Hiro Fujikake (to be exact, Hiroyuki Fujikake), one of Japan's greatest composers, was born on January 31, 1949 in a small village called Higashi-shirakawa located in the eastern part of Gifu prefecture, Japan.

His work is a fantastic marriage of Eastern and Western music. He introduces Japanese traditional music and instrumentation effectively into his symphonic work. He sometimes adds a taste of jazz or rock music, for which he has a liking too. Yet, what lies at the core of his music is love for nature, which was cultivated while he spent his childhood in Higashi-shirakawa surrounded by beautiful mountains and with a clear river going through the village.

In 1964 he started to get his musical education in high school, which is rather late as a musician. He worked extremely hard and was admitted to Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, where he took the composition course for 4 years. Then, he spent 3 years in a master course at the same university.

Since his university days he has won lots of prizes for his composition work. Of all the prizes he received, the biggest is the Grand Prix of the Queen Elisabeth International Music Competition of Belgium awarded for his symphonic work "The Rope Crest" in 1977.

Some of the others are: the Ongakunotomo Composition Prize for "Two Poems for Chorus" in 1970, the second prize of the NHK Mainichi Music Competition for "Threnody" in 1974, the All Japan Band Association's Test Piece Composition Prize for "Concertino Overture" in 1975, the Japan Mandolin Union Composition Prize for "Pastoral Fantasy" in 1975, the first prizes of the Sasagawa competition successively for "Nostalgic Rhapsody" in 1975 and for "Chaconne" in 1976, the Japan Symphony Foundation's Composition Prize for "The Song of Spring" in 1990.

His compositions have wide variety; from symphonies to operas, ballets, musicals, even to music for traditional Eastern instruments. He has a close relationship with mandolin players, and has written many pieces for them. There is no mandolinist who hasn't heard of Fujikake's name in Japan. Pastoral Fantasy is the most popular piece of music among mandolin players. He also composes a lot of pieces for radio, television, films and events like expositions. In the 1989 World Design Exhibition held in Nagoya, he did a great job as executive sound producer and composer.

Fujikake released 2 collaboration albums with James Galway; The Enchanted Forest and The Lark in the Clear Air. The former stayed in the top 10 on the Billboard charts classical crossover section for 5 months.

Although he is a composer, he also plays synthesizers and gives concerts. The main reason he started playing before audiences is because he had terrible experiences where his masterpieces were blemished by bad orchestral performances. This one-man unit is called "Solo Orchestra". It consisted of some 10 keyboards and percussion in the early days but now the number of keyboards has been reduced to about 5. This thanks to the advance of technology and the computer. Occasionally, he has co-players, such as Japanese taiko drummers, mandolin players and Chinese musical instrument players.

He is superb as an arranger too. One becomes convinced of that in I Musici's album called The Four Seasons in Japan. He will sometimes conducts orchestras.

Every year he makes a try at new things and we wait anxiously for his next work.