238 Log 250807: In Conversation with Toshie Kakinuma: Jōji Yuasa, Takemitsu Tōru and Japanese Musique Concrète

Toshie Kakinuma (born in Shizuoka, Japan) is a Japanese musicologist, critic, and translator specializing in 20th-and 21st-century experimental and vocal music. She studied musicology at Kunitachi College of Music (B.M., 1977) and Ochanomizu University (M.A., 1981), before earning her Ph.D. in Music from the University of California, San Diego in 1989, where she conducted research on the American composer and instrument builder Harry Partch. After returning to Japan, she taught at several universities, including Meiji Gakuin and Takushoku, and later served as Professor of Musicology at Kyoto City University of Arts, where she also directed the Archival Research Center. Her research focuses on American experimentalism, contemporary Japanese music, organology, and the relationship between sound, language, and the body. Kakinuma is the author of American Experimental Music as Ethnic Music (Film Art Sha, 2005) and numerous essays on composers such as Yūji Yuasa, Tōru Takemitsu, and Lou Harrison. She has also translated major works of 20th-century music literature into Japanese, including John Cage's Silence and Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise. The conversation with musicologist and critic Toshie Kakinuma focuses on the vocal and electroacoustic works of Jōji Yuasa and Tōru Takemitsu, which she interprets as distinct Japanese articulations of musique concrète. Kakinuma situates these practices in dialogue with the European avant-garde – particularly Pierre Schaeffer, Luciano Berio, and Karlheinz Stockhausen – while emphasizing a critical divergence. Whereas Schaeffer’s concept of the objet sonore relies on analytical reduction and the suspension of linguistic meaning, Yuasa and Takemitsu pursue an approach that repositions the voice in a pre-semantic, corporeal register. The interview further addresses Kakinuma’s research on Takemitsu’s Vocal Trilogy, characterizing his engagement with musique concrète as explicitly anti-analytical. In contrast to European phonematic decomposition, Takemitsu conceives the voice as a bodily, everyday, and pre-aesthetic event, foregrounding experiential immediacy over structural abstraction.