Miya Masaoka

Miller Theatre commissioned the acclaimed writer and musician Tim Munro to write profiles of the composers featured onstage this season, with the goal of connecting listeners to both the creator and their music.

The dust and the noise

“There is always this question of sound versus noise, of chaos versus cohesion,” says Miya Masaoka. “What it feels like to play a pitch compared to what it feels like to create white noise.” In The Dust and the Noise, Masaoka attempts to locate a kind of liminal zone.

“Taking a slice of the moment between these extremes,” she says, “and then creating this piece out of the transitions. The ideas going from this wild chaos to something that still embraces cohesion and logic.”

In The Dust, a quartet of instruments attempts a kind of conversation. A cello scrubs furiously, cut off by ringing metals. The strings call frantically at each other over sounds from the belly of the piano. A piano shouts in bass tones to the bafflement of the other instruments. Peace often seems beyond reach.

“Listeners will each find a satisfaction somewhere in this piece,” says Masaoka. “Just as our contemporary ears have a different sense of what is musically satisfying from ears in the past, it constantly changes for us. One week you like something, and then the next week it is not your jam.”

Masaoka aims for a certain whimsy in works like The Dust and the Noise. “I definitely want to make it fun. I believe in that enjoyment and fun-ness—creating something that that keeps a listener present, engaged.”

Origins

Masaoka’s first instrument was the piano, but even on this most “classical” of instruments her curiosity took hold. “As a crazy kid in third grade, I took my kitten and put her on the piano. When she hit a note, I would try to write it down. And another note with her paw and I would try to keep up.” This kind of experimentation was “part of the flow of my life right from the beginning.”

Across childhood, Masaoka taught herself many different instruments, immersed herself in many styles of music. But piano was a constant. “High school can be a very difficult time,” she says. “The piano was a way of escaping high school angst.”

In college, Masaoka supported herself as a gigging jazz musician, and fell deeply for a plucked instrument with a very deep history, the koto. She also studied a style of Japanese court music, gagaku, from a master whose lineage stretched back more than a millennia.

“One thing that was relevatory about the koto,” says Masaoka, “was touching the strings directly—being able to manipulate the pitch and timbre with the fingers, and pulling, lifting, and scraping. This direct relationship to the strings was a tactile, somatic experience.”

It reminded her of her first instrument. “It felt as if I was playing inside the piano—like bypassing the priest and going right to God.”

Sine waves

A sine wave is a single frequency, the simplest musical tone. All sounds are built from a combination of sine tones. “As the basis of all sounds,” says Masaoka, “when it comes to creating work from the organic materials of sound itself, it is very natural to use the sine wave.”

Sine waves have been part of Masaoka’s practice since she was an undergrad at San Francisco State University. “It feels to me as simple as using a pencil—the basics of making a mark on a paper.” These sounds are also infinitely malleable. “I can filter it, play with the amplitude.”

Sine tones are present all around us. “It is a part of our modern lives, the world of apartments and houses. We hear the sound of light bulbs, refrigerators. It is almost like we are starting to hear tinnitus in our ears, this constant hum. I am trying to create something out of our environment that is meaningful to us.”

Mapping a Joyful Path

Masaoka was commissioned to write this solo violin work for Olivia de Prato, the Mivos Quartet’s first violinist. “Olivia is an extraordinary virtuoso, and also open to different ways of work. She’s so intuitive—I just start explaining something, and I don't even have to finish because she knows what I'm talking about.”

At first, there is a hum. A sine tone. Tentatively, a violin joins, exploring its relationship to the hum, searching, seeking. At first calm, then agitated—short statements cut off by silence. Slow pulsing rubs against sine tones. Some uncertainty, some desperation, some hope.

Coming out of the end of COVID, Masaoka was searching for joy wherever she could. “All of this time in complete isolation, losing friends and family—a life itself is never easy. You have to find a way out of it. We need a way to map ourselves out, to be able to survive.”

Threads

Across her long career, Masaoka has found home in many artistic landscapes: created installations and concert works, collaborated with electronic, acoustic, and even non-human music-makers; toured extensively as a jazz improvisor and composed hundreds of hours of notated music.

What unites this work is curiosity. “There is always an inquiry,” says Masaoka. “Whether it is microtones or polyrhythms or having musicians use vibrators in unusual ways, or new playing techniques, or interacting with plants—a project isn’t worth doing unless I really feel like there is something for me to learn.”

The specific discipline is irrelevant. “Over a lifetime,” she says, “there are different manifestations of your inquiry and what becomes satisfying. The platform is not so important because, like a river, you go where it takes you. To add something to the world that wasn't there before.”

Her work can take strong political overtones, but Masaoka is quick to distance herself from the label of “political artist.” “There is a political thread for everything, all art,” she says. Instead, Masaoka draws comparison to the sciences.

“I am always asking questions like, ‘Why does this happen?’ ‘Why is there a shadow when you cast a light?’ ‘Why does it sound like this in a spatial environment?’ ‘Why does life act in this way?’ These kinds of questions are interesting enough to begin to figure things out…”

The Horizon Leans Forward

Wisps of sound—a shudder, a fragile chord, a distant thrumming—float in and out of focus, consciousness. Gestures gather clarity, drifting towards us. Then losing definition, drifting away.

Masaoka was living at the American Academy of Rome in 2022-23, as the winner of the Rome Prize. She spent the year writing music, but also let her curiosity wander. She read her way through the rich archives and library at the American Academy, with a particular interest in historical notions of three-dimensional space.

Italy in the 15th Century was one birthplace of perspective in visual art. Prior to that, there was an understanding of how to represent three dimensions, but convention dictated that the rules were ignored. “Later there began to be trees in the background,” says Masaoka, “and we begin to use these terms foreground, background.”

The Horizon Leans Forward began with a question: What would be the sonic equivalent of perspective and vanishing point? “There are some interesting overlapping of ideas around space with light and space with sound,” says Masaoka. “Sound vanishes when it's far enough away from you. There’s a disappearance of the sound.”

Masaoka first explored these ideas in electronic form. Working at EMPAC—the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute —she developed work with multiple loudspeakers, playing with ideas of sound moving in space. For her work in Rome, she translated some of that work into acoustic terms.

With The Horizon Leans Forward, Masaoka experimented with the ways dynamics and timbre can hint at three-dimensionality. “I was sculpting a sense of space within the music—with the tapers, the dynamics, the nuances, the way strings are touched, plucked, bowed.”

Soon after arriving at the American Academy, Masaoka learned that her room was the site where Galileo first displayed his most famous and controversial invention, the telescope. She also discovered that Galileo’s father was himself an influential and status quo-challenging musician. In their own ways, both leaning the horizon of our world further forward.

Alone

Composition is a solitary pursuit. “I very much have to work alone,” says Masaoka. “Maybe I have worked on a composition alone for nine months, and then I only get a short time with the musicians—maybe three days if I’m lucky.”

But Masaoka still considers this time alone, dreaming and writing, as a kind of partnership. “I am always thinking about the performer. It is still very much a collaboration, because at the end of the day they have to play it. It is almost like a remote collaboration.”

The pace of her compositional work is quite different to earlier periods in her career. “The hustle was great during certain decades of my life. I love the amazing people that I have worked with, and it still informed many things about my work.”

Improvisation

Masaoka is an inventive, experienced and celebrated improvisor. Yet she draws a distinction between her work as an improvisor and as a composer. “Improvisation is a very particular practice,” she says. “It has very different considerations and values and sets of practices.”

But at several points in this program Masaoka merges the two. She points to the different quality of attention that improvisation can give. “It requires this multifaceted listening and sound production—players have to listen to themselves and listen to the group.”

Into the Landscape opens with an improvised prologue, while in The Dust and the Noise there are points where the players improvise with the shapes and materials. “It is a really different thing to improvise with objects and to improvise with a musical instrument you have studied your whole life.”

Into the Landscape of the Shaking Inner Chôra

In Ancient Greek, the word chôra means place: location, city, life-moment. Philosophers, beginning with Plato, added complexity to that definition, connecting the word to creation, to being, to childbirth.

Philosopher Julia Kristeva (“one of my favorite people,” says Masaoka) uses the word to describe the first six months of a child’s life. “She talks about the chôra as a pre-linguistic state,” says Masaoka, where no separation exists between the child and the parent. “It is a pure state—taking in what you can, without shame, before you know good or bad.”

Into the Landscape of the Shaking Inner Chôra aims to capture something of the essence of that state. “This piece has to do with these vibratory sensations of the chôra. In utero we feel this rhythm of the heartbeat of the mother. And then that stays with you for the first year of life.”

During a three-minute prologue to the piece, the musicians are on the floor. Using vibrators, they explore the resonance of different materials: acrylic, cardboard, different sizes and shapes. Different pressure to create different sounds.

“They explore these sounds as children. There is a kind of rhythmic sense, a drive, that is very chaotic. It is a time of desires.” Even when they return in their seats, Masaoka’s notated music still uses the vibrators at different times, in highly rhythmic, precise ways.

Sound art

Masaoka has a title that might seem incongruous for a creator so closely connected with the musical world: Associate Professor of Professional Practice in Visual Arts at Columbia University School of the Arts. Yet Masaoka sees no separation between sight and sound in her work.

By way of example she mentions a solo pianist. “They make gestures with their arms—they are visual, but in a kind of way aural. They take the sound and they draw it out, and you psychically ‘hear’ the sound elongated. There is something about this visual aspect that brings different ideas in the music together.”

Masaoka is director of Columbia’s Sound Art MFA program, an intensive two-year program. “I am always learning from these students. It is about bringing them to become the best artists that they can. They have such great energy, they come in hungry to learn and try things."

Like breathing

“I’m not a young person anymore,” says Masaoka. “I've been creating music, creating visual art for decades and decades. I can't help but be an artist. It just happens, and I have no choice. To do this or to do that—it is like breathing.

“One of my first memories was playing a plastic saxophone in the bathtub. They keys had different colors and you press the colors and then you could play tunes that I would recognize. I couldn't believe it. It was like magic.

“Experiences like that just are really deeply embedded in my psyche. Music was really a way of communication—on a very primal level. With each work I am trying to get to a kernel of truth.”

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