Michiko Toyama

Michiko Toyama (14 Feb 1908 — 3 Oct 2000) was a Japanese-American composer, the first Japanese recipient of an international compositional award, and one of the early pioneers of electronic music. She was a Japan Society Fellow in the Arts (1956–57). Toyama was born in California into a wealthy family from Osaka. In 1930, she started taking piano lessons in Paris. Eventually growing more interested in composition, Michiko became Nadia Boulanger's student in 1936. After Jacques Ibert strongly encouraged Michiko Toyama to submit her Voice of Yamato work to the contest, she won at the 15th festival of the International Society For Contemporary Music (ISCM) in 1937. Despite this unprecedented achievement, news of Toyama's prize didn't spread widely in Japan. The "Voice of Yamato" remained unperformed for almost 60 years, finally presented at the Gendai no Ongaku-ten '93 exhibition, organized by Nihon Gendai Ongaku Kyokai (Japanese Society for Contemporary Music). Michiko got married in 1937, changing her last name to Muto. In 1948, Michiko Toyama returned to Japan, where she began teaching counterpoint and piano at the Osaka Academy of Music. In 1952, Toyama relocated to Europe and continued her studies at the Paris Conservatory with Darius Milhaud, Olivier Messiaen and Noël Gallon. She met Pierre Schaeffer at Conservatory and became deeply impressed by his presentation of Musique Concrète and other electroacoustic experiments. In 1955, Toyama received a scholarship to study with Roger Sessions at Tanglewood, so she returned to the United States. Michiko also studied conducting at the Pierre Monteux School in Hancock, Maine. In 1956, she enrolled in Columbia University to learn electronic music with Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky at a newly-established Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Toyama became one of the first women to work at C-PEMC, composing her first electronic piece, Waka, in 1958. During her Columbia tenure, Michiko befriended Edgard Varèse as both shared a passion for Japanese "gagaku" traditional court music. Soon after the release of Toyama's sole album, Waka And Other Compositions, she returned to Japan and became a research fellow at Kyoto University. In 1961, Michiko Toyama applied for a Rockefeller Foundation grant to build an electronic music studio in Japan. According to some biographical sources, she got rejected — with Pitchfork Media citing a rather offensive application feedback Michiko received in their Apr 2021 article. As per Tsuji Hiromi in the 1999 "Josei sakkyokuka retsuden" (Portraits of Women Composers) book, Toyama couldn't finish the project due to problems with her Japanese collaborator. Subsequently, she focused on technical acoustical research and gave up composing.