Mind in Art

Author(s): Jji Yuasa

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 178-185
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/833382
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MIND IN ART1

JOJIYUASA

1. ARTWORK

AND PHYSICAL

FACT

WE USUALLYDO NOT have problems with expressions such as "I saw a

wonderful picture" or "I listened to some impressive music." However,

further consideration leads us to wonder what signifies that which we
usually call "picture" or "music."
A sunflower by Van Gogh or an apple by Cezanne, for instance, seem
to exist with both voluminous and textural qualities in space. However,
the space is actually only a two-dimensional plane and it consists of canvas and pigment. When we talk about a "sorrowful music," what is meant
by sorrowful? If music is composed of acoustical, sonic combinations, are
sounds as such really "sorrowful"?
It turns out that acoustical sounds are not "sorrowful," but that the
music has something which evokes sorrow within a listener. Therefore,

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A Jostled Silence (3)

179

the expression, "the music is sorrowful," can be included in a judgment

by a listener, and it does not mean that the acoustical organization (i.e.,
the music itself) has such properties. As for sunflowers, the art of Van
Gogh does not consist of physical objects consisting of canvas and pigment, but the illusion of a sunflower evoked in a viewer.
What is perceived in a picture is not a layer of pigment on canvas. What
is perceived in music is not sounds but an illusion emerging from the
transformation of movements through time and space. A phrase by B.
Croce, "True artwork is spiritual and imaginative; it is not a physical
fact," seems to suggest that art does not only remain at a perceptual level
but enters deeply into our minds.
If one could differentiate between "brain" and "mind," I think that
the brain is a sort of control center in which digital and analog inputs are
intensively processed. When "mind" is men...
mind"vefers
tioned, it refers to a function of the brain, a
floating state in which so-called spiritual functo afunction
the brain,
-1of
11
floatingT~~~~~~
tions are at work. I would like
to talk about what
aoating
state
afloatingfstate
the structure of this mind is for artists like
in which
myself.
spiritualfunctions
are at work.
Needless to say, the definition or the concept
behind art is not fixed, but changes as time
passes. Moreover, there is some confusion as to the activities within art.
Roughly speaking, there are three areas within art: creative activities, the
work itself, and the receiving (interpreting) of the work.
It is appropriatenow to discuss the situation of artists who are involved
in creative activities, and this will relate to the art work itself as well as to
its interpretation.
2. CIRCUMSTANCES

First of all, we have to consider the general circumstances. They guide

the imaginations of artists:geographic or climatic features of the environment and history, which for the Japanese have to do with traditional
roots. These are the issues which are relevant to
a No dancer
a recognition of time and space; in other words,
a
of
the
movesas if
world.
they comprise FtheyM~
way understanding
~he
wishes
compriser~
way~
There are as many
differences in the way a~
the
to bunfied
mind structures thought as there are languages
with theground.
(Japanese, French, American, etc.).
We can clearly see the differences in mentality influenced by circumstances in the following examples: Chinese paintings, which imply various
meanings within large empty spaces, and paintings by Van Gogh, which

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180

Perspectives
of NewMusic

explore the sensation of volume through the brushing of pigment onto

the canvas;ballet, in which a dancer attempts to lightly fly as high as possible, resisting gravity, and N6, in which a dancer moves (keeping his feet
on the floor) as if he wishes to be unified with the ground; Western
music, which tries to arrive at a wholeness of harmony while various
voices individually keep linear and stable behaviors, and the sounds of the
Japanese shakuhachior koto, which move in curves, seeking the subtlest
inflections and transitions of timbre.
On the other hand, we should also mention those mental activities
which actively or subjectively select or reflect the particular influences
which one may receive. For instance, Taro Okamoto, a visual artist, sees
the origin of Japanese sensibilities in the open spirit of vitalistic life during the Jomon period, while I rather see the model for Japanese ideas in
Zeami's N6 and the vitality of the Muromachi and Kamakura periods,
where Buddhist monks such as Dogen, Honen, and Shinran preached
sermons. This issue varies depending upon the artist's subjective choices;
some may experience it in Gagaku, while others may discover it through
the writings of Chikamatsu or Tsuruya Namboku of the Edo period.

3. TIME AND SPACE IN MUSIC AND MIND

It is often said that classicalmusic consists of three elements: melody, harmony, and rhythm. The sounds involved are so-called "musical sounds"
and possess periodic wave forms. If we consider the fact that European
music is not the sole music of the world, the former idea about music
turns out to refer specifically to Western music. The shakuhachi, for
instance, does not produce any harmony; noises, including white noise,
make up a large part of its resource. Therefore, I think in order to
include all the musics outside of Europe as well as contemporary music, it
would be more appropriate to consider music as a transformation of
sound energy (formal transformation) along a temporal axis.
It is clear that musical works have temporal structures; they also
involve spatial elements (distances) because they are structured. In other
words, music attributes its nature to an association of ideas which occur
essentially as temporal phenomena; at the same time, it contains this
notion of spatiality.For instance, a pitch relationship determines a space
which is vertically manifest and a duration determines a space which is
horizontally manifest. The light and shade of timbre, density, and illusory
localization can also be spatiallyperceived.
Since each individual moment of the melody, harmony, or dynamic is
related to the syntax (the structural principles behind the writing), music
possesses not only a currently ongoing time, but also another imaginative

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181

A Jostled Silence (3)

time which constitutes an aggregate of various elements and is a function

which the listener must bring forth. These notions of time are abstracted
onto a spatial axis.
ls
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RL hI)

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qwt

co
s|

-'--

This can certainly be called a "mental operation"; one converts the

temporal organization into a spatial diagram. One of the reasons that animals do not exhibit any art-like behavior may be found in their lack of
the ability to convert time into space and analog to digital (i.e., figures
into numbers).
As we already know, the fact that man has acquired language is one of
his characteristicidentities. The ability to make signs, as well as to convert the temporal to a spatial diagram, might have differentiated the
human being, for instance, from the apes. As mentioned in the beginning, this particular function is related to art as a mental operation; art
cannot exist without it.

4. PHENOMENON AND SYMBOLIZATION

Music needs to be read in order to be performed. Sonic events are symbolized and notated for performance. It is well known that musical notes
are symbolic signs which designate pitches and durations in the conventional notation system. However, further consideration shows that there
are two distinct kinds of notation systems: quantitative notation and
qualitative notation.
With quantitative notation, the length of a duration is fixed as with the
quarter note or eighth note of conventional notation. The specific

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Perspectivesof New Music

duration of the quarter note is quantitatively determined, for instance, to

be sixty-four per minute.
With qualitative notation, on the other hand, the manner in which
sounds are to be generated and the characteristicsof performance (such
as pizzicato, scrubbing motions, and sound-producing gestures) are
notated by graphic notation (see Example 1). Such notational systems are
widely used in contemporary music, but the same qualitative features are
found in goma-ten, in yokyoku,and kuchishoga,and in the vocal rendition
of instrumental expressions used in koto and shamisen music (such as
sararin and chin ton shan).

5. THE RELATIONSHIP OF ARTISTIC THOUGHT TO SCIENCE

As previously mentioned, art is transformed as time passes. If we view the

history of art in periods (Classical, Romantic, Impressionist, and Contemporary), we understand that they are rooted in a "common sensibility," and can be seen in artists living within the same period (Goethe and
Beethoven; E.T.A. Hoffmann and Schumann; Delacroix, George Sand,
and Chopin; and Mallarme and Debussy).
It is not too exaggerated to say that almost all scientific thought and
disciplines (mathematics, physics, and medical science, for example) cast
their "shadows" onto art. Art certainly invites its recipients to a wonderland which goes far beyond daily life, but at the
Art invites
same time appears as a total reflection of man's
its recients tocosmology.
Our civilization has entered the
a wonderland
electronic
If man's life-style is changed
age.
whichgoesfar
advances
in science, man's manner of
through
beyond
thought, perception and sensibility will be
dailylife.
altered as well.
For instance, we can have a real-time pseudo-experience of the events
occurring on the other side of the earth through television, a "small window to peep out at the world." If one is on a jet liner, he can gaze upon
the earth from a bird's-eye perspective, and see a planet that people in
previous ages never could. We can now even experience Mach speeds.
Such new experiences, without any doubt, have forced revolutionary
changes in the sensibilities of man, who just two hundred years ago traveled only at the speed of a running horse. We can recognize this change
in our sensibility if we compare the sensation one might have when
climbing to a height of three hundred meters to the pseudo-somatic
imaginary feeling one would have ascending this same height over the

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A Jostled Silence (3)

183

O Mass tone; however, one tone is considered to be the minimum. The

performer may choose to play a chord of any number of tones (one or
more).
- Pizzicato with sustaining pedal down.
*Mute strings with finger near the bridge.
Mute with sustaining pedal.

Mute the string just after attacking the note from the keyboard; the
tone is not restruck.

O Strike the string with a vibraphone mallet.

A

Step hard on the sustaining pedal.

Time is proportional to space left to right along the horizontal axis, and pitch
(high to low) is relative to the vertical axis.
The dynamics are left to the discretion of the performer.
The use of the pedal is free, unless otherwise indicated.
Oblique lines indicate phrasing.
Graphs, composed of many oblique lines, indicate a circuit. In the circuit, the
performer must proceed along the oblique lines from left to right without
retracing his path until no farther motion left to right is possible. He may then
return to the beginning and proceed left to right again. A performer may follow any path, and he may repeat the circuit as many times as he wishes.
EXAMPLE 1: (FROM PROJECTION ESEMPLASTIC FOR PIANO(S)
BY JOJI YUASA, 1961)

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184

Perspectivesof New Music

Kasumisaseki Building's sixty floors in twenty seconds using an express

elevator.
i

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Similar to Marshall McLuhan's concept of the mechanical extensions

of man, his sensibilities also extend in a parallel sense. Contemporary
plastic arts, including film, make constant use of electronics, computers,
video techniques, and all kinds of new materials;while in music, one finds
effective uses of electronic technology such as tape and computers. These
extensions do not apply only to practical matters, but also to habits of
thought, for instance, to mathematical procedures such as topology,
probability, and stochastics, all of which have greatly influenced procedures in art.
As the frontiers of science approach issues such as chaos (a kind of irrational landscape), art also attempts to approach such an irrational world
with a scientific personality. Westerners never turned their eyes to the
East as eagerly as they do now. Art now tries to address, for instance, the
problem of irrationality,in such a seemingly contradictory term as "controlling indeterminacy."
John Cage, the American composer, was an ardent admirer of Daisetsu
Suzuki, and was trained in Zen Buddhism more than is the ordinary Japanese. European contemporary music was significantly changed by Cage.
Such influence is discovered in the "open form" music, which refers to
forms that are not fixed; there was also an acceptance of what is known in
Zen as "as-it-is-ness." It is the effort not to place events in a musically
fixed form, but to grasp them as a fluid whole. Such a form appearsin the
music of chance operations and the music of indeterminacy, which have a
close relationship to the graphic notation mentioned above.
A counterpart in the field of plastic arts would be the mobiles of Alexander Calder, which Jean-Paul Sartre described as "sensitive symbol[s] of
the nature and original feeling of life."
These examples are only a few of the obvious trends in the current art
situation. As mentioned before, since art is in a sense a metonymy of the

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A Jostled Silence (3)

185

totality of man's activity, the art which man creates and produces as his
legacy cannot cling to the styles of the past, but evidently needs to
explore the new worlds with new materials
art is in a sense
which man has acquired.
In the present situation, the computer is not,
tha
f
totity
ofthe totality
in fact, autonomously creative, although it is
of man'sactivity.
analytical and representational. That does not
mean, however, that the creation of plastic arts and music with computers is not in itself creative. Because it is the artist who writes the computer
program, there is no essential difference between art using computers
and art which does not use computers.
In the creation of music, a composer realizing an image creates a procedure, which is, in fact, already a kind of programming. The actual procedure may be executed by a computer as a substitute for hands or for a
part of the brain's function. According to the principle with which man
creates an "extension" of himself, a tool becomes an extension of the
hands, a musical instrument becomes an extension of the vocal chords,
and a car becomes an extension of the feet. In this sense, it is appropriate
to think that in art, the realization of an image by a computer is executed
as a substitute for or as an extension of the brain.
Previously, many criticized electronic music and tape music, which are
both created from the material of natural or electronically generated
sounds, as being "inhuman" because there was no act of performance by
a human being. The statement by Croce that "physical fact is not an
artistic truth," would be appropriatein this context. No matter how art is
processed by technological manipulation, what is fundamental to it is
man's imagination; there is no art without the operation of spiritualfunctions. Art is brought into existence because there is "mind."

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