Circulating Ocean 循環する海 (2005) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzt9Xy0D6TU
“Circulating Ocean was commissioned by the
Salzburg Festival, composed in early 2005, and is
dedicated to Peter Ruzicka. It received its world première
at the Festival on 20th and 21st August 2005 with the
Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Valery Gergiev.
For some years I have been writing, and will continue
to write, works on the theme of “Ocean”. I am attempting
to express in sound the flow and change of water by
apprehending sound as water. The ocean is for me the
birthplace of life, a being possessed of infinite depth and
expanse. The waves rolling in and withdrawing can be felt
as “the voice from eternity”. Water evaporates from the
ocean and rises to the sky, becoming clouds. The clouds
eventually turn into rain, and pour down again to the
ocean. They then become a storm, and the ocean rages.
In time the storm abates and the ocean regains a deep
silence. Then the water, once again becoming a fog,
ascends from the ocean to the sky. This image became
the basis of the music. I also take the tracks of the
circulating water as the human life cycle. Born from a vast
limitless being, we ascend toward the heights, eventually
begin our descent, experience violent storms and return
again to an ocean of deep silence. Then once again, life
rises to the sky. I wanted to express the tracks of this
circulating life in music.
The orchestra can be seen as the traditional Japanese
shô, a kind of mouth organ. The shô player produces
sound by breathing in and out. The sound cast outward
from the player by his breathing out comes back to him by
his breathing in. This repetition produces time in the form
of a circle. The wave motion of the ocean is a wave motion
of sound that surges in toward and out from the audience
in crescendo and decrescendo. The wave motion,
expressed by the various instrumental sections, folds over
again and again. After experiencing the storm, the ocean
regains a deep stillness, and the water once again
becomes vapour and ascends to the sky. As the ocean
disappears into the unresolved nebulousness of the deep
fog, we are made to feel a premonition of life’s return.”