Though our conversation was conducted through email, he in Japan and I in Mexico, Yosuke Fujita succeeded in communicating exactly what music, and his music, mean to him. Fujita has become well known for the music that he makes with a pipe organ he’s made himself, music said to be grounded in sounds found in nature. 

Listening to this music, to Fujita’s album Iki, for example, one doesn’t get a first impression that nature, birds, or crickets, are being listened to. Perhaps one could hear the sound of a stream, but mostly it sounds like notes sustained into webs of dynamic music, music with a tonality that could tear an ego open. “My house is in the mountains and I can walk right into the forest from my house, so I think that is my neighborhood,” he tells me before getting philosophical—ontological, even—about nature. 

“I think I often get inspiration from things like rules and conditions in nature, rather than finding the sounds themselves,” he says, in no way shying away from his intellectuality. “For example, when I look at a tree, I often think that there are only one or two rules that shape it, very minimal and simple rules, but no two trees are the same and the variations are innumerable. I like the way countless variations are created from very minimal rules. It's very simple but super complex, so no matter how much you look at it, you'll never get bored, right? I would like to make that kind of music, but it's not easy.”

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Then there’s the fact that Fujita’s music is inspired by Gagaku. Having listened to Gagaku music, which is a very complex Japanese traditional court music, a listener of Fujita’s will get the impression that his music is a minimalized version of Gagaku. In Gagaku, ryūteki and hichiriki, both flute-like instruments, play variations of single melodic lines. The shō, along with the strings, is a major harmonic element that offers gagaku the aitake, which are chords that add themselves to melodies made by the ryūteki and hichiriki. 

Though Fujita hasn't studied or had deep involvement in Gagaku—it is not familiar in contemporary Japanese society—he finds inspiration in the tradition. "Very few listeners have ever listened to it as music in an interesting way. But when you listen to it again, carefully, it is very interesting," he writes. "I think it is in the nature of playing to an invisible being (the so-called God) rather than to an audience."

Gagaku influenced an instrument that he has built: Fujita’s music is made with a large wind instrument of his own making, a pipe organ. Fujita’s pipe organ sounds very much like the shō, an instrument that is supposed to imitate the phoenix and has “wings.” The aitake chords that the shō plays, thus, becomes the music of an organ—a pipe organ.

He wasn’t precisely an organist when he made his pipe organ. He was a musician and a dreamer. As a musician, he was a guitar player and a singer who sought to create landscapes for his music. “I honestly didn't have much interest in the organ, and I didn't know a single artist who used the organ, etc. I was only familiar with Bach's organ music. I became interested in the organ only after the instrument was built. And it was only recently that I became interested in experimental organ artists. I just continued to experiment with my organ for about 10 years, and then I learned,” he says.

Bach—because Fujita is influenced by western classical music as much as he is from Gagaku. “In terms of symphonies, I used to listen to Shostakovich Symphony No.5. I like all of Bach's music, I love the third movement of Beethoven's String Quartet No.15 A-minor Op.132, and I used to listen to Erik Satie, Debussy, Stravinsky, Bartok, and Messiaen,” he says.

He dreamt of the instrument in the same way that a musician can dream up a composition. It would not be wise here to venture and compare his dreams to Haruki Murakami’s magical realism or to romanticize a musician dreaming about an instrument. Fujita, as it is evident, has a precise mind, and his comments on dreaming and building his instrument were no less resolved.

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“I am not an instrument builder/craft maker, and basically, there is no interest there at all,” he tells me as I ask him about how his instrument-making relates to the grand craft-making tradition in Japan. “I naturally build instruments in the process of searching for unknown sounds.” About his dreams, he says that “although I do not write them down, I sometimes come up with ideas or decide how to perform them in a dream. These are fully remembered when I wake up and can be reproduced realistically. Maybe I just think I'm asleep and I'm awake.”

Fujita considers himself to be, first and foremost, a lover of sound. It is sound that he pieces together into compositions that are meant to surprise an audience. Time, as Albert Einstein has proven, is slower in the mountains, where Fujita lives, and this can be heard in the music. Furthermore, though his music is not Gagaku, Gagaku has its unique ways of measuring time, through rhythmic structures such as hayatadabyōshi and nobetadabyōshi, which are combinations of measures.

“I've lived in the countryside since I was a child, so I think there's a part of me that's not used to artificial stimulation. It will naturally influence the music I make,” he says. This aim during a performance is to observe sound with the audience, to concentrate on it, and to feel a sense of discovery when the unexpected happens. 

It all comes together as a web of relativity. Each audience member is expecting, assuming, and conditioning how time functions wherever it is that they live. Each audience member a dancing shiva, Fujita dares to move this web of relativity, to feel exactly as one might be moved by the sight and sound of a bird in a forest. He’s loved to do so in “Nantes and Paris (France), Den Haag (the Netherlands), Geneva (Switzerland), Montreal (Canada), San Francisco and New York (USA), and in Italian cities because he loves wine,” he says as he builds a larger web. 

In her book Shifting The Silence, Etel Adnan writes “Silence is a flower, it opens up, dilates, extends its texture, can grow, mutate.” Her words capture what Fujita is doing with his music: shifting the experience, asking us to consider whether the same could be said about a sound. 

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About Adolf Alzuphar

Adolf Alzuphar is a music critic. He also contributes to The Brooklyn Rail, and to the LA Review of Books.

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