Teizo Matsumura was a leading postwar Japanese classical composer, whose work combined Western and Asian influences. He was also a respected poet, essayist and teacher.

Matsumura was born in Kyoto. By the time he was 20, both his parents had died, his mother a victim of tuberculosis, which Matsumura himself contracted. Treatment for this condition interrupted his studies of music and while confined to a sanatorium, he devoted himself to haiku, for which he won the newly established Hyokai Award. After recuperating, he returned to musical composition, again winning first prize in the 1955 NHK-Mainichi Music Competition. Among the judges was the distinguished composer Akira Ifukube, who accepted Matsumura as a pupil.

Matsumura’s style as a composer reflected the Impressionism of Ravel, but his work’s originality lay in its fusion of European traditions with Japanese modes and instruments. As early as 1957 his composition Achime had set to music a text derived from Shinto ritual dance. By the 1960s he was composing for Japanese wind instruments, adding them to the Western orchestra in Flute of Evil Passions. Poem, commissioned for the 1970 Osaka Expo, was his first piece to use Japanese instruments exclusively, being scored for koto (a form of zither) and shakuhachi (a bamboo flute).

Matsumura’s subsequent work continued to blend Western and Asian instruments and techniques. Among his most acclaimed compositions was his Piano Concerto No 2, which won the 1979 Suntory Prize. At the same time he received a commission to compose an opera based on Shusaku Endo’s novel, Silence, on which he worked for 13 years. Enthusiastically received at its premiere in 1993 as marking “the birth of a new kind of opera”, the work again showed the tension in Matsumura’s work between East and West: its subject was the sufferings of Catholic priests in Japan after the practice of Christianity was forbidden during the 17th century.

Like his mentor Ifukube, Matsumura interspersed his work for the concert hall with film scores. He collaborated regularly with two distinguished directors, Kazuo Kuroki and Kei Kumai. His knowledge of international musical traditions served him in good stead as composer for Kuroki’s Cuban Lovers, filmed on location on the Caribbean island, and Kumai’s Indian-set Deep River. Matsumura himself took particular pride in his striking percussion-based score for Kuroki’s remarkable historical film, The Assassination of Ryoma, about the last days in the life of a 19th-century progressive statesman. He generally tried to make his scores serve the material, commenting that “it’s best to use music in a way that makes people wonder if there even was any music”.

In 1994 Matsumura was honoured with a successful retrospective in New York. He also served as Professor of Composition at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music, becoming Professor Emeritus on his retirement.

Professor Teizo Matsumura, composer and poet, was born on January 15, 1929. He died of pneumonia on August 6, 2007, aged 78