Haruna Miyake (born 1942)
Haruna Miyake was born in Tokyo and studied piano from a young age. She appeared with the Tokyo Symphony playing Mozart at 14 and continued studying piano and composition at Juilliard.
Haruna Miyake tends to blend styles that are influenced by Japanese culture, by traditional western culture, and by modernist western music. This is her Bird Shadows for piano, from 1984, which is sometimes reminiscent of ... Chopin? Schumann? the piano bar on the corner? ... and sometimes not.
This is Haruna Miyake’s 1999 composition The Change of Time, which combines the Japanese hichiriki (a double-reed instrument) with sung poems from the Man’yōshū, a Japanese collection compiled in the 8th century:
The sound of the hichiriki might be too piercing to ears accustomed to the mellower sounds of western instruments, but the overall effect is quite haunting.