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. Part II explores how Yuasa's groundbreaking composition Voices Coming redefined the relationship between voice, sound, and meaning. Yuasa used recorded human speech rather than newly produced sounds, emphasizing how voice inherently carries meaning. Through fragmentation and editing, he suspended meaning and broke down normal communication, turning language itself into musical material. Dismantling question-answer structures and expose the emptiness of habitual speech. Kakinuma compares Yuasa's approach to Luciano Berio and John Cage, highlighting Yuasa's distinct focus on the phenomenology of language. Over time, Yuasa expanded these ideas into live and instrumental works, maintaining speech-like rhythms even without actual words. The essay concludes that Voices Coming forms the philosophical and artistic foundation of Yuasa's career, revealing how fragile and yet vital communication is in the modern world. Fist publication: Kakinuma, Toshie: «Jōji Yuasa and the Apparatus Called Language», in: Ongaku Geijutsu, Issue 11, November 1984, pp. 105–109.
Kakinuma et al. (Thu,) studied this question.