MATSUMOTO Mayuko

Profile

Born in Nagano, Japan in 1994. Lives and works in Kyoto. Graduated with an MA in Composition from Nihon University College of Arts, Tokyo, Japan in 2019.
As a composer, her practice has expanded beyond concert music into interdisciplinary works, including sound installations and performances that explore the listener’s spatial presence. She also facilitates workshops and composes for film and dance.

Recent activities:
2026 Music provided for “Sekai ha utsukushii to darekaga itta,” Short film directed by Ryutaro Nakagawa 
2026 Concert “Sparrow: Wings to Fly the Sky,” ROHM Theater Kyoto
2025 Concert “the ash air,“ school (Tokyo)
2025 Solo exhibition “Composition Lisning to Oto-Shakkei - Borrowed Soundscape from Takeno,” Kitamae-kan (Hyogo)
2024 Orchestral work “the stars in flux,” broadcast premiere, NHK FM Radio “Contemporary Music” (Tokyo)  

Recent awards:
2019 1st Prize, at the 88th Music competition of Japan
2019 The Audience Prize at the 36th JSCM award for composer
2019 Osamu Yukawa Prize from Nihon University College of Arts 

About works / performance

For Matsumoto, composition begins with active listening—interpreting and reconfiguring relationships with others, as well as the social and spatial dynamics inherent in sound itself. She questions the Western art music paradigm centered on strict musical reproducibility, conceiving the “score” instead as an imperfect mediation. Through works such as ateno score, a graphic notation designed to evoke new imaginations from the loss of documented meaning, various elements—oni (demon) masks, windows, stairways, video, and even the ”listening body” itself—are presented as imperfect mediating systems. Through these expanded scores, her practice examines how musical acts or phenomena are transmitted, interpreted, and physically experienced.