🎀 Cute Composer Series: World Cancer Support Month — Living Alongside Cancer 🎗️✨🎶 Ryuichi Sakamoto (1952–2023) was a Japanese composer, pianist, and electronic music pioneer whose creative life spanned Yellow Magic Orchestra, Oscar and Grammy-winning film scores (The Last Emperor, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, The Revenant), and some of the most quietly devastating solo piano music ever recorded 🎹🌿 In 2014 he was diagnosed with throat cancer — treated, went into remission, returned to work. Then in 2021 came a second diagnosis: rectal cancer, stage 4, spreading to his lungs. He wrote publicly: "From now on, I will be living alongside cancer. But I am hoping to make music for a little while longer." He kept his promise 💙 His final album 12 — released on his birthday, January 17, 2023 — is a collection of piano pieces dated by when he wrote them, each one a page from his audio diary of living with cancer. The sound of his own breathing, nasal and labored, is audible on some tracks. He died March 28, 2023, aged 71. Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023) was the most celebrated Finnish composer of her generation — ranked the greatest living composer in a 2019 BBC poll, her opera L'Amour de Loin the first staged work by a female composer at the Metropolitan Opera since 1903 🌟 In February 2021 she was diagnosed with glioblastoma — aggressive, incurable brain cancer. Her family stated: "With characteristically strong determination, she fought daily to both slow its growth and live fully." The tumors were located in the area controlling motor skills on her right side, affecting her walking and speech — but not, until the very end, her mind 🧠✨ She continued working. She attended the UK premiere of her opera Innocence at the Royal Opera House in April 2023 in a wheelchair. Her final work — a trumpet concerto titled HUSH — was completed before she died and premiered in Helsinki in August 2023, two months after her passing 🎺 She died on June 2, 2023, aged 70. 👉 Which one's music do you want to explore more? VOTE BELOW👇& follow @daixcompose for more Cute Composer spotlights 💙 Recordings: 🎶 Ryuichi Sakamoto: 20211201 — from the album 12, his cancer audio diary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGNiMbkNDo0 🎶 Kaija Saariaho: INNOCENCE — excerpt from the Metropolitan Opera https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tQ2tknW5sE #ryuichisakamoto #kaijasaariaho #cancersupportmonth #worldcancerday #classicalmusic
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