interview Otomo Yoshihide Post-March 11, 2011 Musical Explorations Showing “The Thing that Isn’t That” (4/7)
interview and organized by Ito Junnosuke
published in Beyond Boundaries: Comparative Civilizations Now 23 (2023)
translated by Suzuki Yoshiyuki and Cathy Fishman(Futarri)
Looking at things fairly and equally
Otomo: Another thing is that I was influenced a great deal by the ideas in a book by the linguist Katsuhiko Tanaka. I mean, it’s the same with Takemitsusan, but I must have been thinking about how to take a discrimination-free approach in a musical setting, too.
Q: You mean ideas like “There’s no ‘valid’ language”?
Otomo: Right. The fact that people naturally tend to say things like “That’s not correct Japanese, so change it.” What is language? That kind of thing. I think it’s the same for music—the idea that what’s done only by professionals isn’t music. Professional music exists, but if you start with the premise that music began as something anyone can do—this might really be my own way of thinking, but instead of starting with music, it’s more like ideas or philosophy written by various people… Having said that, I’m not a very good student, so when I read a really hard book, I have no idea what it means. When I read something like [Jacques] Derrida, I don’t know what it means. The same with Jacques Attali and people like that. I only “sort of” get it. So I was probably thinking about it myself in the actual setting.
Q: But I have a feeling that your way of thinking—there is no “valid” kind of music or “valid” language, things like that—has quite a lot in common with “contemporary philosophy” from the eighties up to the present.
Otomo: Right. I was probably influenced by that—and within that movement, the writing of people like Shunsuke Tsurumi was relatively easy to understand. So even though I don’t understand really difficult writing, it was probably people like Tsurumi and Katsuhiko Tanaka [who influenced me]. I also read the writing of ambitious young thinkers of that period who were called post-modern —but again, it was like I half understood it and half didn’t. Well, they were popular at the time, so… Rather than post-modernist thinking—although I worked hard at reading it and pretended to understand it—I think I was more influenced by Tsurumi, who was from a slightly older generation. “Studies of Marginal Art” and things like that are pretty interesting. Also Katsuhiko Tanaka’s language theory, which I just mentioned. From a language theory point of view, that may be a really classic or old way of thinking, too, but I think it was where I learned the basics of the approach of looking at things fairly and equally. [Before that] I was a believer in musical athleticism, you might say, or elitism. When I was studying with Takayanagi-san. I mean, at first I was making music with the idea of training and making something superior to what everyone else was making—avant-garde things. Then I was thinking more and more that, no, that isn’t the way to go. On the other hand, I knew how interesting that kind of music was, so I gradually started wondering, can’t I do both? Aren’t I allowed to say that both are interesting? I was conflicted. When I was a young upstart I struggled with that, but as I gradually became less of a young upstart, I thought, it’s OK to say both are good.
But people don’t really understand that. In Europe, it doesn’t reach people at all. I did the music for Amachan, I do projects connected with the earthquake, I do noise music—it seems to me that the meaning of doing all those things hasn’t reached people there at all. They probably just think, who is this person? But I think, very simply, why not do bon odori—what’s wrong with that? I do think there are people with artistic beliefs who think you’re not supposed to do that or it doesn’t make sense. Maybe it’s different now. I don’t really know.
I can’t control other people
Q: Sorry to talk about myself, but just after I started university, I joined the glee club. But I quit soon after. It was Rikkyo University Glee Club—“Ritsuguri” for short. It’s famous. Everyone was making a unified sound under the direction of a prestigious conductor—you might call it a certain kind of elitism—and I started really disliking that. Why does everyone have to combine into one sound? Of course, in a sense that feels good, and I think it’s great music in its way. But that kind of method seems like something connected with fascism. I mean, in populism, too, there are various reasons for the appeal of unified emotion. But that’s kind of scary—there’s a kind of fear when your own voice melts into the whole, so I quit after a short time. Because of that, something occurred to me—there’s no feeling of unity in Orchestra FUKUSHIMA! and the Otoasobi Project, is there?
Otomo: That’s so rude. But no, there isn’t.
Q: Instead of being unified, everything seems sort of diffused.
Otomo: It’s kind of scattered around. That’s all we’re capable of. (laughs)
Q: But I think that’s a really good thing about it.
Otomo: When I hear it, I can’t help but think, wow, that’s heaven. So, for instance with a glee club or something, I’m amazed when I hear a part that’s really skillful. I admire it, but I don’t want to join.
Q: When I tried it myself—right.
Otomo: But when I hear amazing [music], I do feel moved, not surprisingly.
Q: Actually, we also sang music composed by Takemitsu, for instance. So for me it was really surprising to hear you cover his music. It wasn’t the kind of thing where everyone sings together and unites their voices. I wondered if Takemitsu-san created music like that—music where each person can sing
however they want within the chorus.
Otomo: He intended to make it like that. But it seems to me that he didn’t get to that point. I think it was still a time when singing that way in a choir or something would have been like knocking on the door to freedom. Thinking about it from the perspective of the war years—just the act of singing. But times have changed. So, I mean, for instance in Orchestra FUKUSHIMA!, the instant I move my hand like this, bam, the sound suddenly comes together, but it isn’t like the kind of unity in a glee club at all—being scattered is a good thing, too. That’s a good feeling…or I guess I always think it’s fine as it is. When I do workshops like that, at first I always say, “Every sound produced will be accepted.” That may just sound like pretty words, but in music that isn’t usually the case. Like you said a minute ago, if anything, I think the mainstream in music is the tendency to unite everything, like in fascism. I guess that kind of thing scares me.
Q: In terms of doing group improvisation, I was wondering how, for instance, improvised performances with turntable, and noise music, connect with group improvisation and are applied in that setting. What are your thoughts about this kind of thing?
Otomo: You mean when members of the public are included?
Q: Right. In performances with amateur musicians, has the methodology of improvised performance, or things you’ve done in noise music, been used in some way?
Otomo: Oh, I see. Sure, something has probably been used. I mean, improvisation is accepting—accepting what happens. You can’t revise it, right? For better or worse. Improvisation is accepting both the good and the bad as you move forward, so I use that approach just as it is. Especially with improvisation, you can control it when you play alone, but when you perform with other people you can’t control them, right? Other people are other people. For instance when I play in a duo or trio, I don’t think at all about trying to control the other people as we’re playing. [I just think about] what I can do to make the
performance interesting within the phenomena that come about. It’s like conversation, I guess—spontaneous conversation. I’ve been doing this for a long time and I think I have a wider range of experience than a lot of people, so I think that’s very useful when we do this kind of improvisation. But even so,
when I played with the Otoasobi Project, it was such a mysterious situation that in a way I was no match for it. It was so fascinating. The freedom and expansiveness of improvisation kind of paled in comparison—I was that amazed by it. That in itself was really interesting.
