Motoo Ōtaguro
# Motoo Ōtaguro

Motoo Ōtaguro (大田黒 元雄, Ōtaguro Motoo) (January 11, 1893 – January 23, 1979) was a Japanese music critic. He is considered a pioneer of music criticism in Japan.

## Biography

### Early life

Ōtaguro was born in Tokyo, on January 11, 1893. He was born into a wealthy family; his father was Jūgoro Ōtaguro [ja], an entrepreneur influential in the adoption of hydroelectricity in Japan. Ōtaguro had private piano lessons with Hanka Petzold [de]. He graduated from Odawara High School [ja].

### Career

After graduating from high school, Ōtaguro went abroad to study economics at the London School of Economics from 1913 to 1914. He attended many concerts of contemporary music during his time in London. He became acquainted with works by English contemporaries such as Frederick Delius and Ralph Vaughan Williams as well as other European composers such as Claude Debussy and Alexander Scriabin. He went back to Japan in July 1914 for a summer vacation but was unable to return to London due to the outbreak of World War I. Starting his career as a music writer, he published his first two books in 1915. One of these was From Bach to Schoenberg, which covered sixty European composers and was the first Japanese book to cover modern composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Claude Debussy.

From 1915 to 1917, Ōtaguro held private concerts in his Ōmori-sannō mansion, where he played contemporary pieces on his own piano, despite not being a professional musician. These concerts were held for an audience of about 20 people, including composer Keizō Horiuchi [ja] and critic Kōichi Nomura [ja]. Despite their small and private audiences, the concerts had programs printed elaborately by Kiyoshi Hasegawa, who lived in Ōmori-sannō at the time. Ōtaguro held a piano concert at the Tokyo YMCA center titled "Scriabin–Debussy Evening" on December 9, 1916. This was the first concert in Japan dedicated to either of the composers' music.

In 1916, Ōtaguro started the publishing company Ongaku to Bungakusha [ja]. It published books and a magazine titled Ongaku to Bungaku, which ran until 1919. He revised and compiled essays he wrote for the magazine into multiple books. By 1921, the company ceased its activities. Ōtaguro went on to publish books for Daiichi Shobō [ja] in 1925, who also reprinted works published by Ongaku to Bungakusha.

He was a founding member of the photography group Photographic Art Society, which was active from 1921 to 1924. Other members of the group included Shinzō and Rosō Fukuhara. The society was affiliated with a magazine, Shashin geijutsu, published from June 1921 until September 1923; Ōtaguro contributed an article, "Shashin shoron" (写真小論), to its first issue. His photography career was short lived, and he did not get much recognition as a photographer.

After World War II, he made appearances on the NHK radio quiz show Hanashi no Izumi [ja].

Ōtaguro was recognized as a Person of Cultural Merit, one of Japan's highest honors, in 1977.

### Death

Ōtaguro died at 86 from cholangiocarcinoma at the Tokyo Welfare Pension Hospital (now JCHO Tokyo Shinjuku Medical Center [ja]) on January 23, 1979. He was hospitalized since September the preceding year. He is buried at Somei Cemetery [ja].

Parts of his residence in Suginami, where he lived since 1933, were transformed into an urban park called Ōtaguro Park, which opened on October 1, 1981.

Ōtaguro's personal collection of books, sheet music, and other material was donated to the NHK by his daughter. The collection was transferred to the Documentation Center of Modern Japanese Music on September 24, 1998. In July 2010, the entire collection of the Documentation Center was transferred to the Meiji Gakuin University's Archives of Modern Japanese Music.

## Writings

### Translations

In addition to his own writing, Ōtaguro translated many books on music, starting in 1919 with Music on Water, a collection of translated essays by various writers.

Ōtaguro's translated works by several English and French composers, as well as historical biographies about composers. Biographies translated by him included works such as André Pirro's biography about Johann Sebastian Bach, which was the first biographic book about Bach published in Japan, and Marie Bobillier's biography of Joseph Haydn.

### Poetry

Ōtaguro published a few books of his own poetry, including Haru no enbu, and Nichirin. He also published poetry in the magazine Kamen.

Ōtaguro wrote the lyrics for Dan Ikuma's song cycle Tōkyō shōkei.

## Personal life

Ōtaguro married his wife, Chizue Hirota, in 1919.

Ōtaguro's other keen interests included baseball, sumō, detective stories, and poetry.

