KANEKO, Hitomi

Hitomi Kaneko was born in Tokyo. While studying in the postgraduate school of Toho Gakuen College Music Department she gained a scholarship from the French government to further her studies in the Faculty of Composition at the Paris Conservatoire. She was awarded first prize in the Franco-Japanese Contemporary Composition Competition in 1988 and first prize in the orchestral composition section of the 59th Japan Music Competition in 1990, together with the E. Nakamichi Prize, and the 9th Muramatsu Prize. She studied composition with Akira Miyoshi and Gérard Grisey. Her works have been performed at the Darmstadt Festival of Contemporary Music, the Festival d’Automne de Paris, at contemporary music festivals in Avignon and Nice, the Bucharest Contemporary Music Week, the Heemstede Contemporary Music Week, Music from Japan and the Takefu International Music Festival, and by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the NHK Symphony Orchestra, the New Japan Philharmonic and the Tokyo Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. She was a researcher at IRCAM in Paris in 1994 and has created works in the electronic music studio of NHK. She lived in France in 2011 and 2012 as an artist sponsored for overseas study by the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs. She served as Guest Research at the Paris-Sorbonne University in 2011-2012, and at the Saint-Denis University in 2018-2020.
Several CDs featuring her work have been released, including Spectral Matters: Contemporary Japanese Composers, Series 27（Fontec).
Her work is published by Zen-On Music Publishers Co.
She was Professor at Toho Gakuen College of Music, and is currently Associate Professor at Tokyo University of the Arts and serves as Part-Time Professor at Toho Gakuen College of Music.