Only the Sound Remains

Noh-​opera diptych

“And this world would be a sorry place to dwell in?”

It was in the midst of the First World War that poet Ezra Pound undertook to publish an anthology of translations of noh plays and synopses, the first of its kind in the Western world. For him, it was a matter of bringing to light the work of one of the greatest experts on Japan, the orientalist Ernest Fenollosa, but above all of making a potentially decisive cultural act, in a context that saw the destruction of the great European empires. For Pound, civilizations collapse when words wear out and cultures stop renewing themselves. It is to the art of Translation, and through it to intercultural exchanges, that they owe their survival and development.

The haphazard trajectory of these texts must be imagined in the context of the time: the rescue of the tradition of noh as a living art by the actor Umewaka Minoru, at a time when it was threatened for the first time in five centuries by the collapse of the feudal system on which it depended, allowing Fenollosa to attend performances; Fenollosa’s work with the scholar Kiichi Hirata who, although ignorant of noh, was able to fill in some of the orientalist’s linguistic gaps; the transmission of the manuscripts to Pound by Fenollosa’s widow; the poet’s interest, fueled by the fashion of Japanese prints and the influence of his mentor W.B. Yeats, who sought to reinvent a theatre of occult forces; and finally their – inspiring if not factually enlightening – encounter with the Japanese dancer Michio Itō. A chain of happy accidents and converging interests, and opportunities for misunderstandings. One that came to have a crucial impact on the fascination for noh of all theatrical avant-​gardes of the 20^th century.

Reaching out to the other, touching the other, remains a major existential issue – of which Only the Sound Remains is, in the twice-​repeated difficulty of two beings to meet, in itself a celebration – but we have fortunately come a long way in the last hundred years. Without pretending that prejudices and orientalism are mere things of the past, we now have the possibility of taking Fenollosa and Pound’s ambitions further, and of bringing about a true encounter of cultures, equal and reciprocal. This production of Only the Sound Remains, created in Tokyo, is an attempt at this.

In this endeavor Kaija Saariaho’s music is the best invitation, and facilitator. For forty years, Saariaho has integrated her study of Japanese instruments into her musical practice, and has managed to make them a breeding ground for extended playing techniques and new sounds rather than a simple exotic palette. Her musical language is in itself a way of overcoming the gap between European and Asian traditions, and in Only the Sound Remains it acts as a common language that allows for dialogue. In addition to the reinvention of an ancient form, our Japanese colleagues have recognized and endorsed in this music what they call yūgen: this suggestion of the invisible mystery of the world that beauty brings to the surface without forcing it. Its emblematic figure is the yo’in, a term that concentrates the ideas of resonance (Saariaho’s favorite musical effect, omnipresent in this work), aftertaste, haunting memory, and poetic suggestion, and that was chosen to translate the title of our performance in Japan.

Music was indeed the vehicle for this encounter. Which was due to the open-​mindedness of the performers, and in particular of dancer and choreographer Kaiji Moriyama, an experienced reinventor of the traditions of noh, with whom we worked on the interfaces between two musical forms that are also two dramaturgies, to give birth to a new one. Also decisive was the rare delicacy of the conductor Clément Mao-​Takacs, the flautist Camilla Hoitenga and the Finnish kantele player Eija Kankaanranta, in their close collaboration with the Japanese musicians, but also in their way of supporting Kaiji’s process from the pit. Finally, the efforts of my assistant Yasuhiro Miura and of the entire team at the Bunka Kaikan in Tokyo were necessary at every stage to maintain an in-​depth and fruitful dialogue, and to bring to life the vision that I had with Étienne Exbrayat: that of a staging that interweaves the aesthetics of Noh and the machinery of Italian opera. It bears traces of the milestones of an intercultural history: Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s lessons in his In Praise of Shadows on the deep roots of the Japanese relationship to space, and the tradition of exchanges that has united the French and Japanese avant-​gardes since the 1950s and the Gutai group, in close physical contact with bodies, materials and techniques – in short, drawing on these obstacles that connect us, and that are also at the heart of our approach to music theatre as a creative medum.

It is obviously not a supposed “universal” that emerges in such an encounter of cultures. On the contrary, it is the difficulty, once again centered as a topic, of any encounter and any dialogue. This work, carried out everywhere in the world by artists, as much in the form of interculturality as of interdisciplinarity, is nevertheless as difficult as it is necessary to build a world that is not unified by an overwhelming globalization, but a happier place to dwell in.

Aleksi Barrière

Pictures

Read Aleksi Barrière’s article on noh and contemporary operaa (EN):

“Dialogues with Noh theatre – Experiences of a stage director”, Finnish Music Quarterly, February 9, 2024