Yasunao Tone, a composer, theorist, and artist associated with the Fluxus movement whose experimental music found a cult following, has died at 90. Artists Space, which mounted his first US retrospective in 2023, announced his passing on Tuesday. A representative for Artists Space said he died of age-related complications.
Tone functioned on a wavelength all his own: He produced scores that resembled abstract artworks, staged performances that involved altering instruments with materials such as ice, and made waves of white noise made by scratching CDs. His goal was turn music away from tradition by utilizing decidedly unorthodox methods of sound-making. As he once told the artist Christian Marclay, “it’s natural for artists to deviate” from the norm.
His work is widely known to those with an interest in experimental music. A 2023 profile of Tone that ran in AnOther Magazine stated that he had “changed music forever” in its display copy. Danielle A. Jackson, the curator of Tone’s retrospective, told the publication that, with his glitchy works made using scratched CDs, the artist “opened doors for a lot of composers and sound experimentalists.”
Yet even though he is perhaps less well-known in the art world than in music circles, he collaborated with many key artists, including Nam June Paik, George Maciunas, Charlotte Moorman, Senga Nengudi, and Merce Cunningham. Yoko Ono, an artist once affiliated with the Fluxus movement alongside Tone, told the Wall Street Journal in 2013, “I think people will be surprised to know that the usual notion of Asian music will be totally destroyed when they listen to his music or read his scores. He is not Asian. He is Martian.”
Tone was born in Tokyo in 1935 and attended Chiba University, graduating in 1957 with a degree in Japanese literature. He wrote his thesis on Dada and Surrealism, and he became involved with other students interested in music. “Being a bit cerebral,” he told the Museum of Modern Art’s post blog, “I was initially planning to work on the theory side of things rather than actually performing. At some point, though, I got swept up in it and started playing music with them.”
In 1961, he cofounded Group Ongaku, a short-lived collective whose name translated to Group Music and whose music tended to be heavily improvised. Around this time, Tone also started using graphic scores, in which musical cues are written out visually instead of using traditional notation. One from 1961, titled Anagram for Strings, features black and white circles whose various sizes correspond to the length of a glissando, though it is ultimately up to the performer to interpret how to produce the resulting sounds. Scores such as these were inspired by ones produced by the American composer John Cage, whose work proved widely influential in Japan during the postwar era.
George Maciunas, a leader of the Fluxus movement, published Anagram for Strings, and that helped grow Tone’s international reputation. It also firmly lured him into the orbit of Fluxus, a movement whose purveyors utilized word scores and performance art to put forward everyday activities and objects as a kind of art.
Yasunao Tone’s 2023 Artists Space retrospective.
Photo Filip Wolak
By the time Tone moved to the US in 1972, he had produced music that sounded more like noise—“a parasite without a host,” as he called this sort of work—and written criticism for Bijutsu Techo, an important Japanese art magazine. He had also worked with the avant-garde collective Hi-Red Center and Team Random, which has sometimes been labeled the first computer art group in Japan.
During the later part of his career, Tone turned his attention to digital technology, corrupting audio files for a project called MP3 Deviations. In more recent year, he even worked with AI, developing a system whose logic he used against itself.
He always paid close attention to the way that music could reshape the world. “I think it’s wrong to want to design a concert hall where the audience members will hear the same sound, regardless of where they are sitting in the hall,” he told MoMA’s post blog. “These kinds of desires are driven by people’s world views, which are informed by certain assumptions about what ‘music’ is.”
