Ryuichi Sakamoto, Groundbreaking Composer Behind ‘The Last Emperor’ and ‘The Revenant,’ Dead at 71
Christian Zilko
Ryuichi Sakamoto, the Japanese composer who helped introduce electronic music to the world as a member of Yellow Magic Orchestra before going on to write some of the most beloved movie 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 works in his home studio whenever his health would allow,” Sakamoto’s management, Commmons, wrote in a statement announcing his death. “He lived with music until the very end. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to his fans and all those who have supported his activities, as well as the medical professionals in Japan and the U.S. 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 the seminal electronic pop band Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1977. The group quickly became famous for its experimentation with synthesizers and is widely credited with helping electronic music become a mainstream global art form.
A lifelong cinephile, Sakamoto soon parlayed his success into a career composing film scores. He won an Oscar for Best Original Score for his work on Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor” with David Byrne and Cong Su, and earned widespread acclaim for his second collaboration with the director on “The Sheltering Sky.” He went on to work with many of cinema’s most celebrated auteurs 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 composing 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 frail state due to his longtime 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 deeply altered the way he saw the world and made him a better artist.
“I used to know 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 death is a process of nature, and being reborn through the soil is a process of nature.”
