Miki, Minoru

(b Tokushima, Shikoku, 16 March 1930). Japanese composer. He was brought up in a musical household, several members of his family being accomplished performers on Japanese instruments. At high school he had his first encounters with European music as a member of a choral group. He studied composition with Ifukube and Ikenouchi at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music from 1951 to 1955. In 1953 he won second prize in the Japanese radio competition for orchestra works with Kōkyōteki sangakushō (or Trinità sinfonica), and after graduating he continued to write large works for European orchestra while supporting himself by composing for films, particularly documentary and educational ones. Around 1960 he turned his attention to choral music, then in 1962 he composed his first piece for traditional Japanese instruments, Sonnet for three shakuhachi. Together with a number of players on Japanese instruments he organized the Ensemble Nipponia (now Pro Musoca Nipponia) in 1964, and Miki established himself as a leading composer for traditional forces. He took the group on overseas concert tours 13 times, acting as its artistic director until 1984. In 1970 an anthology of his music was issued on disc, winning the grand prix at the Arts Festival of the same year.

Miki mastered the techniques of European art music with astonishing rapidity; his command is displayed fully in the early Expressionist orchestral works, which already show a sensitivity to instrumental timbre and a fascination with extra-European music. His early instrumental works and a large number of choral pieces of 1960–63 demonstrate his attempts to combine European and oriental features in his own style. However, the formation of the Ensemble Nipponia marked a turning-point: from then on he gradually departed from the European tradition and began to explore original techniques appropriate to Japanese instruments. In doing so he depended a great deal on effective combinations of timbre and a strong sense of rhythm; his rhythms may be determinedly violent, irregular in beat or completely free and improvisatory, while he has benefited from his close contact with performers in developing music requiring a high degree of virtuosity. Indeed, much of his music after 1960 has been written for specific artists, in particular the Tokyo Liedertafel and Pro Musica Nipponia. In 1968 he met the koto virtuoso Keiko Nosaka, for whom he has written a series of pieces, and with whom he collaborated in the invention of a new 20-string koto, the nijūgen. He has also composed many pieces for the marimba virtuoso Keiko Abe.

After the success of his opera Shunkin shō in 1975, Miki turned his interest to opera, accepting two commissions to write operas to English librettos: An Actor’s Revenge for the English Music Theatre (1979) and Jōruri for the Opera Theatre of St Louis (1985). In these works he used Japanese instruments alongside the Western orchestra, and their international success is due primarily to the composer’s skill in blending elements of Japanese and European music in a way both natural and subtle. In 1983 he presented Utayomizaru, a folk-inflected smaller-scale work for three Japanese instruments and percussion. Designated a musical-opera or folk-opera by the composer, its success encouraged him to found a music-theatre ensemble, Utayomi-za (later Uta-za) in 1986, in order to further develop his ideas on music drama. As melody became an increasingly important element for him after the mid-1980s, his melodic lines became more expressive and suited to the text. At the same time, his interest in traditional instruments extended to include those of China and Korea as well as of Japan. In a visit to Korea in 1989, Pro Musica Nipponia performed Soul with a Korean ensemble. In 1994 his Folk Symphony ‘Den Den Den’ was performed to celebrate the inauguration of Orchestra Asia, an ensemble containing diverse Asian instruments. Throughout his career he has composed over 350 film scores, most notably for the French-Japanese film Ai no korīda (‘L’empire des sens’).

WORKS

(selective list)

Principal publishers: Norsk Musikforlag, Faber, Kawai Gakufu, Ongaku-no-Tomo Sha, Zen-on Gakufu

dramatic

vocal

instrumental

BIBLIOGRAPHY

K. Hori, ed.: Nihon no sakkyoku nijusseiki [Japanese compositions in the 20th century] (Tokyo, 1999), 245–7

MASAKATA KANAZAWA