松平　頼暁

Matsudaira, Yoriaki

1931 - 2023

Japanese composer and biophysicist (1931-2023). Only son of Yoritsune Matsudaira, he was born in Tokyo. When he was 14 years old, he became interested in ‘science and the possibility of composing music without depending only on emotions’. After entering the Department of Biology of the Tokyo Metropolitan University, in 1956 he formed ‘Group 20.5’, a composers’ association consisting of disciples of Yoritsune Matsudaira. Teaching biophysics at Rikkyo University since 1958 and obtaining his PhD in science in 1965 at the Tokyo Metropolitan University, he was a professor at Rikkyo University until 1996. In his first musical works, he experimented with total serialism. It was when Toshi Ichiyanagi returned to Japan in 1961 and John Cage visited Japan the next year that he came to be interested in indeterminacy, which was treated in Transient ’64 for electronic sounds (1964). In the latter half of the 1960s, when he was staying in America, he decided to use citations, inspired by the ‘combine painting’ of Robert Rauschenberg. Since Coherency for ARK (1976), he used the ‘new modality’, in which all-interval twelve-tone rows appear repetitively. Then, Kurtosis I (1982) became the first work where he rigorously applied the ‘pitch interval technique’, which is an extended version of the new modality. In 1980, Oscillation (1977) was awarded the 28th Otaka Prize. He received the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 1988, and became chairman of the JSCM (Japan Society for Contemporary Music, Japanese section of the ISCM) from 1998 to 2002 and an honorary member of the ISCM (International Society for Contemporary Music) in 2008.