Draft:Tomoko Mukaiyama

Tomoko Mukaiyama is a Japanese-Dutch pianist, artist and director. She is known for multimedial performances in which she combines performing and visual arts. Her work redefines the classical difference between composer, performer and audience by exploring their relationship and creative contributions as part of a performance’s broader artistic and thematic scope. Mukaiyama pioneered the piano recital into an open artistic form, combining music, architecture, dance, film, visual arts, photography and fashion with social themes.

Biography
Mukaiyama was born in Shingu in the prefecture Wakayama, Japan. She has lived in Amsterdam since the early 1990s. She is the widow of photographer and writer Philip Mechanicus, who died in 2005. Mukaiyama has a daughter, Kiriko.

Mukaiyama studied piano at the Musashino Music College in Tokyo, at the University of Indiana (Bloomington School of Music) and at the Sweelinck Conservatory in Amsterdam. She took private lessons in improvisation with pianist and composer Micha Mengelberg. Since 2020 she has been taking private lessons in electronic composition with the composer Yannis Kyriakides.

Artistic Career
In the 1990s, Mukaiyama began her career as a pianist in the Dutch and international ensemble culture. Through her playing, choice of repertoire, the dresses she wears and her interaction with the audience, it became clear that for her every concert is, always already, a multimedial expression for a multi-sensory, unrepeatable experience. Her independent approach to the piano recital inspired many composers to write for her. Compositions she premiered include, The memory of roses (1992) and TAO, part two of the Trilogie van de laatste dag (1998) of Louis Andriessen, Nederland, Muziekland (1994) of Martijn Padding, the Techno Etudes (2000) of Karen Tanaka, Night Butterflies (2013) and Bells (2019) of Alexander Raskatov, La Mode (2016) of Yannis Kyriakides, The Unchanging Sea (2016) of Michael Gordon.

After about a decade Mukaiyama widens her work as a pianist by creating performances that connect art and social themes. Amsterdam x Tokyo (2000) is her first work from this period. She connects the urban life of the two cities, as expressed through compositions of Japanese and Dutch composers, with a myriad of transparent bags with goldfish, one by one, hanging from the ceiling.

In for you (2005) Mukaiyama deconstructs the classical piano recital by separating the listener from the collective of listeners that forms an audience. for you is a concert of 15 minutes for one listener in a concert hall with one chair. The consequence is a deregulation of the codes and conventions of the recital for listener and pianist, which opens up to a felt intimacy with the concert space, with music, with pianist or listener and with oneself. for you (2005) thus involves a deconstruction of a piano recital that reopens and refigures musical issues of the agency of music, listener and pianist, of their relationship, of shared responsibility and of the acoustic space.

With wasted (2009) Mukaiyama created an installation-performance, a going together of art installation and musical performance, on the theme of women’s experiences with (in)fertility. The work resembles a cathedral of a thousand virginal white dresses forming a maze-like space through which visitors seek their way. In the center, where Mukaiyama improvises on Bach’s Goldberg Variations, hangs a torn and blood-soaked linen dress. The music and the dress reveal an abstract art work about the potentiality of life and death as an inescapable part of a woman’s life.

Nocturne (2011), is a multimedial work created as commemoration of the earthquake and tsunami catastrophe of 2011 in Japan. It is an installation-performance with two destroyed pianos combined with images of the destructed region and recorded sounds of children. Mukaiyama plays the piano, including work of Frédéric Chopin. Visitors, all standing around the work, became part of this public ceremony.

The audience in La Mode (2016) is immersed in the scene, becoming an integral part of a choreography where dancers start the backstage preparations and catwalk of a fashion show. It is a show in a show that evokes our commercial gaze, which, in fact, excludes people who produce the garments or who cannot afford them. The composition of Yannis Kyriakides and Mukaiyama’s playing accompanied the 10 dancers of the Spellbound Contemporary Ballet.

In pianist (2019) and figurante (2023) Mukaiyama uses dramaturgical-musical techniques to bring together the social and artistic and to get a grip on the resonance between different disciplines and the role they play in creating the musical and narrative line of a performance. In pianist (2019) Mukaiyama took the notion of human time regulation as starting point of her installation-performance. The performance in the Maison Hermès le Forum gallery in Tokyo started at the first day of spring. She gave piano recitals in an art installation of stacked and hanging grand pianos. Mukaiyama played around the clock for a period of 24 days: Each concert, lasting an hour and a half, started an hour later every day until the full 24 hours. The gallery was open only for the concert-hours every day.

figurante (2023) is staged in a 500 ㎡ warehouse space. The floor and walls are covered with plants and natural materials. The audience is invited into ‘Nature,’ a dark space where the boundary between the audience and the performer gradually breaks down. All included are acting as extra’s who are confronted with the necessity to care about each other, to care about the light, to care about the performer, even to care about the narrative-line of the performance of which all are a constitutive part.

Next to concerts and installation-performances Mukaiyama produces a series of music-cinema called A Live in collaboration with the Dutch cinematographer Reinier van Brummelen. Music-cinema are multimedia performances via livestream. It is a form of performance in which the creation of music, sound, images and film are performed as much as possible in real time to preserve the tension and creative indeterminacy of the live performance. The series consists of A live Vol. 1, 2 and 3, 2020, including TWO – in transit Hara Museum, 2021.

The openness of the artistic form of her work is affirmed in collaborations with very diverse artists, such as tech/noise-composer Merzbow and composer Atsuhiko Gondai in Amsterdam x Tokyo (2000), choreographer Jiří Kylián in Tar and Feathers (2006), composer Michael Gordon in The Unchanging Sea (2016), Architect Toyo Ito in La Mode (2016), composer Maxim Shalygin in GAKA the performance (2018) and GAKA the film (2020) and composer Agata Zubel in her Piano Concerto no. 2 (2022).

Awards
In 1991 Tomoko won the International Gaudeamus Interpreters Award and in 1993 she received the Muramatsu Prize for outstanding musical talent. In 2014 she received the Dioraphte dance prize for the production Shirokuro. In 2017 she received the Japan Dance Forum Award for the production La Mode and HOME.

Organisations
In 2007, the Tomoko Mukaiyama Foundation (TMF) was founded. Through the foundation, Tomoko produces multimedia performances independently or in collaborations. The foundation is supported by, among others, the Performing Arts Fund NL.

The Multus Foundation (MF) was founded in 2015 for performances in Japan. MF is supported by various Japanese government agencies.

In 2020, Culture All Nippon (CAN) was founded by Tomoko in collaboration with Hiroko Tsuboi-Friedman, UNESCO associate in the field of artistic expression and diversity. CAN is a network organization with the aim of promoting the arts in Japan by supporting artists and arts policy through organizing meetings, lectures and discussions

Selected Works

 * Amsterdam x Tokyo (2000)
 * for you (2005)
 * haar/haar (2005)
 * You and Bach (2006)
 * Sommer Reisen (2007)
 * Show me your second face (2007)
 * BABY in coproduction with photographer Masafumi Sanai (2007-2011)
 * wasted (2009)
 * SHOES' (2011)
 * Nocturne (2011)
 * SHIROKURO (2012)
 * Multus #1: Canto Ostinato (2012)
 * Project 88 (2013)
 * Falling (2013)
 * Super T-Market (2013)
 * East Shadow in coproduction with Jiri Kylian (2013)
 * Multus #2: Dance on Piano (2014)
 * Sonic Tapestry IV (2014)
 * Multus #3: Canto Ostinato for 4 pianos (2015)
 * Voor Elise (2015)
 * La Mode (2016)
 * Woman in the Dunes (2016)
 * HOME (2016)
 * GAKA (2019)
 * Pianist (2019)
 * ONE (2020)
 * A Live vol. 1, 2, 3 (2020)
 * GAKA film (2020)
 * End and Beginning (2020)
 * KOMANO (2021)
 * TWO - in transit Hara Museum (2021)
 * Love Song (2022)
 * SADO (2023)
 * figurante (2023)
 * EAT (2023)
 * Delirium (2023)

Recordings


 * Women composers (1994, Vinyl 2019)
 * Hello Pop Tart (1998)
 * Amsterdam x Tokyo (2000)
 * En Blanc et Noir (2009)
 * Raskatov, Stravinsky (2014)
 * Canto Ostinato (2015, vinyl 2019)
 * The unchanging Sea (2018)
 * La Mode (2021)

Video-livestream and Film


 * A Live vol. 1. SUPER T market (2020)
 * A Live vol. 2. Canto Ostinato (2020)
 * A Live vol. 3. Night at the Van Gogh Museum (2020)
 * GAKA-film (2020)
 * Two- in transit Hara Museum (2021)
 * Super T (e) market (2021)