Miya Masaoka

Miya Masaoka (born 1958, Washington, D.C.) is an American composer, musician, and sound artist active in the field of contemporary classical music and experimental music.

Her work encompasses contemporary classical composition, improvisation, electroacoustic music, inter-disciplinary sound art, sound installation, traditional Japanese instruments, and performance art.

She is based in New York City.

Masaoka often performs on a 21-string Japanese koto (musical instrument), which she extends with software processing, string preparations, and bowing.

She has created performance works and installations incorporating plants, live insects, and sensor technology.

She founded and directed the San Francisco Gagaku Society (1989-1996) 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 nine 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, Reggie Workman, Dr. L. Subramaniam, Andrew Cyrille, George E. 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.”

Myths, Modes and Means, Mystic Rhythm Society (BMG/RCA 1996)

What We Live (Black Saint 1996)

Suite for Koto and Jazz Orchestra (BMG, 1997. The work was composed for Miya Masaoka)

Twelve Minor (Avant 1998)

She initiated and founded the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival in 1999.

Global Fusion (Erato 1999)

Trancepatterns (Dendroica Music 2000)

Burdocks (Tzadik 2001)

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.

Her full-length ballet was performed at the Venice Biennale 2004.

She has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (2021), the Doris Duke Award (2013) and the Herb Alpert Award (2004), and a Fulbright Fellowship for advanced research for Noh, gagaku and the ichi gen kin.

She is an associate professor in the MFA Visual Arts Department at Columbia University, and the director of the MFA Sound Art Program.

Masaoka began studying classical music at eight years old.

In her early 20s, 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.

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 (LED KIMONO) and mapped the movement of insects and response of plants and brain activity to sound (Pieces For Plants, The Sound of Naked Men, Thinking Sounds).

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.

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…”

Legends and Legacies (Asian Improv Records 2005)

Cloud Plate (Cryptogramophone 2005)

Sequel (for Lester Bowie) (Intakt), 2006)

Sound Body (samadhisound 2007)

Her orchestral work “Other Mountain” was selected for a reading by JCOI Earshot for the La Jolla Symphony 2013.

She received the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2013, and a Fulbright Scholarship for Japan, 2016.