Fumio Koizumi

Japanese ethnomusicologist. Born April 4, 1927 - Deceased August 20, 1983. Graduated in aesthetics at Tokyo University in 1951 and studied music with Eishi Kikkawa. From 1960 he was assistant professor and then full professor at Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku (Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music). In 1967 and 1971 he visited the USA to teach at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. In addition to his special field of Japanese folk music, he took a broad interest in all folk traditions and made frequent field studies during the period 1957-82 in India, Iran, the Near East, eastern Europe, South America, Indonesia and countries along the ancient Silk Road that linked China with the West; the result in 1981 was the monumental set of 50 LPs 民族音楽大集成（１・２） = Anthology Of World Music (Vol 1. & 2.). As an influential teacher and successful speaker on radio and television he further established the popularity of traditional music. His research materials are preserved in the Koizumi Fumio Memorial Room at Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku and in 1989 the Koizumi Fumio Prize was introduced to promote the research and performance of traditional music. The Festschrift Shominzoku no oto [‘Sounds of Various Nations’], ed. T. Sakurai and others (Tokyo, 1986) is a commemorative collection of Koizumi´s papers and contains a detailed biography. [Source: www.komuso.com]