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Miya Masaoka


Miya Masaoka is based in New York City (born 1958, Washington, DC) 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 (musical instrument) 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.

She began studying classical music at 8 years old. In her early twenties, she moved to Paris, France, and upon returning to the USA, she enrolled at San Francisco State, 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. 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 (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 9 opera singers are making bird calls and environmental sounds.


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