By Rob Hochschild
Berklee.edu Editor
May 2001

	Photo by Liz Linder
	Aiko's Audio • "The Young Riders" (A. Fukushima) Listen: slow | fast

Going to the movies has always been more than a social occasion for Aiko Fukushima. As a child, she looked at trips to the cinema as events, but even then, she was drawn by more than stories and stars. Films may have led her to the theater, but it was the music that brought goose bumps to her skin.

"I got so excited as soon as the music started. I always thought about the music," Fukushima says. "It was a dream to become a film composer when I was a kid. I thought, 'Wow, I want to do this kind of thing, but I don't know how.' I didn't think I could do (film scoring), or that I could even study it."

What she found after arriving at Berklee in the late 1990s was that not only was studying film scoring possible but that her college just happened to be one of the few in the world that offered degree studies in the field. Could she afford to add a second major and spend an extra year at Berklee? Fukushima didn't think so, but when Berklee awarded her the Herb Pomeroy Scholarship for outstanding student composers, she changed her mind. "Maybe I should just go do this," she told herself.

So after several semesters as a Jazz Composition major, Fukushima added Film Scoring as a second major. Required courses, such as Dramatic Scoring Concepts for Film and Advanced Film Music Editing were essential building blocks for Fukushima, but she says it was in her Directed Study, with Associate Professor Sheldon Mirowitz, that her work really took off.

"He was really, really helpful," Fukushima says, remembering a Mirowitz assignment to write music for a scene from the television show, "Young Riders." She said Mirowitz told her to write down a verbal description of the scene in one or more words before she wrote the music. "You could write 'warm' or 'red' or 'exciting'. I wrote something like 'youthfulness.' It was really helpful, because it helped me think of the picture, the background, the whole thing. I was always only thinking of the music."

As Fukushima developed her film composing skills, Berklee faculty took notice. She was one of four students handpicked to study with artist-in-residence Jay Chattaway when he visited Berklee between scoring sessions for "Star Trek: Voyager" in November 2000. Chattaway met privately with her several times over the course of a month and guided her through the process of composing, conducting, and recording a score for a short scene from "Voyager." She described Chattaway's style as unexpected but refreshing.

Photo by Liz Linder
Aiko's Five Favorite Discoveries in Boston • Friends from all over the world • BSO Rush Tickets • Chinatown – a film by Roman Polanski • Sketches of Spain – Miles Davis/Gil Evans • Charles River

"He didn't give any musical suggestions," she said. "He didn't talk about things like what chord you should use somewhere. It was more about how to make the scene come to life. He didn't really care about the detail of the music, but the whole thing, the whole picture. That was really interesting."

Such an open-ended approach to learning music has been a welcome change for Fukushima after the more rigid schooling she received growing up in Japan. A native of Hamamatsu, also home to Yamaha's largest piano manufacturing facility, Fukushima recalls living in a neighborhood where many adults worked for the company and nearly every child, including her, studied classical piano. As a result, Fukushima says the musical climate was competitive and most private teachers employed a strict, technical approach with their students.

Berklee teachers, while demanding a lot of her, nonetheless created a much more congenial educational environment.

"I was surprised when I came here," says Fukushima. "The teachers were more friendly and acted like they were our equals. They don't tell us, 'You should do this' or 'There are no exceptions.' They are very open to our opinions."

Fukushima's budding talent has started to receive accolades outside of Berklee. Television composer Mike Post selected Fukushima for a Pete Carpenter Fellowship, giving her an opportunity to study for a month in Los Angeles with top film, theater, and television composers. She also landed gigs composing music for a documentary "Take It From Me" and writing arrangments for a musical, "Semmelweis."

If her progress at Berklee is any indication, it won't be long before Fukushima's music begins reaching a wide audience, and raises a few goose bumps of its own.

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