Hosokawa Toshio

cover “Music,” says Toshio Hosokawa, “is the place where notes and silence meet.” This identifies his aesthetic concept as a genuinely Japanese one. It is found both in Japanese landscape painting and in the music, such as the courtly gagaku, in which audible sound always stands in relation to nonsound, i.e. to silence. In their rhythmic proportions Hosokawa’s compositions are oriented around the breathing methods of Zen meditation, with their very slow breathing in and very slow breathing out: “Each breath contains life and death, death and life.”

Hosokawa Toshio (細川俊夫) was born in 1955 in Hiroshima. He studied composition in Europe, in Berlin and Freiburg with Isang Yong and Klaus Huber.

I only knew about Circulation Ocean for orchestra. Then I found these pieces for accordion and shō (a typically Asian wind organ; it exists in various forms from India to China; see Wikipedia).

Some of them, like the one you'll hear, derive from traditional Gagaku pieces, others were composed by Hosokawa, but all are modeled on a very slow rhythm, with the sounds of the two instruments, almost always in the high register, becoming practically indistinguishable.

Hosokawa Toshio – banshikisho no choshi

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