Kogarashi 木枯 (The Chill Winter Wind)

This piece was composed in November 1923 by Nakao Tozan, who founded the Tozan school in Osaka in 1896. Tozan created pieces totally different in nature from earlier shakuhachi music, with its pervasively religious atmosphere, in a style considered to be more appropriate to the age. These became established as the honkyoku of the Tozan school. The distinguishing features of this new repertoire was the incorporation of influence from Western music in connection with form, harmony and metre, and the prominence of ensemble works in addition to pieces of the standard unaccompanied type.

Kogarashi (The Chill Winter Wind) is one of these Tozan school honkyoku and was composed by Nakao Tozan the year after he moved to Tokyo. Standing in Shiba Park, which had been totally destroyed in the Great Kanto Earthquake two months before he wrote the piece, Tozan felt the chill wind marking the advent of winter blow through his body. He composed this piece to express in an improvisational manner the feelings of inconsolable desolation which welled up in his breast on that occasion. This is one of the few pieces in the repertoire of the Tozan school intended for unaccompanied performance, and allows the performer considerable freedom of interpretation. The graphic and lyrical expression which is an important feature of Tozan school honkyoku appears here in the representation of desolation and chill as falling leaves scatter at the mercy of the piercingly cold wind. This scene is depicted through the medium of accessible melodies which make this one of the foremost pieces in the Tozan school honkyoku repertoire.

The formal development of the piece follows the four-part principle of development employed in Chinese poetry. After beginning slowly, the music gradually speeds up with frequent changes of tempo and variation of tonal colour.


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