Toshiro Mayuzumi (1929-1997) was the first post-war Japanese composer to attract international attention, and for many years the best-known of his generation. Subsequently however his reputation seems gradually to have waned, and by the time of his death the West had almost forgotten him. Part of the reason for this seems to be that, as the years passed, Mayuzumi composed less, devoting his energies instead into becoming a television personality and - ultimately - spokesman for JapanÕs ultra-nationalist extreme right.

This paper attempts to examine the extent to which MayuzumiÕs music itself might be considered an expression of his extremist politics. While this may be obvious in such later works as the opera Kinkakuji (1976), based on a story by Yukio Mishima, the present paper focuses on a work from his earlier years Ð the famous Nirvana Symphony (1958) - to illustrate how even at this period Mayuzumi's music is imbued with his nationalistic world-view, albeit less overtly.Ê

This work is indeed especially interesting in the way it fuses highly advanced musical ideas with deeply reactionary political thought. In it Mayuzumi makes use of a musical discovery which was not to occur to Western composers until many years later. Using the overtone series of a Buddhist temple bell to furnish his materia musica, he effectively anticipates the 'spectral music' later to be particularly associated with French composers such as Grisey and Murail. Closer examination of the work, however - and, in particular, of Mayuzumi's unintentionally revealing explanatory notes - demonstrates that it is nevertheless thoroughly permeated by his reactionary politics. Despite the 'progressive' connotations of Mayuzumi's technical procedure, from the political point of view the work exhibits deeply regressive features which already give a foretaste of the direction his career was later to take.

Peter Burt studied at the universities of York, London and Durham in the United Kingdom and received his doctorate for a thesis on the music of Toru Takemitsu in 1998. In 1997 he travelled to Japan on a grant from the Japan Foundation Endowment Committee to research materials for his dissertation, and with the assistance of the Gen Foundation returned there again in 1999 to spend a year looking at further materials on Takemitsu for a book on the composer, which was published by the Cambridge University Press in 2001. He has also contributed articles on Takemitsu to a number of publications, including the forthcoming special issue of Contemporary Music Review devoted to the composer, of which he is guest editor. In his capacity as vice-chairman of the Takemitsu Society, of which he has been a founder member since 1997, he has organised a number of events relating to contemporary Japanese music, and was responsible for convening a one-day conference on this theme at the University of Brighton in 2001. Currently resident in Vienna, where he is an associate lecturer for the Open University, Dr Burt is now keen to expand his research interests, and in particular is very interested in exploring the work of other composers working in the fascinating and (by the West) largely ignored tradition of Western-style composition in Japan.