His compositions have been performed all over the world. Concerts as "Composer's Portrait of Maki Ishii" have been held in Paris at the Festival d'Automne 1978, at the Berliner Festwochen 1981, in Geneva at the Ete Japonais 1983, in Tokyo at the Music Today 1987, at the Suntory Music Foundation Orchestral Concert 1989, at the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra 1990, in the Hague at the residentie Orchestra 1992, to name but a few.
1997/Artistic Director of Chinese-Japanese Contemporary Music festival in Beijing, 1999-2000/Artistic Director and Conductor of his opera "Tojirareta Fune (Das Schiff ohne Augen) in Utrecht, Berlin and Tokyo.
He has conducted many of the world's leading orchestra, including the Radio Symphony Orchestra Berlin, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra and Radio Symphony Orchestra Beijing, Hong-Kong Symphony Orchestra, in performance of his works and other. Particularly successful has been his two-act ballet "Kaguyahime" (choreographed by Jiri Kylian for the Nederlands Dans Theater), which he conducted on more than 80 occasions between 1988 and 1995 in The Hague, Amsterdam Rotterdam, Esse, Paris, and throughout Japan.
Maki Ishii, influenced earlier by the serialism and West European avantgarde techniques of the 1950's and 60's, turned his attention to Japanese traditional music in the late 1960's. Since then his creative endeavor has been rooted in the attempt to stride two musical worlds by employing both European compositional method and elements from the sound world of Japanese traditional music in his works.
Maki Ishii does not strive in his music merely to set the music and instruments of East and West in opposition one to the other nor even to fuse these two sound worlds, but remains constantly aware of the essential difference that underlies these two musical worlds in an attempt to pursue and grasp a third musical vision. It is this main formative element that gives his music its distinctive features.
In such works as "Kyo-So" for percussion groups and full orchestra (1968-69), Ishii incorporated elements from Japanese traditional music into a structure dominated by European compositional method. However, since the 1970's, in an extensive body of works including "So-Gu Ⅰ" for shakuhachi and piano (1970), "So-Gu Ⅱ" for gagaku and orchestra (1972), and "Mono-Prism" for Japanese drums and orchestra (1976), he has succeeded in creating his own unique sound world in which Western and Japanese instruments are used in the same temporal and spatial setting.
Since the middle of the 1990s, he gropes for new musical world and comes to get interested also in Chinese music, not only Japanese traditional music. He has composed several compositions, for instance, compositions for Erhu (Chinese instruments), or the other for Chinese poet like LUO Guan-zhong, CAO Cao and other.
Maki Ishii Japanese Version Official Site