端山貢明作曲《ビオラ協奏曲》解説 (Composer's Note on the Viola Concerto)

Notes

From the 端山貢明アーカイブ (Hayama Kōmei Archive), item 9952 in the 執筆記事 (articles) category, registered 2022-10-04: https://d-commons.net/hayama/?c=&p=9952. Published by the 端山貢明アーカイブプロジェクト (Hayama Kōmei Archive Project), directed by 前川道博 (Michihiro Maekawa) of Nagano University, on the D-Commons platform, and licensed CC BY (表示). The source documents come from the 端山文庫, the papers kept in Hayama's laboratory at Tohoku University of Art and Design, digitised by the project with the agreement of his family; his autograph scores were given to the University History Archives of the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2026. Source: 『第10回文部省芸術祭交響楽公演』 (10th Ministry of Education Art Festival Symphony Concert) booklet, 1955. Dated: 1955. Hayama's own note on the Viola Concerto, the work that won him the composition prize at the 10th Ministry of Education Art Festival in 1955 and the first of his two Minister of Education awards. He writes that no particular occasion or dedicatee prompted the piece. What drove nearly two months of work was rather a taste for a certain kind of force, of the sort that arises when something collapses, and it was for the sake of that tension and impact that he settled decisively on the viola. In the wind writing, he says, he tried to extract a percussive quality of the kind found in the piano but not obtainable from the piano itself. He closes by noting that this was his first large and distinctly experimental work, and the note carries the slight awkwardness of a composer of twenty-three hearing it played for the first time.