Frontiers of Music Award goes to Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Music and Opera category has gone in this 17th edition to Toshio Hosakawa for “the extraordinary international reach of his work,” which “has built a bridge between the Japanese musical tradition and contemporary Western aesthetics”
Hosokawa happens to be one of the most original and acclaimed creators of our time, according to the awards committee judging the 17th edition of the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards. His ability to weave multiple Japanese elements into his music, including gagaku (music of the Japanese imperial court), noh theater, and instruments as integral to the culture as the shakuhachi, shō, koto or shamisen, shines through in scores that have become “milestones of contemporary music, like the operas Hanjo (2004), recalling the ritual chants of old Japan, and Matsukaze (2011), which deploys an understated but profoundly expressive lyricism.”
The synthesis between East and West that the laureate embodies is just one of the distinctive characteristics that have earned him the award, according to committee chair Gabriela Ortiz. For this composer and Professor of Composition at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Hosokawa has achieved this combination “in a manner that is both personal and frankly dazzling, with a voice uniquely his own that fuses the two cultures with breathtaking skill.”
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. 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.
Seeing Japan from the West
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. Despite coming from a family steeped in Japanese culture – his mother played the koto (a wooden instrument with 13 different-sized strings), and his grandfather practised ikebana (traditional flower arrangement) – until moving to Europe Hosokawa had no particular interest in his own traditions.
While studying in Germany, the young Hosokawa found that the music then in vogue was not the Western music he had admired from his native Japan, but that of other countries far from the Old Continent. It was in this way that he turned his gaze back to the music of his homeland, and before long he returned to Japan to study it in detail: “I discovered Japanese court music and the music of the bonzes, the Buddhist monks, all those sounds that were part of ritual ceremonies and which I had never even considered before.”
Toshio Hosokawa, Premio Fronteras del Conocimiento en Música y Ópera.
The deeply felt influence of the Zen Buddhist tradition
Just as all traditional Japanese arts pursue a communion with nature, Hosokawa does so with his music. He cites among his inspirations ikebana, the ancestral flower arranging technique using cut, rootless blooms that survive only briefly before withering, or the cherry blossom season that lasts just a few short weeks. “It is their ephemeral nature – he remarks – that gives these things their beauty, and the same thing happens with music.”
Hosokawa is also drawn to calligraphy for its ability to replicate sound and silence. His music, he explains, finds reflection in that ancestral art: the sound being equivalent to the shape traced by the brush on a blank sheet of paper and the margin signifying the emptiness that is silence. Both are essential to the balance of the work, which can only exist through the combination of its two parts. “Sound and silence are not opposites,” the composer explains. “And nor are light and darkness. They complement and embrace each other. I see them as like the Yin and Yang of Taoism. Opposed but not mutually destructive, they organize themselves to form a single world.”
Hosokawa proposes a dichotomy between the Western and Eastern conception of musical time, between what he calls “horizontal time and vertical time.” In European music, he contends, time is constructed horizontally by accumulation. Inevitably, the point of comparison is with the Christian tradition and the image of a cathedral being built, its ultimate aim being the connection with an all-powerful God. In the Eastern Zen tradition, conversely, time follows the circular pattern of breathing: “It is an action that comes and goes, in a circle. And in the same instant you have life and death, light and darkness; and the presence of eternity. I wanted to do the same with my music.”
Nuclear disaster and its aftermath
Hosokawa’s work manifests the Japanese people’s heightened perception of the nuclear threat after the two disasters suffered in the last 80 years. In ‘Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima’, Hosokawa engages with the devastation wrought on the city of his birth by the atom bomb at the end of the Second World War. His own mother survived the nuclear bomb that was dropped on civil Japan, so nuclear disaster is a subject that resonates personally, and one he has echoed in other pieces.
In his 2016 opera Stilles Meer, he reflects on the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear accident and the duality between civilization and nature. Another, orchestral work, Meditation. To the Victims of Tsunami (2012), is an elegy to the many victims of this natural disaster. The work begins as a silent chant and builds into a shrill alarm announcing the impending catastrophe, conveyed through percussion and brass.
A feeling of closeness to nature is something else that the Japanese composer owes to his home country. As he puts it, “Japan is a country overflowing with nature. Artists, poets, musicians, architects, invariably think about being part of nature and create their works accordingly. Not to make something opposed to nature, but that forms part of it. That is the goal of our art. For example, a popular instrument in Japanese music is the bamboo flute known as the shakuhachi. The sound is not disagreeable, but it has to resemble the wind in nature. Sound is also part of the natural world. That is one of the purposes of sound and it’s something I try to achieve with my music. There are concertos, the violin or piano concerto, where there is a soloist, one person. And then the orchestra is the nature that surrounds that person. The soloist tries to be part of nature. You have some small conflicts, but in the end they fade into the sound of nature. That’s the music I want to make,” he concludes.