Toshio Hosokawa

Toshio Hosokawa (細川 俊夫, Hosokawa Toshio, born 23 October 1955) is a Japanese composer of contemporary classical music. He studied in Germany but returned to Japan, finding a personal style inspired by classical Japanese music and culture. He has composed operas, the oratorio Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima, and instrumental music.

Toshio Hosokawa
Toshio Hosokawa on VioWorld in 2011
Born	(1955-10-23) 23 October 1955 Hiroshima, Japan
Education	Berlin University of the Arts Hochschule für Musik Freiburg
Occupation	Composer
Awards	Rheingau Musik Preis Suntory Music Award

He was the cofounder and artistic director of a Japanese festival for contemporary music and has been a composer in residence at international festivals such as the Venice Biennale, Lucerne Festival, Warsaw Autumn and Rheingau Musik Festival. His operas premiered at the Munich Biennale and La Monnaie, among others.

Career

Hosokawa was born in Hiroshima. He first studied piano and composition in Tokyo, then from 1976 with Yun Isang at the Berlin University of the Arts. From 1983 to 1986, he studied with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough at the Hochschule für Musik Freiburg. In 1980, he first took part in the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, including the performance of his compositions. He lectured there regularly beginning in 1990. In the following years, he became known internationally and received several commissions.

On a recommendation from Huber, he returned to Japan, where he found his personal style influenced by traditional Japanese music. In 1989, he cofounded the annual Akiyoshidai International Contemporary Music Seminar and Festival in Yamaguchi and was its artistic director until 1998. From 1998 to 2007 he served as Composer-in-Residence at the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. He was also the artistic director of the Japanese Takefu International Music Festival in Fukui starting in 2001. In 2004, Hosokawa was appointed a guest professor at the Tokyo College of Music. He was a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin from 2001. He was influenced by Japanese aesthetic and spiritual elements, such as calligraphy, court music and Noh theatre, giving "musical expression to the notion of a beauty that has grown from transience". He said: "We hear the individual notes and appreciate at the same time the process of how the notes are born and die: a sound landscape of continual 'becoming' that is animated in itself."

Hosokawa's first opera, the Shakespeare adaptation Vision of Lear, premiered at the Munich Biennale in 1998. It includes elements from the traditional Japanese Noh theatre. His second opera was Hanjo, which premiered at the Aix-en-Provence Festival in 2004, staged by the choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker. Co-commissioned with La Monnaie in Brussels, it was also performed in Bielefeld, Hamburg, Lisbon, Lyon, Milan and Tokyo. Hosokawa won the fifth Roche Commission with Woven Dreams for orchestra, which was first played by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Franz Welser-Möst at the Lucerne Festival in 2010. His third opera was Matsukaze, again inspired by Noh theatre, which was staged by Sasha Waltz at La Monnaie in Brussels in 2011, with additional performances at the Berlin State Opera and in Luxembourg and Warsaw. His works were premiered by conductors such as Kazushi Ono, Kent Nagano, Simon Rattle, Alexander Liebreich and Robin Ticciati. Several of them became part of contemporary repertoire.

Hosokawa did research in 2006/07 and 2008/09 at the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin. He was invited to be composer in residence at festivals such as the Venice Biennale, in both 1995 and 2001; the Lucerne Festival in 2000; musica viva in Munich in 2001; Musica nova in Helsinki in 2003; and the Warsaw Autumn in 2005 and 2007. He served as director of the Suntory Hall International Program for Music Composition from 2012 to 2015.

Invited by Walter Fink, he was the 18th composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival in 2008. In a concert of chamber music played by the Arditti Quartet and Mayumi Miyata (Shō), works such as "Silent Flowers" and "Blossoming" were presented, in which the composer tried to give nature a voice (der Natur ... eine Stimme zu geben). and his oratorio Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima was performed at Eberbach Abbey by the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne and the WDR Rundfunkchor Köln, conducted by Rupert Huber, with soloist Gerhild Romberger. The oratorio was conceived in 1989 as a requiem for the victims of the nuclear bomb of 6 August 1945, but was expanded to a suite in five movements in 2001 in response to ecological problems due to economic growth. Among the texts is a poem "Heimkehr" (Returning home) by Paul Celan, and a haiku by Matsuo Bashō. The music uses wind sounds, tone clusters, and percussion close to natural sounds, while the choral writing seems to align with European models. In 2010, he composed a chamber music work for his friend Walter Fink, Für Walter (For Walter), for soprano saxophone and piano, with percussion ad libitum, and attended its premiere in a concert on Fink's 80th birthday.

Awards

Hosokawa has received several awards and honors, including:

• 1982: First prize in the composition competition which marked the 100th anniversary of the Berliner Philharmoniker
• 1982: Irino Prize for young composers
• 1984: Arion-Musikpreis
• 1985: Composition prize of the young generation in Europe
• 1988: Kyoto Prize
• 1998: Rheingau Musik Preis
• 1998: Duisburger Musikpreis
• 2001: musica viva-Preis of ARD and BMW
• 2007: Suntory Music Award
• 2008: Fifth Roche commission

Compositions

IRCAM has a detailed list of Hosokawa's works, several are held by the German National Library:

Source:

Opera

Premiere	Title	Description	Libretto and source	Notes
19 April 1998, Gasteig / Munich Biennale	Vision of Lear	Opera in 2 acts, 105'	Tadashi Suzuki, after his stage play The Tale of Lear
8 July 2004, Théâtre du Jeu de Paume / Festival d'Aix-en-Provence	Hanjo	Opera in one act, 80'	The composer, after the English translation by Donald Keene of the modern Noh play by Yukio Mishima
3 May 2011, La Monnaie, Brussels	Matsukaze	Opera in one act, 80'	Hannah Dübgen, after the Noh play Matsukaze by Zeami
17 March 2012, La Raffinerie, Brussels	The Raven	monodrama for soprano, 45'	Setting of Poe's The Raven
24 January 2016, Staatsoper Hamburg	Stilles Meer	Opera in one act, 90'	Hannah Dübgen, after an original text by Oriza Hirata in the German translation by Dorothea Gasztner
1 July 2018, Staatstheater Stuttgart	Erdbeben. Träume.	Opera in one act, 90'	Marcel Beyer, based on Das Erdbeben von Chili by Heinrich von Kleist

Oratorio

• Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima for soloists, narrators, chorus, tape (ad lib.) and orchestra (1989/2001) after Matsuo Bashō, Paul Celan and the film Genbaku no Ko

Orchestral

• Ferne Landschaft I (1987)
• Ferne Landschaft II (1996)
• Ferne Landschaft III – Seascapes of Fukuyama (1996)
• Memory of the Sea - Hiroshima Symphony (1998)
• Seascapes - Daybreak (1998)
• Seascapes - Oita (1998)
• Circulating Ocean (2005)
• Wind from the Ocean (2006)
• Skyscape (2006-7)
• Danses imaginaires (2007)
• Woven Dreams (2009–10)
• Blossoming II (2011)
• Singing Garden in Venice for baroque orchestra (2011)
• Meditation - to the Victims of Tsunami 3.11 (2012)
• Uzu (2019)
• Sakura (2021)

Concertante

• Voyage series
  • Voyage I for violin and ensemble (1997)
  • Voyage II for bassoon and ensemble (1997)
  • Voyage III for trombone and ensemble (1997)
  • Voyage IV - Extasis for accordion and ensemble (2000)
  • Voyage V for flute and chamber orchestra (2001)
  • Voyage VI for viola and strings (2002)
  • Voyage VII for trumpet and strings with percussion (2005)
  • Voyage VIII for tuba and ensemble (2006)
  • Voyage IX - Awakening for guitar and strings with percussion (2007)
  • Voyage X for shakuhachi and ensemeble (2009)

• Flute Concerto Per Sonare (1988)
• Landscape III for violin and orchestra (1993)
• In die Tiefe der Zeit for cello, accordion and strings (1994)
• Cello Concerto (1997)
• Saxophone Concerto (1998)
• Piano Concerto Ans Meer (1999)
• Clarinet Concerto Metamorphosis (2000)
• Percussion Concerto Tabi-bito (2000)
• Harp Concerto Re-turning (2001)
• Lotus under the Moonlight (Hommage à Mozart) for piano and orchestra (2006)
• Shō Concerto Cloud and Light (2008)
• Chant for cello and orchestra (2009)
• Horn Concerto Moment of Blossoming (2010)
• Autumn Wind for shakuhachi and orchestra (2011)
• Trumpet Concerto Im Nebel (2013)
• Sublimation for cello and orchestra (2016)
• Sorrow River for recorder and strings (2016)
• Violin Concerto Genesis (2020)
• Ceremony for flute and orchestra (2021–2022)

Chamber

• for strings
  • String Quartet No. 2 Urbilder (1980)
  • Landscape I for string quartet (1992)
  • Landscape IV for string quintet (1993)
  • Duo for violin and cello (1998)
  • Silent Flowers for string quartet (1998)
  • Blossoming for string quartet (2007)
  • Kalligraphie for string quartet (2007)
  • Distant Voices for string quartet (2013)
  • Weaving Song for string quartet (2020)
• Dan-sô for piano trio (1984)
• Fragmente II for alto flute and string quartet (1989)
• Birds Fragments III for sho and bass flute (1990)
• Landscape II for harp and string quartet (1992)
• Vertical Time Study I for clarinet, cello and piano (1992)
• Landscape V for shō and string quartet (1993)
• Vertical Time Study II for tenor saxophone, piano and percussion (1993-4)
• Memory for piano trio (1996)
• Deep Silence (2002) for shō and accordion in Gagaku style
• Stunden-Blumen (Toki no Hana) for clarinet, violin, cello and piano (2008)
• Für Walter for soprano saxophone, piano and percussion ad libitum (2010)
• Piano Trio (2013)
• Ancient Voices - In memory of Wolfgang Schulz for wind quintet (2013)
• Water of Lethe for piano quartet (2016)

Instrumental

• Sen series
  • Sen I for flute (1986)
  • Sen II for cello (1986)
  • Sen III for sangen (1988)
  • Sen IV for organ (1990)
  • Sen V for accordion (1992)
  • Sen VI for percussion (1993)
  • Sen VII for bassoon (1995)

• Melodia for accordion (1979)
• Vertical Time Study III for violin and piano (1994)
• Vertical Song I for flute (1995)
• Atem-Lied for bass flute (1997)
• Slow Motion for accordion (2002)
• Reminiscence for marimba (2002)
• Serenade for guitar (2003)
• Lied for flute and piano (2007)
• Lied II for viola and piano (2008)
• Lied III for cello and piano (2007)
• Spell for violin (2010)
• Lullaby of Itsuki: from Japanese Folk Songs for violin and piano (2011)
• Threnody: To the victims of the Tōhoku 3.11 earthquake for viola (2011)
• Im Nebel for trumpet and piano (2016)
• Voice for trombone (2020)

Vocal

• Renka I for soprano and guitar (1986)
• Koto-uta for voice and koto (1999)
• Three Love Songs for voice and alto saxophone (2005)
• Klage for soprano and orchestra (2013)
• Drei Engel-Lieder for soprano and harp (2014)
• Nach dem Sturm for two sopranos and orchestra (2015)

Choral

• "Ave Maria for 16-part mixed choir a cappella" (1991)

Literature

• Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer: Toshio Hosokawa. in Komponisten der Gegenwart. Ed. Text Kritik, Munich. pp. 1992ff.
• Toshio Hosokawa, Walter-Wolfgang Sparrer: Stille und Klang, Schatten und Licht. Gespräche. Wolke-Verlag, Hofheim 2012.
• Luciana Galliano (ed.): Lotus. La Musica di Toshio Hosokawa. Auditorium Edizioni, Milano 2013.
• Reinhart Meyer-Kalkus: Auskomponierte Stimmen. Toshio Hosokawas Vokalkompositionen. In: Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 169.2008, Issue 1, pp. 62–65.
• Basil Rogger (ed.): Roche Commissions Toshio Hosokawa, im Auftrag von Roche und der Carnegie Hall New York, dem Cleveland Orchestra sowie dem Lucerne Festival, Luzern 2010. Program book in English and German.
• Sparrer: Toshio Hosokawas Musik in ihrem Verhältnis zu japanischen Tradition. in: Jörn Peter Hiekel (ed.): Ins Offene? Neue Musik und Natur. Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik. Schott, Mainz 2014, pp. 132–157.

Further reading

• Narazaki, Yoko. 2001. "Hosokawa, Toshio". The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan.

External links

• Toshio Hosokawa discography at Discogs
• Toshio Hosokawa on Naxos site
• Toshio Hosokawa on Neos site, a label for Contemporary Music
• Toshio Hosokawa on agent's site
• "Toshio Hosokawa (biography, works, resources)" (in French and English). IRCAM.
• Interview by Fabrizio Rota
• Toshio Hosokawa on Goethe-Institut Korea site