Hiroyuki Iwaki AO (岩城 宏之, Iwaki Hiroyuki^?) (6 September 1932 – 13 June 2006) was a Japanese conductor and percussionist.

Iwaki was born in Tokyo in 1932. Shortly after he entered an elementary school, he moved to Kyoto due to his father's transferral. He came to play the xylophone at nine years old. He moved back to Tokyo when he was passing on to the fifth grade.

In May 1945, suffering from an air raid, he evacuated to Kanazawa, where his relatives lived. After the end of World War II, he moved to mountainous area of Gifu for his father's work. In 1947, he was admitted to Gakushuin Boy's Junior High School, graduating in 1951. He had applied for admission to the Department of German Literature of University of Tokyo, but he gave up on account of a high fever he ran on the eve of the examination. Eventually he went to the Percussion Department, Faculty of Music, Tokyo University of the Arts. However, he dropped out later. In those days, manners of discrimination depending on specialities was in the faculty?, and above all, the Percussion Department ranked among the lowest group in the faculty.

Yūzō Toyama (外山雄三, Toyama Yūzō^?) (born 10 May 1931) is a Japanese composer and conductor. A native of Tokyo, he was a pupil of Kan'ichi Shimofusa; he studied conducting with Kurt Wöss and Wilhelm Loibner, and like them later became a conductor of the NHK Symphony Orchestra. As a conductor he has served with numerous orchestras throughout Japan; as a composer his prime influences are Bela Bartok and Dmitri Shostakovich. His best-known work is a Rhapsody for Orchestra based on Japanese folk songs.

Toyama won the Suntory Music Award in 1982.

Ettore Bastianini (September 24, 1922 – January 25, 1967) was an Italian opera singer who was particularly associated with the operas of Verdi. He had a prolific international career between 1945 and 1965 which was cut short by throat cancer. He began his professional career as a bass working in opera houses throughout Italy and in tours to Egypt and Venezuela during the 1940s. In 1952, he launched a career as a baritone that quickly earned him worldwide acclaim and brought him to the stages of many of the major opera houses in Europe and the United States. He was a frequent performer at La Scala between 1954-1963 and at the Vienna State Opera between 1958-1964. He was also a member of the Metropolitan Opera between 1954-1957 and again in 1965 during the last year of his career.

Born in Siena, Bastianini first began performing at the age of fifteen while apprenticed to a pastry chef, Gaetano Vanni, who discovered Bastianini's voice and encouraged him to join the choir of his hometown's Cathedral. Between 1937-1938 he sang as a bass during Masses and religious functions at the church. In 1939 he began singing lessons under Fathima and Anselmo Ammanati who continued training him as a bass. He sang his first professional concerts in 1940 and 1941 in Asciano and Siena at the Fortezza Medicea and Teatro dei Rozzi. In 1942 he won first prize at the 6th National Singing Contest at the Teatro Comunale Florence but was soon drafted into the Italian Air Force which prevented him from immediately enjoying the scholarship accompanying the prize.

Toru Takemitsu (武満 徹, Takemitsu Tōru^?, October 8, 1930 – February 20, 1996) was a Japanese composer and writer on aesthetics and music theory. Largely self-taught, Takemitsu possessed consummate skill in the subtle manipulation of instrumental and orchestral timbre. He drew from a wide range of influences, including jazz, popular music, avant-garde procedures and traditional Japanese music, in a harmonic idiom largely derived from the music of Claude Debussy and Olivier Messiaen.

His 1957 Requiem for strings attracted international attention, led to several commissions from across the world and established his reputation as one of the leading 20th century Japanese composers. Takemitsu was the recipient of numerous awards, commissions and honours. He composed over 100 film scores and about 130 concert works for ensembles of various sizes and combinations. He also wrote a detective novel and appeared frequently on Japanese television as a celebrity chef.

In the foreword to a selection of Takemitsu's writings in English, conductor Seiji Ozawa writes: "I am very proud of my friend Toru Takemitsu. He is the first Japanese composer to write for a world audience and achieve international recognition."

Toshiro Mayuzumi (黛 敏郎 Mayuzumi Toshirō, 20 February 1929, in Yokohama – 10 April 1997, in Kawasaki) was a Japanese composer.

Mayuzumi was a student of Tomojiro Ikenouchi at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music immediately following the Second World War, before going to Europe where he attended the Paris Conservatoire national supérieur de musique.

He was initially enthusiastic about avant-garde Western music, especially that of Varèse, but beginning in 1957 he turned to pan-Asianism for new sonorous material (Herd 1989, 133). Like the novelist Mishima Yukio, whose novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion he set as an opera (Kinkakuji, 1976), Mayuzumi opposed the westernization of Japan and tried to emphasize his native cultural identity in his work.^{[citation needed]}

A prolific composer for the cinema, he composed more than a hundred film scores between Waga ya wa tanoshi (It's Great to Be Young) in 1951 and Jo no mai in 1984. The best-known film with a score by Mayuzumi is probably The Bible: In the Beginning (1966). He also wrote many pieces for wind band that have been recorded by the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra.