◎ Zhang Xiaodong

The disease-afflicted "professor" Ryuichi Sakamoto left. When people talk about Ryuichi Sakamoto, what do people talk about? Beauty, music, movies, or nature?

How important is "good looks" for a musician, whether a performer or a composer? Probably more important than we think. For most listeners, music is abstract. When listening to music, people always project pictures of various emotions in their minds. Faces that meet imaginary expectations will have bonuses, and those that do not meet expectations will be detracted. Today, Chopin's mass base is certainly better than Bach's: who would fall in love with a fat man who always wears a wig? But we cannot conversely believe that an artist's achievements are determined by his face. Appearance is the icing on the cake, and it is the "hand of God" that gives him special favor.

Many people like Ryuichi Sakamoto because of their "appearance", which is understandable. For a band soul, the way he looks is itself part of the band's art, otherwise why is David Bowie called "glam rock"? Otherwise, why did Nagisa Oshima let him star? Picture: He has good acting skills? Apparently not. Appearance undoubtedly brings him the convenience of communication: we look at Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor", and in the same frame as the dragon that was shocked by many audiences, Sakamoto Ryuichi did not lose his brilliance, but added a little more tough charm. However, always staying at the level of "appearance", more like a flower idiot behavior, is unable to recognize the true value of an artist.

Atonal music that seamlessly connects with the "world"

The peculiar thing about this is that Ryuichi Sakamoto's music is not popular and "popular" - this was true from the time he first became famous until his death, but he seems to have become "popular". A certain piece of music he wrote for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence is indeed played over and over again because it has a certain pleasant, cheerful, memorable tone, a sense of melody. Simply put, very "popular". But this is precisely not the characteristic of Ryuichi Sakamoto's music. No wonder he resisted playing this music for a long time, because he was asked to play it everywhere, but this music belonged only to a dessert in his composition. It's just that he later "followed all beings". In general, Ryuichi Sakamoto's music is atonal music, which is also a direction for serious musicians in the modern sense.

Ryuichi Sakamoto's childhood and adolescence coincided with Japan's rapid economic development after the war and its gradual emergence as a world economic power, and its cultural integration into the world developed at the same time. It's hard to judge the good absolutely, but the enthusiasm for this integration is obvious. Japan's native culture – literature, theatre, music, film, architecture, art, fashion, including Zen philosophy (and the corresponding tea ceremony, flower arrangement, etc.) – has come to the world stage, and a group of outstanding cultural figures have become indispensable figures in world culture. And with the fact that they are not strangers to the world, ordinary people have also begun to "decharm" the world. Because when I get closer and understand it, I find that some of the original rejection and fear are just an imagination. As a result, Japanese popular culture also reversed into the "world", such as two-dimensional culture.

Ryuichi Sakamoto, who came from high society, was educated from an early age as a "world" elite. His embrace of modern music was part of this education. This allowed him to seamlessly connect with the "world" as soon as he entered his youth - because his musical concept was the mainstream of the "world", and the acceptance of him in Japan was half a beat late. Atonal music is thought to have started with Schoenberg, but in fact there was already a breakthrough in harmony and chords in late Romanticism and Impressionism. For example, Sakamoto Ryuichi likes Debussy (it is worth mentioning that Debussy's music is directly inspired by Japanese ukiyo-e).

Simply put, atonal music is the "manifestation" of modern people's rising self-awareness, inner unease, and pain. The harmony and beauty of Baroque music and romantic music has become "invalid". So we hear all kinds of "dissonance" in modern music, we hear tension, anxiety, sharpness, cynicism - which is incomprehensible to listeners who are used to listening to "beautiful melodies". However, it should be noted that "atonality" does not equal "dissonance", and in the end, it is necessary to seek a harmony of modernity, otherwise the music will become a complete chaos. That's why Bach is one of Ryuichi Sakamoto's favorite musicians. Bach's harmony is a harmony in the true sense of the word, unified, but also unattainable by modern man.

When we observe Ryuichi Sakamoto's life's work, we can see that this is a process of using music to restore the harmony and unity of human beings, and the end point of this process is "nature".

Electronic music as a pioneer

Ryuichi Sakamoto's atonal music has a more avant-garde stance, electronic music.

In the two musical documentaries about Ryuichi Sakamoto "Async" and "Finale", it is not difficult to see his sincere admiration for the Soviet film master Andrei Tarkovsky. This influenced his final musical composition, some of which paid direct tribute to Tarkovsky. In the exhibition "Guanyin Listening Time" at the Mumu Art Museum in Beijing the year before, observant viewers may notice that the video installation plays Tarkovsky's last film, "Sacrifice". The film's apocalyptic theory also echoes some of the arrangements in the exhibition. This is not some unreadable mysticism, but it does have something to do with mysticism. This relationship is the unique advantage of electronic music in conveying irrational, "natural" sound functions.

Tarkovsky was a director with great musical talent. His choice of musicians to work with was no accident. The Soviet master of electronic music, Eduard Artemiev, who died last year, collaborated with him on such important films as "Mirror", "Solaris Star" (that is, "Flying into Space", but this translation is inaccurate) and "Stalker". We can find that Tarkovsky, like the real first-class film masters, is well versed in the essence of the "separation of sound and painting" in the art of film. In his films, sound belongs to another higher dimension. We hear this sound, but there is no counterpart in the picture: sometimes it is a diffuse, repressive, close to our life, you can say a whisper, or you can say a hum in nature. So, Tarkovsky's films require not only visual comprehension (which requires training), but also a keen ear that can really appreciate him. These sounds really amazed Sakamoto Ryu. These sounds in movies are usually synthesized by electronic synthesizers.

It is a fact that the inventor of electronic musical instruments was the Soviet cellist and electrical engineer Tremin. In the first decade of the 20th century, radio engineers stumbled upon the possibility of producing lower-frequency sounds between the interaction of two high-frequency radio waves, thus inventing the heterodyne oscillator. It soon came to mind to use this for the music sector. It has been found that when the human body approaches the vacuum tube, the capacitive action of the human body itself will change the frequency of sound. So the human body itself is combined with the machine. This cyborg discovery finally led to the invention of the world's first electronic music synthesizer, the treming instrument, in 1919. Soon, this pioneering invention attracted the attention of European musicians. So, electronic music points to the future from the beginning. Its meaning is certainly not to embed a "midi" in a cliché melody to disguise "modernity". It means possibilities beyond our everyday realities. This coincided with the experiments of avant-garde musicians in composition at the time, or rather, gave them wings. Because music is inherently inherently inconcrete, this discovery does have some mysterious meaning.

Later, electronic music developed in Europe and the United States, but the Soviet Union came to the fore in the 60s. The ANS synthesizer used by Eduard Artemiev was invented during this period. It is large and more functional, capable of creating a more "cosmic" sound. It is worth mentioning that ANS is the initials of the famous Russian mystic and musician Scriabin. Scriabin's ideas had a great influence on modernist music. Although the name "async" may come from the way communication data transmission is handled, "Async" happens to include the three letters ANS, I wonder if this is a coincidence? Interestingly, someone specially re-edited Tarkovsky's film footage with Sakamoto's music, and there was no sense of contradiction.

Advocating nature Everything is music

Of course, this does not mean that Tarkovsky had any decisive significance for Ryuichi Sakamoto. The idea of including the sounds of nature, that everything is music, has been with him since he was young. For example, the American avant-garde electronic musician John Cage, who is also an expert in mycology (mushrooms), has many influences on the young Ryuichi Sakamoto. There is a direct intrinsic connection between avant-garde music and nature. The connection lies in the belief that there is an "original" nature in which everything is self-sufficient and harmonious, but modern civilization has destroyed this harmony and created all kinds of chaos - not only the ecological disorder, but also the human heart has become "unnatural", and art is the way for human beings to return to this "nature".

The "mystery" of electronic music lies in the fact that it can serve as a medium for people to communicate with nature. What electronic musicians are committed to is nothing more than returning the disordered world to its natural order. This understanding has the flavor of Rousseau. So we see Ryuichi Sakamoto actively engaged in anti-war in his youth, and in recent years firmly in the ranks of protesters against nuclear pollution. He played the "tsunami piano" not to be unconventional, but precisely the most "natural" behavior of an electronic musician. In this understanding of "nature", there is a gradual process. In the process, he became more and more aware of the meaning of Bach's music, as if in response to the question "Why does suffering happen?" This response became clear with his own several cancer and surgeries.

Perhaps we can think that Ryuichi Sakamoto's understanding of "nature" includes both Western and Eastern understandings. The Western style is Rousseau-Tolstoy's view of nature, while the Eastern style is related to the Zen-Taoist concept of nature. But his Eastern understanding is a re-understanding, that is, his knowledge is actually received in the West. Of course, this is also an "integrated" understanding of global citizens, which contains an element of "all-humanity".

Finally, the author has translated the following poem to this master of electronic music. This is a fragment of Tarkovsky's father, the great poet Arseny Tarkovsky, "I dreamed of this..." Ryuichi Sakamoto included this poem specifically in "Asynchrony" and wrote music for it, but using the title of another poem by the poet: "Life, Life" (in 2018, Ryuichi Sakamoto's exhibition was also named after it).

I've dreamed of this, I'm dreaming about this.

I'll dream about this someday.

Everything will be repeated, everything will be concretely presented,

You will dream what I see in my dreams.

On the other side of us, on the other side of the world,

Wave after wave hitting the coast,

In every wave there is a star, a man, a bird,

Reality, dreams, death - the waves crashing against the waves.

I don't need data for dates: I've been, I exist, I'll still be,

Life is a miracle of miracles, and I kneel to miracles,

Lonely, like an orphan, put yourself alone,

Alone, in the mirror - vertigo in the light fence reflected by the sea and the city.

A mother burst into tears and knelt there with her baby in her arms.

(Beijing Youth Daily)