HOSOKAWA TOSHIO – Windscapes

creation : 28.01.1997 à Milan
composition : Toshio Hosokawa
duration : 9′
musicians : 2 percussionists
commission : Società del Quartetto di Milano

Windscapes
for two percussion players

In this work, two percussion players, while rebbing, striking and touching various percussion instruments, create a wave motion in imitation of the wind. The voices (and breathing) of the performers are also articulated to sound like the wind. The wall separating what is internal to the human being and what is external is continually broken down by the human­created sounds through their suggesting the wind, which is a natural sound coming from outside the human being.
This work was inspired by the following poem from Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus :

Einzige Welle, deren
allmähliches Meer ich bin;
sparsamstes du von allen möglichen Meeren,―
Raumgewinn.

Wieviele von diesen Stellen der Räume waren schon
innen in mir. Manche Winde
sind wie mein Sohn.
Rainer Maria Rilke from « Die Sonette an Orpheus »

English translation
Lone wave, whose 
gradual sea I am;
you sparsest of possible seas―
making room.

How many places in space have already
been inside me! Many a wind
is like a son to me…
(« Breathing, you invisible poem! » in Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus. Translated by David Young)

It was commissioned by the Società del Quartetto di Milano and composed in the autumn of 1996. It is dedicated to its first performers, the Danish percussionists Safri Duo.
Toshio Hosokawa