FGM Turns 200! with Haruka Fujii - Part 1

For Good Measure, by Ensemble for These Times (E4TT)
Episode 209: FGM Turns 200! with Haruka Fujii - Part 1

Looking for a way to listen to diverse creators and to support equity in the arts? Tune in weekly to For Good Measure!

In this week's episode, we continue FGM Turns 200!, a mini-series where we talk to Ensemble for These Times' members and past guest artists. Today, we are joined by E4TT’s guest percussionist Haruka Fujii, who we spoke to in April 2025. If you enjoyed today’s conversation and want to know more about Haruka Fujii, check her out here: https://www.harukafujii.com/.

This podcast is made possible by grants from the California Arts Council, SF Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and generous donors like you. Want to support For Good Measure and E4TT? Make a tax-deductible donation or sign up for our newsletter, and subscribe to the podcast!

Intro music: “Trifolium” by Gabriela Ortiz, performed by E4TT (Ilana Blumberg, violin; Abigail Monroe, cello; Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Below the Surface: Music by Women Composers,” January 29, 2022
Outro music: “Lake Turkana” by Marcus Norris, performed by E4TT (Margaret Halbig, piano), as part of “Alchemy,” October 15, 2021

Transcription courtesy of Otter.ai.
Buzzsprout: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1903729/episodes/19269841

Co-Producer, Host, and E4TT co-founder: Nanette McGuinness
Co-Producer and Audio Engineer: Stephanie M. Neumann
Podcast Cover Art: Brennan Stokes
Interns: Renata Volchinskaya, Sam Mason, Christy Xu

Transcript

Nanette McGuinness  00:00

[INTRO MUSIC] Welcome to For Good Measure, an interview series celebrating diverse composers and other creative artists. I'm Nanette McGuinness, Artistic Executive Director of Ensemble for These Times. In this week's episode, we are joined by guest percussionist Haruka Fujii. [INTRO MUSIC ENDS]

Nanette McGuinness  00:28

Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, Haruka.

Haruka Fujii  00:31

Thank you for having me. It's been really, really exciting.

Nanette McGuinness  00:35

Yeah, so let's start out. Please tell me about your musical path.

Haruka Fujii  00:41

Musical past, so I grew up as a daughter of a marimba player. My mother, Mutsuko Fujii, is a known marimba player in Japan, actually, and I give like a full, full an hour and a half master class about history of Japan. I won't do that right now, but history of marimba in Japan. It, we have a really quite interesting and distinguished pass of how we developed marimba, and my mother was one of the generation of, we like, I like to call them marimba goddesses female marimba players who actually really helped the development of the rise of marimba...

Nanette McGuinness  01:29

mmhmm

Haruka Fujii  01:29

...instruments and music in Japan in 60s to 80s and my mother was one of the early time really passionate contributor as a player, and along with this really famous marinist called Keiko Abe, and my mother was Keiko Abe's first generation student, so yeah, and and yeah, we have a really quite amazing array of marimba players who represents that era of Japanese contemporary music, and a lot of composers really wanted to write for this instrument that they thought this is going to be the new star instruments of the classical music, and yeah, my mother worked with so many different composers of that time. She has hundreds of commission pieces that's written for her. So I grew up with her, I mean, as a daughter of a marimba player, and when I was about three or so, I started playing piano, but marimba was also something that took my mother away as a child, so I was resisting to not go to the same instruments for the longest time until high school, so I went to a museum high school as a piano major, and then realizing piano, I loved playing piano, but piano is also a very solo instrument. Yes, you can do a trio and accompaniment, but I wanted to do more timber music. I wanted to make music with people, collaborating with people, and then I go home, and my mother would be, no, you rehearsing percussion ensemble, and I'm looking so fun, and so I kind of gave up and started practicing on my own, and I changed my major when I was sophomore high school to become a percussionist, and it was interesting, my mother, my mother told me she actually got upset that first she was just, you don't, you don't take this seriously, you don't know how hard it is, you will never make money, you will be carrying instruments all the time, yeah, but she was, you know, worried, because at that time, that especially that generation, it was really hard for her to make, you know, the past establish the career as a progressionist, which she did beautifully. So she was worried for me, but well, I pursued and went to the best music college school in Japan, and after that I went on to my dream pass of studying in the US. So I went to Juilliard, and after that, we, you know, my mother started really, you know, seeing how serious I was, and we still played together, and, and, yeah, she is now 76 but she still can play like I can't sound like her. She is still really a role model for me, and I'm really grateful that we can play together. Anyway, so that was the beginning, and then came to the US. In 1998 went to Juilliard, spent several years of starving musicians and freelance musician. I played in music halls, to you know, freelance orchestra, to anything that was available, and along the along the way of really trying not to play anything, some composer, Tan Dun, a Chinese composer, told me playing in this really smallest, like really not known freelance orchestra, he just happened to be in the audience, and and he asked me to if I would be interested in learning his percussion focused opera and concerto, and I was like, "yeah," so that really started giving me really amazing experience of working with different orchestras and learning different style of what percussion could be, his his approach of percussion concerto was all about organic materials, he calls it the paper, water, and ceramics, and so that really opened up the, you know, different, like a defining what percussion could be, that was the beginning of it, and after that I kept meeting the right people. It's all about the connection, right, the right people and right musicians who led me to be exposed to different genres of music, different group of musicians, including Silk Road Ensemble, which is founded by Yo-Yo Ma 25 years ago, now led by the genius, really amazing artist Rhiannon Giddens. So I've been involved with Silk Road about crazy. I used to think I was the like halfway comer, and then I was the baby, but now now it's like it's been 15 years, all years or so I've been involved, and about a year ago I became Associate Artistic Director. So, I've been...

Nanette McGuinness  07:11

Congrats.

Haruka Fujii  07:13

Thank you very much. I've been really lucky to be the conduit between this genius mind, Rhiannon Gibbons, our Artistic Director, connecting this idea with the about 35 artists from all over the world, and we have office members and board members. It's an amazing organization to work with. So, that's a latest, latest, and some sort of main, main thing that keeps me busy. Other than that, I still have the passion of contemporary percussion music development, and then I love working with composers, so I work with composers from all over the world, locally and out of town, globally also. And then lately, so that Bay Area is has been about 10 years, and I love living here, and I just feel so much potential in this city that people are hungry for good music and good events and good cultural presentations, and I feel like people are hungry. Also, people are well educated to, to appreciate these, you know, good things. That's, that's, that's presented, and one of the efforts for me to really, you know, give energy to the city, San Francisco, is to provide more events like what you're doing, I think it's really important what you're doing, and yeah, and my I'm I also started my own version, it's called Nippon Kobo, which, which started last last fall, we are having, we're going through our inaugural year. The second event is coming up in May, but this is a, this is an event series that introduces the combination of music and cultural presentation from contemporary Japan. So, this is something that I'm really passionate about, and yeah, my career has has taken from the, you know, piano, you know, piano player to percussion, to now I spend a lot of time, you know, the producer role and the designing of the program role and other administrative...

Nanette McGuinness  09:37

[laughs] Yeah.

Haruka Fujii  09:38

Administrative part of making the music events and cultural event happen, which has been a really interesting journey, and then I... I love them all.

Nanette McGuinness  09:48

Yeah, interesting and eye-opening, I think [laughs] at least.

Haruka Fujii  09:51

Yeah, definitely.

Nanette McGuinness  09:53

Yeah, would you spell the name of your group for our listeners who might not have understood it, so that we can make sure. Because we also have a transcript that we include and we want to spell it correctly as well.

Haruka Fujii  10:04

Oh, thank you for that. Yeah, it's called Nippon Kobo, n i p p o n k o b o, and it means... Nippon is another way of saying Japan.

Nanette McGuinness  10:15

Yeah.

Haruka Fujii  10:16

And Kobo is a workshop or like laboratory.

Nanette McGuinness  10:20

Ah.

Haruka Fujii  10:20

Yeah, I took this name from this really exciting avant-garde movement that happened between all artists in 60, like early 60, yeah, it was called Jikken Kōbō, Tōru Takemitsu was part of it, yeah, the really well-known poets and stage directors and sculptors and all kinds of really exciting people were just getting together to, you know, collaborate and, you know, make their own identity in that early rise of contemporary music time, and that was that, is sort of an inspiration I took from.

Nanette McGuinness  11:05

Yeah, no, that's very cool. One of the things I love about San Francisco is the openness, you know, as you say, people do want good events and cultural events, and they're open to new and exciting, and hungering for new and exciting, I would agree, and the collaborative nature of the artistic scene here as well, that's strong.

Haruka Fujii  11:28

Yeah, I can't agree more. It's, it's every time I, I, you know, participate in any like contemporary music concert, people are just so engaged and inspired to learn. I love that atmosphere and energy I get from the audiences, and I have to tell you, I believe it was 2016 one of the major tours of Silk Road that was... that still Yo-Yo Ma was the Artistic Director at the time, and about 13 or 14 members of Silk Road, including Yo-Yo, had this big US summer festival tour that started in Tanglewood, and all these, you know, huge outdoor event spaces, and we had 10 cities, we hit 10 cities and started in Tanglewood, Wolf Trap, and then came to Greek Theatre, also, and then ended at the in LA, the big...

Nanette McGuinness  12:30

Oh, the Hollywood Bowl?

Haruka Fujii  12:31

Hollywood Bowl, yes, we ended in Hollywood Bowl, and of all these 10 cities, Berkeley Greek Theatre was the best one I was, I was just so proud of Berkeley Greek Theatre, and the audience, you can tell I, that was a time I just started living, just a few years into this, this area, and then I, I came, came to Greek Theatre as a local, but as a part of Silk Road Ensemble, and then the how, how we, you know, as we come out to the stage, just this whole energy from the audience is like immediate, like we are so welcomed, and people are waiting, and yeah, we got so excited that out of all these 10 cities we only had one encore ready, but then we wanted to play more, so there was a funny scene on the on the stage, like, okay, let's do second encore. It's like this side of the stage saying let's play this, and that side is stages is saying let's play that. There is like a whole discussion happened on the stage to decide, which was really interesting, but that says a lot, you know. Um, yeah, I think, like, long story to just really prove what you were saying, that Bay Area locals are just really engaged and inspiring audience, and I love that we're in this, in the spot to provide good music to them.

Nanette McGuinness  13:59

Yeah, so which encore did you pick, or how did you decide, or did you do both?

Haruka Fujii  14:05

[laughs] I forget which one we went with, but then, for percussionist, every time somebody says we have to set up differently, you know?

Nanette McGuinness  14:12

Oh gosh!

Haruka Fujii  14:13

So [laughing] percussionists started running around in the back of the stage, it was funny. [laughs]

Nanette McGuinness  14:19

[laughs] That would have been funny, you know, the Greek Theatre is actually pretty close to where I live, and when there's a big concert there, we can hear the cheering and the clapping sometimes, and we can occasionally hear the music as well. It's fun.

Haruka Fujii  14:31

Oh, that's amazing. You might have heard us running around. I might have.

Nanette McGuinness  14:36

You're right, we did live here at that point. So, who knows?

Haruka Fujii  14:39

Who knows, really? Yeah.

Nanette McGuinness  14:43

[OUTRO MUSIC] Thank you for listening to For Good Measure, and a special thank you to our guest, Haruka Fujii, for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to our podcast by clicking on the subscribe button and support us by sharing it with your friends, posting about it on social media and leaving us a rating and a review. To learn more about E4TT, our concert season online and in the Bay Area, or to make a tax-deductible donation, please visit us at www.E4TT.org. This podcast is made possible by grants from the California Arts Council, the San Francisco Arts Commission, Grants for the Arts, and generous donors like you. For Good Measure is produced by Nanette McGuinness and Ensemble for These Times, and design by Brennan Stokes, with special thanks to Co-producer and Audio Engineer Stephanie M. Neumann. Remember to keep supporting equity in the arts and tune in next week "for good measure." [OUTRO MUSIC ENDS]