SAIKI, Yumi

Born in 1964, Yumi Saiki studied at Aichi University of Arts before travelling to France in 1991 to study from the following year at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. In 1995 she graduated with the Premier Prix from the Paris Conservatoire (CNSMDP) and in 2005 studied at IRCAM. She was been awarded prizes in the Japan Music Competition and the Akutagawa Compositions Awards. She has received many commissions from leading performers and institutions including Music Tomorrow, Music from Japan, the Suntory Foundation for the Arts, the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra and the Nagoya Philharmonic Orchestra. Her major works have been performed by orchestras including the NHK Symphony Orchestra, Ensemble l’Itinéraire, Alter Ego and the Tokyo Sinfonietta and other leading contemporary music ensembles in Japan and overseas at music festivals and concerts presented in locations such as Darmstadt, Caën, Utrecht (Gaudeamus Festival), Yogyakarta, Taegu, Seoul and Takefu.
Concerts featuring her chamber works were held in 2014 at the Gifu Collection of Modern Arts (GICOMA). A double CD album of works by her released in 2015 received special recommendations from the Rekōdo Geijutsu music magazine and the Asahi Shimbun newspaper. As the composer featured in Composers’ Profile II, a new orchestral work was commissioned from her by Suntory Hall and premiered in November 2018. In March 2019 she was invited to take up the position of artist-in-residence at the Music from Japan Festival 2019 in the United States. A concert of her chamber works was held in New York and she lectured at Columbia University.
Her major works included the Insect Music and Transformation series based on the theme of temporal structures in music. In recent years she has been experimenting with concepts of musical time based on her own unique standpoint involving extra-musical topics and religious subjects.
She currently teaches at the Tokyo University of Arts and in undergraduate and postgraduate programs at Kunitachi College of Music.
Yumi Saiki is a member of the Japan Federation of Composers, the Japan Society for Contemporary Music, JASRAC and Ensemble Contemporary α.