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 creates his music from decades of sound archives and has live musicians play alongside their recorded counterparts. He co-edits our SYNKOPEN series. 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, and money. I’d like them to be infused with radical ideas that travel with us wherever we go. I’m speaking here as a composer, not as a scholar like my co-editors, and for composers, the question is always how writing, reading, and thinking can take our work to the next level. 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. Taking risks is essential to art, and it becomes extremely difficult once you start thinking about your career. Success makes us repeat what worked and play it safe. Risk means failure—not as an end in itself, but as something to be pursued and embraced as an existential condition for radical art.

That’s part of the series’ mission statement: to explore 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 that no one reads. That’s very rare.

Suppose an institution buys the entire series to show how open-minded it is. What could we include in the next volume to ruin the deal?

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. Radicalism is never set in stone. It can’t rest on its laurels.

What kind of radicalism has become the norm?

Good manners are tied to careerism, to the desire to be successful. The hard part is distinguishing between when we’re putting on a show and when we’re genuinely 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: during periods when I wasn’t successful, I blamed it on being so radical. There’s a certain naivety in that, and outgrowing it is a matter of maturity.

Sometimes I wonder if true radicalism is mostly a matter of 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 radicalism and the kind that’s just for show.

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 putting on a show. 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 makes that possible. Music can do it too, but it’s harder; you quickly end up in the realm of the conceptual.

Of course, language is easily used to lie right 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 bother writing at all?

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

That’s a tough accusation. Thinking radically is one thing; expressing it in words is an entirely different hurdle to clear. 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 adversary—someone to challenge it? And would you invite that adversary to contribute to 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 helps us grow, and strangely enough, we come to crave it.

I have a thorough classical training, and it’s hard for me to break away from classical form. If someone criticized my work for that, I would agree. But I’d want that critic to offer a strategy, not just point out the problem: how does one actually break free? That’s what a good composition teacher does—someone you trust, whose criticism is constructive rather than destructive.

An enemy like that—someone writing a book about our work from the outside, from a different musical culture, holding up a mirror we haven’t yet seen—that would be fantastic. That’s what the series’ title is about: syncopation means falling between the beats. For me, that would be the ideal listener.