The Oscar-winning composer, who died after a long battle with cancer, continued to work until his death.

Ryuichi Sakamotothe Japanese composer who helped bring electronic music to the world as a member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra before writing some of the most beloved film scores of the past half-century, died on Tuesday at the age of 71 after a battle with cancer.

“While undergoing treatment for cancer discovered in June 2020, Sakamoto continued to create work in his home studio whenever his health permitted,” Sakamoto’s management Commons wrote in a statement. statement announcing his death. “He lived with the music until the very end. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to his fans and everyone who supported his activities, as well as to the medical professionals in Japan and the United States who did everything in their power to cure him.

Born in Tokyo in 1952, Sakamoto first rose to prominence in the Japanese music community in the mid-1970s. After years of working as a session musician, he co-founded seminal electronic pop band Yellow Magic. Orchestra in 1977. The band quickly became famous for their experimentation with synthesizers and are widely credited with helping electronic music become a mainstream global art form.

A lifelong film buff, Sakamoto quickly turned his success into a career as a film score composer. He won the Oscar for Best Original Score for his work on Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” with David Byrne and Cong Su, and won widely acclaimed for his second collaboration with the director on “The Sheltering Sky”. He went on to work with many of cinema’s most famous authors throughout his career, including Brian de Palma, Luca Guadagnino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Sakamoto’s life and career took a turn in 2014 when the composer was diagnosed with stage III throat cancer. He took a brief hiatus from songwriting to undergo chemotherapy, but quickly returned to work as soon as he was physically able. His attempts to stay creative during his illness were captured in the documentary “Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda”.

In 2015, he agreed to score Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “The Revenant” despite his fragile condition due to his long-standing respect for the filmmaker. His sparse naturalistic score for the survival epic was widely praised and remains one of Sakamoto’s best-known works.

In a 2018 interview with IndieWire, Sakamoto explained that his battle with cancer profoundly changed the way he saw the world and made him a better artist.

“Before, I knew things intellectually, but now I feel them,” he said. “Now I feel that my body is part of nature, so being sick is just a process of nature, and dying is a process of nature, and being reborn through the ground is a process of nature.

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