[Book Sip] Breaking the Illusion of Fixity... New Perspectives Emerge When You Abandon the 'Byeoljari-jeok' Viewpoint

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Ryuichi Sakamoto, a musician honored with the Golden Globe and Academy Awards for music and a passionate environmental activist, and Shinichi Fukuoka, a leading Japanese biologist known for his life philosophy of "dynamic equilibrium"?that life lives by destroying itself?explore the essence of music and life. The two have shared the intimate theme of "how to express nature" for 20 years. Starting from the commonality of music and life that "births arise from destruction," they investigate ways for music and biology to transcend human cognitive limits and capture the sounds of nature as they truly are.

Not long ago, I strongly recognized the piano as a 'physical object' and began to want to present its resonance not as music but as a 'physical object.' To me, 'physical object' means a natural object, and originally, the piano as an instrument is an artificial creation forcibly shaped by humans from natural materials like wood and iron. Even such an artificial piano, if left untouched by humans, would decompose over hundreds of years and return to nature as a 'physical object.' In the past, I tuned the piano precisely, but at some point, I started to want to return the artificially made piano to its original natural state and let it produce sound as a natural 'physical object,' so I stopped tuning it. Of course, the pitch is off, but pitch is also a concept arbitrarily created by humans and does not necessarily deviate from the sounds of nature.

That’s right. No matter how much you look at constellations, you cannot understand the universe, and the very concept of constellations distorts the stars. Constellations are not points of stars stuck on a single plane but shapes formed by stars that are actually at completely different distances. The shape of the constellation you see now might look different 1 million years from now, and since the light from stars originates tens of thousands of years ago, some stars may have already disappeared. To view such things as constellations?a kind of chart and order?is itself an illusion. I think it is very important to temporarily suspend such a 'constellation-like' perspective.

If Western music, which sets a clear 'end' in linear time, is considered monotheistic, then original music was born in a more polytheistic and animistic time frame where having no 'end' was acceptable. Even John Cage was obsessed with structure until the end and focused on 'how to segment time,' but I want to break away from that. Perhaps because I am interested in environmental issues, I am sometimes asked, 'What is environmentally friendly music?' Fundamentally, I think such music does not exist. Still, I continue to seek an answer, and if truly 'eco-friendly music' exists, it might, to some extent, deny human elements?not to the extent of Michel Foucault’s 'death of man,' but in some way. In other words, I personally increasingly want to distance myself from monotheistic human ideas such as having a beginning and an end or history having a purpose. Music on an album must end at some point, but I want to create music that is not a single time with a beginning and an end but multiple times occurring simultaneously, where eternal 'repetition' cannot happen.

Earlier, Mr. Sakamoto mentioned his experiment of not using nouns. Actually, about 10 years ago, I also wondered if there was a way to describe interactions between nouns without using nouns to view biology more integratively. For example, I tried to describe the flow of a river and the movement of clouds without using the words river or cloud, only describing flow and movement. At that time, I thought of two things. One was to leave the tearing, crushing, and dissecting of mice to young scholars and, to use a somewhat pretentious expression, to deeply contemplate as a 'thinker.' The other was not to name elements like rivers or clouds but to create a new expression that explains the flow of life phenomena itself as interactions between elements. So, I came up with the concept of 'dynamic equilibrium' and have been continuously thinking about refining it into a kind of mathematical model.

Music and Life | Written by Ryuichi Sakamoto & Shinichi Fukuoka | Translated by Hwang Guk-young | 212 pages | 18,000 KRW