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Toshio Hosokawa Wins the Berkeley Japan Prize

Jan. 18, 2023

On December 1, 2022, the Center for Japanese Studies (CJS) of the University of California, Berkeley announced that Toshio Hosokawa was selected as the recipient of the 6th Berkeley Japan Prize in 2023. The award ceremony was held at UC Berkeley on January 20, 2023. At the ceremony, Hosokawa's Koto-Uta was performed by Kyoko Kawamura.

Koto-Uta composed by Hosokawa was performed by Kyoko Kawamura.
Photo provided by The Center for Japanese Studies (CJS) of UC Berkeley

The Berkeley Japan Prize is a lifetime achievement award from the Center for Japanese Studies to an individual who has made significant contributions in furthering the understanding of Japan on the global stage. The Prize was founded to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the CJS in 2008, and its recipient is selected once every few years. Past recipients include: Haruki Murakami (novelist, writer and translator, 2008), Hayao Miyazaki (filmmaker, 2009), Ryuichi Sakamoto (musician, 2013), Takaaki Kajita (physicist, 2017), and YU Miri (novelist, playwright and essayist, 2022).

While looking back on the trajectory of Hosokawa's creative activities over the years in Europe and Japan, the CJS evaluated the significance of his activities in the music culture of each cultural sphere, and stated the reasons for this prize as below:

"By updating Noh, by mastering the affordances of contemporary Western music, by foregrounding stories of contemporary Japan, and by balancing Western and Japanese influences in his work, Hosokawa’s accomplishment shows potential for the porousness of culture. By now, his music has impacted Western classical music as much the history of Western classical music had transformed his life. Toshio Hosokawa is not only Japan’s pre-eminent composer: he is one of the most prominent composers in the world."

We heartily congratulate Mr. Hosokawa on receiving this prestigious award!

Additionally, new performance scores of Toshio Hosokawa's Kleine Blume, Verlust, and Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde have recently been published by Schott Music.

Kleine Blume (2011) for horn was composed to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of the composer’s friend and Music Director of Lucerne Festival, Michael Haefliger. It was premiered by Stefan Dohr at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao on May 6th, 2011. The motives of the piece were taken from the solo horn part in Hosokawa's Horn Concerto – Moment of Blossoming which was composed for Stefan Dohr. As in the concerto, this small piece depicts the shape of life inside the lotus flower, blossoming quietly from a bud.

Verlust (2019) for piano was premiered on March 3, 2020 at the Musikverein in Vienna by Rudolf Buchbinder, the Austrian pianist best known for his legendary performances of Beethoven’s works. This work was written for ‘The Diabelli Project’. It was Buchbinder’s first recording since his newly concluded contract with Deutsche Grammophon in 2019. For this project, eleven active contemporary composers were commissioned to write works based on Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, and a new recording of these collected works was released in 2020. It was an innovative project worthy of marking the 250th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth.


Rudolf Buchbinder performs Toshio Hosokawa's Verlust

In addition to Toshio Hosokawa, the eleven composers commissioned for this project include Philippe Manoury, Tan Dun, Christian Jost, Jörg Widmann, Johannes Maria Staud, and others, with a composer representing each era of Beethoven's compositional life.

Toshio Hosokawa’s Verlust was named after Schumann’s Erster Verlust, according to the composer. In this work, the number of notes are reduced to a minimum in order to pursue the resonant beauty of each and every note.

Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde (2019) for English horn was commissioned by the Junge Kammerphilharmonie Berlin who requested that Hosokawa compose a solo piece in relation to Das Lied von der Erde by Mahler for their project on the theme of Das Lied von der Erde.

According to Toshio Hosokawa, Das Lied von der Erde is one of the most important works of western music for him as it expressed Mahler’s eastern tonal world and especially, in the final movement, Abschied, the boundary between this world and the hereafter.

Greatly influenced by ancient Chinese philosophy, Hosokawa has considered music to be the instrument that connects this world and the other, and he has carried out his compositional activities on the understanding that musicians are shamans that connect these two worlds. It can be said that Das Lied von der Erde was the work that served as a starting point for him.

Hosokawa also considers his music a sonic calligraphy of time and space, and the English horn is the perfect instrument to express his calligraphic tonal lines. In this work, a characteristic motif played by the oboe in Abschied is used throughout.

Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde was premiered by Dominik Wollenweber on October 9th, 2019 in Berlin.

To learn more about Toshio Hosokawa, visit: schott-music.com.

Toshio Hosokawa
Koto-Uta (1999)
for voice and koto
9'

Kleine Blume (2011)
for horn
5'
View score
Purchase: Print Edition / Download Edition 

Verlust (2019)
for piano
3'
View score
Purchase: Print Edition / Download Edition

Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde (2019)
for English horn
5'
View score
Purchase: Print Edition / Download Edition

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