TIME

‘In dreams, time can pass exceedingly fast or seem to take forever. Time can jump, and elements from different periods can exist side by side perfectly well. But in everyday life, humans are trapped in time’. Ryuichi Sakamoto is intrigued by humans’ limited experience of time, which in his view means music is also ‘trapped.’ In past years, this inspired him to read up on philosophy – from Confucius and Lao Tse, to Henri Bergson and Carlo Rovelli – and look into the possibilities for freeing himself and his music from time’s constraints. ‘Humans invented time, just like they invented numbers. These concepts have only existed for the past ten thousand years or so. They didn’t exist for early Homo sapiens and still don’t exist in the same way gorillas, or chimpanzees experience things. Even though humans are part of nature, they have divorced themselves from nature through logic and concepts like time. So humans are trapped in this time they invented themselves’.

Freeing music from time 

Sakamoto chose to dispense with all central rhythm in his work to break out of the ‘imprisoned’ structure of timekeeping music. Instead, he makes ‘asynchronous’ music: music that isn’t confined to strict organisational patterns, leaving more room for suggestion and experimentation. By extension, the composer takes an interest in different sounds from outside the realm of music. Following, among others, the composer John Cage, Sakamoto feels everyday sounds are just as deserving of careful listening as the sound of instruments. The influence of such ideas can be heard on the album async (2017) as well as in the soundscapes the composer made for the film The Revenant (2015), in which music and other sounds blend into a seamless whole. Climate concerts Sakamoto first became interested in the conflict between humankind and nature in the early 1990s, when he became increasingly concerned with the environment. He also began to focus on the subject in his work. In 1999, he made his first opera, LIFE, which premiered to seven sold-out shows in Tokyo and Osaka. The work, an attempt to examine the music and events of the 20th century with a macrocosmic/microcosmic view of the entire flow of art and civilization, was an unconventional opera without a libretto. The production featured contributions and performances by over one hundred performers such as Bernardo Bertolucci, Salman Rushdie, Pina Bausch, His Holiness Dalai Lama. It spanned nearly all forms of media, including live performance with a full orchestra, soloists, choir, musicians from different musical traditions, human voice & other samples, and live global internet relay. It was also Sakamoto’s first collaboration working with the visual artist and director Shiro Takatani as the opera’s visual director. Afterwards, Sakamoto and Takatani would go on to create many more installations together, reflecting the state of the world. In water state 1 (2013), for instance, water droplets represent nature and the climate, serving to raise awareness of people’s living environment. TIME can be seen as a spiritual successor to LIFE. It’s an opera without libretto once again, in which humankind and nature are central. Takatani designed a set where water (once more) plays a leading role and where endless reflections mirror the complexity and experience of time live, looking back and forwards. Noh theatre Sakamoto was first exposed to traditional Japanese Noh theatre late in life. The genre wasn’t very popular during his youth and was deemed too old-fashioned for the modern age. But when he was almost fifty, the internationally successful composer began to explore it anyway. There was a clear link with the ideas about music Sakamoto had himself developed at that point: ‘There’s no conductor for the music in Noh theatre, and each musician plays at his or her own tempo. Additionally, everyday sounds - like raindrops - and the sounds of musical instruments are essentially treated the same way. This gives tremendous freedom. It’s in line with my own ideas about music and helped further develop my ideas’. This form of theatre was a major inspiration for his album async and now for TIME as well. Dreams The surreal sense of time in the first story from Soseki Natsume’s collection of stories Yume in which a hundred years pass and a human life turns into a flower, echoes Sakamoto’s new perspective on music: ‘To think about dreams is very helpful to break with our normal concept of time. I try to create music based on a different idea of time or even without the idea of time’. ‘In nearly every music genre, from pop to classical music to jazz, there’s a central tempo that all musicians must keep. While every person naturally has his or her own tempo, the moment you let go of the central tempo, there’s this enormous space and freedom’. This is why the tempo in TIME will be set by two prominent Japanese performers: the experimental dancer Min Tanaka and the well-known shō player Mayumi Miyata (the shō is a traditional Japanese mouth organ made of bamboo). Once freed from time, the music, Sakamoto hopes, will be endless and free as well.