For the first in our series of interviews with artists who have ties to Mie Prefecture, we speak with Sumio Kobayashi. Alongside his work as a composer, Kobayashi has also built a career as a linguist and has spoken on a wide range of subjects across the arts.
—To begin, what do you keep in mind when composing?
I am deeply grateful to music itself, and I believe it saved the life of someone as insignificant in both body and mind as I am when it was in danger. You could say that I chose the path of composition as a way of repaying that debt to music. Some people may find this strange, but creators, including composers, ought to be able to help prolong the life of their field. In film or manga, for example, if everything becomes the same sort of secondhand or thirdhand rehash, people drift away and the field steadily declines. To curb that decline, we need to demonstrate new possibilities within the field and maintain people's connection to it. I think the people who make the work carry the greatest responsibility for that, and I am conscious of the contribution that composers and other creators can make in that sense.
—Could you tell us about your work?
While specializing in linguistics, I have always sought to make the fullest possible use of that knowledge in composition. That is because I believe music that only I can create is what is needed to halt the decline I mentioned earlier. One answer is to write poetic music. But rather than simply being poetic, I have written with the question of how to bring music closer to poetry as language in mind. Music that expresses something of the grammar of language while remaining suggestive, leaving room for the reader—or listener—to imagine. What does it mean to “understand” music? Is it different from understanding language? Does something like a universal grammar exist to make that understanding possible? I reflect my own answers to these questions in my work.
We can close our eyes, but we cannot close our ears. We encounter all kinds of music in everyday life, and even if we try to avoid it, we cannot escape the music around us. Unconsciously, we become proficient in the grammar of the music we encounter, such as tonality. Many papers have demonstrated that this process resembles language acquisition—for example, the acquisition of consonants and vowels and the recognition of musical scales. For these reasons too, I regard tonality and other musical systems as grammar, and write music from that starting point.
Gradually, I began wanting to express a world like an ink-wash painting through music, and as an extension of that, my main focus recently has been on creating optical illusions in music. Here too, I make the fullest use of the knowledge and tools of linguistics. My specialties within linguistics are phonetics and psychological approaches, so my linguistic research has also involved sounds that resemble optical illusions—in other words, sounds that create auditory illusions. Drawing on various earlier studies, I think the result has taken on an illusion-like quality, with a worldview resembling the work of Gérard de Nerval, a writer I love. Specifically, I use what is called the Shepard tone and the tritone paradox. There have been composers who used something similar to the former in parts of their work, but I hope to become a pioneer in writing distinctive works that use it in an almost complete form, also incorporate the latter, and do so in pieces for solo instruments. At present, the piece that most fully reflects my experiments with the Shepard tone is Unreal Rain.
—What outlook on the arts guides your work?
There is little doubt that art will move toward carrying more information, because people's cognitive capacities are advancing. The television programs about ghosts that used to be popular would not work today, would they? Ultimately, society's collective knowledge is maturing, and as a result, things that would only fool a child become less and less viable, while all kinds of things grow more complex. In the arts too, we can easily encounter a wide variety of work, and our cultural knowledge of art matures. Simple tricks no longer work, while, conversely, I think there are ways in which a certain degree of complexity can be accepted. That said, I think it also depends on the field.
—What do you mean by that?
Lately, music has increasingly become background, rather than the main focus. Humans have all sorts of desires, and I think one of them is a desire for information. Moving images are better than still images; seeing and experiencing something in person is better than watching a video. For example, games probably tend to be regarded as having a lower status than films at present. But as games come to offer experiences in the true sense, their status will rise if films do not develop into a new form. In other words, people prefer things that contain more information. We are now in the age of video, and in many respects music cannot compete with the amount of information video carries. As a result, music is increasingly becoming mere background, something like an extra added to a video. Music in films and games, and music used in videos, is receding further and further into the background. If that continues—if people come to listen to music only casually—they will no longer be able to keep up if music grows more complex. In that sense, trying to make music more complex may be a precarious idea. Taking that together with what I have said so far, musicians will need to create music that is somehow new without making it more complex.
I think portable media make this easy to understand. First, the Walkman, which let you listen to music away from home, sold phenomenally well, didn't it? It meant that information in the form of music could be carried around at any time. In other words, it showed that people want to carry information with them and have access to it at all times. Now, more and more people are watching videos on their mobile phones. Ultimately, if you can carry both musical and video information with you, video contains more information than music and is more likely to be judged the better option. In the past, the information you could carry came in books or a Walkman, but now you can carry video too. You still cannot watch videos while driving and in certain other situations, so music retains a role. Watching video while standing on a train is difficult too, so some people only listen to music or read text. But as autonomous driving develops or the form of trains changes, the situation is bound to change in various ways, including for radio. Ultimately, people in society vote with their money to determine the scale and direction of the arts, so music will need to make major advances. Text, however, has its own particular conveniences—being able to focus or concentrate easily on a specific point, or search for information easily, for instance—so it may remain in its current form for quite a long time.
—You think about all these things with a great deal of self-discipline and seriousness.
Actually, I would like to say more silly, ridiculous things, but I take various considerations into account and restrain myself. My self-discipline is probably a matter of taste, or my own form of dandyism or narcissism. I think Yukio Mishima was like that too, for example, and I believe that thinking about how one exists as a person leads to creative work. I am also interested, you might say, in something like the “strait gate” that lies at the end of it.
—The strait gate?
There was a time when I achieved a significant “result.” I pursued what I wanted to do, and it bore fruit. That achievement was a life-changing experience, though results are almost meaningless to an artist.
I tried to preserve the sacredness of my work by avoiding connections, flattering people, and that sort of thing. Achieving a result in that way brought an indescribable sense of accomplishment, and my world changed completely. It is unavoidable, but in the art world it is difficult to separate oneself from things that are the very opposite of sacredness.
I was living in Britain at the time, and every day I would jog along roads that were not even paved, out in the idyllic countryside. I still vividly remember how, the day after I learned of that “result” by email, the familiar scenery on my run looked like a completely different world, even though nothing had changed—not the colors, not the weather. That feeling of looking at something that appears exactly the same, yet seeing an entirely different world.
—Something like a destination you had reached?
Perhaps. But I think people often imagine what is generally thought of as a destination as a place where, once you arrive, that is the end. In reality, it was completely different.
—In what way?
Even if you eliminate impurity and reach something, all sorts of obstacles keep appearing, one after another. Temptation, ressentiment, misfortune—these things draw close, and you must constantly avoid them. Make even the slightest misstep, and you can no longer see that landscape.
Ressentiment is like gravity, a natural phenomenon. Gravity does indeed pull down, quite literally, on the feet of people trying to climb higher, but trying to neutralize gravity is futile. Something like the strait gate in André Gide's Strait Is the Gate does exist, and it is possible to pass through it while alive. But even after you pass through, there is probably another gate. In that sense, perhaps artists are constantly being tested.
—I would like to ask about the creation of your work. Do you use any tools?
A computer is essentially indispensable. Whatever work I make, the process has become something I could not carry out with my own unaided capacities. In today's world, in a sense there is almost no such thing as a kanji character you cannot read, is there? Look it up, and the answer appears immediately. In the same way, you can find out almost anything by looking into it, and you can also obtain all kinds of tools by searching for them.
Novelists, for example, often use a thesaurus, and you could say that this has served as something of a hidden technique, allowing them to express themselves with greater depth than the average person. In other words, professionals can write like professionals not only because of their abilities, but also because they know about a tool called a thesaurus. Today, there is a truly wide variety of tools, yet a great many people know about them and still do not use them. In these circumstances, I think those who recognize that tools have already made seemingly impossible things possible, and who pursue those possibilities to the fullest, can stand out and achieve great things. There is the expression “knowing that you do not know,” but in the years ahead it should be even more important to know what you know—to recognize what is possible. In a sense, we have already become superhuman, and we need to realize that and use that power.
—How do you think being born and raised in Mie Prefecture has influenced your art?
If I say something like “Mie Prefecture is full of nature,” that is true of all sorts of places around Japan, isn't it? What makes Mie special, and genuinely good for artists, may be the sense of the divine there. It is not simply because Ise Jingu is there; even the mountains far from the shrine have places where you sense something. It is often said that art and the divine share the same origins, and there is an affinity between them. I think something rooted in the land like that nurtures a disposition that makes people more inclined to turn toward art. I like Matsuo Bashō, Motoori Norinaga, and Yasujirō Ozu, all three of whom have ties to Mie. Perhaps this sense of the divine in Mie influenced them in some way too.
For a time, I lived near Belluna Dome in Tokorozawa, Saitama Prefecture. It had a different, more relaxed atmosphere, and I was able to work quietly and unhurriedly. I felt that I somehow understood Hayao Miyazaki's connection with Tokorozawa very well.
—Is there anything you would like to do in Mie Prefecture in the future?
There are really so many things I want to do that it is hard to say, but broadly speaking there are two. One is to put on an arts festival, and the other is to create a place like an arts park. I am not currently working on anything of that sort, and these are just my own ideas, but strangely enough, I find myself thinking about all sorts of things related to them whenever I have an unexpected free moment.
—That concludes our interview with Sumio Kobayashi. Thank you for taking part.
April 1, 2021