Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, Border Border Award for the BBVA Foundation

The Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa (Hiroshima, 1955) is the new Border Award for the BBVA Foundation, in the category of music and opera. The jury, chaired by the Mexican Gabriela Ortiz Torres, highlighted in his work “built a bridge between the Japanese musical tradition and contemporary Western aesthetics.”

Toshio Hosokawa began his studies in Tokyo, but at 21 he moved to Germany to train in Berlin and Freiburg. Back to his country, he developed his compositional career. “He is one of the most original and acclaimed creators of our time,” says the jury’s act. Its extensive catalog, which covers all genres, is inspired by both Zen philosophy and the use of high rigor timbral writing and extremely original and recognizable wealth.

Among his most outstanding works are his opera ‘Hajo‘(2004), “which recalls the ritual songs of ancestral Japan,” and’Matsukaze‘(2011), “which displays a contained lirism but deeply expressive,” according to the words of the jury. In his work, on the other hand, the duality between civilization and nature appears, as well as the sensitivity of the Japanese people towards nuclear catastrophes: their oratory ‘Voicess Voice in Hiroshima‘Explore the attack of the atomic bomb to his hometown – the composer was born only ten years later – and his work for orchestra’Meditation To the victims of tsunami‘Reflect on the impact of Fukushima nuclear accident.

The tension between sound and silence is one of Hosokawa’s music. “Sound and silence are not opposed,” says the composer, “and light and dark either; They are something complementary, hugs. It is like Yin and Yan del Taoism. They contrast but do not kill each other, but coordinate, form a world. Woman and man, the strong and the weak, do not fight, but rise each other. It is the world that I think, and I have developed this way of thinking and I have created my music.

Japanese tradition -among other expressions, Nō Theater– It is also very present in your music. «It has a very deep root, a story of more than a thousand years, not only in music but in the Fine Arts in general. And it has several layers: one comes from China, another from India … and among them there is some tradition that has been forgotten, and I want to look for it, look for that world that Europeans do not know, take it as my root to write new music ».

Hosokawa has links with Spain. He has released in San Sebastián and Bilbao recently, and is a resident composer of the Valencia Orchestrawith which he premiered in December 2024 his work ‘Genesis’, and the one that will return at the end of this month to release his opera’The Maiden from The Sea‘, in a semi -drain version; The concert, which will direct Alexander Liebreichwill be completed with another work of his, ‘Meditation to the victims of tsunami’, and with ‘Archipelago S.’, of Toru Takemitsu.