Miyagi Michio

Miyagi Michio

Miyagi Michio ( Japanese 宮城 道 雄 ; born April 7, 1894 in Kobe , † June 25, 1956 in Kariya ) was a Japanese koto player and composer.

Live and act

Miyagi Michio was born the son of a manager of a tea business that belonged to an American. This is how he came into contact with Western music at an early age. Miyagi went blind at the age of eight, was a student of the koto teacher Nakajima Kengyō II. ( 二代 中 島 検 校 ) and appeared at the age of eleven under the name of Nakasuga Michio . In 1897 he came to Korea, where he obtained the degree of Kotomister. From 1917 he lived as a koto virtuoso in Tokyo. He developed some new forms of koto himself: the seventeen- string Jūshichi Gen ( 十七 絃 ), the eighty- string Hachijū Gen ( 八十 絃 ), which is suitable for both traditional Japanese and Western music, and the Tan-Goto ( 短 琴 ) , also the Dai-Kokyū ( 大 胡 弓 ), a large Chinese fiddle.

In 1925 he first appeared on the radio, where he gave koto courses. For this he was awarded the NHK Culture Prize in 1950 . Since 1930 taught at the Tokyo Art University. In 1948 he became a member of the Japanese Art Academy. In 1953 he won first prize at the International Folk Dance Music Festival in Biarritz and Pamplona. On June 25, 1956, he fell off the train while traveling to Osaka and died in Kariya Hospital.

Miyagi composed over a thousand works for Koto, some of them with instrumental or orchestral accompaniment. In his works he fused traditional Japanese music with Western European influences to create his own style, "New Japanese Music" (新 日本 音 楽, Shin Nihon ongaku). The compositions are mostly written for Japanese instruments, but occasionally also for Western instruments, as in his well-known piece “Meer im Frühling” (春 の 海; Haru no umi) from 1929.

literature

• S. Noma (Ed.): Miyagi Michio . In: Japan. An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, 1993, ISBN 4-06-205938-X , p. 987.

Web links

Commons : Michio Miyagi  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Miyagi's compositions

Japanese name: As is common in Japan, the family name comes before the first name in this article . Thus Miyagi is the family name, Michio the first name.