Ichiyanagi, Toshi 1933 - 2022
Author: Sudoh, Eiko
Last updated：April 24, 2018
Author: Sudoh, Eiko
Born in 1933 as the only child of a cellist father and a piano teacher mother. From around age six, he became familiar with the piano under his mother's guidance and was exposed to various types of music through records collected by his father. From junior high school, he studied composition under Kishio Hirao and Tomojiro Ikenouchi, and piano under Chieko Hara. He honed his talent under these mentors, who had studied in Paris, and while still in high school, he won awards in the composition division of the Music Competition of Japan for three consecutive years. This immediately brought him into the spotlight.
In 1952, at the age of 19, Ichiyanagi moved to the United States, a melting pot of avant-garde art. After studying at the Juilliard School in New York, he expanded his encounters with artists of all genres and met John Cage, a leading composer of American experimental music. Decisively influenced by Cage's philosophy of regarding sounds as they are as music, Ichiyanagi released his Piano Music series, based on indeterminacy. In 1961, at the age of 28, he returned to Japan. He introduced cutting-edge music based on indeterminacy and graphic notation to Japan, exerting a strong influence known as the "Cage Shock" across various fields.
In 1967, he traveled to the United States again, invited by the Rockefeller Foundation. While holding presentations of his works across the U.S., he encountered repetitive music by composers such as Steve Reich. After returning to Japan, while engaging in diverse collaborations with artists from various genres, he released Piano Media in 1972 and Time Sequence in 1976. These were repetitive works written in standard staff notation, but his discovery of "musical spatiality" within them brought a decisive expansion to Ichiyanagi's subsequent works. Here, "spatiality" does not refer to a physical sense but rather to an intra-musical space intertwined with musical time.
Subsequently, Ichiyanagi developed a rich compositional structure based on his theory of "musical spatiality" across a wide range of genres, starting with Piano Concerto No. 1 "Space Consciousness" (first recipient of the Otaka Prize in 1981), followed by Piano Concerto No. 2 "Winter Portrait" (1987), which also received the Otaka Prize, the Cloud Atlas series for piano written over 15 years from 1984 onwards, and other works including operas, symphonies, chamber music, and traditional Japanese music. He has received numerous awards to date, including the Otaka Prize, Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (France), Mainichi Art Award, Kyoto Music Grand Prize, Suntory Music Award, Medal with Purple Ribbon, Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Rosette, and Person of Cultural Merit. Currently, he serves as an advisor to the Music Competition of Japan, a trustee of the Suntory Foundation for Arts, and Artistic Director General of the Kanagawa Arts and Culture Foundation, while also actively involved in promoting contemporary music, such as establishing the "Toshi Ichiyanagi Contemporary Award" in 2015.
Author : Sudoh, Eiko
Last Updated: April 24, 2018
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Author : Sudoh, Eiko
Works(59)
Concerto (1)
concerto (5)
Piano Concerto No.5 "Finland" -for 2012 the left hand-
Composed in: 2012 Playing time: 18 min 00 sec
Piano Solo (2)
character pieces (20)
Piano Ensemble (1)
Various works (3)
Chamber Music (1)
Chamber music (26)
Lied (1)
Various works (3)