Somei Satoh - Kisetsu for orchestra (Score Video)

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Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra conducted by Tetsuji Honna
Somei Satoh (1947-) is a Japanese contemporary composer whose work incorporates such diverse influences as Japanese court music, 19th-century Romanticism, Shinto and Zen Buddhist philosophies, and often the electronic innovations of the late 20th century - in which Satoh was particularly involved early in his career. Besides solo, chamber, choral, and orchestral works for Western instruments, he has also written purely electronic music, works of music theatre and pieces for Japanese instruments.
Satoh has long been one of my favorite composers almost ever since I discovered the wider world of contemporary music around 2015; I find his carefully considered treatment of silence to be the most beautiful and profound aspect of his work. Few of Satoh's pieces display these traits more strongly than "Kisetsu" ("Season" in English), which was written in 1999 as a commission from the New York Philharmonic and premiered the same year. As Satoh himself prefers, I will let this work, which says no more musically than it needs to, speak for itself and simply end with the composer's reflections on his music:
"My music is limited to certain elements of sound and there are many calm repetitions. There is also much prolongation of a single sound. I think silence and the prolongation of sound is the same thing in terms of space. The only difference is that there is either the presence or absence of sound. More important is whether the space is "living" or not. Our [Japanese] sense of time and space is different from that of the West. For example, in the Shinto religion, there is the term 'imanaka' which is not just the present moment which lies between the stretch of past eternity and future immortality, but also the manifestation of the moment of all time which is multi-layered and multi-dimensional .... I would like it if the listener could abandon all previous conceptions of time and experience a new sense of time presented in this music as if eternal time can be lived in a single moment."