In writing this piece, I faced several challenges. The first challenge was to write a “concert opener” for a commission on the occasion of what would have been Toru Takemitsu’s 75th birthday – he passed away when he was only 65. Since one often thinks of a “concert opener” as being fast and upbeat and a memorial piece as being slow and somber, I was faced with a crisis of opposing metabolic inclinations. In my struggle to find a solution, I thought of Hiroshige and how, especially in his sketchbooks, he could imply a subject without really presenting it. For example, in The Third Princess’s Cat, he gives the viewer only the border of the princess’s robe under a bamboo curtain. Inspired by this non-sachlichkeit approach, my piece begins with two bars of fast, loud music, music that never returns or relates in any structuralist way to the rest of the piece. It merely functions to introduce potential energy. In this way, I freed myself to be able to concentrate on the “memorial” character in the rest of the piece.

When I was commissioned to write this concerto for two traditional Japanese instruments, the biwa and shakuhachi, I was informed that, besides the orchestral concert, there would be a chamber music recital featuring the biwa and shakuhachi players, and was encouraged to have a piece that these performers could play on that occasion. So, here was my second compositional challenge: to write a duo concerto with orchestra and a chamber piece. My solution was to create a modular form with an extractable cadenza. In the orchestral context, the biwa and shakuhachi only play in the cadenza, which can also be a stand-alone chamber piece. In thinking of this solution, I was inspired by an architectural work by Fumihiko Maki, one of Japan’s leading architects. Kaze-no-Oka (‘Hill of the Winds’), his structure from which my piece borrows its name, is a crematorium consisting of three separate buildings, the grounds of which incorporate recently unearthed ancient burial mounds. I liked the separate-but-incorporated-ness of the ancient mounds with the modern buildings, and this became the structural impetus for my piece: the extractable cadenza for the biwa and shakuhachi are poetically related to the ancient mounds. I also liked the image of the wind over the hills, two systems interacting together, but still remaining separate. The fact that Maki’s building complex is a crematorium fit perfectly with the memorial character of my piece.

In designing the main section of my piece, I sought to concentrate on transcribing the Japanese concept of sawari for the western orchestra. Sawari roughly translates to “beautiful noise” or “touch” and speaks of the prioritization of sound in Japanese traditional music in contrast to the emphasis on harmony and the elimination of noise in Western music. Artifacts of sound production are foregrounded in my music. Microtonal harmonies are employed to create specific beatings to enrich this sonic landscape, as well as to acoustically resynthesize specific multiphonics in the contrabass clarinet and in the bass saxophone. Multiphonics function like ideograms – they represent complex signifiers that are not reducible to simpler components. The effect I wanted to create was one of reversed memory of the music in the cadenza.

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