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. The final part of Toshie Kakinuma's "Yūji Yuasa and the Apparatus Called Language" examines Yuasa's later vocal works-Projection on Bashō's Haiku (1974), Projection on Onomatopoeia (1979), and Etude for "The" (1983). Kakinuma shows how Yuasa's exploration of sound and meaning evolves into a deep engagement with the Japanese language itself: its phonetic energy, gestural character, and cultural resonance. Through these works, Yuasa transforms language into a field of play between voice and self, communication and noncommunication. His music thus reveals the voice as an apparatus mediating between individuality, collectivity, and the poetic essence of Japanese sound. First Publication: Kakinuma, Toshie: «Jōji Yuasa and the Apparatus Called Language», in: Ongaku Geijutsu, Issue 12, December 1984, pp 96–101.
Kakinuma et al. (Thu,) studied this question.