Toshio Hosokawa (b.1955)
Windscapes (1996)

Toshio Hosokawa’s music is deeply influenced by Japanese aesthetic and spiritual elements. Especially in Japanese calligraphy, he finds an antidote to chaos; an inherent quality that brings order amidst disorder. Around the time when Hosokawa composed Windscapes for two percussionists, this influence grew to include
sumi-e painting, an Indian ink painting that can be described as a “drawing version” of calligraphy. He was inspired by a work of the most prominent Japanese master of Indian ink and wash painting, Sesshū Tōyō (1420-1506). In one of his works, “Haboku Sansui,” Sesshū uses a “splashed-ink” technique to depict a figure that casts shadows, but whose outline is not clear. The figure blends with the background, becoming vague and hardly noticed. Lines are continuous, but shapes dissolve into the landscape.

In Windscapes, Hosokawa is deeply inspired by this concept.  As performers of this work we imagine our hands becoming brushes, and drum heads becoming canvas. Playing shapes on our drums, we “paint” wind in space; not only in sound, but also visually. Here, wind is born out of silence and returns to silence again. As Hosokawa says, “We hear the individual notes and appreciate at the same time the process of how the notes are born and die: a sound landscape of continual 'becoming' that is animated in itself."