Hirokazu Fukushima (b. 1971) is a Japanese composer and arranger of primarily band and orchestra music. He studied at the Tokyo College of Music with Reiko Arima. He has won several awards for his music, including the Asahi Composition Prize in 1999 and the Japan Bandmasters Association Shitaya Prize in 2003.
Snow of an Aynu Village (2007) “represents people in [an] Aynu village living strongly and worshipping gods in snow,” according to the work’s score. The piece was written on a commission from a junior high school on Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s main islands. The southern part of this island has historically been home to the Ainu (or Aynu) people, a group with its own language (including many dialects) that has recently been recognized as an indigenous ethnicity in Japan. The Ainu are now still concentrated in southern Hokkaido, with some pockets in the nearby parts of Russia and the Kuril Islands, among other places.
This is a rare chamber work for winds that does not call for double reeds. In fact, the instrumentation is accessible to even some of the smallest band programs: 1 each of flute (doubling piccolo), clarinet, alto sax, trumpet, horn, trombone, tuba (also suitable for a bari sax substitution), and percussion (vibraphone, timpani, suspended cymbal, triangle, temple blocks, and tam-tam). Here it is in performance:
I like it with the bari sax, so here it is in that version (although watch out – the clarinetist here is not confident on the counting):
Snow of an Aynu Village also exists in a flexible instrumentation band version, created by the composer in 2012, which you can see here. The original is available from Bravo Music as well.