Keiko Fujiie

Profile

Born in 1963 in Kyoto. Educated at the Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai), where she completed the undergraduate course in composition and went on to take her Master's in composition.

In 1995, she became the first woman to receive the Otaka Prize, awarded by the NHK Symphony Orchestra for the previous year's outstanding symphonic work, for her orchestral piece Beber for Orchestra. She received the prize a second time in 2000, for Guitar Concerto No. 2 "Koisucho". She is among the very few Japanese composers to have been awarded the Otaka Prize twice. In 1996, her monologue opera Niña de Cera was presented with the Kenzo Nakajima Award.

Her work has not been confined to one form, moving between orchestra, chamber music, choral works, and opera. Her orchestral writing includes Piano Concerto No. 1 "Memories of January" (premiered by the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra in 2000, with pianist Kyoko Tabe under Naoto Otomo) and Organ Concerto "At the Tomb of Fra Angelico" (premiered in 2006, commissioned by the International Organ Competition Musashino–Tokyo). She has also written a substantial body of music for guitar, much of it for the guitarist Kazuhito Yamashita.

Between 1992 and 1993, she was in residence in New York with the Asian Cultural Council, and returned in 1998 to premiere In Their Shoes, a collaboration of music and dance. For about ten years from 2001, alongside her family she formed the Kazuhito Yamashita Family Quintet, an ensemble that was invited to international guitar festivals.

Gagaku — the ancient court music of Japan — has been a continued subject of her study, and she also composes for gagaku ensemble. In 2017, she was commissioned by Music of Remembrance (Seattle) for Wilderness Mute, a song cycle drawing on the words of witnesses and survivors of the atomic blasts at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In recent years, her work has gathered particularly around opera: her opera A Vermilion Calm (蝕) was premiered in Poland in September 2020.

Since 2020 she has been based in Burkina Faso, in West Africa. In collaboration with traditional musicians on the ground, she composed the opera LÀ-BAS OU ICI..., which received its Japan premiere on Burkina Faso National Day at Expo 2025 in Osaka–Kansai. In the same year, together with Tsutomu Tagashira, she established FT Music Office LLC and assumed the position of Co-Representative. In 2026, she was named President of ADEC/BF-J — the Association for the Development of Cultural Exchange between Burkina Faso and Japan — founded on the ground.