Artist Statement →
The cycle of my compositions is based on the concept of using only scale tones of different, traditional Japanese scales for the melody tones of the songs, but to draw the harmony from the western chord stock, especially from the jazz harmony. Since the Japanese scales I use are pentatonic, the compositional process has fewer (if only two) melodic tones available than would be the case if western, heptatonic scales were used. This makes the technical composition process a lot more difficult, but it also proves to be much more appealing. So there is a self-reduction in melodic, but not in harmonic terms. The songs should only be in solo pianistic form, since I consider the return to the essential, i.e. only by means of the pure instrument, to be the most interesting and at the same time the most demanding type of music creation.
