Tetsunosuke KUSHIDA

This piece was inspired by my impressions of three paintings from Hokusai's "Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji."

Hokusai was a popular and well-loved ukiyoe artist from the late Edo period (18th and 19th centuries), and his works are widely recognized by the general public. His style of painting was so distinctively original that it played an influential role in the birth of impressionism in Western Europe, including having an impact on the style of Van Gogh.

As a Japanese person myself, it feels highly natural for me to work with the Japanese aesthetic sensibility embodied by Hokusai's paintings. The bold composition of Hokusai's work was enough to offer me a modern inspiration with which I could freely develop the elements of traditional Japanese music.

This entire piece is structured in a straightforward manner in its portrayal of striking landscapes, so it can be performed by large orchestras by adjusting the acoustic elements accordingly, or by smaller wind ensembles.

"Fine Breezy Day" is a fantasy inspired by the image of a crimson Mt. Fuji suffused with the light of dawn. This is the land of fairy tales surrounded by clouds, large overlapping ridgelines, and birds chirping in the background. With the foot of the mountain depicted by the bass section, the reddish ridges by the treble section, the rising clouds by the trumpets and the trills of the saxophones, and the light by the keyboard and percussion, the result is a highly realistic tapestry with which the majestic figure of Mt. Fuji can be evoked.

In "Umezawa Hamlet-fields in Sagami Province," cranes dance gracefully over Mt. Fuji, which is doused in a magical blue hue on a morning in early spring. The beautiful waltz in this section depicts the cranes taking off elegantly. Each part should strive for a beautiful tone and an uninterrupted flow. The rhythmic beats should guide the melody delicately without being too firm or sharp.

"The Great Wave off Kanagawa," which had appeared on the cover of Debussy's "The Sea," depicts a high, raging wave surging fiercely and threatening to swallow up Mt. Fuji, alongside a fishing boat that appears to be taking on the wave. In this section, the percussion instruments converge into a unified front that symbolizes the rowers' courage and strength. Taiko drums can also be included for greater variety. The figure of Mt. Fuji in the distance gradually becomes one with the larger foreground instead of being swallowed up by the wave. The piece closes with a chorale extolling the magnificence of Mt. Fuji against the backdrop of the large wave represented by the woodwind ensemble.

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