Minoru Miki

Minoru Miki (Tokushima, Shikoku, 1930) was one of the most prominent Japanese composers of the second half of the twentieth century, and his work built a bridge between the European tradition of art music and the traditional instruments of his country. He grew up in a household where music was part of everyday life, as several relatives played Japanese instruments with great ease. His first contact with European music came during his high school years, when he joined a choir.

Between 1951 and 1955 he studied composition with Ifukube and Ikenouchi at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music. In 1953 he won second prize in a Japanese radio competition for orchestral works with Kōkyōteki sangakushō, also known as Trinità sinfonica. After graduating, he continued to write large-scale works for orchestra in the European style and earned his living composing film scores, mainly for documentaries and educational films. Around 1960 he turned his attention to choral music, and in 1962 he composed Sonnet for three shakuhachi, his first piece for traditional Japanese instruments.

In 1964, together with several performers of Japanese instruments, he founded the Ensemble Nipponia, now Pro Musica Nipponia, and from then on he established himself as one of the leading composers for traditional ensembles. The group undertook thirteen international tours, and Miki served as its artistic director until 1984. In 1970 an anthology of his music was released on record, which won the grand prize at that year's Festival of the Arts.

His mastery of European techniques came very quickly, as his early orchestral works of expressionist character, sensitive to timbre and drawn to non-European musics, demonstrate. After the creation of the Ensemble Nipponia, his style gradually moved away from the Western tradition to explore procedures of his own, adapted to Japanese instruments. His rhythms, often violent, irregular or entirely free, rest on combinations of timbres and on close collaboration with the performers, which allowed him to write music of great virtuosic demand. His collaboration with koto player Keiko Nosaka gave rise to the nijūgen, a twenty-string koto, and with marimba player Keiko Abe he composed numerous pieces.

His opera Shunkin shō (1975) opened the door to the lyric stage for him, and he subsequently wrote operas in English, such as An Actor's Revenge and Jōruri. From the mid-1980s melody took on greater weight in his music, and he founded the music theatre group Utayomi-za, later renamed Uta-za. His legacy lies in having naturally integrated Japanese, Chinese and Korean instruments into the Western orchestra, and in having composed more than three hundred and fifty film scores, among them the score for the French-Japanese film Ai no korīda.