Brahms International Online Music Competition - Platinum Award in Category Composition
Highest Prize, All Japan Composers Competition Premiere: May 10, 2026 — Winners’ Concert Duration: ca. 2’30” Words: Percy Bysshe Shelley
Recording:
https://youtu.be/vFr6Z7ktJus?si=d1J-f9HHJAVVdi4j
[https://drive.google.com/file/d/102rdgy5PsuuWy7BiQIcgfsjPcRX6gvNs/view?usp=drivesdk](https://mii-kyoichiro.notion.site/https-drive-google-com-file-d-102rdgy5PsuuWy7BiQIcgfsjPcRX6gvNs-view-usp-drivesdk-3614b92921bc80fa9a56c10c3ba8733e)
Score: available on request
Away! Away! Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
Away, away from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs— To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music, lest it should not find An echo in another’s mind…
Program Notes: Away! Away! is a meditation on escape—escape from systems, from the city, and from the structures that shape our voices. While working in Tokyo, surrounded by concrete and routine, I felt my own “voice” gradually fading. Shelley’s poem became a permission to flee, to breathe, and to rediscover sound as a form of inner truth.
The unaccompanied choir is a space where the voice stands bare. My years singing large-scale works—Messiah, The Creation, Elijah, Mahler’s Resurrection, Beethoven’s Ninth—taught me that the voice is not merely sound, but prayer, question, and resonance. This piece carries that understanding in miniature form.
In the poem’s longing “to the silent wilderness,” I found a musical image of release: the dissolution of structure, the emergence of breath, and the fragile freedom of a voice stepping outside the city’s frame.
On stage, I chose a slightly loosened business‑casual attire. It carries the traces of someone who has lived within the machinery of the city, yet stands in the raw moment of stepping away from it. A white shirt with the top button undone, a posture left intentionally unpolished—these small disruptions mirror the instant when an individual voice rises within a system. That subtle “unfastening” resonates with the work’s central theme: the emergence of a self moving beyond the structures that once contained it.
