Every week the composition department at Carnegie Mellon meets for an hour in "Composition Seminar", a class which brings in outside talent or invites students to present their work in a discussion. This past Friday, we had the honor of being visited by the Japanese composer Somei Satoh, in Pittsburgh for the premiere of a dance piece he was commissioned to write by Attack Theatre. I say "honored" only in reflection as I admittedly had never heard of Mr. Satoh, or "Satoh-san" as another of our guests who accompanied him would continually call him. He arrived veiled in mystery, fiercely Japanese in his unmoving and quiet demeanor, shaved head and stoic scowl. Every movement was rehearsed, he seemed carefully conscious of his posture and spoke (in Japanese, to a female interpreter who sat with knees locked together and hands placed gently palms down atop her thighs in a typically Japanese fashion) almost to the air, calmly and authoritatively. Of course, what most impressed me about Satoh-san's visit was his hauntingly spacious music. I felt, in a way, vindicated by his talk as he addressed the same points which I have been trying to get across to my fellow composers about the use of space, silence and ambiguity in pulse and concept of time. One of the most striking things he said, which goes hand in hand with my own philosophy, is how music itself is "dead". He went on to explain how he felt that before music is created it is dead (or, I think, he meant "nothing" or "empty") while it is being performed it is alive, and by the time each note has been struck, it is dead again.
That is to say, as I have tried to explain to many of my non-musician friends, music is the most abstract form of art, because even once a piece is written, the score is still only an idea. When a painter paints a painting, it is there in front of him, a tangible object containing expressions of the intangible, but "real" nonetheless. When a piece of music is created, it exists only in the thoughts of its creator until that time when it might be performed, and even then it immediately decays with the passage of time and once the performance is finished (indeed, once each note disappears into the cavern of the performance space) it returns to that abstract purgatory, hopefully in the thoughts of not only the composer, but those to performed it and those who listened.
Another point Satoh-san made, when confronted by the question "does your music serve a higher expression, spiritually or the like?" was to say that the composer must "erase" or "kill himself" in creating his music. This, of course, is a deeply Buddhist and Shinto ideal, understood unanimously in the East, and misinterpreted unanimously in the West. I loved his point, that ego must be eradicated in order to serve the music, as the music does not serve us, but we serve it. It is also very clear why he has developed this attitude as he went on to explain to us that he has no formal Western musical training, but was raised by traditional Japanese dancers and musicians who are all taught the same ideals to perfect their musical ability.
Another point Satoh-san made that amused me was when a visitor to our class asked how he notated his music. Of course, this was a sensible question and built upon a point I had raised (or tried to raise) in asking him how he interpreted the difference between space and silence (one possibly being metered and the other being ambiguous) as it was unclear whether his music was notated traditionally, graphically, spatially, etc. His answer to the visitor's question (after much seemingly frustrated postulating in Japanese) was, "that makes no sense to me!"
Of course, what Satoh-san was trying to communicate was that it doesn't matter "how" the music is notated, so long as it is communicated effectively to the performers. Contrary to my own belief in having an established system of notation, at the very least consistently through a single score, I did see his point, and one of his accompanying musicians (an American) explained that his music is very traditionally notated in the classical fashion.
All in all, it was a fascinating glimpse at one of the few Eastern composers whom I feel has truly established a genuine style rooted in his native vocabulary rather than simply falling into the chic trend of imitating the West once Western instruments have been put at his disposal. Satoh-san speaks in his own voice, does not compromise his philosophy and speaks very openly about his distaste for classical music that is overly academic. Indeed, the basis of his discussion was to say that "technique is not music" and learning technique does not teach you how to write. He commented on Western composers imitating the East, such as John Cage, as using "dead" silence in their music, and only achieving a cold emulation of what they may have discovered when looking to the East. He closed by saying that he has never taught composition, and if CMU were to offer him a job teaching, he would turn it down as he feels he would have nothing to teach.
