Hosokawa: Flute Music

Featuring

Kolbeinn Bjarnason
Valgerður Andrésdóttir
Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir
Sif Tulinius
Þórunn Ósk Marinósdóttir
Zbigniew Dubik

Snorri Sigfus Birgisson
Caput Ensemble
Toshio Hosokawa
Anonymous (Traditional)

Did you know?

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Composer's Artistic Vision

Composer Toshio Hosokawa conceives of music as a "calligraphy of space and time," inspired by avant-garde Japanese calligrapher Yuichi Inoue.

Composer's Artistic Vision

For Hosokawa, the flute is the ideal instrument to realize his musical ideas because it produces sound through breath, transmitting the "sound's life-power."

Composer's Artistic Vision

Hosokawa's concept of musical calligraphy focuses on the form of a single musical note, which is born from silence, grows, and decays like an oriental writing brush stroke.

Compositional Technique

Unlike Western architecture's brickwork approach to melody, Hosokawa's Eastern-influenced music uses glissando, vibrato, and tone color changes to maintain the "flow of life" of a single note.

Performer Biography

Flautist Kolbeinn Bjarnason, born in Reykjavík in 1958, is not only an accomplished Western flautist but has also studied shakuhachi music in Japan.

Composer's Artistic Vision

Hosokawa's musical calligraphy, influenced by Japanese tradition, values the blank spaces or silence in music as much as the audible notes, giving notes greater expressive power.

Compositional Technique

Hosokawa's flute music incorporates breath noise, a sound forbidden in Western flute music until the 19th century, but used positively in the Japanese tradition to approach a more natural breath.