was a Japanese

musician A musician is a person who composes, conducts, or performs music. According to the United States Employment Service, "musician" is a general term used to designate one who follows music as a profession. Musicians include songwriters who wri ...

and

composer A composer is a person who writes music. The term is especially used to indicate composers of Western classical music, or those who are composers by occupation. Many composers are, or were, also skilled performers of music. Etymology and Defi ...

. He is considered a pioneer of

ambient music Ambient music is a genre of music that emphasizes tone and atmosphere over traditional musical structure or rhythm. It may lack net composition, beat, or structured melody.The Ambient Century by Mark Prendergast, Bloomsbury, London, 2003. It u ...

in Japan. His music lies mostly in the minimalist genre of ''kankyō ongaku'', or environment music—soft electronic melodies infused with the sounds of nature: babbling brooks, steady rain, and morning birds., However, not all Yoshimura's work included nature sounds. His album ''

Green Green is the color between cyan and yellow on the visible spectrum. It is evoked by light which has a dominant wavelength of roughly 495570 Nanometre, nm. In subtractive color systems, used in painting and color printing, it is created by ...

'' (1986) only contained them in the United States release, as they were excluded in the Japanese version.

Early life

Hiroshi Yoshimura was born in Yokohama, Kanagawa in 1940. He started to learn piano at the age of 5. He graduated from Waseda School of Letters, Arts and Sciences II in 1964. He was inspired by the

Fluxus Fluxus was an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, composers, designers and poets during the 1960s and 1970s who engaged in experimental art performances which emphasized the artistic process over the finished product. Fluxus ...

movement and the work of Harry Partch and

Erik Satie Eric Alfred Leslie Satie (, ; ; 17 May 18661 July 1925), who signed his name Erik Satie after 1884, was a French composer and pianist. He was the son of a French father and a British mother. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire, but was an und ...

Career

He started the computer music group "Anonyme" in 1972. The 70's saw Yoshimura heavily inspired by

Brian Eno Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno (; born Brian Peter George Eno, 15 May 1948) is a British musician, composer, record producer and visual artist best known for his contributions to ambient music and work in rock, pop an ...

, who had a similar minimalist ambient style. In 1978, he was commissioned by the NHK to compose the piece "Alma's Cloud". In addition to solo performances and improvisational music, he performed production performance and sound objects, environmental music containing graphic design and sound design, visual poetry, and worked on sound design business in collaboration with TOA. He also made music for galleries, museums, building spaces and train stations. He was at the forefront of environmental music. He worked as a part-time lecturer in the Industrial Design Department at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Chiba and at the Music Design Department of Kunitachi College of Music. He held workshops on citizen participation in museums.

Death

Yoshimura died in

2003 File:2003 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: The crew of STS-107 perished when the Space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated during reentry into Earth's atmosphere; SARS became an epidemic in China, and was a precursor to SARS-CoV-2; A des ...

after battling skin cancer.

Legacy

In 2017, Yoshimura, as well as other ambient Japanese musicians, received a resurgence due to changes to the

YouTube YouTube is a global online video platform, online video sharing and social media, social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is owned by ...

algorithm. In 2019, the song "Blink", from Yoshimura's debut album, was selected for compilation album ''Kankyo Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990''. In 2020, Light in the Attic Records re-issued ''

''. His music has received much critical acclaim. In 2018, ''

Crack Magazine ''Crack'' is a monthly independent music and culture magazine distributed across Europe. Founded in Bristol in the UK in 2009, the magazine has featured Björk, MF Doom, Lil Yachty, FKA twigs, Gorillaz and Queens of the Stone Age on the cover. T ...

'' selected his albums ''Green'' and '' Music For Nine Post Cards'' as the number 1 and number 7th most essential Japanese ambient albums, respectively. Malcolm Standing for ''Demo Magazine'' referred to Yoshimura as "one of the most influential and prolific of the artists to come out of Japan’s ambient renaissance". Tom Moon of NPR noted Yoshimura as "one of the revered pioneers of Japanese electronic music".

Discography

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Yoshimura, Hiroshi 1940 births 2003 deaths 20th-century Japanese male musicians 20th-century Japanese composers 20th-century Japanese songwriters Japanese male composers Japanese male songwriters Ambient musicians Deaths from skin cancer Musicians from Yokohama Waseda University alumni