Thursday March 29, 2007
___________________________________________________________________________

The University of Maryland is hosting a festival of contemporary Japanese music this weekend at its Baltimore County campus, and there's music in abundance: three concerts on Friday (including a shakuhachi recital by grand master Retsuzan Tanabe) another on Saturday night, and a concluding concert at the Freer Gallery on Sunday afternoon.  Composers Hiroyuki Itoh, Hiroyuki Yamamoto, and Shirotomo Aizawa will be on hand to discuss their music.

If that doesn't sate your appetite, check out the festival's nearly two dozen lectures --  everything from the head-scratchingly arcane (“Structural Integration of Television Phenomena in Joji Yuasa's Observations on Weather Forecasts”) to the more user-friendly “Music in the Bathtub: Reading Takemitsu's Music Through Western Criticism" by Takemitsu expert Peter Burt.