Toru Takemitsu's "Songs", composed for The Philharmonic Chorus of Tokyo and the Shinyukai Choir in the 1980s, and Isaji Sunao's "Songs of Things", which began in 2008 and continues to be commissioned as an encore piece for Vox humana.

Toru Takemitsu's "Song (Will Tomorrow, I Wonder, Be Cloudy or Clear)" and Isaji Sunao's "Saigetsu (Years)", both on the theme of time and way of life, were deemed appropriate for the theme of "Sen" (transition), so we chose these two pieces as the main pieces.
For the rest of the pieces, we chose "a sky" as a sub-theme, with "Chiisana Sora (A small sky)" and "Tsubasa (Wings)" by Toru Takemitsu and "Yuki (Snow)" and "Ichiru no Yumeji (A gleam of dream)" by Sunao Isaji.
I performed three songs from each composer,Takemitsu and Isaji" for a total of six mini-stages, all of which were recorded in multiple recordings.
You will be able to feel the "transfer of my favorite songs" that the music spans 30 years.

<Snow>
This is the last of a dozen small pieces (the twelfth) that were written as encore pieces for Vox humana's biannual performances, and was commissioned for Vox humana's 34th concert in 2016.
In fact, I was involved with Vox humana as a performer for a period of time, and I sang a few songs as a member of the premiere group, and it's not hard to imagine that this is a memorable work for the choir, as he wrote it aiming at a dozen.
A extremely fantastical music was composed to a poem that colors the snow with various words.
On top of that, "Sayasaya..." and "Tonton..." what a beautiful Japanese onomatopoeia for snow!

<Wings>
Originally written in 1982 as an instrumental piece for the theme of the play "Wings." The song arrangement was comissioned by The Philharmonic Chorus of Tokyo in 1983.
In "Uta" where there are many homophonic works in which all parts move in the same way, this song became a polyphonic arrangement in which each part plays a detailed rhythm. It might be a remnant that this song was written for musical instruments.
If you live your life dreaming of hope and freedom, maybe one day you will really be able to fly.

<A gleam of dream>
This piece was commissioned as an encore piece for Vox humana's 27th regular concert in 2012.
The poem was commissioned to Keiko Niimi, with request with conditions that the style of the poem must be in the key of seventy-five, and that it must be a piece of music that is meant to be repeated.
The poem is described as "an unambiguous manifestation of the 'faint' between this world and the other world" by Isaji and he composed an extremely delicate and ephemeral piece of music to her poem.
The beauty of "Voice of Light", which he expressed with not only his voice but also a whistle, is indescribable.

<A small sky>
The song was written in 1962 as the theme song for the children's radio drama series "Gun King", and was commissioned by The Philharmonic Chorus of Tokyo in 1981 for choral arrangement.
Takemitsu said, "It's only been a few weeks since the broadcast started, but I've heard some elementary school children in the neighborhood singing the theme song imitating Takashi Fujiki, the singer, so skillfully. This is a fun and almost first-time experience for me. It is not an exaggeration to say that this song is Takemitsu's masterpiece of "songs", as it has a very memorable melody and attracts many people.
This is one of Takemitsu's choral arrangements with very detailed intonation instructions in which the intonation of the melody is expressed by <>.

<Will Tomorrow, I Wonder, Be Cloudy or Clear>
Composed in 1985 and commissioned by the Shinyukai Chorus in 1992. It was the final arrangement of Takemitsu Toru's "Songs" series.
The song was improvised for the staff who were worried about tomorrow's weather when they were visiting the shooting site of a film that Takemitsu Toru was writing the music for at the time.
The tempo of the piece is very different between the first and second verse, which gives the song a surprisingly different expression.
No matter how sad things are, we just have to walk forward and upward as best we can, right?

<Years>
The title is an excerpt from the coda of "Nippon Saudade" written for Vox humana in 2008.
The poem is a Chinese poem called "Twelve Poems, Part 1" by Toh Yuan Ming (365-427), translated by the film director Yuzo Kawashima (1918-1963).
The background of this piece, in which a poem by a man from the 300s is translated by a man from the 1900s and composed by a man from the 2000s, gives us a sense of a "transition" in this piece.
And the song is a straightforward way of telling us what has "remained the same" through the years.
There is a lot going on in the world, but let's live happily ever after tomorrow.