Dialogue between Hasunuma Shuta andMatsui Midori (art critic)

with classical music. Plus there is the word
“artist”. But if I were to call myself an “artist”,
would that be a sound artist using sound, oran artist of the sound variety doing
technology art? Even a single title can behighly ambiguous, have multiple meanings inboth Japanese and English, so I prefer tostick with ongakuka.
There are several reasons for that, but inthe end, I make tunes, so to speak. I record
music, that you can listen to on some sort ofmedia, in the course of day-to-day life, andfor this exhibition at the Shiseido Gallery, I’ve
produced works that employ music andsound as mediums. I also provide music formovies and dance. So I work on a wide rangeof things.
As to how it ended up like this, allow me tobriefly explain, in chronological order. I’ve
never put together a band, and never studied
any music as a student. The first remotely
musical thing I ever did was starting fieldrecordings as a student. When I say start, it
wasn’t so much recording on my own
initiative as taking recordings in order to keepa record, make observations, as part offieldwork in my course. Observing various
phenomena, I mean. Sounds recorded in thatmanner would change subtly over a certain
period of time. I’d record things and listen tothem, record and listen, over and over again.
I suspect that is how I started “making works.”
It was after this that I produced my first pieceof work, a recorded album of music. In otherwords, using recording media. My activities
started not with live performances or playing
music, but making a recording.

Date: 9 May, 2018 6:00–8:00pm
Venue: WORD Shiseido

H=Hasunuma, M=Matsui, T=Toyoda
T: This exhibition had its beginnings partly inthe comment by Hasunuma-san that, having
been engaged in his activities for just over a
decade, he was eager to start something
new. So in this evening’s talk we hope to hear
about both his activities to date, and his plans
for the future.
Hasunuma-san’s career has been
distinguished thus far by the incredible rangeof methods employed in his expression: heworks in the domains of music and art, but
within that, may do so solo, with hisorchestra, or in collaborations involving othergenres such as film and dance. In the field ofart, his practice encompasses the making ofsculptures and installations, and giving
performances. Tonight he will discuss these
activities with art critic Matsui Midori.
Allow me to present Hasunuma Shuta andMatsui Midori. Over to you.

From there I put together an ensemble,
staged exhibitions, embarked on what weterm collaborations with other genres, andgenerally progressed to making works usingmusic, across multiple domains. I supposethat describes how I got to where I am.

H: Good evening, I’m looking forward to
chatting with Matsui-san here for an hour anda half or so today.
I’ll begin by explaining a little about myself.
In my work, I go by the title ongakuka(musician). Which is a really handy term thatmeans to compose and/or perform—a bit of amagic word, in my view. In modern Japaneseparlance the English word “musician”
generally calls to mind a rock guitarist,
something to do with pop music, while“composer” immediately evokes associations

M: Good evening everyone, and thank you
for coming out on this rainy evening.
For me, Hasunuma-san is someone that it isa little pointless trying to categorize as an
artist of the fine art variety, or a composer. I
see him rather as an artist in the broader
sense, who takes his own feelings aboutsounds and spaces, about human sensations
1

“site-specific” or “relational art” that involve
building new relationships through art, andadopting the stance that developing such
relationships is the goal of artistic activity.
No.4 is “Also delivering music to audiencesin the traditional formats in which people
enjoy music, such as concerts” through themusical activities of groups like Shuta
Hasunuma Philharmonic Orchestra. This typeof activity differs from what Hasunuma-sanrefers to as his “experimental” side. Rather
than positing dichotomies of artist versus
audience, art versus the everyday, or
experiment versus entertainment, Hasunumasan takes a more flexible approach. My
guess would be that underlying this is a
desire to give something to the audience that
goes beyond the avant-garde action ofnegating, of rejecting aesthetics andentertainment.
No.5 is a “bonus” point in a sense, but infact to me the most important question of all:one concerning his “ongoing awareness thathuman beings live amid the whole of creation:
flora and fauna, weather, temperature,architecture, day-to-day routines and theworkings of nature, as well as anaccumulation of cultural and social actions.”
Valuing the sense of being blessed that thisgives, is I believe an attitude that connects
Hasunuma-san’s musical activities as acomposer and work as an artist composing
spaces.
I’ve thus explained just the main points;
now I would like to ask Hasunuma-san tounravel all that a little at a time.

and activities and emotions, and endeavors
to express them mainly through the mediumof sound.
Until recently my dealings with Hasunumasan in a musical sense had been limited, so
figuring I was somewhat of a neophyte when
it came to his work, I put together somequestions, after a fashion, in the process
coming up with five points that help us tounderstand his work. These are listed on thehandout, so can I ask you to turn yourattention to that for a moment.
The plan is for today’s talk to progress as a
back-and-forth of ideas, in which I ask aquestion, and Hasunuma-san answers by
whatever means he chooses.
Let’s start with No.1: “Installing something
like sound in spaces.” This was also theslogan for a 2013 show by Hasunuma-san in
Asahi Art Square. I interpret this phrase as
meaning to create an environment in which
the spectator moves around the space in adifferent manner from usual, and can hear thesounds there from various directions anddistances, and in various states. In otherwords, creating an environment in which thespectator can become conscious of him or
herself as the actor in the listening, thecenter.
No.2 is “Showing new interpretations ofsound.” That is to say, what is that“something like sound” of which Hasunumasan speaks? To this are added his own
original aural interpretations. Not justtraditional interpretation of music, or physicalauditory phenomena, but perhaps also
including his approach of weaving in thevoices of people passing by, for example, orambient noise. However, I think that morethan this, it points to an approach of working
movements, acts, and visual experiences into
the realm of the auditory experience.
Then there is No.3: “Going to a place,studying the properties of that place, andputting together an exhibit to fit.” This refers
to, when invited somewhere to do a project,working in close consultation with people
whom he would not usually encounter in hismusical activities, such as curators, and staff
setting up the exhibits, who have become
involved at the planning and execution
stages. This means activities of the typereferred to in contemporary art jargon as

For my first question then, as indicated in
the phrase “Installing something like sound inspaces,” you started off with composing,
doing work generally seen as the job of acomposer, then went on to exhibit at art
museums and art spaces, and conduct
events, but what was the significance of
exhibiting at museums and art spaces, andwhat were you hoping to achieve? Was there
something you were unable to achieve
entirely in your work as a composer?
H: Assuming for example that you were to
start by dividing my output between themusical, that is my work as a composer, so to
speak, and giving concerts; and exhibiting at2

museums and art spaces, I’d say for me, thefoundation of making music is recording.
Obviously, this is partly because as
mentioned at the beginning, my activities
began with recording. Making modern music
is not only about writing staff notation; there
are also many opportunities to use acomputer. This involves feeding sounds into
the computer, building up multiple aural
layers, and editing this to process the
waveforms and turn them into music. Making
music this way is nothing new, having been
well established in the 1990s.
When doing this, for instance you might
position a microphone which would pick upsounds. These become waveforms, and justat the point I had grasped the processing of
waveforms like that as a premise for music, asmall gallery space known as the Pavilion
happened to open at the Museum ofContemporary Art Tokyo, in 2012. I wasoffered the opportunity to use that space forsomething, and that was how it all started. It
was a setting for presenting my works in aplace called an art space.
In that work, I stretched my interpretation of
the process used to make music. By which I
mean, obviously I do field recordings, and as
you know field recordings are sound so you
use your ears, but when I’m actually doing
field recording, where am I looking? Does avisual point exist? This is the question I
asked. What I mean is, if you put amicrophone in a place it will just record soundindiscriminately. A microphone has no brain.
The microphone does not think to itself, ooh
this is a good sound, and operate by itself. So
a microphone cannot be made to work unlessthe person doing the recording works it. In
other words, I was sensing there had to be afocusing of some sort.
Obviously a microphone also has
directionality, and there is the question ofwhat angle to record from, but the same
applies to a camera, and I was interested in
the relationship between the visual and aural,that is, where the capture is occurring.
I positioned a video camera in the place I
was hoping to record sound, and recorded
sound and images at the same time. I thenedited this recorded video footage in thesame manner I do when making music. In the
production process I use a computer, and themaking of video and music are based on
virtually the same process. I made a work inwhich three videos are played simultaneously
to become one piece of music.
Thinking about it, there are plenty of works
like that in art history.
M: Can you give us an example?
H: I suppose one of Christian Marclay’s video
installations would be the closest.
M: I see. When I spoke of “making theaudience sense the music by the way theimages are linked,” I was thinking of someone
other than Marclay. I didn’t necessarily mean
a musician who uses video in his or her work.
H: Ah, OK.
M: I prefer to think of as “musical” that
intuition, prior to verbalization, when a person
senses something—not a rhythm or tune orsuchlike—amid the flow that emerges when
one video moves to the next, before the video
is received by people as meaning, grasps
what they are feeling now as an organic
experience, a way of joining video that
captures that process, before it is verbalized,that way of viewing things with the senses
before they are verbalized or given meaning.
H: That’s exactly right: what you mean isbefore it becomes words, information.
M: Before it takes on meaning.
H: Moving on to the next sequence before it
takes on any meaning is exactly like that.
Another thing is—and this is the amazing
thing about sound—video is 24 frames per
second, but with sound, you can zoom a lot.
Which means you can edit much more
precisely than with video, say move 0.001
seconds back, which you can’t do with video,
so moving micro amounts of sound data inthat sense allows you to make music.
M: Would our audience be able to see a
concrete example of this kind of soundediting?
H: Certainly. Allow me to run the actual video
presented at the Museum of Contemporary3

Art Tokyo Bloomberg Pavilion while giving abrief commentary. I had people perform a few
different environmental sounds plus guitar,
drums, double bass, sax and steel pan, withme playing a piano exhumed from the depthsof the museum’s storeroom, and recorded
and filmed it all. I set up the video camera
and recorder in a fixed position from theperspective of my view of the instruments(things making sounds). The concept was
one of three videos running on a loop of
about 45 minutes, replayed in sync to formmusic. The space was designed by Hirata
Akihisa, and is shaped like a triangular prismshaped box, with lots of natural light during
the day, meaning the video is not visible. That
is to say, during the day, it is as if only thesound is playing. I made it into a video
installation that gradually looms into sight
toward evening as the natural lightdiminishes.

started with sound, and moved on to engage
with the visual and space as well.
H: Yes, it was.
M: Do you have any other landmark works
you would like to discuss here?
H: One of the five things you listed forunderstanding my work was “installing
something like sound in spaces,” and for me,
this is something common to every one of myactions. In saying that, putting sound into thespace of a record is cutting a record. Though
not works, the act of exploring the soundrelationships in a space for a gig or concert:deciding where to position the musicians,
whether to amplify a certain instrument, or
whether to make other sounds together withthe live sound, how to add variation to theoverall sound, is something I do frequently
anyway.
Musicians in my view fundamentally havean excellent sense of space and time, if that’s
how one could describe it. The same for
performers. I think they are good at sensing
what the reaction will be in this space, at thistime, to something they have made and laid
down.
The Pavilion at MOT was followed by theshow at Asahi Art Square.
M: That was 2013, wasn’t it.
H: That’s right, 2013. I did an exhibition titled“soundlike.” Unfortunately Asahi Art Squareclosed in 2016, but they ran this project
dubbed “Grow-up Artist” in which one young
artist would be chosen each year and asked
to do something in the Art Square. I was
lucky enough to be selected, and every
month would head to Art Square, where I
would research various things about thevenue, under the title of “STUDIES.” I ran
discussions, events, tried making studies for
actual works for exhibitions, all in public. In
saying that, this was on weekdays, so it
wasn’t exactly thronged with visitors.

have a go at flying from music part 3
Bloomberg Pavilion, Museum of Contemporary
Art Tokyo, 2013

M: Kind of workshops?
M: It strikes me that this pavilion work was
important in terms of you being an artist who

H: Yes, workshops. Rather than giving theevents names that would explain them, that4

is, saying, “This is a workshop,” I was
conscious of a kind of “STUDIES” vibe, of
stuff just somehow happening. It felt like the“soundlike” exhibition came about as apresentation of the results of those studies.
Those were also studies in a real sense forme, and a period of taking time for each, toconstruct how I would exhibit them.
M: It was a building unusual in structure, so
you came up with a device that allowed
spectators to walk in a different way fromusual.
H: That’s right. A different route to follow thanthe usual for an art exhibition. I deliberated atsome length on the effect it might have toplace this kind of work when the viewing
order was different.
M: Do you have any images of that?
H: I’ll show some pictures and video.
M: If you could please, and tell us aboutthem.

soundlike
Asahi Art Square 2013

Plays footage

M: Asahi Art Square was actually only used
to display art relatively infrequently, wasn’t it;it was more often a venue for theater ordance performances. It was a long, narrowbuilding.
H: Yes, long and narrow, and oval in shape.
M: Irregular, then.
H: Yes. Designed by Philippe Starck... and I
suspect we’ll come back to this later;
architectural structures, the spaces of abuilding, have a major impact on sound.
Sound goes around this space in a very
distinctive manner, not like normal at all. The
question was how to deal with this challenge,
I guess you could say, or rather how to use it
to my advantage, and I pondered this a lot as
I went along.
In the venue there are all kinds of sounds.
Elements of those sounds include forexample the sound of a video playing. Further
back in the space, is a video of a person
reading aloud. The voice of a narrator can beheard from somewhere. However, because5the space has this peculiar shape, unless you
stand right in front of the video, you can only
hear the sound. I filmed this kind of video also
as part of the “STUDIES” project. Thisrevolving kinetic work, with sound almost likeglass waves revolving cyclically, in a space
where all kinds of sounds mixed together...

amplified, the sound from the amp coming
through speakers placed in the four cornersof the space. Which means that the live
audience listened to, and recognized asmusic, the single piece of music we were
performing, through four speakers.
Under those conditions, for instance if a
euphonium player is in front of the audience,
they will pick up the sound of a euphonium,from among the various sounds present in
the space. The visual aspect on thisoccasion—a live concert being aperformance—meant that the way people
perceive sounds from the bodily actions of
the playing, and think, ah, this is the sound ofa euphonium, was interesting. I imagine from
this, from performing live, I was also thinking
about the gap in awareness, and therelationship, between hearing and vision.

M: Was that “sounds will spin”?
H: Yes, it was the piece called “sounds will
spin.”
M: This work was a special device for making
sound: can you give us a close-up image ofit?
H: Certainly.

M: So you created an environment thatallowed the audience to not only pick up
various sounds in the venue, but subjectively
recognize them as sounds.
This reminds me of what John Cage wrote
about the “sound spaces” created byexperimental music. This is the quote from
“Experimental Music,” a 1955 article by Cage,
excerpts of whichappear on the handout.
Allow me to explain a little. It says, “Here weare concerned with the coexistence ofdissimilars, and the central points where
fusion occurs are many: the ears of thelisteners, wherever they are.” Cage is writing
about the kind of listening experience that is
the goal of a new type of music. What is
generally understood as the quality ofharmony is the product of a fusion of several,
predetermined elements, and if that istraditional music, the aural space as Cage
saw it is a space in which the listenerproactively combines sounds to constructtheir own singular listening experience.
Meaning that “the ears of the listeners” serveas the actors selecting the various elements
given there.

sounds will spin 2013

We humans recognize sounds, how theyturn sounds into music... at the time I wasinterested in that human awareness of
capturing sounds. Even without me arbitrarily
making music, by arranging just sounds in aspace, surely the audience in the space
would turn that into music of their own
volition? This was another sort of practice, a
study.
To speak a little more of awareness, I’ve
put together an ensemble by the name of
Shuta Hasunuma Philharmonic Orchestra,
which for the last seven or eight years moreor less has been giving concerts not every
month, but certainly several times a year. In
2013, around the same time as the“soundlike” exhibition, I tried setting up astage in the middle of a space, and giving alive performance with the audiencesurrounding the ensemble. The sound was

H: That’s right.
M: But generally, perhaps listeners don’t thinkthat kind of initiative is available to them?
H: I guess not.
6

of food for thought.
M: I get the impression, for example, that we
do not have enough of a music education to
go to a concert and consciously listen todifferent parts of the music so our ears
differentiate the sound of a certain type of
instrument, or to be able to integrate thedifferent sounds into a single, organic auralexperience.

M: At Asahi Art Square I think people were
offered a new perspective on “soundlike
things,” in the form of giving them the chance
to experience as sound things people are notnormally conscious of as being sound.
H: Yes, that’s right.

H: Once you start talking about musiceducation, almost invariably it comes down to
how you’ve studied Western music, which isthe complete opposite of the music model
Cage speaks of.

M: I mentioned earlier how if you take aparticular approach to editing video, it canseem musical, and I suppose the same canbe said for people’s movements. The
spectator can actually try moving, and sense
within themselves—I guess to call it amusicality of sorts would be a little odd—anorganic flow, perhaps. Or another person
could see that, and perceive it as a kind ofmusic. Interpreting actions such as this as“music” is I suspect something else you wereaiming for with your exhibits at Asahi Art
Square. Any thoughts on that?

M: Describing it as music education isperhaps a little formal, but generally, in termsof how people approach listening to sounds,
we have spent a long time being taught thatthe experience of listening to music,
regardless of genre, is that of taking
something offered to us that someone has
put together well as a tune, and judging how“good” it is. So when sound comes along thathas not been set, that remains in the form ofmaterials, people may feel it to be“incomplete,” and feel puzzled by that.

H: Hmm, yes. If I were to start talking about
the music of actions, we’d be here all day. Do
you mind if we move on to something else?
There is video of an installation view from ashow in New York. I’d like to show that.

H: That’s very true. People really are puzzled
by that. Harking back to Asahi Art Square, if I
may, my work there was incomplete when I
named it “STUDIES.” I was thinking about
how to make a certain type of incomplete
thing—there will be blanks, obviously it will
have blank spaces because it is notfinished—and I mean thinking about how to
use those blanks. The space is no longer
used, so even if I were to describe the site it
wouldn’t really convey what I mean, but let’s
imagine. You can see the space from above.
The floor above is glassed in, and you canwatch people moving about. When Fumihiko
Sumitomo, director of Arts Maebashi, came tovisit, he commented that it was the audiencethat was doing the study here. There arevarious ways of viewing, but generally when
the audience comes to see a work, they don’t
want to be involved in any study. They want
to see a completed thing and make up theirminds about it accordingly. I was also asked
why those viewing the work should be obliged
to think about it; which in turn gave me plentyVideo plays

7

published in 1964 is a collection of
instructions written by her.
In 1991 an artist, Félix González-Torres
held an exhibition in which candy equivalent
to the combined weight of him and his
deceased lover was placed in the gallery,with visitors to the gallery invited to takehome a piece. The person actually issuing
the instructions, in this case a gallery staff
member, was free to determine the type ofcandy, and the mode of its display. The
artist’s only “instruction” was that candy
weighing the same as him and his beloved beinstalled in the gallery. Which gives theaudience a lot of freedom, doesn’t it?
H: While we’re talking about Torres, I’ll
mention that actually, the amount of water
here is equivalent to my weight. Part of that isfor the same reason as Torres, but also,
water evaporates. As time passes, thevolume reduces. I thought well, in the end,
sound is invisible, and so is that evaporatingwater. It just naturally diminishes, becomespart of the air. Which struck me as
wonderfully poetic, and a live performance
seemed the best way to proceed. Poetic ofcourse means having an element of poetry,
and when I say live, I mean in the sense of
the immediacy of an exhibition per se, andalso that sound, I think you can hear it as weare speaking now, that clinking tone. I lovethat sound, the way it reverberates.

Compositions
Pioneer Works 2018
アサヒ・アートスクエア 2013

H: The venue, a place called Pioneer Works,
is in an area of Brooklyn known as Red Hook,and could be described as a multipurpose art
space. There are instructions on the wall
asking visitors to move bottles containing
water to wherever they like, and so they do.
By instructions I mean something akin to thesheet music of a score.

M: How is that sound made?
H: It’s just what you get when you move winebottles.

M: The avant-garde art movement known as
Fluxus was active from the 1960s through tothe early ’80s, mainly in New York but
extending to Europe and Japan as well, and“instructions” were a method of making art
that emerged from the endeavors of Fluxus
practitioners. This did literally involve
instructions, i.e., the artist issuing shortwritten directions for performing some action,in the vein of “water” or “touch,” which each
spectator would interpret in his or her own
way and use to perform assorted actions, in amethod designed to encourage audience
participation in a performance. It was usedmost in the early days of Fluxus, around
1961–62. Yoko Ono’s book Grapefruit

M: So the sound is produced by the moving.
H: Like this (looking at video).

8

are deemed the norm, the act of moving or
switching around objects becomes very
conventional. Meaning that the changes insound engendered by those “nothing special”
actions are important.
H: Yes. In the end, there was a single soundin the space. The same goes for the show at
the Shiseido Gallery; when two sounds occur
simultaneously, basically that forms acomposition. The instant two sounds areproduced, it becomes music, bizarre thoughthat may seem. This work involved just thesimple act of moving bottles, but what I’msaying is that for me, just two of thoseclinking sounds together sounds like therichest of compositions. It reinforces the ideathat this is in fact a musical work.

Compositions
Pioneer Works 2018
アサヒ・アートスクエア 2013

M: They make a sound because they touch.
H: Ultimately, they make a sound when
moved, so you could simply put this down to
randomness, but obviously randomness isguaranteed, so here for me randomness is
not the theme; I simply adore that sound.

M: It really is.
H: I suspect this is precisely what we mean
by music being action, by musicking.

M: The sound also differs according to howmuch water remains in the bottle.

M: I agree. I wonder if this is also closely
connected to the concretist approach pursued
by artists in the 1960s. Concretism is anapproach that, rather than maintaining ahierarchical relationship between everyday
sounds and composed sounds, values theoriginality of sounds without manmade
interference. It is based on the idea that by
opening our hearts and minds to theunintentional sounds surrounding us, just as
Cage noticed in his “anechoic chamber
experience” at Harvard University, we canenjoy a richer aural experience. Fluxus leader
George Macunias, who learned of this ideafrom Cage, attempted to apply it to theunderstanding of art as a whole. According tohim, modern western works of art havecontrolled various elements, including nature,through human thought, packaging them into
collated forms such as pictures or stories todeliver to audiences; but the new art would
wherever possible avoid intention or
subjectivity on the part of the maker, insteademphasizing the likes of random
occurrences, and process. In other words, he
was saying that in the new music, it would bea case of hitting something and having it
make just the sound of being hit, making
sounds that convey directly the unique quality

H: Indeed.
M: And which parts of the bottles collide. So
where a composer would calculate, this partis high, this part goes slowly, it’s left to therandom effects born out of the unique natureof the physical conditions such as postureand speed, when the person performs theaction.
H: The pitch changes when the volume ofwater is increased or reduced, to the extent
that a musician looked at it and wondered, if
you hit this with sticks, would it sound like a
glockenspiel?
M: But I imagine that hitting something to
make a sound like a glockenspiel was besidethe point here.
H: Absolutely. Plus I was conscious of
offering a work that allowed the audience toconfigure the gallery space freely, in this caseby moving bottles.
M: Assuming it was a performance of the sortwhere actions with a clear purpose or result9

of what is occurring now; and in painting,move preferably in the direction of conveying
the strength of an action, or the process.
If that directionality was “concretism,” to put
such an approach into action it was vital forthe artist to create conditions in which theywould be able to forget their own intentions
and subjective view. The best-known
example of a method made for intentionallysuppressing subjectivity is Cage’s chance
operations. Macunias called his own method
for forgetting subjectivity his “automatic
machine.”This instruction of yours, in which
spectators move water set up by you, thoughrather too poetic to be described as a“device,” can perhaps be thought of as a kindof “automatic machine” in which rather thanthe composer him or herself intentionallycomposing, music is obtained as a result of
the physical actions of the audience, moving
objects.

encounters.”
Listening to you talking now it struck methat these words will help us unravel anumber of things. In the end I think only
humans are aware of time and space, and wehave to consider the relationship between
space and time for things; animals and plantseven.

H: I see on the handout for the show there issomething marked “Upon the Occasion of ～ing.” Allow me to read it to everyone.
I wrote, “Sounds come into being, only todisappear in an instant. All endeavors that wecall ‘music’ arise, perhaps, from humanbeings’ desire to apprehend these sounds
before they disappear. Music is born out of
our everyday lives, originating in theindividual, ultimately returning to theindividual. All human beings on Earth,regardless of the society or community towhich they belong, are implicated in myriad
relationships: not just with other humanbeings, but with the non-human too.
Recognizing both human and non-humanactivities, conscious of the interlacing
relationships that exist between them, may
well be the key to broadening the scope of
our coexistence. Many phenomena in our
ecosystem that overwhelm our everyday
logic—climate change, earthquakes,
radiation—seem to us both temporally andspatially unfathomable. The time and spacecontained in this exhibition, ～ing, belong toyou. You may find the ever-changing
environment hazy, indefinite, indefinable:
impossible to pin down with words. I hope theexhibition leads you to many such elusive

H: That’s right. Ultimately I make it available,
to a degree, and what actually comes out of
that, is no longer to do with me.

M: Are you saying that things other thanhumans are incapable of creating time andspace as the setting for proactive actions
involving themselves as individuals?
H: That’s right. And in this work, in the end I
have no autonomy, I guess you’d say,although that sounds a bit coerced.
M: What you mean is, it is not that yourthoughts have already created the work, andyou are just proffering the results of that tothe audience.

M: I suppose you’d call that unconscious, or
natural... Macunias also opined that if an
iconographic stance was modern art, then
now we ought to make art in which space andtime are incorporated in us. But it was only
natural for him to aim for that. The sound ofrain falling, for example, is art, he said, as is
the fluttering of a butterfly. That is a way of
thinking that doesn’t discriminate between art
and nature, art and the everyday. That’s also
the stance you were aiming for with thisexhibition, more clearly than you have everdone before.
If on the one hand we have this going backto nature, on the other hand we also needmethods and tricks to indicate that even so,
art is not the everyday as such, butsomething supported by the arousal of a
special kind of sensation.
H: Absolutely.
M: I imagine that emerges from issuing
instructions, installing works, in order tocreate the conditions for actions.
10

H: If I may apply this idea a little, my ideal
musical performance or concert requires
composer, performers, audience, and space
to each be an independent sounding body.
By which I mean, it’s sufficient for all these toexist, but I think the job of a composer is toturn those sounding bodies into music bycreating a certain, single order, in the senseof making sound.
In this latest exhibition too, there are lots ofdifferent things placed around, and listening
to what you just said, it strikes me thatperhaps creating a single order, the way one
does that, does require something almost
akin to a trick.

creating a setting for communication was
something more typical of you than a lot ofother creatives. What do you think about
that? Or, I know in the case of Asahi Art
Square, you ran various study groups, andlooked carefully at the structure of thearchitecture, in order to familiarize yourself
with the site; can you tell us a little about what
it means to you to research things and people
you don’t know about? For instance, can you
tell us what form your “STUDIES” of the
Shiseido Gallery, and of Ginza as a site, took,
and what kind of people you reached out to in
the process of creating a space forcommunication?

M: This order of which you speak, do wemean that it is not the kind of systemgenerally spoken of that everyone has tofollow, but a unification or totality created by
the people on the spot using the materials
they are given?

H: Although the question is how to unravel allthat.
M: An explanation of a specific work will do.
Sasaki-san said this was a standout featureof your artistic character, so what are yourthoughts on that?

H: Yes, a totality.
H: Hmmm, character you say...
M: Would it be correct to view your making
and positioning of a device that suggests
people to do it, that invites them in, as having
made an environment for the audience tonotice their own autonomy?

M: I imagine he meant a talent he associatedmore with you than other people.
H: It’s humans connecting with other humans,so I suppose the easiest example to use
would be the ensemble. As I’ve said manytimes before, everyone in the ensemble, thatis Shuta Hasunuma Philharnomic Orchestra,
comes from a different background. What I
mean by that is, a different musicalbackground: there are people who areclassically trained, and others who’ve playedin bands. Their music is not something they
can share.

H: I suppose so, yes.
M: If I may move on to our third question?
H: Certainly, hopefully we are moving alongat about the right pace. I guess we are.
M: My third question is: when you go to aplace, research its special properties, andcreate an exhibit to suit, I assume you involve
not only people that you usually deal with, butpeople with a connection to that place, inparticular exhibition staff?

M: Do you mean in terms of general musicalknowledge, or skills?
H: Strictly speaking both, though obviously
they try to understand the other person, how
tough it is, and get closer to them. Get closer
to each other’s unfamiliar music, I mean.
Perhaps they are incapable of understanding,but the act of getting closer is something they
can do, being human, and I always try to
make music centered on that growing
familiarity.

H: I do, yes.
M: Looking back at your previous
conversations with other critics, I seem toremember one in particular, with Atsushi
Sasaki, owner of your record label HEADZ,
where Sasaki-san said that gathering
together people and elements like that and11That approach to making music is, in mycase, just my character, I suppose. The
reality is that when everyone grows closer,
the result is a single piece of music, so I
suppose I’m capitalizing on that increased
familiarity. If you call that communication, I
suspect those circumstances apply in all
kinds of settings.

H: That’s right.
M: So did you also think it would be better tocome up with something else?
H: That’s exactly what I thought. Something
different, or rather, I thought I needed tomake something new.

M: Indeed; for example, for the exhibition at
Kobe Art Village you were asked to do thesame as the one at Asahi Art Square, butwhen you actually went to the location in
Kobe, you realized it would be better not to
do the same there, so did something
different. Can you tell us a little more about
that? Say, how you capture the special
qualities of a particular place?

(Images screen from here)

This is what the work was like: here you
can see the first floor of Kobe Art Village
Center. I’ll explain more later. There wassomething like this on the first floor, and thisgoes down underground. You get in theelevator and go down to the basement, andthese are stairs. This is the basement. The
work is positioned here, like this. This is fairly
close to the Asahi Art Square exhibit. This is
the type of work I was making.
As to what I was doing here, Kobe Art
Village Center has a silkscreen workshop.
Ah...silkscreen, I thought. I think you can tellfrom this, out the back is an open space. Not
so much the back, as the back as entrance.
Think of it as entering from the entrance, andmy work being further in, at the back.
I spent a week in this open space making
the work. What I was making was sound,using the piano, and all the other instruments
at Kobe Art Village Center, which I brought inthere. What kind of sound? It was all a scorefor
myself.2 I read that score and recorded asoundlike
Kobe Art Village
Center 2013
successionof sounds
at the venue. This is
アサヒ・アートスクエア
thespeaker, and2013
the music I made played outof this, in an installation I did while looking at
the graphic score I had made.
Here we have glass, and people pass by.
For example, as you see here, the blue andyellow are instructions to use two
instruments, and this is random, this shows
the intensity of the sound. I left it recording,and did it using the piano, and did stuff like
perform sounds repeatedly in the moments
people passed by. It was a score: I recordedat the same time as the score to make thework.

H: It was as you say. I started with the idea of
touring what I’d done at Asahi Art Square
after carrying out the “STUDIES,” and there’s
this art space by the name of Kobe Art Village
Center. They don’t only show art but haveconcerts, movies, and all sorts of amazing
programs, and that was to be the venue forthe exhibition. If I had taken what I did at
Asahi to that place unmodified, it would havebecome a completely different piece of work.
M: Different because the location was
different.

12using diagrams to show sounds.
M: Did you have help from staff to do thescore?

H: Yes. To some extent the medium formaking the sound (eg the musical instrument)
is decided in advance, and you have to fit inwith that, so it’s like a track for actions,directions for making people move.

H: I did. It was the people from Kobe Art
Village Center who worked with me on thescore to start with, and they actually
performed at the same time, under mydirection. So I had the staff performing aswell.

M: So there is something already complete,
and the decision to add oneself to that cannot
be made arbitrarily; one must follow rules toforget one’s own thoughts and selfawareness, to make it possible to createsound.
H: Meaning there is a blank that is left up to
the performer.
M: Yes, that’s it. The score being in diagrams
gives the freedom to generate those blankspaces.
H: That’s correct.
I’m not sure if “those days” is the right
expression, but the way of using graphic
notation when Cage was doing it, forexample, and the philosophy behind my useof graphic notation are inherently totallydifferent, in my view. I’ve never even remotely
done it because I wanted to do it like Cage,and even if I used the same thing as he did in
those days, I’m confident my output would be
different, and in fact, think it is. I am making a“those days” of my own with theunderstanding that I am not simply tracing
history, but doing something completely
different.

graphic score 2013

M: Can you first of all explain your definitionof “score” a little more?
H: The term score refers to the sheet music, I
suppose you could call it. You have what is
known as staff notation, but in the 1950s acomposer by the name of Morton Feldman,
among others, invented a new kind of musicalnotation...
In simple terms, I suppose you could
describe it as the idea of how to incorporate
randomness and uncertainty in what was
written in staff notation, how to see if evensuch underlying, existing concepts can be
destroyed with music.

M: There are a lot of new, ingenious aspects
to this exhibition at the Shiseido Gallery. I
mentioned earlier that the aim of Fluxus was
to move away from the hierarchy of art versus
nature and explore ways to bring art closer tonature, and I see in the text you have written
for this exhibition something similar, stated in
more contemporary terms. In the days of
Fluxus, the notion of art for art’s sake had
been dominant for a very long time, which isperhaps why the Fluxus artists, as a counterto that, sought to return to nature throughradical actions, but in your case, there is along history of composers contemplating how
the avant-garde music that emerged from that

M: That’s exactly right. A score is usually
written in notes, but Cage for example tried
using a map of Henry David Thoreau’s book
Walden, out of empathy with the philosopher
and writer’s account of his time there. The
notation for Cage’s performances canresemble drawing-like symbols.
What you came up with on that occasion was
something akin to those performance scores,
13

time on would be accepted in human culture
and social contexts.
Seeing this exhibition I was surprised by
how much more concerned than before you
are with things like plants and water. Moisturetends to remind us of weather, and it felt as if
you were taking great pains to explore how
things in nature, including natural
phenomena, and the human body, engage
with each other, and in particular how
humans and other entities meet, mix andconnect through the sensation of sound.
Would you tell us a little about this latest
exhibition?

because this exhibition is titled “～ ing” tostart with, there is this void, on both sides of
the “～.” Room for words to go in. Somethingor-other to something-or-other. That
something-or-other to something-or-otheritself, in my view, demonstrates that
relationship. It could be things and people,
myself and others, hearing and vision, but
because it is “ing” obviously it could be theprogressive form, or you could insert “be” andmake it being, as in human being. Add “th”
and you have thing. Thus my hope was thatusing a symbol like this, would give a lot of
scope in meaning.
Amid all this rethinking of things, due tospecific problems right now such as climatechange, or in Japan, radiation in Fukushima,
we have lost the ability to imagine the future.
But it strikes me that the future is not
something we’ve ever been able to imagine.
By which I mean, there are similarities
between the acts of revisiting the past andimagining the future. Meaning that handlingnow, the present day, with care, amounts tothe same.
I suspect that valuing the here and now isvery close to feeling deeply this time we
grasp right now, to expanding our sensibilities
as we go along; in other words, time passes,
so environments also change with that
passage of time. Through my works I create
environments for people to be not so muchconscious of, as sense, those changes, evena little; where they can embrace them as
sensations.

H: Yes, why not. The exhibition I spoke ofearlier, that involved moving bottles of wateraround, was titled “compositions,” and wasstaged in locations such as Aomori, Tokyo
and Beijing before heading to New York,
where it ran up to April 8. The exhibition at
Shiseido Gallery was from April 6, so there
was a slight overlap. These circumstanceswere another reason why I had been
considering making something new since
Toyoda-san of the Shiseido Gallery
approached me.
I’d been brainstorming, I guess you’d say,for ages; thinking about concepts. To put it
plainly, if I may, I’d been doing what I do now
for eleven years, and the more I did, the more
keenly I felt that the society in which we live
was not getting any better.
The past two or three years I’ve had a lot ofopportunities to visit New York, and done a
lot of moving around. That shifting about has
allowed me to view things with a kind of
objectivity, and be more open in my ideas fortackling new challenges, but I thought fromthe start that I needed to rethink my verypractice, this kind of thing, including thematters that had influenced my activities todate. So each of the works in this exhibition
has a reference, I suppose you’d call it, apast work, not the same but a reference, mythought being that perhaps I could come up
with some new perspectives on those works.
I was hoping this exhibition would perhaps
offer a few new insights for the future fromthe present, via the act of revisiting the pastin this way.
This leads on to discussion of things likerelational qualities and environment, and

M: It strikes me you have used that as a
blueprint and developed assorted projects
accordingly. In the exhibition at Shiseido
Gallery, the floor is packed with gold-coloredscraps which at first glance look like debris,but which when someone walks on them,make sounds as they move against eachother. The walls meanwhile have been turned
into mirrors, their semi-opaque surfaces
seeming wet with steam. Particularly on
humid, cloudy days like today, they look evenwetter, creating, with refrections, a lyricalscene reminiscent of people walking in rain.
There is also a tree in the exhibition, thatsways subtly due to the vibrations from adevice you have set up to emit sound. Thus
14

despite the exhibition venue being a closed
room, it is a space where one can sense a
connection to organic things like water, trees,
and weather. Into that, flow sounds you havespent a great deal of time collecting.

dismantle and then reconstruct objects to dowith music and sound. Those reconstructions
are referred to as re-models, and that act of
re-modeling could also be viewed as arejection of sorts of the Western view ofmusical instruments, of music. These works
were made with the same idea as that
underpinning Shuta Hasunuma Philharmonic
Orchestra, that of assembling a different typeof Western orchestra structure more suited tomodern society. When the musical objects
known as instruments are dismantled, making
them no longer instruments, they quickly turninto objects, matter. I suppose you could
almost call it cruel, this demotion frommusical instrument to mere stuff, this verbal
trick of logic.

H: Yes, that’s right.
M: It felt as if the world outside had beensummoned into the enclosed space of theroom, by weaving in sounds from other times,
and fragments of actions being performed in
the now; by having a living tree there, with awind—if the vibration is seen as wind—shaking it, and mirrors covered in drops ofwater.
The material that looks like debris on the floor
is partially dismantled musical instruments,
isn’t it?
H: Yes: to be precise, scraps left over fromthe manufacture of brass and other wind
instruments.
M: With things like that placed there, one
senses a connection to human living.
When it came to doing an exhibition here in
Ginza, I imagine you felt you had to work inelements like people passing by, theambience of the site and so on. I alsopresume that in order to get YAMAHA to
supply you with scrap, you had to negotiatewith someone at Yamaha, so in incorporatingsocial context including that task, you may
have been thinking about Ginza as a placewith a lot of human traffic.
H: Ah, YAMAHA. If I may start with YAMAHA;
I actually started the creating when I returned
to Japan in early March, going straight to
YAMAHA, to their factory in Iwata, where they
explained the process involved in making
instruments, and then showed me their wastematerial.

Re-model 2016

M: Pieces of musical instrument are not the
only things that would make a sound bytouching when people move, so why did you
choose instruments? I’m curious.

M: Cruel I’d say. If equipped technologicallyas an instrument, a thing can make thesounds we expect it to.

H: Ah, well you see, as I think is written on
the handout for the exhibition, there’s a seriesof mine called “Re-model,” in which I

H: Indeed.
15

M: If that is dismantled into parts, it is likely to
be seen, like debris, as being of no use.

H: That’s right. Reusing something, notinfrastructure, but reusing something that has
fallen. Not sure if reuse has the right feel...

H: That’s exactly the anthropocentric way of
thinking I’m talking about.

M: Reuse is fine, I think. Reuse has been an
important concept in contemporary art terms
since the 2000s.

M: Also very technology-centered.
H: Yes. When I actually went to the factory,
various people there told me that making
musical instruments in Japan was a high-end
pursuit to begin with these days, the point
being that it’s about crafting by hand, a job forartisans, and that is a good thing. Whether itreally is a good thing or not I don’t know, but
by all accounts, it is.

H: I suppose it has.
M: It’s also similar to the idea of
deconstruction; in art “reuse” means taking
something used for something in a particularway, that has thus become commonplace oroutdated, placing it in a different context orusing it in a different way, and thus finding a
new way of using, a new vitality, a newcontext for something ostensibly done with.
Nor does “reuse” apply merely to objects. In
contemporary art, the term “reuse” also refers
to going to a town or neighborhood, listening
to a forgotten story, and organizing an eventthat brings this story back to life. An example
would be when the contemporary artist
Michihiro Shimabuku went to a town in Walesand found that even though long ago, a dog
had saved the lives of several people there,
the locals were starting to forget the animal’sheroic exploits. So he undertook a projectthat involved putting together a one-off eventfor dogs and their owners to have dogs
swimming at the beach, in honor of thatforgotten dog. [Shimabuku: Swansea Jack
Memorial Dog Swimming Competition]
Apparently lots of people took part. By doing
this, he altered the local community’sawareness not only of the legend in question,but of the place they lived in.
Just now you said that even when amusical instrument is taken apart and turned
into just things, no longer producing thesounds you would expect from an instrument,
those things have their own innate sound,and that moreover, is a good sound. You
were attempting to create the conditions forplaying that sound in a different form from an
instrument, weren’t you? That, I think, is“reuse” in the contemporary art sense.
Liberating sound from the functionallyprogrammed realm of music, returning it topure sound, and making a place to listen to
that: all this is I think connected to the quote

M: Well, it’s good in its own way surely....
H: And after seeing that I saw the debris...
which actually isn’t debris is it, but scrap.
M: Sorry for just classing it as “debris.”
H: Material that is used to make musicalinstruments sounds pretty good to start with.
Any material, from East or West. Even a
piano makes a good sound when struck withbrushes like a percussion instrument.
M: Striking a piano with brushes...
H: For example, playing a piano on theinside. Like the reverberating sounds from aprepared piano. What I want to say is, evenwhen it just becomes a thing, that in itself has
nothing to do with sound. Even when amusical instrument is taken apart and reverts
to its status as materials, I believe thosematerials make a lovely sound. I actually did
one of my studies with those pieces of scrap.
I did it right there, and I think I could describe
them as being in robust health.
H: Meaning sound that was in great shape.
The very concept of a musical instrument for
the rational emission of sound is one of logos,of verbalizing. In turning from instrument tomere matter, it has dropped away fromhuman sensation.
M: Slipped from the realm of cultural acts.
16

from Cage in the first section of the handout.
That quote concerned Cage’s experience inthe anechoic chamber at Harvard. Cage once
went into a space set up technically in such a
way that no sound would be audible, andheard two types of sound. When he later
asked an engineer about the source of thosesounds, he was told they were the sound of
his own nervous system, and blood
circulating. Cage concluded from this that nomatter how much one tries to expel soundartificially, as there are sounds like this inside
one’s own body, it is impossible to shut out
randomly occurring sounds. He also felt there
was therefore no sense in the traditional
categorizing of sounds written on sheet musicas sound, and everything else as silence, ornoise. He realized that the world is suffusedwith sound, so by simply opening our hearts
and minds we can also sense, as a special
experience, sounds conventionally deemednoise. From there arose Cage’s appreciationof uncertainty; it also determined the directionof his music, which became to methodologize
this appreciation. This is a famous story;
perhaps so famous that it has been a little
forgotten.
To me, your thought that as even the stuff
that emerges when musical instruments are
dismantled sounds good, why not create a
new environment that will bring that goodsound back to life, is a trial attempt at taking
discarded sounds and working them into
human experience again.

sound, and thus I think that physicalsensation of touch is also one feeling ofsound, a feeling of sound that will likely beremembered.
M: Is that part of your idea of beingsoundlike?
H: Yes, though I refer to it as “something likesound.”
M: Sound, and the various sensations
surrounding it, something of that nature?
H: Cage’s experience in the soundproof room
also relates to the idea, I suspect, that inside
us is a whole other cosmos, and sound goeson, music goes on, as long as we live,
meaning we kind of store up memory andphysical feelings inside us.
M: I agree. Cage’s experience of the sounds
he was hearing actually being the sounds ofthings flowing around his own body isimportant to you as well, I think. Which is why
you take the view that it is not only our ears
that sense sound, but the whole body, andthat the body can serve as an instrument formaking sound. Many contemporary
musicians take Cage’s ideas as thelaunchpad for their own, and those ideas ofCage’s are so elementary they hardly needreferencing here. In saying that, I think we
can say they are to a degree linked to theorigins of your own ideas?

H: Furthermore, when the audience entersthat place, perhaps you could call it thesensation of feet; it’s very physical. They areusing their bodies. Using their bodies to unite
sound and body I suppose, there is a real
sense of that physicality being worked in as asound-generating phenomenon. Obviouslythat is intentional…

H: I don’t know if this is a fitting example, buttake today’s pop music for instance, take theBeatles: their music is made up of just four
instrumental parts: drums, guitar, bass andvocals. The Beatles and Cage rank similarly
in musical terms for me, though the reason
for that requires a little explaining...

M: Is it a sense of that physical experiencefor example of one’s feet hitting things, andthe feel of a sound being produced swiftly
shifting from touch to hearing to becomeone?

I think you can go at this from a number of
directions. I’m saying they’re the same in thatboth created our modern perceptions ofmusic. Not that their music is similar, but thatthey were similar in the sense of being
influential.

H: Yes. Sound is not something we just hearwith our ears, so I believe it is something thatvarious factors lead us to recognize as

M: The more rigorous attitude to sound in
Cage’s day, and your approach that17

endeavors to incorporate social context,
including the visual, could just be describedas the difference between modern and postmodern, but it does seem to reflect thecomplexity of the period that followed.
When I was given the opportunity to chatwith you, I was asked to do so in the context
of what is always taught at school—Cage,
Fluxus etc.—but it struck me that thiswouldn’t entirely mesh with your current
approach. What was rediscovered in the
1960s was the power of unprocessed soundper se. Fluxus and so on anticipated thatsound itself would lead humans back to anatural world hitherto disrupted by the formatof civilization versus nature, and to do so they
had no choice but to adopt an “anti-art”
stance that rejected professional music andart, instead aiming for the natural.
However, since the 1970s I think effort has
been made to open up various paths for
returning the avant-garde music, orcontemporary music, ushered in in that form,
to the everyday lives of living people.
As someone composing and working in theworld post that of the 1970s, I think you havethe more human viewpoint of a person who
has come in fresh; a way of engaging withmusic that is not necessarily anti-art. Whichalso brings me to the last of my questions. It’s
something evident also in the way you
decline to reject the concert as a form,
typified in the activities of Shuta Hasunuma
Philharmonic Orchestra. That is to say, youhave not abandoned the question of how todeliver your music to an audience. And also,
in your musical activities, there is a sensethat your heart is open to symbiosis withnature, and to the everyday joy that people
take in the subtle changes that occur in thenatural world and day-to-day living; the crisp
air of morning, evening light, the sound of an
insect’s wings.
Although some might fail to see theconnection between this sort of thing, andcontemporary art. In anticipation of our talk
today I listened to the tracks on Shuta
Hasunuma Philharmonic Orchestra CD Timeplays and so we do ～ that you gave to me.
Having done so, it seems to me that in yourmusical realm you may have taken on board
avant-garde experimentation as a basis for

how you engage with sound, but have not
moved that far toward the reverence for the“mechanical” adopted by the avant-garde inits effort to evade the subjective; instead you
have actively sought to embrace the lyricaland emotional, rather than excising it. Your
tunes possess a rich emotional realm
restored through human sensation, a sense,
one could say, of the poetic being precious toyou. Would you like to comment on that? By
all means actually play some of the music for
us if you can.
H: I think I can manage that (laughs).
(Plays ONEMAN by Shuta Hasunuma
Philharmonic Orchestra)
M: Ideally it would be good to read all thoselyrics, actually.
H: Indeed.
M: This music is probably a difficult world foranyone very familiar with contemporary music
to recognize. I first heard this sound source in2013 when asked to contribute to the catalog
for your exhibition at Asahi Art Square, andfelt it would be hard to discuss in the context
of the contemporary art I knew. At the time, I
happened to be studying the avant-garde
methodologies of the ’60s, such as Fluxus,
and to me there seemed to be little crossover
between the austerity of avant-garde
methods, and the generous inclusiveness of
your music.
Having now done more research on avantgarde methodologies, I sense a very humanworld to take on board anew. As you build
your career as a contemporary artist, I
suspect that human aspect will become
harder to acknowledge publicly, so perhaps
this would be a good opportunity to discuss
the significance of those human, lyricalaspects.
So let us read a little. Today I have alsobrought along a poem by Shuntaro Tanikawa,from Kiku to kikoeru – on Listening, hiscollection of poems on the subject of music.
The words you wrote, with no knowledge at
all of Tanikawa’s poems, resonate superbly in
my view with his thoughts on music, on theexperiences of “listening” and “hearing,”18

flowing through his poems.

it.

H: I see. You mean the track I played justnow, right? “Amid the light we turn to face inunison / Who said let’s go together? / Amid
the urgent knocking / I ask, bundle the time of
my birth / Amid the light we turn to face inunison / Gauging the all and only the same /Amid the urgent knocking / I ask, bundle thetime of my birth / Ask, bundle time / If I start
to count a moment / Amid a single blink of theeye / Who said let’s go together? / Just why is
it / There is a mono noise / That changes tostereo / Like playing monopoly / This space
between everyone and us / Is in unison /Beyond the universe / Divide 1 by 1 and themeaning will appear here / I thought I saw
something / Thought I saw something / Let’s
go while we still can / Ask, bundle time /Making light turn back / I am one man and yet
not one man

H: The last song (Shuta Hasunuma
Philharmonic Orchestra Hello Everything) isdefinitely like that.
H: “Us bundling endless words flowing
forgetting recalling / Us piling endlessgestures on one another like air flowing
through all / Bright morning-sun light througha chink in the curtains / Open the window,
outside air flows in, found it, a nearby tree /Mid afternoon, burgeoning green, Shapes
visible, in the shadows / A couple sit barefooton a bench under the tree, adorable /Between branches, sunset, color changing
slowly / A bird lands, Eats a berry from thetree, Tasty / Well... white breath, dissolves inthe shadows / When dark falls, I grow sleepy,
Goodnight, See you tomorrow”
M: Thank you. The word “bundle” appears inboth the first and last track, returning towhere you began, the same thought first andlast.

M: I get the feeling these lyrics are connectedto the “～ing” idea of this exhibition.
H: It projects my awareness of issues at thetime I was writing that song. It was co-writtenwith Orchestra members Misato Kinoshita
and Roy Tamaki. Put simply, it was a plea tojust acknowledge diversity. Although thatwould seem rather obvious. I confess to asneaking admiration for that which is strong.
By strong I mean here for example theWestern. In sturdily constructed systems—
whether painting, or sculpture, or movies ormusic—I sense something underneath that
we just don’t possess, that fascinates me. But
when I attempt to make that fascinating or
attractive thing myself, it ends up being
somehow controlling. And so the diversity is
lost.
Which is why when I put together thisensemble, I knew I had to acknowledge
everyone, that is, the existence of theorchestra members, and the people who
listen to the music. By acknowledging I mean
not making statements from my own,
dominant viewpoint, but affirming as we goalong. And that applied across the whole ofthis album.

H: That’s right. I wrote the lyrics for this one
again with Roy Tamaki. The rap is a favoritetoo.
M: When I was given this opportunity to
speak with you, and saw the exhibition at thegallery on the opening day, a member of staff
told me that in this show, you were intensely
conscious of the different experiences of“listening” and “hearing,” and that theexhibition was configured in a way that would
allow visitors to “listen,” that is, be consciousof the experience of listening to music. But
what I sensed when I stood in the gallery was
more like “hearing” sound. Various sounds
came from all directions, not intruding but
creating the sensation of a single, organic
space, despite there being so many different
sounds. For me, it was not so much an
experience that converged on me as actor, iethat of “listening”, as one of taking in what I
heard, of “forgetting myself.” It struck me thatthe exhibition was also set up in a way open
to such a visiting of sensations.
Not long ago there was an exhibition by
Shuntaro Tanikawa at the Tokyo Opera CityArt Gallery (January 13–March 25, 2018).

M: The same goes for the last song, doesn’t
19That was a wonderful show, and thelanguage of Tanikawa’s recent poetry is
wonderful too. Not an extraneous word
anywhere, and every word emerging from thetruth of the author’s own heart. The poetry
was straightforward yet true, as if the lengthof each line matched the power and meaningof the words. I found a poem like that in On
Listening, and would like to read it.
Between this poem, and the lyrics you justread for us, I sense a kind of spiritualresonance.

pine trees, of the wind itself, for example. In
contrast to such sounds as these that cometo us, we listen to man-made music with ourhearts, via our ears. Yet those two modes ofhearing are not inherently distinguishable.
Initially I thought of the title of this book interms of the difference between listening andhearing. But eventually I came to think that if
we concentrate hard enough on listening, we
may notice the audible things that lie hidden
far below.”(ii)
H: It’s a question of hearing and listening, ofcollecting sound. It’s my lot to be involved inmusic, and though in Japanese the words forhear and listen are homophones, their
meaning is totally different. It’s not as if any
answer exists, and my work is not an attempt
to search for an answer. So I do my thing in
the hope that there will be lots of flashes ofinspiration, that I’ll become aware of newthings, I suppose. Natural sounds that one
hears... yes, I know what he means.

Tanikawa Shuntaro, “Like Music.”
I want to be like music / To navigate withease / The labyrinth from body to heart, likemusic / To lead the heart to calmness /While arousing the body, like music / Toslip away from time, like music / Out into
vast sunlit fields / And where winged andfeathered creatures are dancing in the sky /Creatures with legs galore crawling on theearth / If the distant peaks are too dazzling /Let me linger like a mysterious mist / A
single tear sitting on my lashes / Like music/ Let me be like music / I want to hold thismortal body in my arms / And release myheart into the skies, like music / I want to be
like music. (i)M: It’s not just physical sounds being heard,
but “the audible hidden far below,” so I
imagine to listen to something, you have tobe open to it in your heart. Things that
become audible when you are trying hard tolisten are “things outside of consciousness” I
guess.
Many of your devices, because they employ
electronic sound, are designed not to be
audible unless one listens carefully. In thework sounds will spin you introduced earlier,
was there plastic in the glass tubes?

For Tanikawa, music counters silence. Thatsilence is both the source of life, andexceedingly close to death, the embodimentof the non-human world. Complete in itself, it
has no need for human words. Which is why
humans may gain strength from it, be bornfrom it, yet in order to prove that “I am here
and I am alive,” they have to emit words.
Tanikawa has grasped that music is theultimate form of speech.
It seems to me that music’s ability to“navigate with ease the labyrinth from body toheart” as Tanikawa writes, is not entirely
unrelated to what you were talking about
before; the idea that sensing sound is not justabout hearing, but closely related to humanphysical sensations.
Furthermore, in the afterword of his book,
Tanikawa says, “I believe an emotion it would
be fair to describe as poetic sentiment isaroused in us by the various sounds ofnature: the sound of a breeze soughing in

M: That was glass as well.
M: There are pieces inside, and when thedevice spins, those pieces come into contact
with each other in various ways and makesounds; in these circumstances, I imagine
you have to concentrate quite hard to hear.
On the other hand, in the work Heart ofHandrail, there is a tiny speaker on thehandrail that produces sound, and that soundcannot be heard without crouching right up
close to the rail. Which inevitably turns the
spectator into a performer. Such actions
really are acts of “listening,” and the works
devices for “listening.” I think they are about
picking out various sounds, and being
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conscious of the self as the receiverintegrating these, that is, as the listening
actor. With repeated training of this sort,
perhaps one becomes more attuned to what
is heard.

M: Amid modern rationality, people tend to
only be able to form connections with things
that are of use to humans, but what you aresaying is, that is not the case.

H: I guess so. Obviously it’s natural you also
become more attuned to hearing things.
Apart from that, in my view there is a
consciousness on top of sensation, andconsciousness is very human, isn’t it? I see it
as something humans are capable of, it’s justthat environments with sound have entities
other than humans living there, existing there,
so to recognize the presence of those things
one has to liberate one’s consciousness, orthey will not be audible, not in a tautologicalsense of recognizing the existence of a being,
but of understanding the environment. Or
rather than understanding the environment,
perhaps it would be more accurate to say,being aware of oneself as one entity in theenvironment.

H: Meaning taking a fresh look at that kind ofthing.
M: Indeed. Thank you very much.
Is there anything else you would like to say
before we finish?
H: Partly I guess because I tend to come up
with lyrics and so on largely unconsciously, I
was surprised myself to find how muchcommonality there is between this type of
exhibition I do, how I approach my works, andeven my lyrics.
M: I am certainly of the opinion that what you
do with Shuta Hasunuma Philharmonic
Orchestra, and what you do in the way of
exhibitions and so on as a contemporary
artist, should not be split between educating
the public, and avant-garde expression.

M: A kind of awakening, perhaps. Earlier you
were talking about diversity, and mentionedthat when you said, when launching Shuta
Hasunuma Philharmonic Orchestra, thatdiversity would be important, people just tookthat for granted. But to you though, would it
be fair to say diversity refers to the way there
are all kinds of living things, and all kinds ofsounds, and even if something is of nobenefit or significance to humans,
acknowledging that each exists in its own
unique form?

H: Thank you.
M: Hasunuma-san, thank you from us to you.
H: And thank you, Matsui-san.
T: We have time for a couple of questions, if
anyone has any?
Question Thank you for taking the time tobe with us today. You spoke earlier of how
several years ago when you were doing ashow, you felt that no matter how much you
did, the world didn’t seem to get any better,but how have you felt about that more
recently, as you pursue your activities? Can
you tell us a little more specifically what madeyou think that all those years ago?

H: I suppose so. You could call that diversity,and it very much the case for the text in this“Upon the Occasion of ～ing.”
M: So we return to that?
H: To not only the human.

H: I started making works in 2006 or 2007,
then as you know in 2011 there was the big
quake and tsunami, and now we are sevenyears on from that. It just strikes me that withtime passing to a degree since that event, it isstrange that as we, naturally enough, carry on
with our day-to-day lives, we have simply
returned to how it was before the disaster; I

M: Engaging with the non-human has hidden
potential doesn’t it; even with objects, I
suppose, like those pieces of musicalinstrument mentioned earlier.
H: That’s right. Hopefully it prompts people tolook at things afresh, do some rethinking.
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have this strong sense that even thoughperhaps, we could have actually become apeople able to take the initiative and show
other countries how to make changes, we’ve
just reverted to the status quo. For thatreason, when I was making this kind of album(Shuta Hasunuma Philharmonic Orchestra
Time plays – and so do we.), I wanted toimbue it with the idea that unless somethingis listened to, it’s pointless, incorporating thatmeaning in a way. In other words, to memusic is not music just by virtue of being
made; it only becomes music when people
listen to it.
I loosely packed that album with a sense ofthis, and that awareness, and released it in2014, but it’s now we need to be conveyingthat message even more directly.
What I mean, and this might not be theproper way to say it, is that I perceive this tobe the time not for hair-splitting argument, but
for straight talking, or the message will not
get through. It’s similar to what I said before
about music not being music unless it’slistened to, and on many occasions, it felt tome like, if something was not getting throughto people directly, that way of thinking did noteven exist to start with. Which is why I think,in this latest exhibition also, I suppose what
you could call the main work—the one madeusing musical instrument scraps—takes theconnection between object/matter andinstrument, self and others, and turns it fairly
simply into a artwork, with the intention of
ensuring that the concept of asking people torethink their ideas about relationships isconveyed quite directly. So it’s not as if
something specific, some eureka moment,
occurred for me at a particular point; more apowerful sense that things have just changed
with the passing of time.

H: I had no intention at all of creating debris,but I do think that when such an event (adisaster or incident in society) occurs, music
is one of the media capable of swiftly giving it
tangible form, expressing it. To convey amessage directly, all you need is a song anda guitar. But I was unable to do so
immediately. I found I couldn’t convert
thoughts into action. Obviously I have toacknowledge that this was the biggest shock
to date on my personal timeline, and that mycapabilities, as an artist, are limited; I also felt
utterly powerless. In my works it is difficult toinsert directly anything social, any politicalmessage. I feel that keenly myself, and madethat work not so much as debris, as with asensation of a failure of what could havebeen music to become music, the scatteredremains of what remains of human ego
shattered, so I think that when people see it,they will imagine debris or rubble; it does
have that concept. So I suppose it is akin to asituation in which something made byhumans has been dismantled and left there. I
believe everyone will have different ways ofengaging with the works, and different
perceptions, which to me seems a goodthing, and I hope those differences persist.
Not much of an answer, I’m afraid.
Question 2

Thank you.

M: I think you are seeing the same thing, justdescribing it differently. If, just as Hasunumasan has picked up on the possibility ofliberating latent sound in that no longer usedas music instruments, the person who saw
the fragments in terms of a connection to theearthquake saw people walking, making
sound, amid a scene in which everything
seemed to be destroyed, and sensed arebirth, I thought there was a connection
between the possibilities identified by both.

Question 2
You mentioned the Tohoku
quake disaster, and perhaps this is not thebest way to put it, but when I saw those
scraps of musical instrument, I found myself
reminded of all the wreckage after thetsunami. But conversely it seemed to givethat a new, animated quality, one could say; itfelt like a remodeling, and it was this part ofthe show that moved me the most. Was this aconscious thing on your part?

H: Thank you.
M: Thank you to our audience for listening
this evening.
T: Thank you. Today I think a few things havebeen put into words by our guests, and somethings that were a little hazy, made clearer.
Our thanks to Hasunuma-san and Matsui-san
22for their time.

Translation by Pamela Miki(i) Shuntaro Tanikawa, “Like music” from Kiku to kikoeru (OnListening) (Sogensha, 2018), p.46.
(ii) Shuntaro Tanikawa, “Afterword” from Kiku to kikoeru,
pp.124, 125.
Translation checked by Katsumasa Nishihara and William I.
Elliott.
Cooperation by Toshi Shibata, Akemi Watanabe

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