Editing Yasunao Tone (section)

== Group Ongaku and Other Early Artistic Activity ==
In the late 1950s, Shūko Mizuno, Tone’s classmate at Chiba University enrolled at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music ([[Tokyo University of the Arts|Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku, abbrev. Geidai]]) and began musically improvising with classmate [[Takehisa Kosugi]].<ref name=":7">William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 19.</ref> [[Takehisa Kosugi|Kosugi]] played a tape for Tone and asked him to join their sessions.<ref name=":7" /> Tone was affected by [[Takehisa Kosugi|Kosugi]]’s gesture, who seemed to show no regard for Tone’s lack of formal musical training.<ref name=":7" /> He joined their group, buying a saxophone from [[Takehisa Kosugi|Kosugi]] and a Sony open reel tape recorder.<ref name=":7" /> [[Mieko Shiomi (composer)|Mieko Shiomi]], Genichi Tsuge, Mikio Tohima, and Yumiko Tanno also joined, making Tone the only member not enrolled at [[Tokyo University of the Arts|Geidai]]. Mizuno’s house became an important meeting place for the group.<ref name=":7" /> The group’s experimental endeavors were further informed by the young [[ethnomusicologist]] Fumio Koizumi, who became a part-time faculty member at [[Tokyo University of the Arts|Geidai]] in September 1959.<ref name=":7" /> As historian William Marotti describes, “The different ‘ethnic’ instruments were each bound to a complex performance tradition outside of a western orchestral frame—and thus provided a variety of rich alternatives to the latter’s conceptual dominance of music with its particular, narrow, and oppressive systematicity.”<ref name=":7" /> Tone recounts influence by [[Noh]] music, [[Indian music]], [[Jazz]] musicians like [[Ornette Coleman]] and [[Eric Dolphy]] and [[Kabuki]] music, among others.<ref>Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yasunao Tone, “Interview with Yasunao Tone,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 63-75, 65.</ref> According to his own account, Tone saw music as lagging behind the experimentation present in other art forms of the time and therefore providing a rich ground for the transformative capacity of art.<ref name=":8">William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 22.</ref>

Tone also wrote about the group, first in August of 1960 where he emphasized the role of chance and their endeavoring in “an experiment concerning an absolutely new music.”<ref name=":8" /> At this time, the group also decided upon its name as “[[Group Ongaku]],” “ongaku” meaning “music” in Japanese.<ref>William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 25.</ref> As Marotti points out, this emphasis on chance was part of Tone's and the group’s exploration of a [[Surrealist]]-inspired [[Surrealist automatism|automatism]] in opposition to artistic egoism.<ref>William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 23.</ref> The group’s improvisational approach to collective art making therefore had wider theoretical consequences for the social import of art. Inseparable from this work is its contextualization within the massive protests against the renewal of U.S.-Japan Security treaty (abbreviated as ''[[Anpo]]''), as seen in their performance from the van of Tone’s family’s business during the [[Anpo protests]].<ref>William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 31.</ref>

Among his early influences, Tone cited [[Musique concrète|Concrete Music]], [[John Cage]]’s experiments with sound, [[Jackson Pollock]]’s action painting, and Art autre/[[Informalism|Art informel]].<ref>William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 14.</ref> A former literature major, Tone became a fixture within the Japanese contemporary art scene. Tone was involved with the [[Neo-Dada Organizers|Neo Dadaism Organizers]] group, attending and sometimes participating in their events such as those conducted at [[Masunobu Yoshimura]]’s “White House” in [[Shinjuku]],<ref name=":9">William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2006), pp. 13-33, 29.</ref> In the early sixties he became involved with the international [[Fluxus]] movement. For example, his 1961 score ''Anagram for Strings'' was published and distributed by [[George Maciunas]]’s Fluxus Editions in 1963.<ref name=":0">{{Cite web|date=2014-08-05|title=Sound Is Merely a Result: Interview with Tone Yasunao, 2|url=https://post.moma.org/sound-is-merely-a-result-interview-with-tone-yasunao-2/|access-date=2021-11-13|website=post|language=en-US}}</ref> This work was Tone’s first graphic score, and it was performed during the first [[Fluxus]] festival, a 1962 tour around Europe.<ref>Dasha Dekleva, “In Parallel,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 39-54, 41.</ref> Dasha Dekleva describes the score, writing that it “is populated with small white and black circles and dots, and with random whole numbers (positive and negative) along the top and left edges. The realization of the piece involves drawing a line across the score and using basic arithmetic calculations that determine how a series of downward [[glissando]] is to be performed.”<ref name=":12">Dasha Dekleva, “In Parallel,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 39-54, 42.</ref> Among other shorter scores, ''Anagram for Strings'' was translated to English by [[Yoko Ono]].<ref name=":0" /> In another 1961 work, ''Days'', Tone recorded himself counting to past one hundred at a low volume. He then played the recording back at a high volume, re-recording it.<ref name=":0" /> This process was repeated multiple times until the distortion has completely obscured the sound to unintelligibility.<ref name=":0" /> In 1961 Tone also produced ''Geodessy For Piano'' in which he “experimented with the inevitable indeterminacy of a precise execution of sounds,” according to art historian and curator [[Alexandra Munroe]].<ref name=":1">Alexandra Munroe, “A Box of Smile: Tokyo Fluxus, Conceptual Art, and the School of Metaphysics,” in ''Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky'' (New York, NY: H.N. Abrams, 1994), 220.</ref> In this work, Tone stood elevated on a ladder above an open piano. He then took various handheld objects such as a tennis ball or cork and dropped them one-by-one onto the exposed strings.<ref name=":1" /> Tone would also modify the method by ascending or descending the ladder to increase or decrease the distance from which the objects were dropped.<ref name=":1" />

1962 saw a multitude of notable events in Tone’s oeuvre, including his first solo concert “One-man Show by Composer” in February.<ref name=":12" /> The concert occurred at the former Minami Gallery space with assisting performers seated on [[tatami]] mats on the floor.<ref name=":12" /> Compositions performed here include ''Anagram'', ''Smooth Event'', ''Silly Symphony'', and ''Drastic'', in which the performer took a large amount of laxatives and performed on the drums until they had to use the bathroom.<ref name=":0" /> 1962 also saw the Yamanote Line Incident, by [[Natsuyuki Nakanishi]], [[Jiro Takamatsu|Jirō Takamatsu]], and Hiroshi Kawani. Tone and [[Takehisa Kosugi|Kosugi]] also participated, although they performed on a different spot along the circular loop of the [[Yamanote]] train line than the other group.<ref name=":11">William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 32.</ref> Tone and [[Takehisa Kosugi|Kosugi]] were supposed to meet up with the primary group at Ikebukuro, but the primary group ended their performance prematurely when [[Natsuyuki Nakanishi|Nakanishi]] became too nervous to continue.<ref name=":11" /> Tone and [[Takehisa Kosugi|Kosugi]], on the other hand, completed the circuit of the Yamanote line, playing mobile tape players so that the sounds from the tapes and the sounds from around the train lines intermingled.<ref name=":11" />

Tone’s first submission to the progressive [[Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition|Yomiuri Independent Exhibition]], an annual exhibition that had become a hotbed of experimental artistic activity and discourse, also occurred in 1962. This submission was titled ''Tēpu Rekōdā'' (Tape Recorder).<ref>William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 29.</ref> The work was initially a reel to reel tape recorder which, after some uncertainty, he painted in hopes of making it a more acceptable submission to the art exhibition.<ref name=":9" /> Unhappy with this, he placed this entire tape recorder inside of a big white cloth bag that belonged to [[Takehisa Kosugi|Kosugi]].<ref name=":9" /> The result was an amorphous cloth form that would occasionally produce strange sounds on the thirty to forty minute loop.<ref>William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 29-30.</ref> The following year, the final year of the [[Yomiuri Indépendant Exhibition|Yomiuri Independent]], Tone produced ''Something Happened'' (1963).<ref name=":10">William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 30.</ref> Acquiring the stereotype mold of the Yomiuri newspaper (the exhibition sponsor) published that day, Tone rendered the news in plaster.<ref name=":10" /> Other works by Tone from this period were more performative, such as ''Catch Water Music'' (1965), a collaboration with [[Tatsumi Hijikata]], in which Tone threw water from a balcony onto the stage below.<ref>Dasha Dekleva, “In Parallel,” in ''Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language'' (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 39-54, 39.</ref> Around this time Tone also frequented the events at the [[Sogetsu Art Center|Sōgetsu Art Center]]. It was here that Tone met [[Nam June Paik]], who had been working in Tokyo with Shūya Abe between Summer of 1963 and Spring of 1964.<ref>Alexandra Munroe and Nam June Paik, “To Catch Up or Not to Catch Up with the West: Hijikata and Hi Red Center,” in ''Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky'' (New York, NY: H.N. Abrams, 1994), 77.</ref>