Award-winning composer Koji Nakano’s compositions reflect the relationship between beauty, form, and imperfection through the formality of music. In 2008, Dr. Nakano became the first composer to receive the S&R Washington Award Grand Prize. His portrait concert has been presented at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and at Tenri Cultural Institute of New York, among other venues. In 2016, he was named the Scripps Erma Taylor O’Brien Distinguished Visiting Professor at Scripps College in the U.S. Co-founder of the Asian Young Musicians’ Connection (AYMC), Dr. Nakano commissions emerging composers to create music that is performed by worldwide professional musicians at AYMC’s annual concerts, lectures, and workshops.
At MacDowell in 2018, he finished two compositions including the chamber opera Spiritual Forest, which will be premiered in early 2019 by the CSUSB Opera Theater in California, and “Three Lullabies” from the chamber opera Spiritual Forest for solo guitar commissioned by Aaron Larget-Caplan who will premiere the piece at the International Festival of Arts & Ideas on June 14, 2018 in New Haven. He also completed the first draft of two other pieces, Spring Breathes VII for Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Western instruments with new choreographed Thai dance commissioned by the Hong Kong Asian Young Musicians' Connection to be premiered by the Hong Kong Crossroads Ensemble in Hong Kong September 2018 and Imagined Sceneries II for amplified flute, piano and live electronics for the Sounds Modern series at Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.
