Steven Takasugi: “Music Never Lies”

Steven Takasugi on the allergy to success, radicalism as good manners, and the enemies he would gladly invite

Steven Kazuo Takasugi builds his music from decades of sound archives and lets live musicians play against their recorded doubles. He co-edits our series SYNKOPEN. In Donaueschingen, after the premiere of his Museum Factory, we talked about risk, radicalism—and the enemies he’d gladly invite.

Interview: Wolke Verlag

SYNKOPEN books are small enough to carry in your pocket. What would you like them to contaminate while they’re in there?

Pockets are for keys, phones, money. I’d like them to be contaminated by radical ideas that travel with us wherever we go. I’m speaking as a composer here, not as a scholar like my co-editors, and for composers the question is always how writing, reading, and thinking can push our work further. That’s why SYNKOPEN matters so much to me.

Suppose a reader develops an allergy to a word after reading SYNKOPEN. Which word would make you proud?

Maybe the allergy should be to success. Risk-taking is essential to art, and it becomes extremely hard once you start thinking about career. Success makes us repeat what worked and play it safe. Risk means failure—not as an end point, but followed through and embraced as an existential condition for radical art.

That’s in the series’ mission statement: to pursue what lies outside one’s comfort zone. And SYNKOPEN doesn’t just let you take risks, it publishes them. It brings them into the world instead of leaving them in a journal no one reads. That is very rare.

Suppose an institution buys the entire series to prove how open-minded it is. What could we put in the next volume to ruin the transaction?

Composers who call themselves experimental or radical face the same problem. Once you’ve defined yourself, you have to keep pushing beyond your own idea of what is provocative. And once you’ve been accepted, you should question that acceptance—it may mean you’ve become mainstream. Radicality is never settled. It can’t rest on its laurels.

What kind of radicalism has become good manners?

Good manners have to do with careerism, with wanting to be successful. The hard part is telling apart where we’re posing and where we’re authentically radical. I know people who didn’t achieve the success they expected, became bitter, and said it was because they were too radical. I’ve done it myself: in phases when I wasn’t successful, I blamed it on being so radical. There’s some naivety in that, and growing out of it is a matter of maturity.

Sometimes I wonder whether true radicality is mostly personality—something almost innate, a strong character that breaks through convention and politeness not because it wants to be radical, but because it has to be. I’m no expert at identifying it. But as an experienced listener, I can sense the difference between true radicality and the posed kind.

What should a book about music be allowed to get away with that a composer wouldn’t?

I always say: music never lies. You listen, and you can tell when a composer is posing. In writing, you can wear a mask. You can lie, be a fraud—and still tell the truth, as literature does through its characters. The truth lies between the lines, and the complexity of writing allows for that. Music can do it too, but it’s harder; you quickly end up in the conceptual realm.

Of course, language is easily used to lie to our faces—just listen to politicians. Both media can lie and tell the truth at the same time. Perhaps language is simply used more often to lie, whereas music assumes that it is always, existentially, telling the truth.

You’re a composer. Why take on writing at all?

The question was what it actually means to be published in this series. Is it just to be provocative? Just to be radical? Magdalena Zorn said something I’ll never forget: the writing has to be brilliant.

That’s a hard charge. Thinking radically is one thing; expressing it in words is another bar to clear entirely. Not every composer has to write. But composers who claim to be critical use language to clarify what they’re doing, as a form of self-reflection. Language can cut through the habits we fall into when composing and show us how to go further.

Which of your own convictions deserves an enemy—someone to counter it? And would you invite that enemy to write in the series?

Oh, yes—I love my enemies. The best criticism is self-criticism, and the criticism that stings and stays with you for years is wonderful. Artists are sensitive, but criticism makes us grow, and strangely we become hungry for it.

I’m thoroughly classically trained, and it’s hard for me to break out of classical form. If someone criticized my work for that, I would agree. But I’d want that enemy to offer a strategy, not just point to the problem: how does one actually get out? That’s what a good composition teacher does—someone you trust, whose criticism is constructive rather than destructive.

An enemy like that, writing a book about our work from the outside, from a different music culture, holding up a mirror we don’t yet know—that would be fantastic. That’s what the series’ title is about: syncopation means getting between the beats. For me, that would be the dream listener.