14 Facts About Toshio Hosokawa

Toshio Hosokawa is a Japanese composer of contemporary classical music.

Toshio Hosokawa studied in Germany but returned to Japan, finding a personal style inspired by classical Japanese music and culture.

Toshio Hosokawa has composed operas, the oratorio Voiceless Voice in Hiroshima, and instrumental music.

Toshio Hosokawa was the cofounder and artistic director of a Japanese festival for contemporary music and has been a composer in residence at international festivals such as the Venice Biennale, Lucerne Festival, Warsaw Autumn and Rheingau Musik Festival.

Toshio Hosokawa's operas premiered at the Munich Biennale and La Monnaie, among others.

Toshio Hosokawa first studied piano and composition in Tokyo, then from 1976 with Yun Isang at the Berlin University of the Arts.

Toshio Hosokawa was the artistic director of the Japanese Takefu International Music Festival in Fukui starting in 2001.

In 2004, Hosokawa was appointed a guest professor at the Tokyo College of Music.

Toshio Hosokawa was a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin from 2001.

Toshio Hosokawa was influenced by Japanese aesthetic and spiritual elements, such as calligraphy, court music and Noh theatre, giving "musical expression to the notion of a beauty that has grown from transience".

Toshio Hosokawa won the fifth Roche Commission with Woven Dreams for orchestra, which was first played by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Franz Welser-Most at the Lucerne Festival in 2010.

Toshio Hosokawa's works were premiered by conductors such as Kazushi Ono, Kent Nagano, Simon Rattle, Alexander Liebreich and Robin Ticciati.

Toshio Hosokawa was invited to be composer in residence at festivals such as the Venice Biennale, in both 1995 and 2001; the Lucerne Festival in 2000; musica viva in Munich in 2001; Musica nova in Helsinki in 2003; and the Warsaw Autumn in 2005 and 2007.

Toshio Hosokawa served as director of the Suntory Hall International Program for Music Composition from 2012 to 2015.