For the Love of the Music
MICHAEL SCHELLE AND MIHO SASAKI ____
For the Love of the Music
Words by Nicholas Johnson, Ph.D. • Photos by Esther Boston
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If you met local avant-garde composers Miho Sasaki and Michael Schelle on the street, you might not guess they are married. Sasaki jokes about their generational and cultural differences. “We have nothing in common except music, cats and Indian buffets,” she says. “Most importantly, we love tiny little things together in daily life. It’s all we need, and nothing else.”
They brag on each other as the source of motivation, work-ethic and passion for new music. “We do what’s right for us, not jumping on bandwagons, or what’s going to make us more money, or what’s politically correct, or what the audience wants to hear,” says Schelle, a professor of music at Butler University. “Nobody needed The Rite of Spring until it was written. Now everybody needs it.”
Sasaki and Schelle were married in 2008 in the United States, and again in a Shinto ceremony in Japan in 2012. Both had long been composers, but their marriage has given them new inspiration.
Sasaki credits Schelle’s wind ensemble Guttersnipe (1994) with changing her life by opening new musical possibilities and means of expression. Likewise, Schelle admits that it was Sasaki’s brilliant
