Misato Mochizuki

Born in 1969 in Tokyo, Misato Mochizuki is amongst those composers who are equally active in Europe, North America and Japan. After receiving a Master's degree in composition at the Tokyo University of the Arts, she was awarded first prize for composition at the Conservatoire National Supérieur in Paris in 1995, and then joined the "Composition and Computer Music" program at IRCAM (1996–1997).

In her own combination of Occidental tradition and the Asiatic sense of breathing, Mochizuki's style of writing developed exciting rhythms and unusual sounds of great formal and stylistic freedom. Her catalog of works (published by Breitkopf & Härtel) consists of about 60 works, including 16 symphonic compositions and 15 pieces for ensemble. Her works have been performed at international festivals such as the Salzburg Festival, the Biennale di Venezia, the Lincoln Centre Festival, and music festivals in Donaueschingen, Berlin, Witten, Cologne, Lyon, Zurich, and Toronto. Her most outstanding productions include the orchestral portrait concert at Suntory Hall in Tokyo (2007 and 2019), the cinema concert at the Louvre with her music to Kenji Mizoguchi's silent film Le fil blanc de la cascade (2007), and portrait concerts at the Festival d'Automne in Paris, Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ in Amsterdam (2010), and Miller Theatre in New York (Columbia University, 2017).

Between 2011 and 2013, Mochizuki was composer-in-residence at the Festival international de musique de Besançon, leading workshops, conferences, and the jury of the renowned young conductors' competition, for which she wrote the symphonic piece Musubi II for the finalists. Since 2007, she has been a professor at the Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo and has been invited to give composition courses in Darmstadt, Royaumont, Takefu, Paris (ManiFeste, Collège de France), Barcelona (Mixtur and ESMUC), the Amsterdam Conservatory, Columbia University, and the Tokyo University of the Arts (guest professor since 2021).

Mochizuki also writes regularly about music and culture — quarterly for the Yomiuri Shimbun (2008–2015) and weekly for the Nihon Keizai Shimbun (January to June 2018), two of Japan's most widely read daily newspapers. In November 2019, a selection of these writings was published as a book (The Composer's Reflection on Music and Daily Life, Kairyusha, in Japanese).