Steven Takasugi

Steven Kazuo Takasugi (born 1960 in Los Angeles) studied composition with Noah Creshevsky, Bunita Marcus, Morton Feldman, Brian Ferneyhough, Joji Yuasa, and Roger Reynolds, as well as computer music with Charles Dodge, F. Richard Moore, and Harold Cohen. He received his masters and doctoral degrees in composition from the University of California San Diego and has held artists and guest residencies in Japan, Germany, France, and the United States. His compositions have been presented worldwide and he has won numerous grants and awards. He has lectured extensively and is author of many articles on new music and aesthetics. He currently lectures and teaches composition and analysis at UCSD and is permanent faculty at the International Summer Academy for Young Composers, Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.
His primary compositional interests lead to a re-examination of instruments—Western, “Non-Western,” technological, makeshift and invented—informed by deconstructive analyses of assumptions embedded in traditional or experimental practices, as well as scientific, socio-political, or religious-aesthetic pretense, as these pervade compositional and artistic thinking of musical material, time, and space. More recently, his work has turned to literary texts, recitation, and musical-theatrical contexts. From these “excavations” of lodged assumptions come the energies for his work. This includes a cycle entitled Vers une myopie musicale (Mudai, Untitled, and Iridescent Uncertainty), Jargon of Nothingness, Strange Autumn based on poems by Wieland Hoban, for multi-channel spatialization and real-time performance, and Das Fliegenpapier / The Flypaper based on the prose piece by Robert Musil.