Ushio Torikai

Ushio Torikai is known for her highly individual musical voice, developed over many years of research and compositional experience in diverse musical fields including European classical music, traditional Japanese music, ancient Japanese music and computer/electronics. Ms. Torikai has received commissions from Ensemble Modern (Frankfurt), the Modern Art Sextet Berlin, the City of Los Angeles, the Ensemble Continuum (New York), the Kronos Quartet, the Canadian Electronic Ensemble, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, and Japan National Theater, to name only a few. Commissioned pieces range from works for concert music and opera to a permanent music installation in a public park. Ms. Torikai's albums have been released on JVC: GO WHERE?, the compositions on which were realized at IRCAM (the computer-oriented musical research center in Paris), and A UN, a seventy-five-minute work for a choir of forty Japanese Buddhist Monks, Son Bou no Toki, featuring a Native American poem, "Many Winters". Her newest album REST (chamber works for strings, piano and voices), dedicated to the victims of war and terrorism in the world, was released on Innova Records. The New York Times has written: "Ms. Torikai has a wide ranging musical imagination....[Her] music was exuberant, radical and dense." She occasionally writes about Japanese social phenomena for Japanese newspapers and magazines.