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 awards. He has lectured extensively and is author of many articles on new music and aesthetics. He currently teaches composition at University of California, San Diego.

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. From this “excavation” of lodged assumptions comes the energies for his work. This includes a cycle of works entitled Vers une myopie musicale and his most recent piece, Jargon of Nothingness.

Chaya Czernowin and Steven Kazuo Takasugi are permanent faculty for the Summer Academy master class to give consistency in methodology and content.