Daryl Jamieson

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Daryl Jamieson was born in 1980 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He began his formal musical training at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario with Glenn Buhr and Linda Catlin Smith, before moving to the UK to study with Diana Burrell at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama and then with Nicola LeFanu at the University of York. He also spent a research year at the Tokyo University of the Arts, studying composition and Japanese music under Jo Kondo as a Japanese Government Scholar. He is currently based in Zushi, Japan, and works as a researcher at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto. His music is published by Da Vinci Edition, Osaka, and is also available at the Canadian Music Centre. He has written music criticism for TEMPO (UK) and Nutida Musik (Sweden), and was the English translator of Jo Kondo’s book homo audiens (MusikTexte, 2022). His first monograph, Experimental Music and Japanese Aesthetics: Silence, Nature and Hollow Listening, will be published by Bloomsbury in September 2026.

Jamieson’s work focuses on place, perception, and memory. His preoccupations with musical time (i.e. rhythm) and the psychogeography of historic locations are heavily influenced by his study and practice of nō theatre and koto, as well as his study of Japanese poetry and art. One of his largest works to date, a trilogy of musical theatre pieces called the Vanitas Series, received the 2018 Toshi Ichiyanagi Contemporary Prize. Ichiyanagi called it ‘an epic musical work of extraordinarily elegance and contemporary topical perspective’. Field recording and site-specific work has been very important to his recent output, especially in the utamakura and Descants series. Other major works include three string quartets (umoregi, warm stones and monkish fires), chamber and orchestral works (the most recent being 2016’s KoNoSo for 25 instruments), many pieces for Japanese instruments (including a shakuhachi concerto, and multiple solo and chamber works for koto, shō, shakuhachi, biwa, and shamisen), solo keyboard works, and many songs. His music has been performed across Europe, North America, and Japan by the Quatuor Bozzini, the Thin Edge New Music Collective, the Orchestre National de Lorraine, Ensemble Muromachi, Ko Ishikawa, Miyama McQueen, Satoko Inoue, Cheryl Duvall, and Kimihiro Yasaka.

He founded the intercultural music theatre company Atelier Jaku in 2013. He was a co-founder and the composer-in-residence of mmm…, a Tokyo-based trio dedicated to introducing the music of young composers from around the world to Japanese audiences, as well as a founding member of the composers collective Music Without Borders.

He is also active as a researcher, writing on the aesthetics of the Kyoto School of 20th-century Japanese philosophers, as well as contemporary music and spirituality. In addition to winning the 2018 Toshi Ichiyanagi Contemporary Prize, he has received grants and awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, and the Japanese Ministry of Education (MEXT), among others.