Soloists of the DSO Berlin

The programme illustrates that in the attempt to interweave great traditions it is essential to have a thoroughly worked-out concept if you want to embrace more than just the surface of things. A group of composers around Joji Yuasa and Toru Takemitsu adopted the techniques of Western avant-gardists to break up and “relocate” Japanese traditions. Following the ideas of the innovators, music is regarded as an intellectual process. For Hans Zender, the structures of Japanese Haiku poetry provided a means to focus his musical language and to make musical time float.

Gerhardt Müller-Goldboom took the “reduction of material accompanied by an expansion of the content” as a basis for Sabi – a term with the original meaning of “a feel for beauty” that later on came to represent the basic aesthetic idea of Haiku. Experiences with the chants of Bhuddist monks are “diffracted” in Giacinto Scelsi’s Ho, a vocal meditation centring around one single tone. Toshio Hosokawa projected sonic structures from ceremonial court music into the ideological world of the avant-garde and placed them in auditory perspectives comparable to Chinese landscape painting.