Miya Masaoka With Her Laser Koto And Madagascar Hissing Cockroach

STEVE ELKINS: Your formal musical training on the koto is in ancient Japanese court music known as Gagaku. I read an interview you did with the Zen Buddhist minister Masao Kodani, who raised an interesting point about that tradition. He said: “Organ music is the perfect Christian music. It has this real vertical kind of feel, whereas Gagaku is the perfect Buddhist music, because of the horizontal feel. Organ music soars, it goes up, up to God. Gagaku music is very earth-bound, it has no sense of soaring, it’s there, it doesn’t go anywhere…Christian churches go down the aisle and then go up (to God). Buddhism has always been horizontal, it never tries to leave the ground. It is a union between Reality and the Earth.” I’m wondering if this way of thinking reflects your relationship to the koto. Or if it inspired your musical explorations of nature, such as collaborating with insects and plants as musicians.

MIYA MASAOKA: Well, my relationship to the koto is multifaceted, much like the instrument’s history. The modern koto came through the Korean peninsula from China. Its ancestor was the Chinese zither known as the guzheng. In China, there was a Confucian theory that if music is harmonious then there is order and balance in the Universe. The five notes of the scale corresponded to the five Confucian virtues, so learning music was synonymous with learning morality and ethics. But the Confucian view wasn’t mystical at all, it was a way to order society.

Tonkori Of The Ainu People

MASAOKA (cntd): In Japan, the koto became associated with religious rituals. The indigenous Ainu people had their own kind of koto called the tonkori. In Shinto, Gagaku is the music that communicates to the gods. So the Japanese koto is perceived as a mediator for different kinds of environmental and universal energy.

ELKINS: So as it migrated from China, the koto transformed from being a tool for social order into something more mystical?

MASAOKA: Yes, in China it was a way to fill musicians with Confucian principles. But Japanese Gagaku is more about emptying oneself to become more integrated with one’s environment. It became the music of Buddhist temples. Gagaku is a way of channeling forces that submerge the ego, so that the musician is not merely a vessel for human-centric orders. By contrast, Confucius would say that music is the most important part of government.

ELKINS: The Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert said that if one wants to protect the State, it is important to keep music from changing. Socrates likewise said “musical styles are nowhere altered without changes in the most important laws of the state.” I've been interested in the idea that a change in a musician's relationship to their instrument can lead to a change in their relationship to the society they live in. That's something that's drawn me to your work and connects you to the other musicians I'm interviewing for this film.

MASAOKA: That may be why a lot of my work explores tensions between the individual and the hive, which is not only a central concern in my practice of free improvisation with other musicians, but more generally in our relationship with the society we live in. I tend to make music with marginalized species, both human and insect. I did five tours to Europe with cockroaches. My piece “What Is The Difference Between Stripping And Playing The Violin?” explored similarities between two marginalized subcultures: sex workers and experimental musicians. I conducted erotic dancers and an orchestra using Tai Chi techniques on a busy street in my San Francisco neighborhood, near the red light district. Five prostitutes had just been murdered near there. I wanted to highlight how stigmatization of the sex industry, and middle-class, moralistic attitudes against sex work make women more vulnerable to violent attacks.

Masaoka Conducting "What Is The Difference Between Stripping And Playing The Violin?" (1998)

ELKINS: The human body keeps resurfacing in your work as a kind of musical instrument. Whether you’re turning your body into an instrument for insects to play, or harvesting music from human brainwaves, or wearing musical clothing.

MASAOKA: I remember my koto teacher telling me that your body is really an extension of the instrument. Playing the koto, I end up wearing kimonos for different recitals. It’s part of the performance, it’s like an extension of the instrument. I started looking at how to change the textiles and learning about conductive thread. It’s a metal thread and you can pass electricity through it. This opens up endless possibilities for what the kimono can do. Right now, the kimono can perform music intelligently in response to other sounds and phenomena in its environment. It transforms data into light through LEDs I’ve stitched into the fabric. For example, if I wear electrodes during performance, the kimono can reflect my inner thoughts…readouts of the brain onto the kimono.

ELKINS: Is there a tradition of electronic clothing that inspired you, or are you pioneering this idea yourself?

Atsuko Tanaka’s Electric Dress (1959)

MASAOKA: Atsuko Tanaka’s electric dress of 1959 is a kind of historical precedent, though I wasn’t aware of it when I started. My kimono is almost part-creature, it’s like a living kimono in a sense that there’s some kind of life, some kind of thing that changes and grows and evolves, whether they’re generative algorithms or the live feed of what’s happening in its environment. To me that’s a very fascinating area to work with, because the kimono operates like these giant squid that I’m really interested in. They’re white and flat like the kimono, and they’re able to take on different colors and patterns of their environment to camouflage themselves. They work with the colors of the ocean, and whatever is in front of them. Whether its seaweed or a school of fish, they’re able to transform their appearance almost like a color TV monitor. I’ve been looking at these patterns and how these squid are able to do that. I really want to do a musical duet with the squid on stage, where the kimono is receiving biofeedback from the pigment in the squid’s skin and translating it into music. Or responding musically to the squid as it transforms.

LED Kimono Sleeve Under Construction

Brainwave Music: Alvin Lucier (1965) And David Rosenboom (1975)

Miya Masaoka's "What Is The Sound Of Naked (Asian) Men?" (Music For Bodies And Brainwaves)

MASAOKA: Well for me, one of the most important parts about working with brains is that it led to my work with plants. I began putting my electrodes on leaves of plants. One of the things I learned is that plants emit a micro-voltage that changes depending on what’s happening around them. So if the plant senses something, the voltage in the plant rises. The electrodes sense the plant’s physiological response to its environment, so I can access these mini-volts and translate them into sound highly amplified. In one of these pieces I had a plant that was like a part of the ensemble. It was responding and improvising with the musicians as a soloist would. I had a spotlight on the plant, and when it was the plant’s solo turn, we would turn up the amplification of the plant sounds.

Miya Masaoka Performing Music With Plants

MASAOKA (cntd): Their awareness is extraordinary to the level of definitely some form of consciousness. Walking into the room and looking at the plant, they sense that for example, from six feet away. Plants are far more aware of what’s going on around them than we would guess. Some plants in the rainforest have an ability to see ultraviolet light, and have different ways of cutting off root supplies and traveling around the tops of trees where it’s a better environment for them to live, and putting down new root systems. I have a whole awareness of plants that I didn’t have before I started working with them.

ELKINS: Did you take any inspiration from the Japanese composer Mamoru Fujieda? He spent decades creating music based on the electrical activity in living plants.

Mamoru Fujieda's Music For Plants

MASAOKA: I think his work is beautiful, but I wasn’t aware of him when I made my plant music. I should interview him sometime, that would be interesting. He took a different approach, partly by translating the plant data into a score for traditional instruments. You can listen to the piano performances and not know it was a plant that had generated the music. Whereas my pieces were much more about interacting with the plant in real time on stage, and hearing the plant be a musician improvising right there, in the moment.

A lot of people might be surprised to know that the initial research into plant consciousness was done by Cleve Backster, an interrogation specialist for the CIA who was the world's foremost expert on lie detectors. It was something he stumbled on completely accidentally while testing and refining polygraphs to train N.Y.P.D detectives and FBI agents. Before him, Jagadish Chandra Bose — a scientist from Bangladesh who made major contributions to the field of radio microwave optics before becoming the father of Bengali science fiction — was one of the first researchers to demonstrate the electrical nature of stimuli in plants that were previously thought to be chemical. There's a crater on the moon named after him.

CIA Interrogation Specialist Cleve Backster (Left) and Bangladeshi Physicist Jagadish Chandra Bose

Miya Masaoka Performing With Bees

MASAOKA (cntd): There’s another whole strain of bees called “solitary bees,” the indigenous bees in the United States who were here before the European colony bees came over. They’re very different. They don’t have to follow the regimes of the hive. They don’t have to clean the hexes. They’re on their own, they’re these free agents, and they live in burrows in the ground. And they have a completely different lifestyle compared to the European colony bees. So I think that’s really interesting, how these bees have such a different way of life.

Scout bees make sure hive openings face south for warmth. In winter, they don’t hibernate, but create a microclimate in the hive, sealing off cracks and openings with plant resin. When it gets too hot they spread water over the honeycomb to remove heat through evaporation. Bees are just so amazing, I could go on and on about them. Another thing I find interesting is that all these bees have the potential to be the queen bee, genetically. And it only depends on what kind of food they’re fed.

ELKINS: I've heard that the only purpose of the males or the drones in the hive is to mate with the queen bee, but then they die as soon as they do.

MASAOKA: Well, the drones have the DNA of both male and female, so they’re this ambiguously gendered bee. And their whole life is driven to mate with the queen, but when they ejaculate their abdomens explode with a popping sound, and then they die. So it’s very dramatic.

ELKINS: Ok, so I understand your fascination with the cultures of different bees, but what made them appealing to you as musical collaborators?

MASAOKA: Usually bees buzz around middle C. And when they get excited, they go faster, almost to a C-sharp, or possibly a D. The koto has a lot of natural buzzing sounds, so I had a hive of 5,000 bees and would perform with them, uniting our buzzing sounds which they use to communicate with each other. Different bees would come up to the microphone, and you could almost hear them soloing.

There was one time that I was lying on the table, and they had just been let out of their hive. So they were very excited to be out. And the sounds…they were buzzing right by my ears, and by my eyes, and on my face. The lights were coming down and it was just this ecstatic moment, because their wings were translucent, and it was just all these fractured moments of chaos and great beauty…there’s really nothing like it. These moments are what we live for, you know?

ELKINS: Is it true that you’ve been developing your own language that incorporates insect sounds?

MASAOKA: Yes, insect sounds have their own coded meanings and are a pseudo-language of sorts. I started performing using insect sounds combined with these Japanese syllables and Hindustani syllables I had learned from traveling to India seven times to work with Indian musicians. So putting these three things together, I was able to create phrases and sentences, and eventually a language which I am writing a dictionary for.

Ma Yuan (Chinese Painter, 1175 - 1225 CE)

ELKINS: The Japanese syllable “Ma” fascinates me, because it points to something so unique that Japanese culture contributes to our understanding of music: it seems to value the silence between notes as much, or more, than the notes themselves. As you wrote about it so beautifully: “Silence, Ma, as space between the notes, is a distinguishing element of Japanese music, and it has its roots in the spiritual and philosophical premises of Buddhism. Consider the large, empty space of a Zen painting on a large scroll and with only a small boat in a tiny corner of the painting. This ‘one-corner style’ originated with Bayan (Ma Yuan, fl. 1175 - 1225) and is associated with the Japanese painters’ ‘thrifty brush’ tradition of using the least possible number of lines or strokes to represent forms on paper or silk, a tradition very much in accord with the sprit of Zen. This minimalism is evident also in Gagaku, where, using the minimum of sound and stroke, restraint on the part of all the players yields the maximum impact on the listener. In Gagaku, the concept of Ma is that of the essence of a space or interval or emptiness between objects. The very strong emphasis placed upon this Ma is an important aesthetic principle in all of the Japanese arts.”

MASAOKA: Ma can manifest in many different ways: in the spare decor of a monastery or garden, in the momentary pause in speech needed to convey meaningful words, or the space between notes in music. The Kanji symbol for Ma combines “door” and “sun.” Together, they imply a doorway through which sunlight can flow.

ELKINS: Somewhere else, I’ve heard it said that Ma is the time and space life needs to breathe. Because if we have no time, or if our space is restricted, we cannot grow, or feel, or connect. I encountered this myself in a remote mountain village in central Japan, when an elderly Zen monk allowed me to sleep in his monastery in exchange for some small chores around his shrine and garden. I met with him regularly in an empty room for tea and miso paste infused with maple leaf burning on a candle. "The rooms are bare," he explained, "because in Zen, the reality of a room is not to be found in its four walls, but in the empty space between them. Drinking tea is a celebration of poverty. It is learning to be sufficient within the insufficiency of things. Only by focusing on what is not in the room, will you realize that you actually possess something in your poverty."

Whenever the room was emptied of his voice, it was obvious what the room did contain. The light crackle of the burning log. The smell of maple leaf. Moonlight. The sound of raindrops dripping off the leaves outside. The faint taste of tea in my mouth. Liquid simmering in the suspended pot. In this room, where nothing was happening and almost nothing was contained, every sensation became a reservoir of gratitude. "When you have nothing," the monk said, "everything becomes a treasure. No room is empty when the mind is full."

The experience of Ma in the monastery showed me it wasn't just aesthetics, it can have a transformative, practical impact...an embodiment of something Kakuzo Okakura said: "Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others." I'm curious to know more about how you expanded on the concept of Ma in your instrument designs, especially the development of your laser koto.

Miya Masaoka And Her Laser Koto

MASAOKA: Learning traditional Japanese Gagaku music, and especially koto music, there’s a lot of negative, or “empty” space. There’s a lot of silent gestures that are involved; motions where you bring your hand up and you keep it up and don’t move it. And these silent gestures somehow have a sonic effect on the audience, even though there is no sound occurring. I once composed a piece of music made up entirely of silent gestures, and people in the audience told me afterwards they actually heard music. So I became really interested in how the hands work in relationship to sound and music.

My friend Donald Swearingen was working on a laser harp, and I was working on four lasers as musical triggers, invisible strings in an array going across my body that triggered samples. So I collaborated with him to make my laser koto. That way, the silent hand gestures that are traditionally meant only to imply sound can actually trigger sounds through the lasers. It’s like playing two instruments at once, because I can create complex accompaniments to my koto playing through my hand gestures.