Toshio Hosokawa

Six string quartets by Toshio Hosokawa, spanning three decades from Urbilder (1980) to Blossoming and Kalligraphie (both 2007, revised 2009), played by the Arditti Quartet. The music draws on traditional Japanese arts, poetry, calligraphy and ink painting, and on the idea that no sound stays still. Kalligraphie appears here in its first recording.

Hosokawa was born in Hiroshima on 23 October 1955. After studies in Tokyo he moved to Berlin in 1976 and studied composition with Isang Yun at the Hochschule der Künste, and from 1983 to 1986 with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough in Freiburg. Huber encouraged him to explore Japanese traditions such as gagaku, and he found a personal style rooted in Japanese culture. The Arditti Quartet plays here with Irvine Arditti and Ashot Sarkissjan, violins, Ralf Ehlers, viola, and Lucas Fels, cello. The recording was made in Baden-Baden from 20 to 22 February 2012 in co-production with Südwestrundfunk, produced by Armin Köhler with Dorothee Schabert as recording supervisor. Dirk Wieschollek wrote the liner notes. Irvine Arditti founded the quartet in 1974, when its first members were students at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

In these quartets every sound is continuously changed by glissandos, trills, tremolos, harmonics, shifting vibrato and dynamics and varied bowings, so that a single note becomes a moving structure. Blossoming opens the disc with thirteen and a half minutes of this slow transformation. Landscape I (1992) and Silent Flowers (1998) are of similar length, while Floral Fairy (2003) lasts six minutes. Kalligraphie is a set of six pieces and Urbilder, the earliest work here, is in five parts, so the programme moves between single spans and collections of shorter movements.

Nature shapes Hosokawa's aesthetic: "I have always wished to compose works which might become part of the sounds of nature, the sound of the cosmos." He has also said his quartet sounds come from the scores of Western modernists as well as from Asian thought, and that he looks for what the two traditions share at the root rather than stressing their differences.

CD, Wergo WER 6761 2, released in 2013 in Wergo's Toshio Hosokawa series, 76 minutes.