Takuma Tanikawa
Composer Tanikawa Takuma has received commissions from the New York City Classical Guitar Society and Dr. Faustus: A Composers' Project. He is a recipient of the George Perle Prize, the Luigi Dallapiccola Award, the Robert Avalon Prize and the University of Chicago Scholarship and Fellowship. He has worked with such artists as Pacifica Quartet, eighth blackbird, International Contemporary Ensemble and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.
In 2001 Tanikawa worked as a recording artist and producer for Toshiba-EMI Records. The following year, he began studying composition at the Juilliard School of Music where he attended master classes with Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt. In 2004 he began studying with John Link and in 2007 earned a master's degree in music composition and theory at CUNY Queens College, Aaron Copland School of Music. At CUNY he worked with Jeff Nichols, Hubert Howe and William Rothstein and served as president of QC New Music Group. In 2007 he began working as a fellow and lecturer at the University of Chciago, where he studied with Augusta Read Thomas.
About his piece for the Intersections project (2008):
"Orange is a series of short fragments for piano trio written two to three years apart, each meant as a snapshot of life under Orange Alert. The first fragment was written in February of 2003 when the first Orange Alert was issued nationwide and the terrorist attacks of 2001 remained vivid in everybody’s mind.
The second fragment was written in March of 2006 when the anti-war populist stance began to take hold in America and one could sense a shift taking place in the public discourse surrounding the nation’s geopolitical concerns.
The third fragment, written for tonight’s concert, is a setting of a Japanese poem by Emperor Jomei (593–641). The poem could be interpreted simply as an expression of the emperor’s love for his land, but there can also be found echoes of war and conquest in the language. My translation provided here emphasizes this aspect normally not discussed in analyses of the poem, perhaps partly due to the link between poems such as these and the rise of nationalism in Japan which led to its involvement in World War II."