Yuriko Hase Kojima
Dr. Yuriko Hase Kojima is a Japanese woman composer and researcher, specializing in composition, theory, and computer music. Currently, she serves as the Chair Professor of Composition at Shobi University in Japan. Additionally, she teaches as a lecturer at Toho Gakuen School of Music and Senzoku Gakuen College of Music. At Shobi, she is responsible for establishing an efficient composition program which educates young composers for both contemporary and popular music. Many graduates have been hired as full-time composers at big game and animation companies such as Nintendo, Capcom, Square Enix, and Elements Garden.
Born in 1962 in Tokushima, Japan, Dr. Kojima graduated as a piano major from Osaka College of Music in 1985. She changed her career path to music composition under the guidance by Isao Matsushita while teaching piano and solfege at a music school in Tokyo. In 1990, she moved to the United States to start her formal studies in composition. She eventually continued her studies for ten years in the US. Along with several honors including the Arthur T. Whitney Award for the Highest Scholastic Achievement and Roger Sessions Composition Award, she graduated at the top of the class obtaining another B.M. from Boston Conservatory. She moved to New York to pursue her graduate studies and got M.A. (1996) and D.M.A. (2000) from Columbia University, where she studied music composition, computer music, music theory, aesthetics, and philosophy of music, with Tristan Murail, Jonathan Kramer, Fred Lerdahl, and Brad Garton, among others. She was awarded the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowships and the Boris & Eda Rapaport Composition Prize. She also studied Betsy Jolas and Philippe Leroux at the American Academy in Fontainebleau, France.
Her music expands from contemporary European Classical music idiom to Asian music tradition, combining styles and techniques from different parts of the world. Her works have been presented at various international festivals and concerts, including the International Society for Contemporary Music's "World Music Days" (2000 Luxembourg, 2017 Vancouver), the Asian Composers League's "Asian Music Week" (2000 Yokohama), the International Computer Music Association's "International Computer Music Conference" (1997 Thessaloniki, 2005 Barcelona, 2006 New Orleans, 2007 Copenhagen, 2018 Daegu, 2019 New York), the International Guitar Festival in Mexico, and the CrossSound New Music Festival in Alaska, among others. Her pieces have been performed by ensembles such as Ensemble Modern, the Pearls Before Swine Experience, Azure Ensemble, and Ruckus Ensemble, New York New Music Ensemble, and Voyager Ensemble, to name a few. In 2022, she collaborated with a dancer/choreographer Akiko Miwa to create a thirty-minutes long dance production based on a play "Three Sisters" by Anton Chekhov. It was selected and premiered at the Toyooka Theater Festival 2022 in Hyogo, Japan. Right now, she focuses on creating two solo pieces, one for violin and the other for accordion, to be premiered in 2024 in New York and in Tokyo, respectively. Selected works can be heard at her SoundCloud page.
Dr. Kojima also continues her researches on contemporary music, electroacoustic music and music theories and analysis to present papers at the conferences such as Electroacoustic Music Studies Network, the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition, and the Convergence Festival. At conferences, she has frequently served as a session chair and a paper reviewer.
Since 2006, she has been conducting researches on Japanese electroacoustic music and its history, aesthetics and analysis, such as musical analysis of Takemitsu’s multi-media work “Water Music.” Her current research especially focuses on Japanese/Asian composers and researchers who worked on their projects at historical Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. In 2021, she gave a talk as a panelist at a symposium “Unsung Stories” hosted by Columbia University. Member of the International Computer Music Association, IRCAM Forum, Japanese Society for Sonic Arts, Japan Society for Music Perception and Cognition, the Japan Society for Contemporary Music, and the Japan Federation of Composers, by whom her pieces have been published and recorded for JFC Japanese Composers Series. She has been active as the founder and the artistic director of Glovill (http://glovill.jp/), a non-profit organization established to introduce new music to Japan.