YÅ«ji Takahashi

Yuji Takahashi (Japanese高桥 悠 治, Yuji Takahashi, born September 21, 1938 in the prefecture of Tokyo) is a Japanese composer and pianist.

Life

The brother of the pianist Aki Takahashi had first music lessons from his father, a violin teacher, and from 1945 at Dan Ikuma. He was later Kompositionssschüler of Minao Shibata and Rō Ogura and studied from 1954 to 1958 at the Toho Gakuen Daigaku piano with Hiroshi Ito.

From 1960, Takahashi worked as a coach of the opera group Nikkikai. 1962 premiered his first work as Fonogene for twelve players and electronic sounds. With the composer Toshi Ichiyanagi and Kenji Kobayashi, he founded the Ensemble for New Music New Directions. In the field of film music, he worked with Tōru Takemitsu.

In 1963 he was a DAAD scholarship to Berlin, where he met Elliott Carter and Frederic Rzewski and studied composition with Iannis Xenakis. Starting in 1964, Takahashi was a pianist in the Parisian music group Domaine Musicale. In this time of Xenakis compositions such as embossed chrome Amorphous I for seven instruments (1964 ), chromium Amorphous II for Piano (1965 ) and 6 STOICHEIA for four violins (1965).

1965 Takashi looked in Stockholm as a member of the experimental music group Four Ueberkingen. With a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, he went in 1966 to New York. Here he studied computer music and attended until 1968, the summer courses at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood. 1968-69 he was a member of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts in Buffalo. 1971-72 he taught at Indiana University and at the Conservatory of San Francisco. He then returned to Japan and has since been living as a freelance composer and pianist in Tokyo.

The pianist Takashi was known primarily as a performer of contemporary works. He played the world premieres of several works of Tōru Takemitsu ( Piano Distance, 1961 Corona, 1962; Arc, 1963; asterism, 1969), and his teacher Xenakis composed for him Herma (1962) and Eonta (1964). He worked as a soloist with the London Symphony Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra together and performed at the International Music Council of UNESCO Congress in 1966 and 1968 and at the World Exposition 1970 in Osaka.

In addition to the pianistic oeuvre of Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alban Berg took on Takahashi compositions by Olivier Messiaen, Xenakis, John Cage, Frederic Rzewski, Cornelius Cardew, Tōru Takemitsu, A. Selamat Sjukur, Earle Brown and Roger Reynolds. As a conductor, he recorded works by Xenakis, José Maceda, Sofia Gubaidulina, John Zorn and Edgar Varèse.

Swell

• Bach Cantatas - Yuji Takahashi
• AsianCultureLink - Yuji Takahashi

• Japanese composer
• Classic pianist
• Japanese
• Man
• Born in 1938