Toshio Hosokawa is a prominent representative of the current generation of Japanese composers. Born in 1955 in Hiroshima, his music has received recognition in major venues throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. His works show a mature, personalized style, often emphasizing subtle shifts in timbre and texture and the exploration of extended instrumental techniques. Sen I is a challenging and rewarding study in extended techniques for the solo flute. Successfully integrating modem Western and traditional Japanese elements, it employs an array of special effects, including varying degrees of breathy sound contrasted with focused flute tone, pitch bends, quarter tones, and extreme contrasts in dynamics. It offers many interesting and effective kinds of articulation, with a variety of key slaps, tonguing techniques, and a special sforzando with large volume of air borrowed from Muraiki shakuhachi flute technique. Perhaps the most striking feature of this piece is its extensive use of vocal sounds. The score frequently splits into two staves to indicate both flute playing and vocalization. The flutist is called upon to sing while playing and to alternate flute playing with short yells and grunted vowel sounds. While the vocal effects in this piece contribute to its accessibility, they never stand out as gratuitous. Hosokawa seamlessly integrates these vocalizations into a successful exploration of advanced flute technique that is highly expressive, virtuosic, and idiomatic. In the opening of the work, percussive outbursts of breathy flute sound are heard in rapid alternation with short, guttural vocalizations. The effect is an exciting and rhythmic kind of Klangfarbenmelodie for the solo performer. This gradually gives way to expressive, long-sustained flute tones of shifting timbre and bending pitch. A delicate passage combining multiphonics with sustained vocal sound is quite exquisite. The con moto passages that follow are striking in their percussive interplay of vocal exclamations and flute sounds. Sen I is a dramatic and effective concert piece and should be very gratifying for advanced performers and their audiences. It artfully blends modern Western and traditional Japanese flute techniques, and composers interested in contemporary writing for flute will surely benefit from its careful study. Sen V is a very difficult piece for accordion solo. It requires complete mastery of a free-bass technique, with equal writing for right and left hands displayed in a four-staff score (two staves for each hand). Left-hand clusters of up to five specified notes often follow clusters for the right hand in close imitation. Buttons are not employed to play fixed chords, as in more common accordion playing. Pushing accordion technique to the limit, die piece presents some very difficult reaches for the hand. Rhythms are complex, but in general, the challenges in this work are in execution more than conceptualization. The work requires great agility and control of the bellows. A low E is sustained throughout, and the piece may optionally be performed in combination with a drone on low E prerecorded on a tape. The first section of Sen V features long, sustained tone clusters of gradually increasing textural density in the low register, separated by pauses of varying length, senza tempo. Aggregates of major and minor seconds are built up around central pitches, forming symmetrical relationships of inversion, as one finds in some works of Bela Barok. The effect is very spacious and even transcendental in quality, as broad phrases are extended for the full duration that air in the instrument's bellows will allow. Sustaining the volume of air throughout these passages will present a great challenge, and the indicated tempo of the eighth note at m. …