School of Music
2023-24 Awarded Amount: $12,000
Title: The WA! Four Corners Tour: Japanese Culture Meets the US Four Corners
The WA! Four Corners Tour was a successful musical and cultural tour that hosted six Japanese musicians (known as “Team Yamaguchi”) for two and a half weeks of travel and concerts between Arizona and Utah. Professor Kirstin Chávez joined the musicians to act as their guide, translator, chauffeur, and fellow performer.
The Japanese musicians arrived into Phoenix, Arizona on October 25th, and were picked up with a 7-passenger van rented from U Fleet Services. All were lodged in an AirBnB house in central Phoenix and, over the course of one week, no fewer than ten concerts were given between the Phoenix Japanese Friendship Garden and four area schools:
- Betty Fairfax High School
- Desert Meadows Elementary School
- La Joya Community High School
- Camelback High School
Although there was specialized programming offered at the Japanese Friendship Garden (which was celebrating the annual Moon Festival), 45-minute concert/culture programs were offered to each of the schools, featuring Japanese folk songs and traditional music, a slide show of life for school children in Japan, Japanese folk dances, and origami tutorials.
After finishing in Arizona, Team Yamaguchi and Professor Chávez traveled to Salt Lake City after a brief stop at the Grand Canyon. Between November 4–11, Team Yamaguchi and Kirstin performed four concert/culture programs at the University of Utah, and performed for seven area elementary schools:
- Escalante Elementary
- Backman Elementary
- Wasatch Elementary
- Beacon Heights Elementary
- Nibley Park Elementary
- North Star Elementary
- Mountain View Elementary
The offerings at the U consisted of:
- A presentation on the lives of musicians in Japan for the Voice Majors of the School of Music
- A presentation and performance for all School of Music Students
- A discussion in Japanese with students of Japanese from World Languages and Cultures, hosted by University Professor Ashton Lazarus, head of Japanese Studies
- A grand concert, free to the public, featuring Team Yamaguchi, Professor Kirstin Chávez, Professor Haruhito Miyagi and 15 School of Music Voice Majors who performed a world premiere of a piece written especially for the occasion by Japanese composer Yasuzumi Tokubi called “Nippon no UTA.”