Hikaru Hayashi

Hikaru Hayashi (1931–2012) was one of the most prolific and wide-ranging Japanese composers of the twentieth century. Born in Tokyo, the son of a physician, he began studying composition at about the age of ten with the conductor and composer Hisatada Otaka, and later entered the Tokyo University of the Arts, which he left without completing his studies. In 1953 he founded the ‘Goat Society’ (Yagi no Kai) with his fellow composers Yūzō Toyama and Michio Mamiya, a group that set out to create a new Japanese concert music, rooted in the country’s own traditions and speaking to a broad public,. His output was enormous: symphonies and concertos, chamber music, more than thirty operas, a large body of songs, and the choral cycle Scenes from Hiroshima (Genbaku shōkei), which occupied him from 1958 into the 2000s. From 1975 until his death he was artistic director and resident composer of the Opera Theatre Konnyakuza, a Tokyo company devoted to opera in clear, singable Japanese. He composed more than a hundred film scores, most famously in a long partnership with the director Kaneto Shindō, including The Naked Island, Onibaba and Kuroneko, and for Nagisa Ōshima’s Death by Hanging. Among many honours, he received the Suntory Music Award in 1998. He died in Tokyo in January 2012, at the age of eighty.