to study music, the only answer is to listen to good music by good performers. There’s no other way. Think of an art appraiser trying to distinguish between authentic and forged art. There are no criteria or standards to teach this skill. The only thing you can count on is the eyes of the appraiser and how much authentic work this person has been exposed to, and music is just like that. In music, the ear is very important, and the only thing to distinguish the quality is the capability of making a judgment by listening.

Considering artificial sounds, one of the two aspects of balance, it has started only in the mid-twentieth century. It has evolved from electronic music, musique concrete, live electronics, and then into synthesizers, and the computer just incorporated all of them and even became a way to listen to traditional music now. It’s a convenient tool, but in terms of quality, it’s not the best. For musicians, the ear or hearing capability and natural acoustics are very important, so even though we teach about computers, we want the students to have this acoustic study experience.

Of course, those who study acoustic music need to learn how to record music using a microphone, and those who study computers need to know the true or live music, so that’s what I mean by having a balance between acoustic and computer music because each influences the other. 

At our Naka-meguro・Daikan-yama campus, we have a studio with high-specification equipment available. We hope that using that facility will help to maintain that good balance.

When it comes to change at the university, we first talked about internationalization and then technological promotion and advancement. To me, those things go hand-in-hand, and both lead to the third key, which is diversification. When I first encountered a computer and the Internet, it was the 1980s when I was receiving training in computers in France at the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM). At that time, many critics were saying that if technology continued to develop, English was going to be the hegemonic language and that it would just incorporate all the cultures in the future. I had that concern as many others did, but now, 40 years later, it didn’t develop that way. On the contrary, computers have developed in such a way that we can use the languages of any ethnic minority more easily and make the most of them. For example, if I want to talk to a composer from Estonia about his or her music, I can do that using a computer and the Internet, and I can even understand an explanation of his or her work in the Estonian language thanks to translation software that is readily available. In that sense, the computer is opening up the world in terms of language and that is very important for art.

I say that because there has been a trend that younger people gradually become alike in their hobbies, tastes, and performance styles in terms of their performance and composition regardless of country. What makes each performance and composition different in such circumstances is how and what they think in the languages they use. For example, when I was a judge in the composition category of a music competition in Geneva in 2017, I looked at over 60 scores, and by just looking at the scores, you can’t tell which country the score is from. Out of those 60, 30 of them used similar figures developed in similar ways. Of course, they are not exactly the same, but what makes the difference is the language they use in thinking and its thought form. Hence, as more and more young people have the same hobbies and similar tastes, I think language enriches the world of art; it helps us transcend a superficial resemblance and makes a difference.

This all leads to the point I made about diversity, and regarding that, we are currently at the stage of transformation. This also goes back to your first question about what we need to do, which is to address diversification. Unless we address this matter, we won’t be able to solve the issues of internationalization.

Thank you very much for your insights, especially regarding internationalization. To wrap up, I would like to ask more of a personal question. As the President of TCM and also an active composer and concert pianist, if we were to come back to interview you a second time on the last day of your presidency, whatever that may be, what goals or ambitions would you like to have achieved?

So many things can happen at the university, and we have more issues besides internationalization or digitalization. My tenure as president is four years, and I am in my second year. How much I can achieve or what I can achieve before the end of my tenure is one way to look at it, but I truly believe that passion is what moves things forward and makes a difference from the past, so I would like to take on all the challenges with passion. To do so, using my previous experience as a musician might not suffice. Still, one important thing I want to do is to pave the way for the future. Unless we internationalize, there’s no future for Japanese educational institutions, so that is the most urgent and important task.

For more information, visit their website at: https://www.tokyo-ondai.ac.jp/en