Yasunao Tone, a composer, theorist, and artist related to the Fluxus motion whose experimental music discovered a cult following, has died at 90. Artists House, which mounted his first US retrospective in 2023, introduced his passing on Tuesday. A consultant for Artists House stated he died of age-related problems.
Tone functioned on a wavelength all his personal: He produced scores that resembled summary artworks, staged performances that concerned altering devices with supplies akin to ice, and made waves of white noise made by scratching CDs. His purpose was flip music away from custom by using decidedly unorthodox strategies of sound-making. As he as soon as advised the artist Christian Marclay, “it’s pure for artists to deviate” from the norm.
His work is extensively identified to these with an curiosity in experimental music. A 2023 profile of Tone that ran in AnOther Journal acknowledged that he had “modified music perpetually” in its show copy. Danielle A. Jackson, the curator of Tone’s retrospective, advised the publication that, together with his glitchy works made utilizing scratched CDs, the artist “opened doorways for lots of composers and sound experimentalists.”
But despite the fact that he’s maybe much less well-known within the artwork world than in music circles, he collaborated with many key artists, together with Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, Senga Nengudi, and Merce Cunningham. Yoko Ono, an artist as soon as affiliated with the Fluxus motion alongside Tone, advised the Wall Road Journal in 2013, “I feel individuals will probably be shocked to know that the same old notion of Asian music will probably be completely destroyed once they take heed to his music or learn his scores. He isn’t Asian. He’s Martian.”
Tone was born in Tokyo in 1935 and attended Chiba College, graduating in 1957 with a level in Japanese literature. He wrote his thesis on Dada and Surrealism, and he grew to become concerned with different college students fascinated by music. “Being a bit cerebral,” he advised the Museum of Fashionable Artwork’s submit weblog, “I used to be initially planning to work on the idea facet of issues somewhat than truly performing. Sooner or later, although, I acquired swept up in it and began enjoying music with them.”
In 1961, he cofounded Group Ongaku, a short-lived collective whose title translated to Group Music and whose music tended to be closely improvised. Round this time, Tone additionally began utilizing graphic scores, by which musical cues are written out visually as a substitute of utilizing conventional notation. One from 1961, titled Anagram for Strings, options black and white circles whose varied sizes correspond to the size of a glissando, although it’s in the end as much as the performer to interpret learn how to produce the ensuing sounds. Scores akin to these have been impressed by ones produced by the American composer John Cage, whose work proved extensively influential in Japan throughout the postwar period.
George Maciunas, a frontrunner of the Fluxus motion, printed Anagram for Strings, and that helped develop Tone’s worldwide fame. It additionally firmly lured him into the orbit of Fluxus, a motion whose purveyors utilized phrase scores and efficiency artwork to place ahead on a regular basis actions and objects as a type of artwork.
Yasunao Tone’s 2023 Artists House retrospective.
Picture Filip Wolak
By the point Tone moved to the US in 1972, he had produced music that sounded extra like noise—“a parasite and not using a host,” as he referred to as this kind of work—and written criticism for Bijutsu Techo, an necessary Japanese artwork journal. He had additionally labored with the avant-garde collective Hello-Pink Middle and Workforce Random, which has generally been labeled the primary pc artwork group in Japan.
Through the later a part of his profession, Tone turned his consideration to digital know-how, corrupting audio information for a challenge referred to as MP3 Deviations. In newer yr, he even labored with AI, growing a system whose logic he used towards itself.
He all the time paid shut consideration to the way in which that music might reshape the world. “I feel it’s flawed to wish to design a live performance corridor the place the viewers members will hear the identical sound, no matter the place they’re sitting within the corridor,” he advised MoMA’s submit weblog. “These sorts of wishes are pushed by individuals’s world views, that are knowledgeable by sure assumptions about what ‘music’ is.”
