“Silence also contains profound sounds”

Awarded with the 17th BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Music and Opera, composer Toshio Hosokawa explains how his work draws on Japanese tradition, where sound and silence, light and darkness, are not opposites but complementary forces like yin and yang. Inspired by Japan’s nature and seasonal transitions, he incorporates elements such as the tsuzumi drum and the shakuhachi flute to create a music of “vertical time,” built on circular movements and on the integration of humans with nature, rather than the linear construction typical of European classical music.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Music and Opera category in the seventeenth edition to Toshio Hosokawa for “the extraordinary international reach of his work,” which “has built a bridge between the Japanese musical tradition and contemporary Western aesthetics.”