The Knowledge Frontiers Award honours composer Toshio Hosokawa, a musical bridge between East and West

Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa has been awarded the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Music and Opera for the "extraordinary international reach of his work" in "building a bridge between Japanese musical tradition and contemporary Western aesthetics." The jury highlights that Hosokawa "is one of the most original and acclaimed creators of our time," with an "extensive catalogue covering all genres," inspired by both Zen philosophy and the use of a highly rigorous and richly original and recognisable timbral writing.

Hosokawa has intertwined elements of Japanese tradition such as gagaku (Japanese imperial court music) and nō theatre with fundamental instruments in his culture like the shakuhachi, shō, koto, and shamisen to compose "milestones of contemporary music such as his opera Hanjo (2004), reminiscent of the ritual chants of ancient Japan, and Matsukaze (2011), which unfolds a restrained yet deeply expressive lyricism," the jury notes. Thus, the composer symbolises the synthesis between East and West "with surprising mastery" and is capable of turning silence "into a structural element of his musical thought."

Toshio Hosokawa arrived in Germany in 1976 to study with South Korean master Isang Yun at the Berlin University of the Arts and continued his studies with Swiss composer Klaus Huber at the Freiburg University of Music between 1983 and 1986.

Although his family was deeply connected to Japanese culture—both his mother, who played the koto (a wooden instrument with 13 strings of different sizes), and his grandfather, who practised ikebana (traditional flower arrangements), lived that tradition of which they were a part—before travelling to Europe, Hosokawa discovered the Japanese tradition when he went to study in Berlin at the age of 20. "I realised that I was not European, but that I belonged to another tradition," he explains.

In the 1970s and 80s, he discovered Japanese court music, the music of Buddhist monks, and those that were part of ritual ceremonies. At the same time, he was influenced by European composers such as Hungarian György Ligeti and German Helmut Lachenmann, to whom he brought thoughts from the Eastern tradition, as well as Zen Buddhist philosophy or thought.

His chamber works titled 'Landscapes' (1993), his oratorio 'Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima' (1989/2001), and his orchestral work 'Circulating Ocean', premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic at the Salzburg Festival in 2005, have been some of the milestones of a body of work that has resonated in the world's most important concert halls.

Hosokawa's work is also sensitive to the nuclear catastrophes that Japan has suffered. In 'Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima', he delves into the devastation of his hometown following the atomic bomb attack at the end of World War II. His own mother is a hibakusha—a Japanese term for those bombed—survivor of the nuclear bomb. In 'Stilles Meer', his opera premiered in 2016, he explores the impact of the Fukushima accident and the duality between civilisation and nature, a reflection that began in 2012 with another of his orchestral works, 'Meditation. To the Victims of Tsunami', an elegy to the victims of this disaster.