Graphic scores visibly and sonically changed contemporary music in the late 1950s and ’60s. The new notation unleashed a torrent of fundamental questions about music, sound, and composition: What counts as music? What distinguishes musical sound from non-musical sound? What is the time of music, and can there be alternatives to industrial clock-time? What assumptions about performance and skill underlie formal musical training? As Akiyama Kuniharu and Ichiyangi Toshi brought their knowledge of music and graphics from their experiences in Germany and the United States to Japan between 1959 and 1961, excitement surrounding graphic notation and its aesthetic possibilities spread rapidly among experimental composers, critics, and composers working around Tokyo. This annotated bibliography presents a selection of essays and articles about the new notational forms. Some, like Donald Richie, wrote scathing criticisms of the scores and performances linked to the aesthetics of chance and indeterminacy. Others, like Takahashi Yuji, questioned the motivation for using graphic notation: is it employed merely as a utilitarian tool for making writing easier, or is it viewed as the basis of a new aesthetic?

Two exhibitions presenting graphic scores in Tokyo in 1962 and the surrounding discourse attest to the high level of interest generated by the new form not only among musicians, but also among artists and designers. In about 1962 the critic Akiyama began using the term “graphic scores” to refer to the scores that used graphic notation. This reflects a profound change in the concept of the score itself, first as a combination of musical practice and graphic design using new forms of notation, and then as a hybrid object that stands on its own, potentially even independently of music and performance.

After the early 1960s, many of the pioneers of graphic scores returned to traditional notation, while others stopped writing scores in favor of instructions or embraced free improvisation. It’s difficult to say why the popularity of the form was so short-lived. One way to approach the question is to return to the conversations that took place in the early 1960s. Another is to turn to composers and performers working today and ask about their relationship to scores and notation. How might scores operate with a new, contemporary significance in tandem with the abundance of recorded sound available online today?

Source contents

Of Theory, the Aleatoric, and Space
by Nam June Paik, December 1959

Paik discusses recent developments in music theory and composition, notably the use of chance operations and indeterminacy in the music of John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff. The essay is by a young Paik, still deeply immersed in the study of contemporary Western classical music and the debates that surround it. Includes excerpts of graphic scores by Cage, Feldman, and Earle Brown.

Publication: 「セリー・偶然・空間など」  Ongaku Geijutsu 17(13), 82−101
Language: Japanese

Notation and Graphism: New Tendencies in Modern European Music
by Akiyama Kuniharu, March 15, 1960

Akiyama writes about his encounter with graphic notation during his European travels from August to October 1959. He is particularly impressed by the idea of notation and musical graphics as representations of “moving forms” in Stockhausen’s music. He reports that the European experiments with graphic notation are tied to efforts to conceptualize “new senses of time and space.”

Publication: 「記譜とグラフィズムーーヨーロッパ現代音楽の新傾向」 The Yomiuri Shimbun
Language: Japanese

New Directions in Sound and Image (Round Table) 1
by Akiyama Kuniharu, May 1960

In conversation with the artist Yamaguchi Katsuhiro, musician and critic Akiyama Kuniharu discusses his recent trip to Paris and Germany, commenting on the state of contemporary music (particularly musique concrète and electronic music) and the music festival circuits in Germany. Yamaguchi draws Akiyama out on the subject of Moving Forms, a new approach to composition that he encountered at the Domaine Musical concerts in Paris. Akiyama explains that among the composers featured in Domaine Musical, the aim of music composition is shifting from forming melodies and harmony by arranging a succession of pitches to creating acoustic space and time through movement. In the second half of the interview, Akiyama speaks with great excitement about his encounter with the new graphic notation used by composers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, and Sylvano Bussotti, among others. Contains images of graphic scores by Stockhausen, Berio, and Bussotti.

Publication: 「音と形のあたらしい展望(対談)-1-」 Bijutsu Techo 173, 69–79
Language: Japanese

New Directions in Sound and Image (Round Table) 2
by Akiyama Kuniharu, June 1960

Part two of the conversation between Akiyama and Yamaguchi takes up the topic of new entanglements of sound and image, with a focus on jazz and action painting. Yamaguchi opens the conversation with the statement “I think abstract art and electronic music are related in the sense that they are both deeply invested in rationalism.” This is followed by a discussion of the relationship of rationalism, anti-rationalism, indeterminacy, and improvisation in music and painting. Akiyama notes a concentration of new and exciting electronic music coming out of Poland: “I am fascinated by the search for a new musical language in Poland in the midst of building a new social state, and a new society.” Contains images of graphic scores and notation by Stockhausen, Boulez, and Cage.

Publication: 「音と形のあたらしい展望(対談)-2-」 Bijutsu Techo 174, 62−75
Language: Japanese

Toward a New Approach to Time and Space 1
by Akiyama Kuniharu, March 1960

Part one of a report following Akiyama’s trip to Europe and his encounter with the idea of Music and Graphics (Musik und Graphik) during a five-part talk on the subject by Karlheinz Stockhausen.

Publication: 「音楽の新しい時間と空間への試み I 」 SAC, no. 1, n.p.
Language: Japanese

Toward a New Approach to Time and Space 2
by Akiyama Kuniharu, April 1960

Part two of a report following Akiyama’s trip to Europe. Akiyama writes about Musikalische Graphik, an exhibition of graphic scores held at the Donaueschingen Music Festival, along with performances of graphic score pieces by Roman Haubenstock-Ramati and Sylvano Bussotti, conducted by Pierre Boulez. These new notational forms, he argues, are attempts by young avant-garde artists to create a new sense of time and space through the intersection of music and graphics. Illustrations include photographs of a rehearsal in Cologne and an excerpt of Bussotti’s score.

Publication: 「音楽の新しい時間と空間への試み II」 SAC, no. 2, n.p.
Language: Japanese

John Cage
by Ichiyanagi Toshi, February 1961

An introduction to the music and thought of John Cage, focusing on his work since the late 1950s and exploring concepts such as indeterminacy, chance, natural sounds, and the musical approach to silence. Also includes a discussion of graphic notation and instruction-based scores.

Publication: 「ジョン・ケージ」 The Ongaku-Geijutsu 19(2) , 10−16
Language: Japanese

Music of Chance
by Ichiyanagi Toshi, October 1961, 48−50

Ichiyanagi introduces readers to chance operations in his own music and in the music of others, including Morton Feldman, Richard Maxfield, and Sylvano Bussotti. He credits John Cage with establishing chance operations as a compositional method. Cage’s method is groundbreaking, he writes, because the music of chance begins with the premise that “beauty happens in all sounds that occur in the environment.” Illustrations include images of scores by Cage and Ichiyanagi.

Publication: 「偶然の音楽」 Geijutsu Shincho 12(10)
Language: Japanese

Design (A Proposal for New Scores)—From This Year’s JAAC Exhibition
by Akiyama Kuniharu, October 25, 1961

Akiyama writes about an experiment undertaken at the Nissenbi (Japan Advertising Artists Club) exhibition of 1961, where designers rather than composers presented visual proposals for making musical notation suitable for contemporary musical sensibilities.

Publication: 「デザイン〈新しい楽譜のための提案〉——ことしの日宣美展から」 SAC Journal, no. 19, n.p.
Language: Japanese

Design (A Proposal for New Scores)—From This Year’s JAAC Exhibition
by Akiyama Kuniharu, December 8, 1961

In his review of Ichiyanagi’s concert at the Sogetsu Art Center on November 30, 1961, Akiyama writes for the general public about the new graphic notation. “There is the sense that music is an aestheticized form that is incapable of violently attacking people.” With this statement, he implies that the new music might possess the capacity for violence. Another idea to ponder: “The ‘work’ does not exist a priori [before performance].” Includes an image of Ichiyanagi’s graphic score for “Stanzas” and a description of his piece “IBM.”

Publication: 「現代音楽の自由と冒険　一柳慧の作品発表会をきいて」 Yomiuri Shimbun, Evening edition, 7
Language: Japanese

Nature and Music
by Ichiyanagi Toshi, February 1962

Part one of a three-part series. Writing about the ecology of everyday sounds in the city, Ichiyanagi opens with Cage’s questions: “Is music just sound?” and “Is the sound of a truck passing also music?” Arguing that traditional notation (using a five-line staff and notes) privileges the authority of the composer while de-emphasizing the natural environment, the essay follows the trajectory of European and American composers such as Varèse and Cage, who “reintroduced” into music the material and acoustic reality of sound.

Publication: 「自然と音楽」 Ongaku-Geijutsu 20(2), 6−9
Language: Japanese

The Meaning of Changing Signs: Looking at Graphic Scores
by Takiguchi Shuzo, March 1962

Beginning with descriptions of graphic scores realized as collaborations between composers and designers (Takahashi Yuji and Wada Makoto; Takemitsu Toru and Sugiura Kohei), and of a then-rare example of musical performance in an art gallery (Group Ongaku at an exhibition of paintings by Hiraoka Hiroko), Akiyama proceeds with a discussion of new undertakings by composers, performers, and designers working together on the creation and performance of graphic scores. He writes of concerns shared by composers Pierre Boulez and John Cage: “Problematizing the idea of chance, [the new graphic scores] afford performers a certain freedom of choice, and a site of possibilities.” On an optimistic note, Akiyama concludes: “If putting signs in a white space means producing a new acoustic space, what a free painting that is.” Illustrations include part of Takemitsu Toru’s score for “Corona for Pianists.”

Publication: 「記号変革の意味——グラフィズムの楽譜をみて」 Yomiuri Shinbun, Evening edition, 7
Language: Japanese

Nature and Music 2
by Ichiyanagi Toshi, March 1962

In part two of a three-part series of essays, Ichiyanagi discusses his own graphic scores as well as scores by John Cage, Matsudaira Yoriaki, Takahashi Yuji, Yuasa Joji, and Takemitsu Toru. Ichiyanagi argues that this new form of notation places a premium on process and experience (the “natural way of music,” as he puts it) rather than on the inscribed score as the final product by the composer as author. Includes images of scores by Ichiyanagi, Cage, Matsudaira, Takahashi, Yuasa, and Takemitsu.

Publication: 「自然と音楽 2」 Ongaku-Geijutsu 20(3), 14−19, 47
Language: Japanese

Corona for Strings II
by Takemitsu Toru & Sugiura Kohei, April 1962

Devoted to the theme “Contemporary Image,” this issue of the journal Bjutsu Techo includes a graphic score co-created by composer Takemitsu Toru and graphic designer Sugiura Kohei. The reproduction is notable in that it is a facsimile copy of the score rather than a partial or reduced illustration.

Publication: 「弦楽のためのコロナ II」 Bijutsu Techo 203, 34−41
Language: Japanese

Nature and Music 3
by Ichiyanagi Toshi, May 1962

In the final part of a three-part series of essays, Ichiyanagi focuses on the notion of time in contemporary music. Asking what kinds of time besides clock-time are possible, he writes about the endeavors of musicians such as John Cage, Yoko Ono, Tone Yasunao, Takehisa Kosugi, and LaMonte Young, who are seeking new conceptions of time through practices involving graphic notation, chance, and indeterminacy. At the end of the article, an announcement of an exhibition of graphic scores at the Tokyo Gallery includes a list of works by the four featured composers. Includes illustrations of scores by Cage and Tone, respectively, and installation views of works by Yoko Ono and Gruppo T.

Publication: 「自然と音楽 3」 Ongaku-Geijutsu 20(5), 23−27
Language: Japanese

Exhibition of 4 Graphic Composers
by Akiyama Kuniharu, May 1962

Setting aside his customary enthusiasm, Akiyama pans the exhibition of graphic scores at Tokyo Gallery (4 Composers—Exhibition of Graphic Scores). He describes the exhibition as hedonistic and opportunistic, overly focused on visual prettiness and spectacle (“Real live tadpoles! Toys hanging on strings!”), and missing the opportunity to engage with the new creative possibilities afforded by graphic scores.

Publication: 「4人のグラフィック楽譜展」 SAC 24, n.p.
Language: Japanese

From the Exhibition of Four Composers—An Adventure in Signs of Sound and Vision

by Akiyama Kuniharu, June 1962

A reflection on the exhibition 4 Composers—Exhibition of Graphic Scores at Tokyo Gallery featuring images of scores by Ichiyanagi Toshi, Mayuzumi Toshiro, Takemitsu Toru, and Takahashi Yuji, and accompanied by brief explanations of how to interpret the works. One of the illustrations includes guitarist Ibe Harumi playing Mayuzumi’s “Tadpole Music.” Adopting a more positive tone than the one he used in his review of the same exhibition, published in the May issue of the SAC Journal (see above), Akiyama discusses the profound significance of graphic scores for new ways of thinking about music. However, he reiterates his desire for the show’s four composers to translate these new concepts into audible musical results rather than fixating on the heightened visual interest in the scores.

Publication: 「『4人の作曲』展より　音と視覚の記号の冒険」 Bijutsu Techo 205, 39−43
Language: Japanese

Tripping up at the Front Lines: Yoko Ono’s Avant-Garde Show
by Donald Richie, July 1962

In this essay Donald Richie, working in Japan as a filmmaker and active participant in the experimental arts scene, launches a vitriolic attack against Yoko Ono’s concert at the Sogetsu Art Center. Richie accuses Ono of lacking originality and stealing from the work of others. The program consisted of pieces performed using instruction-based scores that challenged conventional ideas about music, originality, and aesthetic judgment.

Publication: 「つまづいた最前線——小野洋子の前衛ショー」 Geijutsu Shincho 13(7)
Language: Japanese

A Voice from the Front Line: A Response to Donald Richie
by Ichiyanagi Toshi, August 1962

In an eloquent response to Donald Richie’s harsh critique of Yoko Ono’s concert at the Sogetsu Art Center (see above), Ichiyanagi defends Ono and explains her position within the international avant-garde, citing established artists such as John Cage and Morton Feldman, who have expressed admiration for her work, and noting her recent invitations to participate in concerts and exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. Ichiyanagi describes the contributions her work has made to current conversations about temporality and the roles of the audience, performer, and composer in avant-garde and experimental music.

Publication: 「最前衛の声—ドナルド・リチイへの反論」 Geijutsu Shincho 13(8), 60−61
Language: Japanese

Seeing Music
by Sugiura Kohei, August 1962

Writing from the perspective of a designer, Sugiura regards his contributions to the creation of Takemitsu’s “Corona for Pianists” and “Corona for Strings II” as visual solutions to the composer’s ideas. For Sugiura, it doesn’t matter if the result is called a “score”; what is important is that the result be seen and handled by the interpreter, who may produce one of many possible orderly systems based on the object. The ideal design, he writes, is “a site that allows a person to explore freely the possibilities of self-expression.”

Publication:「見る音楽」 Geijutsu Shincho 13(8), 112−113
Language: Japanese

I Am Tired of Avant-Garde Art
by Hariu Ichiro, August 1962

Revisiting a panel on “The Present and Future of the Avant-Garde” moderated by the critic Hariu Ichiro, the article begins with excerpts from starkly contrasting statements by Yoko Ono and Takahashi Yuji about the current avant-garde. Other panel participants include composer Ichiyanagi Toshi and members of the Neo-Dada group. Noting the proliferation of conflicting statements about the avant-garde, Hariu expresses doubts about the usefulness of “avant-garde” as a label as well as about the role that avant-garde art plays in contemporary society. Includes images of performances by Ichiyanagi at the 4 Composers exhibition at the Tokyo Gallery, including “Tadpole Music” by Mayuzumi and works by Shinohara Ushio, Kikuhata Mokuma, Yoshimura Masunobu, and installation views of the Yomiuri Independent exhibition.

Publication:「前衛芸術に疲れました」 Geijutsu Shincho 13(8), 148−153
Language: Japanese

Announcement for Exhibition of WGS: Body text—”An exhibition of more than 100 new works by John Cage and more than 40 composers from around the world”
November 1962

A newspaper announcement for the Exhibition of World Graphic Scores. A clipping of the announcement, along with a fragment of a news page dated November 19, 1962, was inserted into the notebook in which Akiyama Kuniharu laid out the plans for this exhibition.

Publication:本文より「ジョン・ケージら世界各国の作曲家40数名の新作百数十件の展示」 Shukan Shincho, 18
Language: Japanese

An Exhibition of World Graphic Scores—A Return to Zero
By Yano Junichi, November 25, 1962

In a review of the Exhibition of World Graphic Scores, Yano Junichi celebrates the event for bringing together works by important figures in experimental music from Japan and around the world. Comparing the new form of notation to work by action painters, Yano writes that graphic notation allows composers to “return to primary sensations” and access the nature of sound itself.

Publication:「世界の新しい楽譜展——ゼロへの回帰」 SAC Journal, no. 27, n.p.
Language: Japanese

Round Table: An Inquiry into Graphic Scores—Around Recently Performed Works
By Ichiyanagi Toshi, Kobayashi Kenji, Kumagai Hiroshi, Takahashi Yuji, Yamaguchi Koichi, Akiyama Kuniharu July 1963

Performers, composers, and critics participating in the roundtable discussion address the significance of recently performed works that employ graphic notation. Violinist Kobayashi speaks of practical issues surrounding performance, while Takahashi wonders about the aesthetic and philosophical significance of graphic notation for the new music of chance and indeterminacy. They discuss pieces performed on July 3, 1963, at the Sogetsu Art Center (Sogetsu Contemporary Series 21, New Direction ensemble, second concert), including “Phrase à Trois,” by Sylvano Bussotti, “Zyklus,” by Stockhausen, “Drip Music,” by George Brecht, and “Sapporo” by Ichiyanagi Toshi.

Publication:「座談会 図形楽譜の問題——今回の作品を中心に」 SAC Journal, no. 32, n.p.
Language: Japanese

New Direction’s Second Concert, Or, A Critical Reflection on Graphic Scores
By Tone Yasunao, September 1963

Reviewing the July 3, 1963, concert by the New Direction ensemble (see above), Tone suggests that graphic scores such as Sylvano Bussotti’s, which depends on expert performers like David Tudor, harbor regressive tendencies. He contrasts this with Ichiyanagi’s “Sapporo,” which he praises for employing minimal signage and privileging actions by performers engaged in forms of creativity that are not centered on self-expression.

Publication:「ニューディレクション第２回演奏会または図形楽譜への反省」 Ongaku Geijutsu, *in Kagayake, p. 284
Language: Japanese

An Unusual Exhibition
By Hariu Ichiro, April 1974

Reviewing the July 3, 1963, concert by the New Direction ensemble (see above), Tone suggests that graphic scores such as Sylvano Bussotti’s, which depends on expert performers like David Tudor, harbor regressive tendencies. He contrasts this with Ichiyanagi’s “Sapporo,” which he praises for employing minimal signage and privileging actions by performers engaged in forms of creativity that are not centered on self-expression.

Publication:「異色の展覧会」 Geijutsu Seikatsu 296 , 148−149
Language: Japanese

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Miki Kaneda: I’d like to ask you about your music activities since the 1960s, and about some of the pieces you performed in the concert at MoMA last month [January 2013].

Tone Yasunao: That reminds me . . . I was invited by Peters Edition to publish a score. After I received the invitation, Peter Peterson, whom I learned was the president of Peters Edition, came to Japan looking to publish scores by Japanese composers. There was a music school called Ueno Gakuen, which was run by the father of Fukushima Hideko and Kazuo. They were having a party there and I was told to go, and so I did. Then the guy from Peters saw me and thought I was this kid, and so he asked me, “How old are you?” That pissed me off, and so I ignored him completely.

Kaneda: When was that?

Tone: Around 1963 or ’64, I think, after John Cage went back to the U.S. So I think the people who Cage named were asked to go to that party. The younger brother of Fukushima Hideko, Kazuo, was there, too. Ichiyanagi Toshi was also there. Mayuzumi Toshirō, too. When Mayuzumi saw that I was upset, he made sure that the guy knew I had graduated from Geidai. Apparently, he thought that that was my alma mater even though it actually wasn’t. Now that I think about it, George Maciunas wrote me a letter saying something along the lines of “the Cage school” is going to be over soon, and so don’t bother publishing in a place like Peters Edition.

Kaneda: Is that a reason you declined?

Tone: Well, that, too, but also, my English wasn’t that good. I thought it was too much work to translate all the instructions into English.

Kaneda: But Maciunas published your scores in English. How did that work out?

Tone: Oh, that was Yoko [Ono]. I think she did those for me. We didn’t have access to a typewriter, and so I think Maciunas took her handwritten text and typed it out. That score of Anagram that you have at MoMA has a Fluxus Edition stamp on it. So Maciunas probably reproduced it on the basis of the score that I sent to him. Also, you know the scores that have textual instructions, such as the Music for Reed Organ piece? Those were translated by Yoko as well. But the longer and more complicated ones, like Geodesy, I didn’t send. For the ones that did make it to Maciunas, Yoko suggested having a GI guy send the scores by the military mail because it was the cheapest way. It turned out the GI was Jeff Perkins.¹

Kaneda: Speaking of Fluxus Editions, did you ever make any money from being involved in that?

Tone: Not at all! I received a letter from Maciunas saying that one score would sell for something very little . . . under a dollar. And he said that we would split the profit evenly.

Kaneda: Well, that doesn’t sound like such a bad deal for Maciunas!

Tone: But I’ve been thinking, if I had taken the opportunity to publish through Peters, I might have been labeled as part of the “Cage school,” and it might have been harder for me to start doing my original work.

Kaneda: Is that something that you were thinking back then, too?

Tone: No. When I was younger, I used to go back and forth and think that maybe I should have accepted the offer to publish through Peters. Once I arrived in America, though, I had it in my head that I had to do something completely new and different from the past. One of the first things that I did was to work with Merce Cunningham. But at Mills College I did do some of the things that I had been doing in Japan, like the cutting piece Music for a Painting. Bob [Robert Ashley] was at Mills College. At that time it was a women’s college, and they had a graduate music program. Among the graduate students at Mills, Paul DeMarinis, “Phil Harmonic” [aka Kenneth Werner], and Jon Bischoff were also there and performed my pieces for my concert. The interesting thing was that even with my poor English, people understood easily what I was trying to do.

Kaneda: How do you think the most recent performances of Smooth Event and Anagram at MoMA compare to performances of your work in the past?

Tone: You know, I think it might be better now. Before, it used to be too “musical.” For example, in something like Anagram, the glissandi are supposed to flow like a river.

Kaneda: Do you mean sonically?

Tone: Well, I was thinking of it more as a concept, like the monochromes of Yves Klein or the achromes of Piero Manzoni—something that doesn’t change, that isn’t allowed to progress. In Anagram, well, I think there were some people who were trying to make ugly sounds on purpose, and I’m not sure about that, but when you listen to it, it’s not “musical.” I like that.

Kaneda: Anagram and Smooth Event have been performed a number of times since you first composed them. Can you talk about some of the other recent performances of these pieces?

Tone: Joan Jeanrenaud, a former member of the Kronos Quartet, performed Anagram. Also, a video documenting Smooth Event was shown along with Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Hans Haacke, etc. at the exhibition Iron Works at the Anne Reid Gallery in Princeton, New Jersey, in 2003. When Anagram and Smooth Event were performed at the Minami Gallery in 1962, I also presented pieces called Silly Symphony and Drastic. For Drastic, the idea was to take drastic laxatives and then bang on a drum to hold off from going to the bathroom during the performance. The title Drastic is a combination of drumstick and drastic laxatives. Mizuno Shūkō, who performed the piece at that time, took about five to eight minutes. It’s a good thing there was a bathroom right behind the wall next to where the performance took place at Minami Gallery! The audience could hear the flushing sound.

Kaneda: I received some feedback from people who attended the recent concert at MoMA, and while Fluxus concepts are quite well-known and understood, some people mentioned that having to sit through it and experience it was a very different thing. Grasping something intellectually is totally different from being put in a situation where you have to deal with your own reaction to the experience of the piece, whether it’s boredom or frustration.

Tone: Well, if you want boredom, it should have gone on longer! But that wasn’t the goal. The idea was that it’s just one thing and unchanging.

Kaneda: At your MoMA performance, everyone except for Lary Seven was playing with you for the first time. I was interested in your process—that there was no rehearsal and only minimal discussion leading up to the event. It seemed like a purposeful decision.

Tone: If someone takes a piece that I wrote a long time ago and does it the same way now, well, that’s fine by me, but I was wondering what it means for me to also be committed to the performance as a performer. But if there are young people who aren’t intimately familiar with my old work, instead of telling them how to play it, I wanted them to interpret the score based on what they’ve experienced and what they’ve learned in their lives so far. It’s kind of an experiment to see how they would respond to it, and I was really interested in seeing how that panned out. So it’s not that I didn’t tell them what do on purpose, but rather that I was curious to see what would happen, and I didn’t want to give the impression that they had to do as I said.

Kaneda: All the pieces in the concert were from the 1960s, but there was one piece that was paired with you performing MP3 Deviation, a much more recent project, along with the rest of the ensemble improvising. Could you please explain how MP3 Deviation works?

Tone: There is a sound source and a computer program for the piece. The sound source is related to the idea that I wanted to do something totally new when I came to the U.S. I decided, “Now that I am here in America, I don’t want to make works for somebody else, just for myself.” Anyway, around that time I also went to Paris. That’s when David Behrman was the music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He sent me a letter asking me to do something for the next year’s season. That was probably Cage’s idea. Behrman had also heard about the Mills College concert and told me, “I heard that you did something really interesting at Mills.” He probably heard about it speaking on the phone with Bob [Ashley]. It hadn’t even been a month since I had come to New York.

I went to New York at the end of 1972, and before that, in November, I did my concert at Mills. In January or February, Cage and David Tudor had a concert at the State University of New York Albany campus, and I went with a bunch of friends in a car rented by the management company Performing Art Services [a not-for-profit management organization which represented Robert Ashley and other artists]. Ay-O and, I think, David Behrman were also in the car. Nam June Paik and Shigeko Kubota and my wife were in the car, too. Shigeko used to be Kosugi’s girlfriend. Then she married Behrman. After she divorced Behrman, she became Paik’s girlfriend. Kosugi didn’t come because he had gone back to Japan around 1967. He didn’t come back to the U.S. until 1977. Eventually, Shigeko married Paik. It was funny because in the car Paik was joking about making a band with Kosugi and Berhman and calling it something like the “Shigeko Brothers.”

Kaneda: Was Shigeko-san laughing?

Tone: That kind of thing doesn’t faze her at all. She was complaining that it was all Japanese guys in the car, and then Paik protested that he wasn’t Japanese. But she ignored it. This was around the beginning of 1973. In the summer of 1973, Kudo Tetsumi was in Paris. He wrote to tell me that New York is nice enough, but why didn’t I come to Paris. And so I went to Paris with my wife. This was around the time of the Bastille Day festival, le quatorze juillet in French. The first thing I did after coming back from Paris was the Avant-Garde Festival at Grand Central. At that time I did two pieces that were just instructions based on the idea of a counter–Doppler effect because I had heard that we were going to borrow train cars and do the concerts inside them. But then it turned out that they didn’t move; they were just boxcars, and so it didn’t go according to my plan.

Tone: For the counter-Doppler piece, the idea was to make a sound with your voice each time the train passed another train. The voice was supposed to do the opposite of the Doppler effect. With the Doppler effect, when a moving vehicle approaches, the sound gets louder, but in this case, you were supposed to do the opposite and make your voice softer when the train passed and raise your voice gradually again as it moved away. So it’s a hard piece.

Kaneda: But the trains didn’t move, and so then what happened?　

Tone: We just pasted the instructions on the wall of a boxcar, along with instructions for the piece titled One Day Wittgenstein, which I performed with two other participants at Grand Central Terminal Main Concourse. That was all! It was simply conceptual. That was kind of leaning toward a kind of text-based music, right? Next was a piece for the Merce Cunningham concert. There is a book called Dada by Hans Richter, and I made a piece looking at that. This was a video piece that I made for a two-day Cunningham event. Using a pulley system, I used three turntables, each moving, respectively, according to the second, minute, and hour hands of a clock. The turntable going according to the seconds would make a full rotation every minute. I placed a video camera on the turntables. This idea came from the space of the Cunningham Studio, which has a stage on one side and a full mirror on the other side. I put the turntables right by the mirrors and the image goes around half in the real space and half in the virtual space of the mirror. All the while, the camera is reflects both real and virtual spaces. I had this visual idea first, and then I made a text based on “Theatrum Philosophicum,” Latin for the “theater of philosophy.” This was a text by Michel Foucault on Deleuze. I took some passages from Foucault’s text and combined them with a text of mine called “On Looking at Photography” (Shashin o miru koto ni tsuite), which appeared in a magazine called Shashin Eizō. It’s also in my book Gendai Geijutsu no Isō (1970).

After this, when I was asked to do this piece again, I didn’t use this text but instead used a nude woman videotaped in three parts: the head was one part that was rotating once an hour, the body was another part, and the legs were moving once a second or something like that. Those images were projected onto a monitor and each piece was rotating at a different rate; once every hour, they would come back together. The piece is based on René Magritte’s painting of a nude woman’s body divided into three separately framed images, I called this piece Clockwork Video à la Magritte. Then I added a new text for the piece. So these are the beginnings of my work with “text” in music, or so-called textual music.

Then I did a piece at Phil Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation. I thought of using text, and so I thought about the title Voice and Phenomenon. The title is the same as Derrida’s book, but the rest is totally different. Mine was based on the Tang poems in the collection Tōshisen.

This was what I consider my really original project that no one else had done. I decided that now that I had come all the way to New York, I would not work for anyone but myself, and I would not do things that someone else had already done.

Around that time, Shirakawa Shizuka, an East Asian Studies scholar, published a book called Kanji through Iwanami Shinsho that I found at Tokyo Shoten, a Japanese bookstore on Fifth Avenue near 50th Street in New York. Shirakawa talks about how kanji [Chinese characters] came to be from an ancient ethnographic perspective. Shirakawa was a very esteemed scholar. After I came across this book, Nam June Paik told me that Shirakawa was a very important person, and that since he was getting old, he should make a video while Shirakawa was still alive. But then Nam June died before Shirakawa, who lived into his mid-nineties and was an honorary professor emeritus of Ritsumeikan University. Reading Shirakawa’s book, I started thinking about how I might use this idea of Derridian grammatology for myself. I found the analysis of kanji to be very interesting. Normally, when you think of the kanji character for sky, you think the character is just a representation of the sky. But think about it—if you made an image of the sky with a cloud in it, how are you going to tell if the character is supposed to represent the sky or a cloud, right? So when you look at the term sora 空 (sky) it’s the word ana (hole) 穴 combined with kō 工 as in kōgu 工具 (tool). Shirakawa explains how these parts came to mean “sky” by going back to ancient Chinese bronze inscriptions and oracle bone script.

Kaneda: What were the images that you projected?

Tone: The images were based on the kanji. I researched all the origins of the parts of the characters based on Shirakawa Shizuka. Some of them were not in his first book. There is a set of hardcover books by Heibonsha called Kanji no Sekai, and two volumes about the history of ancient Chinese bronze inscriptions and oracle bone script called Kōkotsu-bun no Sekai and Kinbun no Sekai, also from Heibonsha. I also used Setsumon Kaiji, a five-volume Chinese reference book about the origin of characters, which dates back to the early second century. I used both of those sources to look up all these characters. This took a very long time!

Then, I developed this piece to turn the images into sounds by putting CDS light sensors on a screen. They are sensors that detect light and convert it into an electric signal. I connected that to an oscillator to make it into sound, and I amplified that through a PA system. When you screen that, the kanji turns into a sound.

Kaneda: So this is the basis of all of your music since the early 1970s!

Tone: Yes. When I released Musica Iconologos in 1993, I had already been working in this way for a while, and my question was whether I could do something similar using a digital process on a computer. This was right after Steve Jobs got kicked out of Apple and made the NeXT Cube on his own, not at Apple. It was all black and a very cool-looking computer. I used this machine. I wanted to make digitize an image and use the computer to turn that into sound. I had to find someone who could write a program to do this kind of thing. Tudor introduced me to one of his assistants, who was a student at McGill University in Montreal. At McGill there was an electronic music studio that I was free to use. I had an assistant, because I wasn’t very proficient at using their system. McGill had developed a program that recognized patterns, like pitches, or English characters. There was a Japanese-Canadian scholar, Fujinaga Ichiro, at McGill who made that program. Using that program to read images and characters, I then generated histograms—a kind of bar graph. Fujinaga’s program was combined with another program called Projector to read the wavelike shape of the histogram as a sound wave. Scanning an image, the program would read the digitized result and produce sound. One image becomes one histogram, which produces sound. The outcome of this project was released by Lovely Music as Musica Iconologos (1993).

Kaneda: What I find fascinating and perplexing is how in all these stages before the sound that we as listeners have access to, you are dealing with very concrete objects like images and characters and their histories. But when you hear the resulting sounds, which are very noisy, there is no way to hear any reference or connection to the original images and texts. How can we make sense of this relationship between the sound and the images that generate the material for the sounds?

Tone: First of all, if you wanted to create completely random sounds, that’s actually very difficult to accomplish because of habit and taste: if there are things that you found while you were messing around and that you liked, you might want to produce them again. I wanted to remove those tendencies but still remain very precise about my method. When I make music, I don’t start with an idea about a sound I want to make. Rather, I want there to be both rigor and differentiation in the sounds. If you start worrying about references between sound and the source, then it starts to be no different than what old-fashioned composers do, namely, representation as re-presentation.

Kaneda: But what do you make of a situation like your recent performance of Improvisation with MP3 Deviation? Your own contribution was based on MP3 Deviation, and so you could say that you yourself were not responding to the other players, but what about the interactions between others in the group?

Tone: We just happened to be in the same place at the same time. It was juxtaposition. This was true of when Group Ongaku members were working with Kuni Chiya’s dance company. When we were making the music, we weren’t looking at the dance at all.

Kaneda: That’s the method that Cunningham and Cage used in their collaboration.

Tone: Exactly. And so when I learned about that, it was not a surprise at all. As Group Ongaku, we were doing the same thing in the early 1960s. But it wasn’t that much of a conscious choice. It was also all we could do.

Kaneda: Why did you choose to work specifically with MP3s as opposed to any other digital format?

Tone: Before MP3s, I developed an idea while working on a project called Solo for Wounded CD. The CD wasn’t released until 1997, but the piece has been performed live since 1985. While I was preparing for the concert, I found a Japanese paperback titled Mijikana Kagaku Zeminaru (A science seminar for the familiar) by Hashimoto Hisashi, and I was intrigued by the author’s remark on digital recording. According to the author, digital recording is an excellent device, but a mistake in the numeric value will lead to a totally different and unusual sound. This became an idea for the new piece. When there are scratches or other marks of damage on the CD, the CD reader or CIRC [Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code], an error-correcting system, “corrects” these spots. I had a friend—a rich Chinese guy, who had a Swiss-made CD player from early on. I wanted to know how to override the correcting function of CD players. An engineer friend of his told me that if you poke tons of pinholes on the surface of the CD and then put little pieces of Scotch Tape on the CD’s surface and hit “play,” the CD player tries very hard to “fix” the files. But if there are too many errors in the original, then the errors will override the player and cause unexpected sounds. And so I tried it, and it worked. It took some time, but I figured out how to make different kinds of sounds this way. I would make twenty CDs, and maybe one would work. Sometimes the machines would just spit out the CD. Maybe I’m inefficient. Everything takes a lot of time for me. But it’s like that for things like Japanese pottery, too. The craftsmen make hundreds, and only one or two of them make the cut.² Back then, in 1985, there were no CD burners and no CDRs, and so I used commercial CDs.

Later, as an alternative to using the program made by Dr. Fujinaga, I tried going more directly from the characters using a sound-editing program called Sound Designer II. You can see what it looks like if you look inside the CD cover of my self-titled album released on Asphodel. This process makes things sound very good. In addition, you can do very detailed manipulations. Using a WACOM tablet with a stylus with the pencil function, I wrote out the characters in the Man’yōshu [the oldest existing collection of Japanese poetry]. So I used the flow of the characters as the sound-wave forms. I used this process for one of the tracks on the album. These sounds became the main source sounds for my later work, the album titled Yasunao Tone, released by Asphodel in 2002.

With MP3s, I figured out how to corrupt the file between the encoder and decoder using a program developed in collaboration with researchers at the New Aesthetics in Computer Music research group (NACM) at the University of York, in the U.K. When a file is corrupted, you get an error message inside the program, and so we used the program errors. The program converts the error messages into designated numbers. We used twenty-one different categories of error messages, and so we made the numbers one through twenty-one of the messages convert to designate the sample length for the sounds. When a sound file is corrupted, we made it so that degrees of corruption are adjustable with percentages ranging from 1 to 100. For example, if a text is converted to the number 2346, then that becomes the length of a sample sound of the original. Then there is another parametric change we use, and that determines the speed of the designated sample played. If the number is one, then it plays at the same speed as the original sample. If it’s two, then the playback speed is twice as fast, and so on. Another device in the program is inversion of polarity; in one sample, you invert the polarity with a certain duration of the waveform, and it produces a completely different timbre. This process makes it so that the original sounds are converted into something completely different. That’s the main idea—there’s no way to predict what kind of sounds this is going to produce. I wanted each corruption to produce a different sound, but at first, the resulting sounds weren’t very varied, so we had to experiment a bit.

Basically, I want to be able to not repeat the same sounds. And I don’t want habits of representation to get in the way of the music that I’m making. In other words, “representation” is “re-presentation,” which I want to avoid. I want to find sounds that I’ve never heard before.

Kaneda: Some critics who write about you focus on the fact that your music is about the destruction of technology. Related to this, the “noise” that you produce is sometimes described as the sound of this destruction.

Tone: That’s simply incorrect! I just added an important function to the way we use machines—producing errors.

Kaneda: This leads some people to place you in the lineage of noise music, but the processes and concepts behind your music make it seem as if you’re coming from a very different place. It seems like those kinds of connections are based on listening to the sonic product of your work without taking into account the processes or concepts, or the scenes that you’ve been affiliated with. But what has been important in your work for a very long time is this idea of media.

Tone: I’ve been influenced by Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” The reason this essay resonated with me so much is that I always felt that technologies of reproduction are not merely tools for playback. I see them as technologies for production or creation. Also, when I was young, I read a lot of modernist poetry. There is a poet named Kondo Azuma, and one poem of his that I felt was particularly interesting is a poem called Aoi Shigunaru (The Green Light). This is a poem that is meant to be read out loud. He wrote it to be played on radio. There are some naïve Marxist elements to this, but the main idea goes something like this: Right after the title, before the poem is heard, the listeners are invited to close their eyes and listen. The text of the poem itself is something along the lines of “Ladies and gentlemen, do you know what the green signal means?” At the very end, though, it says, “Ladies and Gentlemen, to those of you who have closed your eyes! / In the depths of your eyes, / What do you see? / Can you see the green light? If you can see it, let us depart / If you can see it, let us go / If you can see it, let us move / If you can see it, all aboard! / But if you cannot see it, there’s nothing that can save you. / You might as well enter into a deep sleep now.”³ This was amazing to me, because the act of the listeners closing their eyes is outside the text of the poem, but it’s of utmost importance to how the poem works. I’m interested in the things outside music in the same way. Here’s an example. In a piece titled Days, a tape music piece I composed in 1961 and performed for a dance piece by Kawana Kaoru, I tried to accomplish something similar for music. I started by reading the numbers, one, two, three, four . . . all the way to one hundred or two hundred. Once I had finished reading them, I recorded the same recitation of numbers onto a tape at a very low volume. Next, I played back that recording at a very loud volume while recording that plus a new layer of recitation. I repeated this a number of times, always recording low and replaying high. On an open-reel tape, this process produces so much distortion that the tape recorder (an old-fashioned reel-to-reel) placed on the stage literally starts jumping around. I remember somebody commented in a blog that Alvin Lucier did the same thing much later [I Am Sitting in a Room, 1969].

Kaneda: How many repetitions did it take for that to happen?

Tone: More than ten repetitions. At that point, you are not just dealing with sounds. It’s about the action produced by the overstressed tape recorder physically moving as a result of the layering of the tracks.

Kaneda: When this event took place, was the tape player visible to the audience?

Tone: Yes, they could see it shaking.

Kaneda: I noticed that in many of your pieces, including those like Smooth Event, which you recently performed, visible actions and things beyond the idea of music as sound figure prominently.

Tone: That’s right. Normally, when you think of playing the piano, you move your hands in order to make sound. I was more interested in specifying the action. Graphic scores are ideal in that sense because it’s about entering through action, and that’s the piece. Sound is merely a result.

Kaneda: Based on your interest in what is happening around the exterior of a piece, what is the role of the audience for you? Do you consider their reactions as part of a performance? For example, when you performed Geodesy at MoMA, I think there was a general sense of fear from the audience as we watched you ascend a tall ladder to drop things into the piano. I didn’t realize how intense that physical, visceral element of the piece would be in a performance.

Tone: Do you mean because I’m old?!

Kaneda: No. I was afraid for your co-performer, Ning Yu, as well.

Tone: Well, sound doesn’t exist as some kind of abstract entity. In addition, listening to re-presentation of sound is the same thing as listening to a record many times. As a composer, that’s meaningless to me. There are some people who like to listen to the same thing many times, but personally, I think it’s a bit strange that people don’t get bored of doing something like that. It would be great if you could write something that, even if it’s the same sound, turns out sounding different each time you hear it. There are certain things that sound is good for, but it’s very imprecise. In terms of the senses, it’s much rougher than something like vision. You can’t do the same things with sound that you can do with image or text. So there’s always the danger of sound becoming mere representation, which is what I try to avoid.

Kaneda: You’re talking about other ways to understand the idea of music as more than just “sound.”

Tone: Sound is vibrations, and so sometimes people describe things as “noise,” but in a sound coming from speaker cones, there’s already extra sound there, because of the physical movement of the cones. That’s why I think it’s wrong to want to design a concert hall where the audience members will hear the same sound, regardless of where they are sitting in the hall. These kinds of desires are driven by people’s world views, which are informed by certain assumptions about what “music” is.

The post Sound Is Merely a Result: Interview with Tone Yasunao, Part II appeared first on post.

During the late 1950s and the first half of the 1960s, many prominent composers on the international avant-garde music scene began producing graphic scores that employed new forms of notation and inscribed them on sheets that deviated radically from convention in size, shape, and color, as a new way to communicate ideas about music. In contrast to scores representing sound in traditional notation, graphic notation emphasized concepts and actions to be carried out in performance itself, resulting in “unexpected sounds and unpredictable actions” that may not even include the use of musical instruments. In 1962, two exhibitions of graphic scores were held in Tokyo, bringing together the work of Japanese and international experimental composers. The first, 4 Composers, presented scores by four Japanese musicians: Mayuzumi Toshiro, Ichiyanagi Toshi, Takahashi Yuji, and Takemitsu Toru. The second, An Exhibition of World Graphic Scores, was organized by Akiyama Kuniharu and Ichiyanagi Toshi to coincide with John Cage and David Tudor’s first visit to Japan. Crammed into a small gallery, that ambitious show featured close to 150 scores by dozens of Japanese and international composers and artists. Some of the works, such as the collaboration between designer Sugiura Kohei and composer Takemitsu Toru, were clearly made with exhibition display in mind.

This Curated Selection on post presents documentation of the exhibitions, primarily in the forms of scores, photographs, flyers, and planning materials from MoMA’s collection. Ironically, although scores typically function as instructions for musical performance, in the context of an exhibition, the sounds themselves of performance exist only as ideas. The double function of a score—both a means for performance, and a visual object—presents an interesting challenge to exhibiting graphic scores. Does it make sense to display scores in the same way as other printed matter or drawings? Where and when should performances take place? Why don’t the performances receive as much veneration as the scores? The answer to these questions depends on more questions: Where is the “work” (is it the material object, the duration of performance, or both)? What do we privilege as artists, musicians, curators, viewers, and listeners? Check out our selections below and send us your comments, ideas, and interpretations of the scores.

With many thanks to Sen Uesaki of the Keio University Art Center for research guidance.

4 Composers

An Exhibition of World Graphic Scores

The post Graphic Scores: Tokyo, 1962 appeared first on post.

Over the years, as many of his iconoclastic peers from the postwar generation of Japanese artists have garnered prestigious titles and leadership roles in large cultural institutions, Tone has stayed put in the experimental art scene of downtown Manhattan, which has been his home since the 1970s. In his long career as a perpetual innovator and subversive figure in experimental music, he has worked with musicians, artists, and filmmakers such as Shiomi Mieko, Kosugi Takehisa, Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, John Cage, George Maciunas, Kanesaka Kenji, and IImura Takahiko, among many, many, others.

post is privileged to publish an extensive two-part interview with Tone, together with documentation from a concert of his works that was held at The Museum of Modern Art in January 2013 in the context of the exhibition Tokyo 1955–1970: A New Avant-Garde, and with material related to his output, since the 1960s, as a musician, artist, and critic. The first part of the interview, presented here, focuses on Tone’s early years as an experimental musician in Japan, his work with Group Ongaku, and his involvement with Fluxus in New York. The second part will focus on his work since the 1970s.

This interview took place in Tone Yasunao’s loft in Chinatown, NY, August 12, 2012.

“I picked up whatever was lying around and experimented with it.”

Miki Kaneda: Could you please say a few words about your student days and Group Ongaku?

Tone Yasunao: One thing I did in my student days that had an impact on my later activities was writing my thesis on Dada and Surrealism. Then, toward the end of the 1950s, some art students and I formed an improvisational music unit called Group Ongaku. Being a bit cerebral, I was initially planning to work on the theory side of things rather than actually performing. At some point, though, I got swept up in it and started playing music with them.

I started out on the sax. I hadn’t had any formal musical training, so at first I taught myself to play the sax with a manual. Then I gradually grew more ambitious and thought playing just a single instrument wasn’t enough. Koizumi Fumio, a professor who taught an ethnomusicology course at the art university, had all of these musical instruments from around the world, and I borrowed them one after another and performed with them.

After a while, though, that started to bore me, too, and I thought, “A musical instrument is an object, and it’s fundamentally no different from other objects.” I started picking up this and that object and using them to produce sounds. I might read aloud from a book, I might beat on a metal barrel or scrape on a washboard. I picked up whatever was lying around and experimented with it, making noise. It occurred to me that this was a form of automatism, and I persuaded the others to accept this interpretation. After that, everyone started talking about what we were doing in terms of automatism.

We formed the group in 1958, and in 1961 we played our first and last concert as Group Ongaku at the Sogetsu Art Center. Until then we had been playing in various places: in the Department of Musicology at the art school, of course, or in other unused classrooms there; at Mizuno Shuko’s house, or at the house of this guy, a friend of a friend, who made his own guitars. The guy was single, and making your own guitars costs a lot of money, so it was obvious the guy was well off. We kind of invited ourselves over to his place, and he said he wanted to improvise with us. Those are the kinds of places we played before doing the concert.

Around that time Shiomi Mieko (then known as Chieko) was giving piano lessons to Kaga Mariko’s older sister. Of course just sitting there practicing the piano is boring, so they got to talking, and Mieko mentioned that we were doing this Group Ongaku thing. It turned out that the sister was a classmate of my older brother’s at Meiji University, so there was a kind of double connection there. And the sister knew a music critic named Sakisaka Masahisa—ever heard of him? She offered to introduce us to him, and so we talked to him, and he said incredulously, “You guys perform without any audience?” We replied that what we did was automatism, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you perform in front of people. He said that was a wasted opportunity, and he would introduce us to the Sogetsu people, and we should most certainly perform there. We then met Igawa Kozo from Sogetsu, and he offered to let us perform without paying any rental fee for the hall.

That’s how we came to play our first concert at the Sogetsu Art Center. That is to say, our first concert by ourselves. We had performed earlier at a place called the Kuni Chiya Dance Institute, along with the dancers. We also played places like the Toshima Public Hall in Ikebukuro, along with friends of Kuni Chiya’s. It was different, though, because we were accompaniment for the dancers.

Kaneda: Where does the name Group Ongaku come from?

Tone: Kuni Chiya was involved with a group of young dance critics called Niju Seiki Buyo no Kai (20th-Century Dance Circle), and they were planning to run a feature in their journal about the connection between improvisation and dance, or some such theme. We were all invited to write a piece, as guest writers, but we didn’t have a name for our group. I suggested simply Ongaku (music), thinking about the literary journal Littérature that the Dadaists founded. That name was tongue-in-cheek, and I wanted ours to be, too. The Japanese word ongaku could be written with different characters, like「音が食う」, so that it means “sound eats,” or 「音が苦」, “sound is pain.” Since just calling it Ongaku would be confusing, we called it Group Ongaku, so that people would know what it was. That’s the origin of our name.

But our group split up after that first concert at the Sogetsu Art Center. What happened was, Kosugi Takehisa, Mizuno Shuko, and I got in an argument. It was Kosugi and I against Mizuno. Mizuno said what we were doing was not music. We said, “You’re a conservative reactionary unfit for our group.” That was the end of the group. However, I went on performing with Kosugi, and all the members later performed with me at my concert at Minami Gallery, along with Ichiyanagi Toshi and [Takahashi] Yuji.

Kaneda: Group Ongaku remains well known today. Was the public response to the group immediate?

Tone: Well, that concert at the Sogetsu Art Center was talked about a lot. The Mainichi and Asahi newspapers, I think it was, covered it. You know there was no TV in those days, or rather it existed, but very few people in Japan had one, so they used to show these newsreels before or after movies at the movie theater. We were featured in one of those. After that concert they interviewed us, and they also filmed us performing at Harumi Pier or somewhere. A review of us ran in a mainstream newspaper. We got that degree of attention.

The “John Cage Shock” is a fiction!

Kaneda: At that time, did you already have the perception that Group Ongaku was engaged in something very innovative?

Tone: Yes. We really did! We thought everyone in the music world was a bunch of old fogeys. You know, the phrase “John Cage shock” was hogwash they made up. On the other hand, there was a man named Hewell Tircuit who wrote a music column for the Japan Times. I think he still lives in Japan. He said what Cage was doing was something that had been developing in Japan for quite a while, and I’m sure he was making a veiled reference to Group Ongaku. So, the whole notion of “John Cage shock” was a fiction! Cage’s music and ideas weren’t such a shock—Japanese people accepted them with relative ease. After all, Cage himself said that Japan was the first country to recognize and understand what he was doing.

Kaneda: Was there a particular mentality that made Japan very open to Cage’s music?

Tone: Well, one thing was that with the political turmoil surrounding the 1960 U.S.–Japan Security Treaty, there was a progressive mindset of rejecting the old and welcoming the new, even among the general public. The anti-treaty movement was a huge one, even by global standards. Sixteen million Japanese people took part in the movement between 1959 and May 1960. I believe that this political situation had an impact on the general mentality.

Kaneda: Did you see Group Ongaku as very political during this period?

Tone: I have a funny story about that. The 20th-Century Dance people held a symposium and let us speak at it. A man named Yamano Hakudai asked, “What do you people think about engagement?” He used the French word, meaning political engagement, but I intentionally misconstrued his words to mean audience participation in a performance rather than political participation, and I answered his question in this way. I wanted to make the point that thanks to the political environment at the time, artists were being asked questions like his, and the role of artists was changing. As old hierarchies of composer, performer, and audience were broken down, we were becoming aware of new creative possibilities. I think his question led me toward things I later did, like composing music with graphic notation and creating event pieces.

Graphic notation generates unexpected sounds and unpredictable actions

Kaneda: Did you write your first musical scores using graphic notation?

Tone: That’s right.

Kaneda: Did graphic scores composed by other people inspire you?

Tone: Actually, I don’t think I had seen any. I had only heard about them, from Ichiyanagi Toshi and so on. Ichiyanagi told me, “In the U.S., there are guys who do nothing but events.” I thought, “Doing only events sounds all very well, but seeing as how I’ve been doing music thus far, I’d like to compose music and then place it within the context of the event.” In a case like that, I’d like to have people that are not professional musicians do the performing and be working with a clear concept. To do that, graphic notation seemed like the most appropriate method.

Kaneda: Did you have a lot of opportunities to hear European avant-garde music at that time?

Tone: I did. For example, in the late 1950s, Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kontra-punkte was performed at Tokyo Video Hall, a small concert hall located in or next to the Asahi Shimbun building in Yurakucho. When I went to see it, I ran into Mizuno Shuko. I knew him by sight, since we were in the same year at Chiba University. We both said, “Hey, I didn’t know you were into this kind of thing.”

In those days, Shibata Minao, who hadn’t yet become an art school professor, was doing a long-running program on NHK [Nihon Hoso-Kyoku (Japan Broadcasting Corporation)] to introduce listeners to contemporary music. I used to listen to that all the time.

In high school, I had wheedled my dad into buying me an LP record player. That was in the early 1950s, around 1951 or so, so I must have been fifteen or sixteen. The first records I bought were Bartók, Prokofiev, and then they had these jazz EPs…I still remember I had Duke Ellington’s “Take the A Train.” When I first came to New York and rode the A subway line, I thought to myself, “I’m actually taking the A train,” and I was overcome with deep emotion. The record I owned actually had Dave Brubeck on piano, not Ellington, but in any case, that’s the kind of thing I was into.

Kaneda: Would you say that the music you performed with Group Ongaku was a kind of reaction against the music you had been listening to?

Tone: I think we were trying to say that we were completely different and we had no relation to anything that had come before. Though when I first got to know her, Shiomi Mieko would talk about Brahms and things like that. She had been brainwashed [laughs]. And Takemitsu Toru asked us, “Why don’t you guys play jazz?” I told him, “What we do isn’t jazz, man. It’s tango [laughs].” And he said, “Oh, I forgot, you’re a bunch of Surrealists” [laughs].

Kaneda: Was that a joke? Or were you serious?

Tone: As a matter of fact, Kosugi Takehisa had a part-time job playing the violin in a tango band called Orquesta Tica or something. He was literally playing third fiddle, and during actual performances they wouldn’t even let him produce any sound. He told me, “If I actually play, they get angry with me” [laughs].

Kaneda: Even nowadays, we hear a lot about the “John Cage shock” and the extent of Cage’s influence in Japan, but earlier, you distanced Group Ongaku from Cage. Can you say a little more about that?

Tone: At first I thought John Cage was irrelevant, but when I actually listened to his music in depth, I realized how great he was. I had started writing graphic scores at that point, and I noticed that Cage’s work was quite close to the kind of thing we were attempting to do. I came to admire John Cage.

Kaneda: Judging by Cage’s 1963 lecture “Contemporary Japanese Music,” edited by Fred Lieberman, which he delivered after returning to the U.S. from Japan in 1963, Cage had a lot of admiration for you and Group Ongaku.

Tone: People’s influence on one another is mutual, and even if they’re in a teacher-student relationship, it’s possible for the student to influence the teacher. For him to admire what we were doing doesn’t seem strange to me.

Cage came to Japan along with David Tudor, and Tudor’s piano playing was quite incredible. The combination of Cage’s compositions and Tudor’s performance was really something else. It blew me away.

Kaneda: Contemporary musicians today are now quite accustomed to forms of graphic notation, but the majority of them do not seem to be interested in the graphic score as such. Some go as far as saying that the music that results from a graphic score is just not that interesting. Conversely, Cage’s scores and other graphic scores are presented in museums as works of art. What do you think is the ideal way of dealing with a graphic score?

Tone: This can’t be a matter that’s limited to graphic scores. It has to be about works in general. In a graphic score, if the concepts are crystal clear and can easily be grasped in visual form, the graphics aid the task of performing the piece. There are some people who just look at art, as well as some who just listen to music, and some who do both. However, when it comes to people that only listen to music and don’t know much about art, you’ll find that their attitude toward art hasn’t evolved past the nineteenth century. That means they might look at the most intriguing work of art and find it uninteresting. For that matter, if you ask someone about something outside their limited areas of interest, they’ll always say it’s uninteresting [laughs]. If you abandon the format of staff notation and write things in graphic notation, or even just as a set of instructions, the range of possibilities for performers’ actions expands so as to be almost limitless. It’s fascinating. However, whether it’s a set of instructions or a graphic score, it’s not too interesting if you can look at it and easily imagine what it’s going to sound like. The great thing about graphic notation is that it generates unexpected sounds and unpredictable actions.

Kaneda: Was there a score for the piece Tape Recorder, which you showed in the 1962 Yomiuri Independent exhibition?

Tone: What I did was take a lot of tape recordings of my piece Anagram for Strings and create a thirty-minute loop wound inside a plastic case that I then placed on top of a tape recorder. The case was placed on top of the tape recorder instead of the reels, and the tape threaded through the pickup in such a way that it produced sound indefinitely. The music is all stringed instruments performed by the members of Group Ongaku.

Kaneda: Group Ongaku’s music is improvisational, and the sound is somewhat similar to that of British free improv. However, it seems as if you arrived at that sound by a different route. Did you have any interactions with British musicians?

Tone: I never did. I used to look down on them [laughs]. When I saw MEV [Musica Elettronica Viva] at Cunningham House, I thought, “What on earth makes this group so famous?” With Group Ongaku, when things aren’t going well during a performance, like when everyone gets too carried away producing noises and the volume suddenly rises, we all notice and put a stop to it. Their performance was like that all through. Group Ongaku had decided long before that we had to stop that kind of thing, not to get worked up by what the other members were doing and start going overboard. We made a conscious decision that each member would produce his or her own sound without being affected by the surrounding sounds. That is, each of us listens to the others, but we don’t react to each other directly. If you react, then the music becomes indistinguishable from jazz.

“In Paik’s concert, I played one of La Monte Young’s pieces, which involves pushing a piano around. The instructions were along the lines of ‘Simply keep pushing the piano, and if you come to an obstacle, keep pushing until you get through it.’ I followed these instructions and pushed the piano as hard as I could up to the wall and then kept pushing so it would break through. It didn’t go the way Young planned it, though.”

Kaneda: What events at the Sogetsu Art Center made a particularly lasting impression on you?

Tone: Well, at the time when John Cage was in Japan, I was particularly struck by a piece composed by La Monte Young. It involved dragging furniture and other objects. That was really something. Another one was Takahashi Yuji playing Cage’s Winter Music. I’d have to say that was the most impressive performance I’ve seen of one of Cage’s compositions. The sounds are all disjointed and seemingly unrelated to one another. I thought to myself, “Hey, this guy is doing exactly the same thing as me.” When I played the sax, I tried my hardest to play without any distinct melodic line. I went about it by playing one very fast passage with all sorts of disparate sounds packed into it, so that it was both extremely fast and sonically diverse, with twenty to thirty different noises produced per second. But there is no continuity, and there are intervals between them. When Takahashi performed Winter Music, he banged out a series of tone clusters at intervals of two minutes or so, which he timed with a stopwatch. I can’t remember if that was before or after John Cage came to Japan.

Also, La Monte Young had a piano piece that had the performer kowtowing. That’s a Chinese style of bowing where they kneel, fold their arms across their chests, and prostrate themselves so their heads touch the floor. In that piece, the performer kowtows and then plays the black keys with his right hand and the white keys with his left hand. Nam June Paik played that piece at his [Paik’s] concert, and it made a great impression on me. In Paik’s concert, I played one of La Monte Young’s pieces, which involves pushing a piano around. The instructions were along the lines of “Simply keep pushing the piano, and if you come to an obstacle, keep pushing until you get through it.” I followed these instructions and pushed the piano as hard as I could up to the wall and then kept pushing so it would break through. It didn’t go the way Young planned it, though.

Kaneda: It seems like it would only take a little while for you to push the piano to the wall [laughs]? But the Sogetsu piano was a very expensive Bösendorfer, wasn’t it?

Tone: Well, they wouldn’t let us use the Bösendorfer for something like that. For that I used a plain, cheap upright piano. The Bösendorfer, that was specially ordered—it was a sight to see. It looked more like a red, white, and blue sculpture than a piano.

Kaneda: Could you tell me a little more about the Paik concert that you just mentioned?

Tone: Paik selected the performers himself, and they were like a who’s who of avant-garde music. First came Ichiyanagi’s concert, then Yoko’s, and then Nam June Paik’s. Paik’s was the most artistic.

Kaneda: What was the piano destruction like?

Tone: It was beautiful. Spectacularly beautiful. Aesthetically sublime.

Kaneda: What do you mean by beautiful?

Tone: Well, I think he had made incisions with a saw beforehand so that it would fall apart properly. Then he sawed and hammered at it, and when there was an impact on the strings inside, they made this drawn-out, flanged sound like the scraping of a plane, which was truly beautiful. Finally, he attacked it with the hammer until it fell apart. Only the strings didn’t come off; they were attached to a steel frame and remained intact. The performance was sonically and visually gorgeous. The destruction of a piano is a spectacle like the collapse of a cathedral ceiling. It’s not at all violent.

Paik also has a piece called Solo for Violin, where the performer waves a violin around like a sword and smashes it: wham, it shatters and falls apart. I performed it once myself in a Fluxus concert during the Fluxus Festival at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. A violin is flimsy, so it comes apart easily. When I first saw this piece performed, I thought they had made cuts in advance so it would smash more easily, but in fact it doesn’t need it. When it comes to the piano, though, I’m sure he prepared it by making cuts or something in advance, or else it wouldn’t go so smoothly.

“Until [1972] I considered myself anti-American because of the Vietnam War.”

Kaneda: When did you first start hearing about Fluxus?

Tone: Ichiyanagi came back to Japan from New York, and he and I got to be very good friends. And he told me that George Maciunas wanted one of my works. I asked him who Maciunas was, and he told me he was this really flaky artist. He did things like filling a bathtub with water, floating oil paint on the surface, then putting a canvas face down on the water and calling the results an “instant painting.” A really out-there artist, but he got things done. If he said he was going to do something, he did it. I didn’t have a lot of work at that point, so I sent him Anagram for Strings. That and a few pieces of tape music. Maciunas kept telling me to send him something, and I was at a bit of a loss as to what to do.

Kaneda: And that led to your getting involved with Fluxus.

Tone: After that I went to New York and met Maciunas, who said he was really glad I could make it. We went to 80 Wooster Street in SoHo, and we talked about all kinds of things. Maciunas often put on all kinds of events and Happenings at 80 Wooster. He was living in the basement, and Anthology Film Archives was on the ground floor, run by Jonas Mekas. They had an event there called the Fluxus Olympics, with activities based on various sports. Maciunas built a tandem bicycle for it. I bought this toy drum and used it in place of the ball in a game of volleyball.

Kaneda: Did you first visit New York in 1972?

Tone: That’s right. Until then I considered myself anti-American because of the Vietnam War.

Kaneda: What prompted you to visit the United States?

Tone: Over a two-year period starting in 1971, I was working on a fifty-year chronology of contemporary art for Bijutsu Techo magazine. When you’re doing something like that, you stop producing work of your own. You even stop being able to write. You get bogged down, creatively stagnated. Until then I had been making a living as a writer, and I thought, “I could write just as well in New York.” I happened to attend this puppet play, I can’t remember if it was by the Yuki Magosaburo Company or Hitomi-za—in any case, it was held in Kichijoji, Tokyo. Afterward, I was talking with some people including Takiguchi Shuzo and Nakanishi Natsuyuki. And Takiguchi asked me, “Tone, don’t you ever go overseas?” And I answered that I needed a reason to go. Nakanishi never went abroad either, and he said he saw no reason to, unless it was to a country with great coffee [laughs].

Well, after that I started thinking about how I hadn’t been abroad, and Takiguchi was encouraging me to go. While I was thinking about this, I got a pamphlet in the mail saying there would be a design conference in Aspen, Colorado, the World Design Conference. I was writing about this for Bijutsu Techo and Design Hihyo as well, and I told them I’d be going to Colorado for a week or so to cover it. After the design conference was over, though, I thought it would be dull to go back to Japan right away, so I stuck around for this event called the Aspen Music Festival. Before I left Japan, people had told me New York was hot in the summer, so why didn’t I check out San Francisco? And so I did.

Sakurai Koshin, a member of the Kyushu-ha, had started a commune in San Francisco. I think he moved to San Francisco around 1965. It was one of the first hippie communes, called the Konnyaku Commune. Sakurai founded it along with two other people, a Filipino poet called Al Robles and a Rinzai Zen monk named Gisen. When I was departing for the U.S., I heard that this commune still existed, so I wrote them a letter saying I would visit, and then I called when I arrived in San Francisco before going to Aspen to say I’d be stopping by afterward. They said I should by all means visit on my way back. I planned to spend about a month there as a summer vacation, but I ended up staying until November, six months in all.

Kaneda: When did you next come back to Japan after that?

Tone: It was about seven years before I got back.

Kaneda: Did you bring a lot of things with you?

Tone: Actually, I lost all kinds of things, like books and photographs of things I had done in the past. The only things that survived were a few things my younger brother just happened to be keeping. I have those still. The rest is gone.

Kaneda: What was your life in New York like?

Tone: I wasn’t thinking at first about how to make a living, but my wife followed me to the U.S. and stayed with me for about a month in San Francisco; then we went to New York. At first we were living on savings, but then I got sick and had to be hospitalized. Shortly before that, I had gotten to know a woman named Thais Lathem, who was the director of the Intermedia Art Institute in New York. She let us rent the ground floor of the institute cheaply, for just one hundred dollars a month or something [laughs]. We moved in there, and then I got sick and had to enter the hospital. I couldn’t speak English, though, and I didn’t know what to tell the doctor, but Nam June Paik rushed to the hospital by taxi and interpreted for me. Thais negotiated with the welfare office and took care of my medical fees.

Oh, yes. I had gotten to know Thais through Nam June. She told me, laughing, about meeting Fukuzumi Haruo, the senior editor at Bijutsu Techo. She had been contacted by the U.S. State Department, who told her that a high-ranking editor at Japan’s top art magazine was going to visit and instructed her to meet him. She waited for him at the Intermedia Art Institute office and was surprised when the person who stepped out of a limo was this little bearded fellow in a rumpled army jacket.

Kaneda: Was there already quite an extensive community of Japanese artists in New York at the time?

Tone: There was, though I was wary of associating with them. After all, the reason Japanese people can’t speak English is that they always isolate themselves in these Japanese communities. In the commune in San Francisco, they had a bit of diversity, I suppose. There was a black painter, a white hippie girl, and her boyfriend, a former coal miner from West Virginia with a very thick accent. Then there were five or six Japanese people from the neighborhood who would get together. Sakurai Koshin asked me to give a lecture to these young Japanese people and “educate” them [laughs]. At that time the journal Shiso (Thought) had just published a Japanese translation of Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in their June and July issues, and I suggested we all study that. That’s an example of why I didn’t make progress in English at first. My English is still rotten today, to tell the truth. In the experimental music community in New York, though, at least there weren’t a whole lot of Japanese people.

Kaneda: I get the impression that Fluxus and Maciunas were very accepting of Japanese artists.

Tone: Maciunas actively sought our work, as I mentioned, and Japanese artists were participating in Fluxus just like any other members, at a time when, in general, there was little recognition for artists from outside America and Europe. One reason for this is that Maciunas had a certain interest in Japan. For example, he was fascinated by the Shoso-in collection of national treasures in Nara, and he had the idea of creating a collection of Fluxus art that would be like a contemporary Shoso-in. He also came up with the name for Neo Haiku Theater, a short Fluxus event, which was inspired by Japanese haiku poetry. There’s no doubt: Maciunas took an active interest in Japanese culture. Rather than say that he accepted Japanese artists into Fluxus, I think it would be more accurate to say that he explicitly sought Japanese artists to join Fluxus. And not only Japan; he also did various things in other countries, for example in Wiesbaden, in Copenhagen, in Paris, where the early Fluxus concerts took place.

When he asked us Japanese artists to send him work, and we did, that was still before Fluxus had even gotten started. Fluxus was formed around 1962, right? It was in 1961 that he asked us for work. So at that time, we didn’t think it was such a big deal just because we were getting attention from overseas—after all, there was little audience for our work there. In Japan, in contrast, when we played a concert at Sogetsu in Tokyo, there was a full house. And as for my concert at the Minami Gallery, the proprietor, Mr. Shimizu, thought it would make an ideal opening event for his new gallery space, but I wasn’t taken with the horseshoe-shaped layout of the new space, so I got him to hold it in the old Minami Gallery in the building next door, which was still unoccupied. There was a big audience there as well. By comparison, I heard from Ichiyanagi Toshi that La Monte Young, for example, had a piece for nine musicians where there were only four people in the audience, and the performers surrounded the audience so that they couldn’t leave. In that sense, we were more famous in terms of media attention. Funny, isn’t it?

The Sogetsu Hall seats about four hundred, and we had a full house at our concert. You wouldn’t see that in New York even nowadays! The audience for avant-garde music in New York was really negligible, so just to be hearing from a guy in New York wasn’t particularly thrilling.

Kaneda: So it was Maciunas who sought out Japanese artists for Fluxus, not the other way around?

Tone: Maciunas was basically the brains behind Fluxus, and my impression is that he was more or less responsible for pulling various people together and forming a group. Some people who disagreed with Maciunas, like La Monte Young, ended up dropping out. Dick Higgins was expelled at one point as well. And Kosugi Takehisa sent Maciunas some work towards the beginning but was purged.

Kaneda: Why was that?

Tone: I guess there was a strong element of sectarianism, you know? And there was animosity between Maciunas and Charlotte Moorman, so when Kosugi took part in Moorman’s Avant-Garde Festival as soon as he arrived in the U.S., that rubbed Maciunas the wrong way, I suppose.

Kaneda: Did you maintain a good relationship with Maciunas?

Tone: Yeah, it’s hard to say why that is. To Maciunas, Fluxus was not art. It wasn’t a career—it was something to do for fun after working an eight-hour day job. If you were an artist, then you could spend eight hours a day making art and then do Fluxus in the evening. The idea that Fluxus itself was art was completely out of the question. That’s why he had no objections if I was doing things that were geared toward the mass media, since we weren’t supposed to be in the business of making high art anyway.

Kaneda: Did you take part in Fluxus activities in Japan before you went to New York?

Tone: Fluxus was formed in late 1962. Akiyama Kuniharu went to New York in 1965, I think it was, and he participated in the Fluxus Festival that was held at the Carnegie Recital Hall. There were reports on that in the Yomiuri Shimbun and so forth, so there was a degree of knowledge about Fluxus in Japan. Then, in 1966, or maybe it was 1965, something called Fluxus Week was held at the Crystal Gallery in Ginza. What grabbed everyone’s attention at that time was Nam June Paik’s Opera Sextronique—no, no, it was Serenade for Alison, dedicated to Alison Knowles. It had a female dancer, one of Kuni Chiya’s troupe, wearing seven pairs of panties that she stripped off one by one in a kind of striptease. The dancer said she was embarrassed and didn’t want to do it, but Ichiyanagi persuaded her, saying something like, “The whole point is that an ordinary girl is doing it. There’s nothing interesting about a professional stripper shedding her panties.”

Kaneda: So who ended up doing it?

Tone: It was a woman by the name of Nakahara, one of Kuni Chiya’s dancers. Kosugi Takehisa had become infatuated with her, and for his sake I asked her on a date to go see West Side Story, but then I didn’t go and Kosugi went in my place to meet her at a coffee shop. I can’t remember clearly, but I think things didn’t go well at all, and he came back without even taking her to the movie.

The idea for the soundtrack to Adachi Masao’s Gingakei was based on a computer flow chart

Fluxus in Japan wasn’t well known as an active group like the one in New York. I was interested in introducing Fluxus to Japan, but I was more focused on making my own work. And I was busy earning money as well, for example, making music for a television commercial.

Kaneda: What kind of commercial was it?

Tone: One of those things with mint in it, you know, to prevent bad breath—like candy, breath mints. And the person who was in charge of the commercial also got Takeda, Sugino, and Shiomi to compose music…

Kaneda: What kind of music did you do for the commercials?

Tone: Pretty simple stuff, sounds like the flourish of a vibraphone and things like that. We were just pulling things out of a hat. I can’t remember clearly what we did [laughs]. Then there were film soundtracks. There was this Tokyo extra-governmental organization called the Tokyo Metropolitan Film Institute, and Adachi Masao was working there part time. They had this weekly Tokyo cinema news report, and I did music for that.

Kaneda: You also did music for one of Adachi Masao’s Gingakei (Galaxy)?

Tone: That was fun to make. I showed Adachi my idea for the soundtrack, which wasn’t computer music but was based on something like a computer flow chart. Then I asked a jazz critic named Aikura Hisato to get together some young jazz musicians, and they improvised. All of them became quite famous later, but at the time they were still unknown.¹

Kanesaka Kenji had a film called Hopscotch, right? The sound for that was recorded at Sogetsu, at the Sogetsu Hall film studio or somewhere. Okuyama Junosuke did some sound engineering, and then there was this circle of people we formed to work on the music for Hopscotch, and people were given instructions to prepare to play something. The Japanese word for play is hiku, and it can have multiple meanings. People asked what it meant specifically, and I said it could mean a lot of things depending on the context. For example, if you say ocha o hiku, it means “to grind tea.”² I told them it was up to them what to hiku. So Takamatsu Jiro did subtraction problems on a blackboard (hiku also means “to subtract”), Kanesaka Kenji and some others played Japanese traditional playing cards (hiku can mean “to take [a card]”) [laughs], and Togashi Masahiko pulled the trigger of an air gun (hiku can also mean “to pull”). My idea was to do color subtraction applied to sound. I made a chart correlating colors to sounds. If you subtract red from purple, you get blue; if you subtract blue from green, you get yellow; and so forth. So I would do the subtraction and then produce the corresponding sound. We recorded all these various sounds and used this as the source for the soundtrack.

Kaneda: Did you interact with a lot of jazz musicians?

Tone: Not a lot, though I did play the piano for one of Kara Juro’s plays at the request of Aikura Hisato, along with some other jazz musicians. Ri Reisen, one of the actresses, complained that I made noise with the piano every time she was delivering a line [laughs]. They never asked us to perform again!

Translated into English by Colin Smith; transcribed by Yu Yamaguchi

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In terms of performance art in Japan, the first documented event in the country that was called a “happening” took place at the Sogetsu Art Center, at Ichiyanagi’s concert in late 1961. Cage, Tudor, and Cunningham all came to Japan for the first time through invitations by the SAC.

Some Historical Background

Preceding the SAC, Sogetsu Ikebana School was founded in 1927 as an ikebana (flower arrangement) school; in 2012, it remains one. Kado (the historical art of flower arrangement) in Japan is said to have originated around the fourteenth century. Rooted in Buddhist practice, it was adopted by the nobility as a leisure activity. Like many traditional Japanese arts—Noh, Kabuki theater, instrumental music and calligraphy—kado spawned many schools, or ryu-ha, each with its own master and distinct style. Sogetsu was one of these.

Teshigahara Sofu (1900–1979), founder of the Sogetsu school, counted among his friends and influences artists such as Dalí, Miró, Gaudí, and Tàpies, and Time magazine described him as the “Picasso of flowers” in a review of his 1955 solo exhibition in Paris.

When the Sogetsu Art Center was founded in 1958, Sofu’s son, Teshigahara Hiroshi, who would later be known as an avant-garde filmmaker, became its director. When Sofu opened the new Sogetsu Kaikan, a new building for the Sogetsu school in the Akasaka area (across from the imperial crown prince’s residence), he gave Hiroshi office space for SAC administration and permission to use the concert/lecture hall with moveable seats. Among Tokyo’s young artists, it quickly became known as a center for creative collaborations by the city’s foremost experimenters.

The building, designed by Tange Kenzo, included a concert hall, a recording and electronic music studio, film projectors, and a custom-made vermillion red Bosendorfer piano, which had a distinct aerodynamic shape that was closer to a retro- futuristic spaceship than the classic nineteenth-century grand piano. One of only three pianos of this design, it was custom-ordered especially for the hall. Inside, the design of the concert hall and the lounge spaces was magnificent yet sleek and modern, even by the standards of today, over fifty years later.

As an institution with a concert hall, exhibition space, recording studio, custom-made Boesendorfer piano, administrative staff, and its own journal, the SAC provided small and often loosely structured collectives with favorable conditions for the creation of artistic and social networks. It was especially significant for the history of experimental music in Japan: with a stage and auditorium rather than a gallery as the central space for gatherings at the SAC, music and musicians occupied central places in the programming, particularly during the first half of SAC activity, between 1960 and 1964. Throughout the entire duration of the SAC, film programs were the most consistent and longest-running events.

A Bigger Future? / The End of the SAC

While the SAC as an institution did not close its doors until 1971, many artists and musicians who frequented the Center view the mid-1960s as the end of the SAC as a place of major significance, with interest and energy directed elsewhere, including into more organized, larger-scale projects such as Crosstalk/Intermedia, Orchestral Space, and EXPO ’70.

An uprising by an anti-capitalist group who called themselves the Fesutivaru Funsai Kyoto Kaigi (Joint Struggle for the Annihilation of the Festival) forced the termination of the 1969 Film Art Festival. It is ironic that these critics viewed the SAC as an institution for legitimating avant-garde art, when in fact, it originally set out to provide a place for artists outside the world of commercial art (Yamaguchi 2002, 120). It seems a bit extreme and unfortunate that an experimental film festival would become the target of anti-capitalist violence—how lucrative, really, has experimental film ever been? But the SAC itself had already changed, too. As artist Yamaguchi Katsuhiro puts it, by the late 1960s, “Sogetsu itself began to change, but that means the connections between people also changed”.

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In this environment, musical performances showcased the early free improvisers of Group Ongaku, Ichiyanagi Toshi and his Happenings, Yoko Ono and Shiomi Mieko’s Events, and included visits by U.S. artists John Cage and David Tudor. After film, music events were the most frequently programmed. The Sogetsu Contemporary Series, initially conceived for the presentation of experimental and avant-garde music, film, performance, and dance, focused overwhelmingly on music. Some of these events were portraits by young composers such as Takemitsu Toru, Matsudaira Yoriaki, and Hayashi Hikaru. Others focused on presenting new and recent works by international composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Olivier Messiaen, Morton Feldman, and Karlheinz Stockhausen alongside young Japanese artists. While such a lineup of names may seem to replicate the “masters” of the European and North American avant-garde, the combinations in which they were presented were quite unique to the particular context of the Sogetsu Art Center. For example, at a concert on October 12, 1963, the ensemble New Direction performed the music of High modernist Pierre Boulez on the same night as Kosugi Takehisa’s Organic Music, a piece based on a simple set of instructions that state, “Breath by oneself or / have something breathed / for the number of times which you have decided / at the performance. / Each number must contain breath-in-hold-out. / Instruments may be used incidentally.” Such combinations could not happen at the Donaueschingen Festival in Germany (the oldest and one of the most prestigious strongholds of the musical avant-garde) or at a Fluxus Festival taking place in a downtown New York loft. Other events, such as the Group Ongaku concert in 1961, were one-time events. While the bulk of the musical activities happened by 1964, a significant performance called Kukan kara kankyo e (From Space to Environment) took place in 1966, to accompany a multimedia exhibition of the same name that focused on the intersections between sound, art, and technology.

The events below are organized by date. For each event, a program of the pieces performed is displayed, along with a collection of related materials. The materials you see here are part of a growing body of material objects, and we’re still in the early stages of scholarly examination to make sense of them. If you have ideas, analyses, or stories about the works and events presented here, or related images, sounds, and movies that could shed new light on this group of materials, please share them!

1961

1962

1963

1964

1966

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