About this Piece

Toshio Hosokawa (b. 1955) wrote his meditative Cloudscape using tone clusters to imitate the sho, a Japanese mouth organ used in traditional gagaku music. Three independent shos are represented symbolically and contrapuntally by the two hands on keyboards and the feet on the pedals, exploring different harmonies and philosophical characters.

-Gregg Wager is a composer and critic. He is author of Symbolism as a Compositional Method in the Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen. He has a PhD in musicology from the Free University Berlin and a JD from McGeorge School of Law.