Miya Masaoka


Miya Masaoka is based in New York City and is an American composer, musician, and sound artist active in the field of experimental music. Her work encompasses contemporary classical composition, improvisation, electroacoustic music, traditional Japanese instruments, and performance art.
Her full-length ballet was performed at the Venice Biennale 2004. She is the recipient of the Core Fulbright Scholarship for Japan, 2016.
She often performs on a 21-string Japanese koto koto, which she extends with software processing, string preparations, and bowing. Masaoka has created performance works and installations incorporating plants, live insects, and sensor technology.

Early life and education

She began studying classical music at 8 years old. In her early twenties, she moved to Paris, France, and upon returning to the US, she enrolled at San Francisco State University, and received her BA in Music, magna cum laude, where she studied with Wayne Peterson and Eric Moe. She holds an MA from Mills College where she received the Faculty Award in Music Composition. Her teachers included Alvin Curran, Maryanne Amacher and David Tudor.

Biography

Masaoka's work spans many genres and media. She has created works for voice, orchestra, installations, electronics and film shorts. She has sewn and soldered handmade responsive garments and mapped the movement of insects and response of plants and brain activity to sound
Her works have been commissioned and premiered by Bang on a Can, So Percussion, Either/Or, Kathleen Supove, Joan Jeanrenaud, SF Sound, Volti, Rova Saxophone Quartet, Alonzo King’s Ballet, The Del Sol String Quartet and others. Her orchestral work “Other Mountain” was selected for a reading by JCOI Earshot for the La Jolla Symphony 2013.
She founded and directed the San Francisco Gagaku Society under the tutelage of Master Suenobu Togi, a former Japanese Imperial Court musician who traced his gagaku lineage more than 1000 years to the Tang Dynasty.
Her love of nature and resonant outdoor space led her to record the migrating birds in the deep and naturally resonant canyons near the San Diego Airport, resulting in the work “For Birds, Planes and Cello,” written for Joan Jeanrenaud, formerly of Kronos Quartet. “While I Was Walking, I Heard a Sound” is scored for 120 singers, spatialized in balconies of the concert hall. During one movement, three choirs and 9 opera singers are making bird calls and environmental sounds.
As a kotoist, she remains active in improvisation and has performed and recorded with Pharoah Sanders, Pauline Oliveros, Gerry Hemingway, Jon Rose, Fred Frith, Larry Ochs and Maybe Monday, Steve Coleman, Anthony Braxton, Didier Petit, Reggie Workman, Dr. L. Subramaniam, Andrew Cyrille, George Lewis, Jin Hi Kim, Susie Ibarra, Vijay Iyer, Myra Melford, Zeena Parkins, Toshiko Akiyoshi, William Parker, Robert Dick, Lukas Ligeti, Earl Howard, Henry Brant and many others.
Masaoka describes herself, saying, “I am deeply moved by the sounds and kinetic energy of the natural world. People, history, memory, this geography and soundscape of nature and culture --from our human heart beat to the rhythms of the moon and oceans-- how infinitely complex yet so fundamental.”
She initiated and founded the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival in 1999.
In 2004, Masaoka received an Alpert Award in the Arts, and she previously was given a National Endowment for the Arts and a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Award.
The New York Times describes her solo performances as “exploring the extremes of her instrument,” and The Wire describes her own compositions as “magnificent…virtuosic…essential music…”
She has been a faculty member at the Milton Avery Graduate Program at Bard College in Music/Sound since 2002, and has taught music composition at NYU. She received the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2013, and a Fulbright Scholarship for Japan, 2016.

Works

Myths, Modes and Means, Mystic Rhythm Society
What We Live
Suite for Koto and Jazz Orchestra
Twelve Minor
Global Fusion
Trancepatterns
Burdocks
Legends and Legacies
Cloud Plate
Sequel
Sound Body
With Fred Frith and Maybe Monday