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The UMass Fine Arts Center is presenting “Sakamoto Blue Sky,” a free online series of world premiere works commissioned in tribute to legendary Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who died in March 2023 at age 71 after a long battle with cancer.

The works will be released weekly on the Fine Arts Center website and will be shared via the Fine Arts Center’s YouTube, Facebook and Instagram channels.

• Thursday, Aug. 31, 2 p.m., Ken Ueno, “How Many More Times Will I See the Full Moon”
• Thursday, Sept. 7, 2 p.m., Molissa Fenley, “In The Garden (with Ryuichi)”
• Thursday, Sept. 14, 2 p.m., Carl Stone, “The Journey”
• Thursday, Sept. 21, 2 p.m., Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, “Butterfly Soul”

The title of the project refers to 美貌の青空 Bibo no Aozora (“beautiful blue sky”), one of Sakamoto’s most widely beloved compositions, which he played throughout his career with a variety of musicians from different cultures and was most famously used in the 2006 feature film, “Babel,” directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Sakamoto was a keyboardist and songwriter in Haruomi Hosono’s Yellow Magic Orchestra, he helped set the stage for synthpop. His solo experiments in fusing global genres and close studies of classical impressionism led to him scoring more than 30 films in as many years, including Nagisa Oshima’s “Merry Christmas. Mr. Lawrence,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” and “The Sherltering Sky” and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “The Revenant.” 

In the past 20 years, Sakamoto wrote a multimedia opera, turned a glass building into an instrument, and traveled to the arctic to record the sound of melting snow. That exploratory spirit runs through Sakamoto’s 2017 album, “async,” which paints an audio portrait of the passing of time informed by his recovery from throat cancer.

“Music, work, and life all have a beginning and an ending,” said Sakamoto in early 2019. “What I want to make now is music freed from the constraints of time.”

“It was a very quick but natural decision for us to honor Ryuichi Sakamoto after his passing,” said Michael Sakamoto, Fine Arts Center performing arts curator and Asian and Asian American Arts and Culture Program director. “His lifelong commitment to constant innovation connected to the real world we all live in together is a core value we share. Sakamoto was not only a famous composer and popular artist on stage, screen, and recordings, but a longtime environmental and anti-nuclear activist and humanist who defied convention. His five-decade output also spanned every category, from technopop to fusion to experimental electronics to symphonic, ambient, and so much else.”

The artists in the series, Ken Ueno, Molissa Fenley, Carl Stone, Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, and Sirintip, were selected based on their connection to Sakamoto's work and activism. More information on Sakamoto, the artists and their works is available on the Sakamoto Blue Sky webpage.

This season, the Fine Arts Center celebrates 30 years of its Asian and Asian American Arts and Culture Program, with a mission to present the artistic and cultural heritages and living practices of Asia and the Asian American experience as a lens to promote cultural awareness, intercultural dialogue and social justice.

For more information, contact Sean Glennon, Fine Arts Center director of marketing and communications at 413-545-4159, or glennon@umass.edu.