For the single performance of the opera "LÀ-BAS OU ICI..." — composed by Keiko Fujiie in collaboration with musicians from Burkina Faso, and premiered at Expo 2025 in Osaka–Kansai — two composers spoke, and decided to set up this company. From here we carry on: composition for every scoring and form, music for the screen, writing, and the slow work, between West Africa and Japan, of holding culture not as a commodity, but as something passing from person to person.
Both co-representatives took their training in composition at Tokyo University of the Arts. Across some thirty years, each on their own and the two together, they have brought more than two hundred works into the world.
Beginning with the opera at the Burkina Faso National Day at Expo 2025 in Osaka–Kansai, we are at work, alongside people on the ground, on a place where West Africa and Japan meet through culture.
How a musician makes a life; copyright; how culture is handed on. The questions raised on the ground, brought into writing and into discussion, opened out to the wider world.
Two Composers
Three Pillars
Orchestra, chamber music, choral works, music for the screen, opera — answering, in each setting, what the work itself asks for. The composing of music remains, day by day, the centre of the work.
Works by Tagashira → Works by Fujiie →From the opera presented at the Burkina Faso National Day at Expo 2025, through the work with the city of Kashihara, to the Traditional Music Outreach Programme in the public primary schools of Ouagadougou. A bridge, laid slowly, between West Africa and Japan.
Burkina Faso Project →From the experience of years on the ground, we keep open a place to think — on the lives of musicians, on copyright, on the transmission of culture — through writing, research, and public discussion.
Recent Activities
On Burkina Faso National Day at Expo 2025, we presented the opera as our own programme. Under the Cabinet Secretariat's International Expo Exchange Programme, Burkina Faso entered into a partnership with the city of Kashihara in Nara Prefecture, and some seventy pupils of Kashihara Municipal Kanahashi Primary School took part as guest performers.
In the autumn of the same year, under a commission from the city of Kashihara, musicians invited from Burkina Faso gave teaching and provided new compositions for the fifth-year pupils at Kanahashi Primary School, who then performed at the Kashihara–Takaichi Children's Concert.
The pilot phase of the Traditional Music Outreach Programme is under preparation. Through our local partner ADEC/BF-J (the Association for the Development of Cultural Exchange between Burkina Faso and Japan), lessons of three months begin in four schools in the Bissigjin area of the 8th district.
Together with the Research Centre for Arts Resources at Kyoto City University of Arts, preparations are also under way for a workshop and research meeting on the line where music that is not written down meets the institutions of copyright.
