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Country Song and Bluegrass
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' Our instrumental compositions are those of bluegrass music. Naturally, we play lots of American bluegrass music. But we sing them in Japanese most of which are translations by Tomoya Takaishi, a folk singer. There are pros and cons in not singing in the original language but we are more comfortable singing in our own language
and we hope this will give our audience better understanding of the lyrics.
Bill Monroe established a new genre of music called bluegrass based on American folk music which had been passed down the years. If classified roughly, it will fall into a category of country music. In bluegrass music, much importance is put upon instrumental performance
and each instrument takes turns and plays a solo between verses. Though we follow this style, we do not mimic the recorded music ; we would like to create our own music. Some may think we do not mimic because we are not good enough to do so, while others may say we are too creative to do so. Each one of ' The Circle ' member has a different musical background.
We put them all together to create our own music, putting much emphasis on creativity, which we are very proud of.
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Our original pieces of music
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' Most of our original pieces are written by Katoh and Enomoto.
The most popular piece so far has been ' Mipola to tomoni (On together with Mipola)' , the World Expo theme music. Since most of the children know this song in Mie, we could call it a ' big hit ' . We also have written campaign songs for safe driving and for strawberry sales.
It was about 10 years ago that the music Enomoto composed to go with a lyric written by Tokiko Iwatani got a top prize. Tokiko Iwatani is a lyric writer who has written words of many hit songs.
We also got a prize in the ' Suzuka Contest ' in the category of composition and lyrics.
' Our repertoire includes not only bluegrass music but also many standard numbers, as we try to challenge as many kinds of music as we can.
We have even tried the rock and roll hit, ' Have you ever seen the rain ? ' by CCR !!
However, it has never been without difficulty. Compared with country music that uses only three codes, standard numbers require more codes, which can mean more work for some of our members who are not used to it.
Still, each one of us is not only willing to but also proud of working hard in order to perform better and creative music.
We would like to entertain as many people as we can with our music.
Please come and enjoy our performance.!!
