Yoshiaki Onishi


Yoshiaki Onishi is a Japanese-American composer, conductor, and clarinetist. He is a recipient of several international prizes and honors. He currently resides in the United States. In 2018 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship and is currently Assistant Conductor of the New Music Ensemble at the University of Missouri School of Music.

Education

In 2000 he entered the Conservatory of Music at the University of the Pacific, studying composition and clarinet, graduating in 2004. Between 2005 and 2008 he did his graduate studies in music composition at Yale University. In February 2015 he received his doctorate from Columbia University, where his principal teachers have been Fabien Lévy, Tristan Murail and Fred Lerdahl.

Awards

Onishi’s music has been in part characterized by the engineering of timbres. In his 2009 work for string quartet, Culs-de-sac , he employs varieties of extended techniques for the string instruments. Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times said of the piece: “Who needs electronic instruments when a composer can draw such varied, eerily alluring sounds from good old string instruments?”.
Onishi’s works have been commissioned by performers and organizations including Mayumi Miyata, :jp:パシフィック・ミュージック・フェスティバル|Pacific Music Festival, Norfolk and Lucerne Festivals. His composition, Départ dans… was commissioned by :ja:武生国際音楽祭|Takefu International Music Festival in 2010, and became the winning piece of the Gaudeamus Prize in Music Composition in 2011.
Performance organizations, including JACK Quartet, Quatuor Diotima, Yarn/Wire, Nieuw Ensemble, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Klangforum Wien have performed Onishi’s works.
Since 2014, Onishi's works are published by Edition Gravis Verlag.

Works

The following is a partial list of works.
Onishi is currently an assistant conductor of the Mizzou New Music Ensemble at the University of Missouri School of Music in Columbia, Missouri. Previously he was an assistant conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra until 2013. He is also affiliated with New York-based percussion ensemble Iktus Percussion as a conductor of the Iktus+. He has also guest conducted several ensembles, including the Wet Ink Ensemble.