Tomorrow Is the Question: New Directions in Experimental Music Studies

5. Challenge to Music: The Music Group’s Sonic Politics

109 Challenge to Music The Music Group’s Sonic Politics William Marotti The careers of several notable Japanese experimental musicians—Kosugi Takehisa, Tone Yasunao, Shiomi Mieko (b. Chieko), Mizuno Shūkō— began with their participation in an improvisational collective formed in the late 1950s.1 The group was active as a formal collective for barely more than a year (1960–61), marking a momentary but intense confluence of the members’ diverse theoretical and performance concerns and binding them together as improvisers determined to free music itself from its abstract and ossified form. Could there be a more “experimental” music? Yet this formative moment is occluded from the outset by the common half translation, half transliteration of their name. By rendering the appellation 「グループ音楽」 as “Group Ongaku,” rather than “the Music group,” the group’s very name becomes symptomatic of both a continuing resistance to its claims and practice and a contributory self-exoticization.2 If the history of this foundational group is to contribute fully to a reconsideration of both “experiment” and “music,” and if we are to understand properly the stakes behind its actions, the issue of nomenclature must be settled from the start. The problem is at once historical and conceptual. In arguing for the common rendering, an unattributed editor wrote in 2005 that “Group Ongaku represents a hybrid name combining the English ‘group’ (pronounced gurūpu in Japanese) and the Japanese ‘ongaku’ (music); like Gutai, if translated, the distinct linguistic tonality of the name would be lost.”3 The double insistence here on the distinctiveness of utterance gives a hint of the specific variety of nominalism in play: an effectively neonativist notion of cultural identity predicated on the sound of the Japanese language, 110 • tomorrow is the question one that blocks a possible universality of reference in order to highlight a local “distinctiveness” within the linguistic bounds of an always primary national community. Rendered as “Group Ongaku,” the name intimates a reassuring particularism both by the capital G and the refusal to translate ongaku into “music.” The published CD edition of the group’s 1960 works, music of group ONGAKU, at least abandons the capital, but it still refuses to translate the name fully.4 The price such efforts pay in attempting linguistically to reserve the group’s provenance for Japan is in the consequent reduction of its horizons to the nation’s border—thus subtracting it from an international, tumultuous moment in music, except as a possible exotic footnote. Staking a claim of irreducible distinctiveness on utterance alone misguidedly seeks to guarantee particularity against a general category of “music” justifiably suspect as bearing Euro-American-centric cultural assumptions. But through this translation refusal, the group suffers exactly what such efforts would like to forestall: the reduction of its work to an exoticized, indigenous eastern particular to a western experimental universal, one unable to communicate its claims beyond its immediate national linguistic horizons. Such language claims defer the question of the Music group’s distinctiveness to either tautology (difference because of difference) or nativism and surrender the possibility of actual engagement within its historical moment. Rendering it instead as the Music group modestly acknowledges that cultural production coming from Japan, one of the most powerful twentieth-century nation-states, should be evaluated on its own merits as a coeval participant in the globalized discourses and practices of capitalist modernity, in which differentiation is itself produced as part of these global interactions.5 In other words, analysis needs to avoid the dead end of either reductivist culturalism or indefensible notions of (American) originals and local copies, where we acclaim the first for its creative cross-cultural and crossfield synthesis and reduce the latter to borrowings from elsewhere. Instead, the Music group should be credited for its own particular contribution to a global discourse and recognized for its local significance on that basis, as much as for its imbrication in more immediate debates. The Music group brought together a diversity of points of reference in constituting its distinctive experimental approach to the problem of “music ,” including an engagement with both ethnomusicological research and the historical and contemporary avant-garde, both domestic and international . The latter perspective is in fact announced in its choice of name itself (as I detail below), a fact that further demands its translation as the Music group. If we take this claim seriously, explicating the full scope of Challenge to Music • 111 the group...