Hinako Takagi

Hinako Takagi (born 1989) is a Japanese composer and pianist. She is a lecturer in composition at the Osaka College of Music. In 2019, she became the second Japanese to win first prize in the composition category of the Geneva International Music Competition. Her award-winning work “L’instant” was selected as a task piece in the oboe section of the same competition held in 2021. Biography Takagi was born and raised in Hyogo, Japan. In junior high, she was asked to compose a song for her class for a school event. The experience inspired her to be interested in music composition. She majored in piano in high school, and enrolled in composition major in university. In her freshman year, she received an assignment from her teacher, Yoko Kubo, to compose “100 variations of the same piece in one year.” She later said that she learned the basics of composition from this assignment. She studied composition with Yoko Kubo and Allain Gaussin. In 2012 she was appointed as a lecturer at Osaka College of Music in Osaka, Japan. She has organized many small concerts with new musical arrangements to engage people’s interest in contemporary music. In 2019, she composed a pantonality song called “My