Kumiko Omura - Sea Cloud II
During long flights, I enjoy looking out of the window. You can see so many clouds, always changing form and colour.
The idea for this piece came to me on one trip. I remembered an interview with a mountain climber who climbed Mount Fuji (the highest mountain in Japan): "...after I climbed through many clouds, I finally reached the top of the mountain, and I didn’t see clouds any more, and there was only one bright sky."
When we see the sky from the ground, the view is always different depending on the weather, but essentially, the sky itself is a universal being. This piece has various processes, with more and more light appearing, and the music ends in full bright light, which expresses the universal world.
The chords in the last part come from the japanese instrument of Gagaku Music, a Sho (a mouth organ), which I personally see as a symbol of light.
Kumiko Omura is a Japanese composer of contemporary music.
She worked as a resident artist between 2006 and 2010 at ZKM (Centre for Art and Media) in Karlsruhe, Germany, where her portrait concert took place in 2009.
She has won the Irino Prize (1994, Japan), the Gaudeamus International Composers Award (1998, Holland), the young artist prize at the Nordrhein-Westfalen (2000, Germany), and most recently the Giga-Hertz Award 2012 Encouragement Prize from the SWR Experimetalstudio and ZKM in Germany.
