238 Log 250807: Toshie Kakinuma: Joji Yuasa and the Apparatus Called LanguagePart I

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. At the time she wrote "Yūji Yuasa and the Apparatus Called Language" (originally published in Ongaku Geijutsu, October 1984), she was a young critic and researcher deeply engaged with the new directions of postwar Japanese vocal and electronic music Abstract Part I Toshie Kakinuma examines Jōji Yuasa’s tape piece Voices Coming (1969) as a rigorous exploration of the relationship between language, sound, and perception. Unlike other avant-garde composers, Kakinuma compares Yuasa to Boulez, Berio, and Stockhausen, Yuasa works exclusively with unaltered recorded speech, isolating fragments of everyday language and stripping them of semantic meaning. This process reveals the inherent musicality and temporality of speech, transforming language into sonic material. Kakinuma interprets this as both a deconstruction of meaning and a reconfiguration of the voice as a medium between sound, language, and communication. First publication: Kakinuma, Toshie: «Jōji Yuasa and the Apparatus Called Language», in: Ongaku Geijutsu, Issue 10, October 1984, pp. 100–103.