Gagaku, the music of the Imperial Japanese Court, has exerted a fascination on Western composers for many decades, not least Britten, Cowell, Messiaen and La Monte Young. Western audiences have been slower to warm to it but cultural gaps are a two-way phenomenon: I recall the fascinated befuddlement of Ono Gagaku Kai at the rapturous reception accorded them at the 1985 Proms.

The Belgian composer Frederic D’Haene (b1961) studied with (among others) Globokar, Pousseur and Rzewski (to whom he was assistant in the 1990s) and first encountered gagaku in 1986. D’Haene became intrigued with the idea of integrating elements from widely disparate types of music in a style he terms ‘paradoxophony’ and Music with Silent Aitakes (2003 06; the final word’s apostrophisation on the cover is spurious) is a very fine example of this. It is scored for 14 gagaku players accompanied by a chamber orchestra of 13. An ‘aitake’ is the chord cluster produced by the Japanese reed instrument, the shô, of which there are three featured in the work, and silences form crucial structural markers in the two large, complex gagaku movements, ‘Haya yo byoushi’ and ‘Haya roku byoushi’. These each run for a quarter of an hour and are framed and separated by three much briefer ‘Netori’ sections, acting as prelude, interlude and postlude.

One of the compositional bases of D’Haene’s score is an alternation of drones on E and B. These may be a perfect fifth apart but there is nothing remotely tonal in the music built over the top. D’Haene has constructed with estimable precision a work where both ensembles accompany and counterpoint each other, achieving a remarkably satisfying synthesis that transcends how dissonant or alien the musical language may seem. The performance, recorded in Frankfurt in 2015, sounds immaculate, as does Ravello’s recording.