Meirin Attunement Room（明倫調律室）
[2018, Japan] installation
An interactive installation that invites the audience to imagine how they may orient themselves in a world through 'listening,' inspired by the image of a tuned city of ancient Kyoto hypothesized by Shin Nakagawa in his book Heiankyo Sound Universe. In collaboration with an Onmyoji (a professional practitioner of a Japanese esoteric cosmology based on the principles of yin-yang and the Five Elements,) a shō player, and the maker of koto strings, I created a sound universe in a tearoom of Kyoto Art Center by placing tuning forks of the pitches from corresponding gagaku modes and some symbols of the elements related to five directions. The audience members sitting in the east, west, south, and north sides of the room would vocalize the sound of the tuning forks, while the member lying down in the center would become the hollow body of a koto that resonated with the whole room and tune the string over their body. This way, the room itself, as well as the audience’s bodies, became instruments to be played and tuned in relation with each other. The work was commissioned by and presented as part of “The Instrument Builders Project Kyoto: Circulating Echo,” a forum for experimentation and collaboration between artists from Australia and the Asia-Pacific at the intersection of contemporary art, sound, music, and performance.
Premier and venue： September 16, 2018 Kyoto Art Center
Collaborators: Yasuko Momiyama, Kyu-mei, Wukir Suryadi, Misbach ,Daeng Bilok, and Caitlin Franzmann.
Special Thanks To: Eri Ito (Sho player), Tobaya Co., LTD., Murin-an, Okayama Moss Association, and Moire.
Commission: The Instrument Builders Project Kyoto: Circulating Echo
Conversations with Birds, Dead Birds, and Cracks in the Stone
[2017, Croatia] site-specific performance
An audience participatory walk presented as a result of collaboration with Mila Pavicevic, a Croatian poet and dance dramaturg, as part of Perforacije Festival. Through 2 weeks of journey together from Dubrovnik, Zagreb, Novi Sad, and back to Zagreb, Mila and I experimented with giving workshops to each other in order to explore how two individuals with different senses of realities and histories may engage in a truly sincere and intimate dialogue with each other. As the dialogue between the two artists developed—while involving our collective and private memories of war and disaster, as well as tangible and intangible presences around us—our thoughts on what was 'home' also deepened. To open this ongoing process to the public, Mila and I held walking performances with sound and poetry at a quiet park in the middle of the city of Zagreb, where we guided the audience through various dimensions of time and space by tracing the map of our journey. The walks were followed by a roundtable discussion with the audience members at night with homemade soup.
Premier：December 21, 2017, at Rokov perivoj, Zagreb, Croatia.
Commission：Perforacije Festival
On This Side, a Spirit
[2017, Japan] concert music
A piece for two pianos composed based on the study of “Hitori-sumo” from Ōyamazumi Shrine on Ōmishima island in the Seto Inland Sea. Performed every year during the rice planting festival in the spring and the harvesting festival in the autumn, “hitori-sumo” is a Shinto ritual in which a human and a rice spirit play sumo together. Surrounded by 3000 year old camphor trees, a human wrestler, a human referee, and the spirit enter into the sumo ring next to the sacred rice field. As people hold their breaths and watch the matches closely, they start to see the invisible spirit together. In “On This Side, a Spirit,” two pianists play with each other while taking on the roles of the human wrestler, referee, and the spirit. At the end of the piece, the spirit goes back to their home while singing the “Sumotori Bushi,” a folk song from Ōmishima. The piece was premiered by Tomoko Momiyama and Sachiyo Tsurumi on August 3rd, 2017, at the 3rd Ryogoku Art Festival. Different versions of the piece have been performed since then, at various occasions.
Instrumentation: Piano 4 hands / 6 hands
Photo Credits: Sachiyo Tsurumi, Makoto Nomura, and Tomoko Momiyama on piano
at JACSHA 2019 Summer Traveling Concert in Iwatsuki (Iwatsuki Sakai Hall) on August 11, 2019.
Rite of Masago
[2016, Japan] concert music
Audience-participatory music inspired by a folk ritual called “Koshiki-Dohyo-iri (the Ancient Rite of Ring Entrance)” from the town of Iwatsuki in Saitama City. In this autumn harvest festival, local children march through the town and enter into the sumo ring of a local shrine with stylized movements and calls. “The Rite of Masago: Spring in Iwatsuki” was originally composed for piano, cello, shamisen, and audience participation with voice, and premiered as part of the Saitama Triennale 2016. It was then re-arranged for two pianos and audience participation as “The Rite of Masago: Summer in Ryogoku” and premiered at the Ryogoku Art Festival 2017 in Tokyo. The composition has since then been re-performed in different arrangements.
Instrumentation (for the “Spring in Iwatsuki” version): Piano, Cello, Shamisen, and Voice.
Premiered on April 2nd, 2016, at “Let’s Sumo Music in Saitama” concert for Saitama Triennale 2016 in Iwatsuki, Saitama City, by Tomoki Tai on cello, Yumiko Tanaka on shamisen, Makoto Nomura on piano, and voluntary members of the audience on voice.
CONVERSATIONS WITH MYSELVES: Recollecting the 10 years of Minori-Majorite Travel
[2016, Japan] Film
A documentary film that attempts to examine the “Tokyo Borders Travel Sketch” project by Minori-majorite Travel––an art creation unit headed by Tomoko Momiyama––between 2005 and 2006. Involving people with various minority identities, including persons with physical and mental ‘disabilities,’ sexual minorities, foreign residents, and so on, the project challenged the borderline between ‘disability’ and ‘ability,’ or ‘minority’ and ‘majority’ in Tokyo, through the realization of an experimental performance work. Video footage from this process were interwoven with additional interviews shot 10 years later, to create a film that invites the audience to reflect on how the society may or may not have changed with regard to its treatment of differences. Since its premier at Uplink Shibuya in March 2016, the film has been screened throughout Japan and continues to engage people from multiple localities in a dialogue around the issues of ‘disability’ and ‘art.’
Director: Makoto Sasaki
Executive Producer: Tomoko Momiyama
Produced by Minori-majorite Travel Chronicle / 61 minutes
Subli ng Karagatan: a Chant for the Sea Forest
[2015, Philippines] site-specific performance
Commissioned by the “33rd Asian Composers League Conference and Festival: Likha-Likas: Reconfiguring Music, Nature, and Myth” and composed during a month long residency in Batangas, Philippines, “Subli ng Karagatan: a Chant for the Sea Forest” was a ritual performance to be offered to an endangered sea. Here, the human audience—who had come to the concert from different parts of the world—became the participants of the ritual and the sea in front of them became the audience of the music. The piece was realized through collaboration with local high school students and the elders from a local folk dance and song tradition called “Subli,” as well as an environmental activist and a spiritual leader. A collectively imagined inner-sea soundscape was vocalized as a prayer so that all living things could find their way home with the rich songs of healthy corals.
Instruments: Voice and percussion
Performers: Sinala Subli Dancers (Luisita M. Abante, Severino D. Cruzat, Beda M. Dimayuga, and Neri G. Manalo), SBC-PAO Repertory Brigid (Jan Jilliene M. Alday, Rhainne Cshyra M. Dimatatac, Veronica Mae E. Lalusin, Drecz Alecz A. Maderazo, Wendhyl M. Manalo, Michelle C. Marqueses, Ma. Zshalia Eleni M. Muñoz, Ma. Gloria Isabelle N. Pechay, Carl Joshua B. Seno, and Angela Denise S. Viceral), and the audience of the 33rd Asian Composers League Conference and Festival.
Premier: Novermber, 2015
Venue: Laiya Beach, San Juan, Batangas, the Philippines.
Commissioned by the “33rd Asian Composers League Conference and Festival: Likha-Likas: Reconfiguring Music, Nature, and Myth”
Where Little Foot Sleeps
[2015, Japan] concert music
Little Foot, according to a recent finding published in April 2015, is the fossil of an adult female hominid from 3.7 million years ago. Found at the bottom of a hole deep inside a dark cave, Little Foot is one of the earliest known ancestors of humans. I met her for the first time when I visited the Cradle of Humankind in 2014 as part of Unyazi Festival in South Africa. “Where Little Foot Sleeps” follows a dream she might have had at her graveyard as she would have listened to kaleidoscopic memories of the future in 3.7 million years’ time. The piece quotes a healing song of the Eland spirits from the San people, an indigenous group of hunter-gatherers in South Africa, as well as the music of a traditional deer dance from the Iwate prefecture in northern Japan, in which a human and a deer dance together on the borderline that separates them. “Where Little Foot Sleeps” was commissioned by the pianist Satoko Inoue and premiered by herself and Jill Richards from South Africa at Ryogoku Art Festival 2015.
for two prepared pianos, premiered at Ryogoku Monten Hall, Tokyo, Japan.
Searching for the Sound of Taji
[2014, Japan] site-specific performance, sound walk concert
Commissioned by an association of farmers in the Taji area of Fukui, I created a sound-walk performance with local residents in a valley of rice fields surrounded by mountains. Through a month-long residency, I researched about forgotten histories of the place and their myths by talking with elderly people in the village and learned about their ways of life and how they have changed in recent years. I created instruments from local bamboo trees with children and worked with local amateur musicians, including a taiko group, a gagaku ensemble, singers, wind and brass instrumentalists, and so on. In addition, I studied about special characteristics of this land with a botanist and an anthropologist. As a result of this process, I created and directed a site-specific and audience-participatory music performance event entitled “Searching for the Sound of Taji,” performed by the villagers themselves, from young to old, as part of “Flower, Food, and Sound Art Fair.” The whole village –– rice fields, mountains, forests, a spring, a temple, a shrine, a community center, and a garden –– became the stage for the performance, through which the audience was invited to walk while listening to the sounds from multiple locations in the environment. The project attempted to empower the rice farming community by rediscovering their natural, cultural, and human resources through music.
When Humans Go Extinct
[2014, Republic of South Africa] concert music, multi-media performance
A multimedia performance created in collaboration with artists from Johannesburg and premiered at Unyazi IV Festival of Electronic Music, where I was invited to participate as the festival’s composer-in-residence. Together with Jill Richards (piano), João Orecchia (sound artist), and Jurgen Meekel (visual artist), I formed a team to explore the changes in the relationships between humans and the earth from the time of our origin to this day and create a piece from the process. Specifically, the team worked closely with archaeologists and geologists from the Origins Centre and the school of Geosciences at the University of the Witwatersrand to learn about the latest findings in palaeontological studies at the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, where many kinds of pre-human fossils had been unearthed inside caves. At the same time, the team visited communities around Johannesburg that were affected by recent mining developments, in order to talk with miners who worked underground and local people who heard sound from the earth 24 hours a day due to the underground mining activities. We played with “gong rocks” of the San indigenous people at the Rock Art Research Institute and made recordings inside caves and underground using geophones. Based on this intensive collective research, I composed “When Humans Go Extinct,” which was performed by the team at the festival. The piece is a reflection on our origin as human beings as well as a question about where we have come to and where we want to go from now on, in relation to our lands.
for piano, live electronics, and image projections, premiered at the Music Room, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
Calling from a Changtang Steppe
[2014, India] site-specific performance, sound installation
As part of Earth Art Project 2014, I made music with children of nomadic families from the Himalayan mountains by documenting signs we received from the earth and the sky. I worked at two schools in Ladakh, one at 3800 meters high altitude in Nang village, and another at 5000 meters in Puga in the Changtang region. At each school, I stayed for 2 weeks and conducted workshops with the school children to make music through dialogues with their environments. By creating instruments from found objects and making use of natural acoustic phenomena such as the echoes from surrounding mountains and the whistling sound of strong winds, I composed site-specific music performances entitled “Bilungpa’s March” in Nang and “Calling from a Changtang Steppe” in Puga, which were performed by the children. In addition, I created sound installation pieces using recordings from the workshop processes, which were exhibited at the schools.
for children’s voice, wind organs, and self-made instruments, premiered at Nang Middle School and Nomadic Residential School Puga, in Ladakh, Jammu & Kashmir, India.
Moons of Hidden Times
[2013, Mexico] concert music
Commissioned by Tambuco Percussion Ensemble and composed through close collaboration with the ensemble at Tambuco-Japan Composer-in-Residence Program 2013, “Moons of Hidden Times” was world-premiered by the ensemble in Mexico in March and then Japan-premiered in July 2013. Since then, the piece has become part of the ensemble’s repertoire and is performed frequently at various international concerts, including 2015 LA International New Music Festival at REDCAT, California, U.S.A.
for percussion quartet, world premiered at Sala Xochipilli, National School of Music, UNAM, Mexico City, Mexico, and Japan premiered at Tsuda Hall, Tokyo, Japan.
At a Meeting of Microcosms
[2013, India] site-specific performance
As part of “Prominority: Master’s of Soil” art project, I stayed for a month in a village of the Santali people, an indigenous minority group in West Bengal. Together with the villagers, I created a performance ritual at rice fields in order to celebrate various sounds from their daily lives.
Sehalai Village, West Bengal, India.
I Saw Time, under a Cherry Tree
[2012, France] electro-acoustic music
Commissioned by Fukushima Open Sounds Project, which was initiated by a network of international radio programs in response to the ongoing nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant following the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami on March 11th, 2011, I composed an electro-acoustic piece entitled “I Saw Time, under a Cherry Tree.” The music is based on my own journey from Tokyo to Fukushima, where I visited a highly radiated forest of Bakkamiki in Minami-soma, which was the birthplace of an old and mysterious lullaby called “Kanchororin” with a group of local folk musicians, and then to Paris, where I talked with trees in the city and asked them what they thought about the situation in Fukushima. The piece utilizes field recordings from this journey as well as recordings of the sound inside Parisian trees. The composition was realized in 2012 through residencies at INA-GRM (French national institute of audiovisual–Music Research Group) in Paris and Utopiana in Geneva, in collaboration with engineers from these cities. “I Saw Time, under a Cherry Tree” has been broadcasted at various radio programs and festivals worldwide, including Festival FUKUSHIMA! and Monofonic 2014 ACSR Radio Festival.
for radio, broadcasted at Fukushima Kitchen Garden, Japan / Radio France / Radio Télévision Suisse / Radio Télévision Belge Francophone / Australian Broadcasting Corporation, among other radio programs worldwide.
The Zoo, the Ship, and the Beggar
[2012, Indonesia] site-specific performance
Commissioned by Sharing Art Garden and Festival of Ocean Mountain Arts 2012, I facilitated music workshops with children from displaced families at an interfaith kindergarten in Borobudur and composed “the Zoo, the Ship, and the Beggar” for these children. Borobudur’s local community has been divided since the 70’s, when the Indonesian government relocated many villagers to build a cultural heritage park around Borobudur Temple. Now, the residents are very much isolated from the temple, which used to be the pillar of their collective identity. The project was an attempt at reclaiming the temple as the people’s garden and inviting the villagers to listen to each other and imagine multiple dimensions of time. “The Zoo, the Ship, and the Beggar” was performed by the children at the temple and later recorded in the village in collaboration with Found Sound Nation, a music collective based in New York.
for violin duo and children’s voice, Borobudur Temple, Magelan, Indonesia.
Code Purnama Hatiku
[2011, Indonesia] site-specific performance
As part of the Asian Public Intellectuals (API) Regional Project “Humans, Nature, and Local Knowledge,” co-organized by the API Community and Pemerti Kali Code, a local NGO in Yogyakarta, I conducted a collective music composition workshop with flood survivors along the Code River in Yogyakarta. The project was aimed at empowering the traumatized inner-city community of informal settlers, after the volcanic eruption of Mount Merapi in 2010 and ensuing flood disasters. The community faced an imminent conflict: the community needed to come together so that their voices could be heard through the reconstruction process of the city, but the villagers were fighting with each other as a result of the perceived inequality in the distribution of resources and support among the riverside settlements. Seven participants from different settlements with various economic and social backgrounds gathered to create communal music of the river. We traveled along the river to visit each other’s homes and shared their experiences of the flood from multiple perspectives. Based on this journey, we together composed “Code Purnama Hatiku” (Code, the full moon of my heart), which was performed by the participants in front of the community members, as well as the government and the media. The event resulted in a signing of a MOU between the Code River community, the government, and academic institutions, in which all the parties agreed to commit themselves to corporate with each other for a more inclusive development of the city post disaster.
for voice, angklung, guitar, recorder, and various self-made instruments, performed at Jogoyudan village, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.
CANDIES~girlish hardcore
[2010, Japan] theater
Composed music with Yow Funahashi (musician / composer) and Skank (musician / composer) for theater pieces directed by Shirotama Hitsujiya and presented by Yubiwa Hotel Performing Arts Company.
©YUBIWAHotel 2012 Photo:Kunihiko Hatase
A Cave Dream
[2010, The Nederlands] concert music
Commissioned by the Niwebyrth Ensemble, which promoted new music for period instruments, “A Cave Dream” was premiered by the ensemble and won the “Cupid’s Darts: A Love Song Competition.”
for soprano, fortepiano, historical clarinet, and cello, premiered at Korzo 5HOOG Theatre, The Hague, the Netherlands.
A Song Pouring
[2009, The Nederlands] audience participatory sound and visual installation
Commissioned by Camera Japan Festival, I created an audience-participatory audio-visual installation entitled “A Song Pouring” with Takako Hamano (visual artist) for the festival’s “Kappalai” group exhibition. We created constantly shifting soundscapes with recorded interviews at a historical ship, and later in a historical mansion, and invited the audience to pour songs from their secret memories into the live space. The piece questioned the ownership of memory at the borders between what might be considered “private” and “public.”
Havenmueum, Rotterdam / Siebold Huis, Leiden, the Netherlands.
Mesujika DOE
[2009, Japan & U.S.A.] theater
International theater project with a North American playwright Trista Baldwin and a Japanese director Shirotama Hitsujiya. I worked as the project’s dramaturg to co-create this multi-lingual play, which explores the issues of mutable identities and core of the self across nations, languages, cultures, and genders. Developed through many years of research, workshops, and work-in-progress presentations, the piece attempted to address both Japanese and American audiences without the use of subtitles.
Photo: Rich Fleishchman
Playwright’s Center, Minneapolis, Theater Yugen, San Francisco, and Jan. 2012 Morisita Studio, Tokyo, among other locations in the U.S. and Japan.
Ballade for Lost Waters
[2009, The Nederlands] concert music, multi-media performance
In 2008, I initiated an art project with Melissa Cruz (visual artist) and Yamila Rios (sound designer) in order to investigate the relationship between people and their environment in Dutch society, with a specific focus on water. By working closely with Gemeente Den Haag (municipal government) and Hoogheemraadschap van Delfland (water management institution), we traveled throughout the city of The Hague in search of water that was still alive, and recorded underwater sound using hydrophones. As a result of this shared journey, a multimedia performance piece for a solo percussionist and live electronics was composed. The audience was invited to listen to the silent voices of water, while the percussionist conversed with her own shadows projected from the water mirror creating an optical magic. “Ballade for Lost Waters” was premiered during the Spring Festival 2009 at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and later performed at different locations in the city.
for percussion, tape, live electronics, and water mirror, premiered at Kees van Baarenzaal, Royal Conservatoire, The Hague, the Netherlands.
Lullaby of the 21st Century
[2008, Japan] concert music, site-specific project
I designed and facilitated a collective composition workshop with citizens of Kanazawa as part of the museum’s “Graphism in the Wilderness: Kiyoshi Awazu" exhibition. Seven participants, varying in their age from 24 to 70 years old, traveled together through the exhibition and exchanged their shifts in perception with each other. From this shared experience surfaced a collective narrative, which was then mapped onto a graphic score and translated into music. As a result of this creative dialogue, “Lullaby of the 21st Century” was composed and performed by the participants at the museum.
©hiraku ikeda
for voice, piano, saxophone, Theremin, Taisho-goto, recorder, harmonica, ocarina, and self-made instruments, performed at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan.
Y/i : feeling out of harmony in Yokohama
[2007, Japan] concert music, site-specific project
As part of the hall’s composer-in-residence program, I collaborated with Sachiyo Tsurumi (composer) and Keisuke Mitsuhashi (music critic) in organizing a community-based project entitled “Hama–Mix=Yokohama+Remix.” Each resident artist worked with a group of Yokohama citizens: my group consisted of four people varying from 7 to 54 years old. Together, we composed music based on fieldtrips around the neighborhood, which included newly developed commercial bay areas as well as an old Chinatown and a flophouse district. In addition, the resident composers created new pieces of music by re-mixing the materials produced through all the group workshops. These re-mixed compositions as well as the group compositions were premiered at the concert hall by professional musicians and the workshop participants.
Yokohama Minato-mirai Hall, Kanagawa, Japan.
TOKYO BORDERS TRAVEL SKETCH: The Seven Deadly Sins
[2006, Japan] site-specific performance, audience participatory theater
In 2005, I founded an art group called minorimajorite-travel with Shirotama Hitsujiya (theater director) and Ayako Miyake (art education producer) to investigate the issues of identity from multiple perspectives through creative dialogues between what may be minorities / majorities in a society. A project entitled “Tokyo Borders Travel Sketch” challenged unspoken borders within a society between “abled” and “disabled,” which could be inverted depending on a context. Professional and non-professional performers with experiences of disability due to their minority status in contemporary Tokyo were brought together through grassroots outreach and open calls for audition. The project team included people with various physical and mental disabilities, a gender identity disorder, and an eating disorder, as well as sexual minorities, a former alcoholic, a foreign resident, and a homeless person. Together, we formed a caravan and traveled across different layers of Tokyo, which were often invisible or inaccessible without certain perspectives or backgrounds. As a result of this year-long research and creation process, an audience participatory tour-performance entitled “The Seven Deadly Sins” was presented on April 2006, with support from the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s Bureau of Transportation and the Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance Company Social Welfare Program. The performances took place throughout a day, on public buses, streets, and at a warehouse-turned-theater, in Tokyo. While the audience members traveled with the performers, they were constantly asked to define themselves among others. By inviting people to become aware of how they draw borders, the project attempted to visualize our unconscious and yet universal processes of identification and discrimination.
on public buses, streets, and Space EDGE, Tokyo, Japan
Upacara Bayu Ruci: Making Love with the Winds of Solo
[2004, Indonesia] site-specific performance, audience participatory ritual
I created and directed a ritual celebration of the wind spirits at a Javanese temple from the 15th Century on Mount Lawu in Central Java. With support from the Tourism Department of Karaganyar District Government, the event was realized in collaboration with Suprapto Suryodarmo (meditation movement artist), Daryl Wilson (visual artist), Kaori Okado (choreographer), a Javanese gamelan ensemble, and dancers from the local and international communities, as well as the mountain village residents and the audience. The audience was an integral part of the ritual, in which they were invited to “make love” with the wind using multiple senses, through listening, smelling, seeing, tasting, touching, and etc.
Sukuh Temple, Karanganyar, Indonesia.
Lagu Tanabata Tetanggaku
[2004, Indonesia] site-specific performance
Based on common mythologies and storytelling traditions from Japan and Indonesia, I organized a cross-cultural art festival entitled “Tanabata Festival” in collaboration with Mizuho Matsunaga (performance artist) and several community-based art organizations in Bandung, including Jendela Ide, Toko Buku Kecil, and Bandung Center for New Media Arts. I worked with local children to build instruments from found objects through fieldwork and composed “Lagu Tanabata Tetanggaku (My neighbors’ Tanabata song),” which was performed by the children at the Common Room.
Bandung Center for New Media Arts, Indonesia.
Play of the Winds
[2000, U.S.A] concert music
A Murmur
[1999, U.S.A] concert music
Allison’s Journey
[1999, U.S.A.] concert music
The Dance of A Tree God
[1998, U.S.A.] concert music
Soliloquy for a Lover I & II
[1997, U.S.A.] concert music
Emily’s Death and Emily’s Blue
[1996, U.S.A.] concert music
Filter Works:
© Tomoko Momiyama