BIO
Toshio Hosokawa (Hiroshima, Japón, 1955) is considered one of the most internationally renowned contemporary Japanese composers today.
After beginning piano and composition studies in Tokyo, Toshi Hosokawa moved to Germany in 1976 where he studied composition at the Universität der Künste in Berlin under the South Korean master Isang Yun. He then continued his studies with Swiss composer Klaus Huber at the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg from 1983 to 1986.
His name first garnered international attention in the early 1990s with the chamber work series Landscapes (1993), but it was the success of his oratorio Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima
(1989/2001) and his orchestral piece Circulating Ocean, premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic at the 2005 Salzburg Festival, which would definitively place his work on the music stands of the world’s top orchestras and concert halls.
From 1989 to 1998, Hosokawa was artistic director and organizer of the Akiyoshidai International Contemporary Music Seminar and Festival in Yamagushi, Japan, which he co-founded. Since 2001, he has also been artistic director of the Takefu International Music Festival in Japan.
Hosokawa is a prolific author, with an output of nearly 200 scores including concertos for solo instruments, chamber music and film music, as well as orchestral pieces and works for traditional Japanese instruments. He has received numerous recognitions, including first prize in the Berlin Philharmonic’s centennial composition competition in 1982. Elected to Berlin’s Akademie der Künste in 2001, he has been composer-in-residence at the Venice Biennale (1995, 2001), the Lucerne International Music Festival (2000) and with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra (1998- 2007).
He currently holds a residency with the Orquesta de València, which he initiated in December 2024 with the Spanish premiere of his violin concerto Genesis, featuring as soloist Veronika Eberle, the superb German violinist who is also the work’s dedicatee.
Genesis is a musical journey though a human life, starting from the prenatal stage where the chords conjure the to-and-fro of the amniotic fluid and the harp reproduces the beats of the mother’s heart; beats which extend out to embrace all of nature – a second mother – so consumingly important in Japanese art.
CONTRIBUTION
Although his family had a very direct relation with traditional Japanese culture, Hosokawa showed little interest in it in his youth and left his country in 1976 to study in Germany. Among his earliest influences are European composers, most notably the Hungarian György Ligeti, or the also winner of the Frontiers of Knowledge Award Helmut Lachenmann, with whom he coincided in Berlin as resident artist.
In Germany, his mentor, the South Korean maestro Isang Yun, advised him to return to his roots to find his own musical voice, and he went back to Japan to learn in detail about techniques, traditions and instruments.
Hosokawa proposes a dichotomy between Western and Eastern conceptions of musical time, between what he has called “horizontal time and vertical time”. In the case of European music, time is constructed horizontally, cumulatively. In contrast, in the Eastern Zen tradition, time follows the circular pattern of breathing.
The composer observes the art of traditional Japanese calligraphy to replicate sound and silence. His works appear to be written in a single stroke, like the letters of calligraphy. They are replete with elements that seek technical complexity but, to both the viewer and the other musicians, they appear as a single piece.
His work highlights the duality between civilization and nature, and the sensitivity of the Japanese people to nuclear catastrophes. In his oratorio Voiceless voice in Hiroshima he explores the atomic bomb attack, while in his opera Stilles Meer and his orchestral work Meditation he reflects on the impact of the Fukushima accident.
