Akari Komura (b.1996) is a Japanese composer-vocalist. She grew up in Tokyo and spent her teenage years in Jakarta, Indonesia. From an early age, Akari has been involved in performing arts through playing the piano, singing, and dancing modern ballet.
Her interest in somatic practice and embodied consciousness is central to her creative process. Akari imagines her score as an invitation for the performers to contemplatively engage with listening and soundmaking. She is interested in curating a participatory performance space that invites a community of performers and audience for a collective and ritualistic act of listening and soundmaking. Akari’s artistic exploration is oriented towards heightening awareness and transforming our perception of the sonic environment. The works of Pauline Oliveros, Yoko Ono, and Hildegard Westerkamp are especially influential to her creative process.
Her breadth of work spans chamber ensemble, multimedia electronics, and interdisciplinary collaborations with dancers, visual artists, and architects.
Akari’s works have been presented at the Atlantic Music Festival, Composers Conference, International Composition Institute of Thailand, New Music Gathering, Nief-Norf, MATA Festival, Montreal Contemporary Music Lab (Canada), Penn State New Music Festival, soundSCAPE (Italy), soundpedro, and VU Symposium.
Recent highlights include receiving a commission by the Kinds of Kings as a 2020 Bouman Composer Fellow and premiered by the Rubiks Collective. In 2023 spring, Akari was selected by American Composers Orchestra EarShot Reading to work with The Next Festival of Emerging Artists on a new string orchestra piece, Inhabited by air.
Akari holds an M.M. in Composition from the University of Michigan (recipient of the EXCEL Enterprise Fund and Sonic Scenographies Research Grant) and a B.A. in Vocal Arts from the University of California, Irvine. Akari is currently a Ph.D. composition student at the University of California San Diego.
