In 1949, Joji Yuasa joined a contemporary music research group organized by Kuniharu Akiyama (who eventually became a leading music critic in Japan). Both were undergraduate students at this time - Yuasa a medical student at Keio University, and Akiyama at Waseda University. This was the beginning of a friendship that eventually led in 1951 to the formation of a group that was to profoundly affect the future course of Japanese music. This group (Jikken Kobo - translated as "experimental workshop") included composers Takemitsu, Suzuki, Fukushima, and poet Tanikawa, among others, and experimented with intermedia. They also began questioning in their interactions and in their art the most basic principles of what is human, what is music, and the relationship of the cosmos to humans.
Mr. Yuasa also became interested in the music of Jolivet and Messiaen at this time; studied Bartok and Bach; and Zen in 1953. Even though he began composing with 12-tone techniques around 1954, he felt questions about his relationship to these techniques that "grasp the European world." Mr. Yuasa relates that "At that point (when I wrote Cosmos Haptic), I felt I had to return to the origin of my own self. I felt like I needed to be free from 12-tone composition and anything connected to it, and to write a more natural form for me. In Cosmos Haptic, my cosmos is an inner sense; it is not scientific, or a cosmos that we can analyse logically - I always think of the cosmos that was existing at the birth of primitive religion."
Mr. Yuasa's writings will be related to the sound and structure of Cosmos Haptic - examples will be performed.
Born in Japan and and educated at the Kunitachi College of Music (B.A. - piano), Kazuko Tanosaki received a M.A. in piano under full scholarship from the University of California, San Diego. She has studied piano with Kazuko Abe, Cecil Lytle, Jean Charles Francois, Frederick Marvin, and Rebecca Penneys. Ms. Tanosaki was a first prize winner in the 1982 La Jolla Orchestra Young Artist Competition (San Diego), and a finalist in the 1982 Ventura Young Artists Competition (Cal.). She is currently a Lecturer in Music (piano) at Hamilton College, and has begun studies leading to a DMA in piano performance and literature at the Eastman School of Music. Ms. Tanosaki has presented solo recitals throughout Japan, Europe, and the United States, including performances at the 1989 Piano Panorama of Twentieth Century Music in Rotterdam, Holland, the 1989 International Electronic Music Plus Festival (Oberlin College), the 1990 Kobe International Festival of Contemporary Music (Japan), the Tokyo American Center, and recitals at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, the Civic Center in San Diego, California, and Lemoyne College in Syracuse, New York.