休止符と緊迫感 (Rests and the Sense of Tension)

Notes

From the 端山貢明アーカイブ (Hayama Kōmei Archive), item 131224 in the 執筆記事 (articles) category, registered 2025-05-08: https://d-commons.net/hayama/?c=&p=131224. Published by the 端山貢明アーカイブプロジェクト (Hayama Kōmei Archive Project), directed by 前川道博 (Michihiro Maekawa) of Nagano University, on the D-Commons platform, and licensed CC BY (表示). The source documents come from the 端山文庫, the papers kept in Hayama's laboratory at Tohoku University of Art and Design, digitised by the project with the agreement of his family; his autograph scores were given to the University History Archives of the Tokyo University of the Arts in 2026. Source: 『め』 magazine, September 1983 issue. Dated: September 1983 issue of 『め』, per the archive; the document itself bears no date.. A short essay on the musical rest, the sign for the part with no sound — whose character, Hayama says at once, is the difficult thing. He goes first to nō: the 乱拍子 of Dōjōji, where a shirabyōshi come for the bell's dedication dances in an eboshi while the small drum and the kakegoe cries strike into the joints of an almost soundless dance; and Shakkyō. Watch the stage, he says, and the silent places are plainly not merely soundless but intensely strained time, the drum waiting on the slightest gesture — a toe raised or lowered — and striking into it, until consciousness fills with sound and bursts into the climax of the 鐘入り, the entering of the bell. He rejects the familiar claim that a Western rest is mere soundless time while Japanese silence carries deep meaning. Japanese silence does have weight, he grants, but rests within the dynamism of Beethoven's piano sonatas show the same charged readiness. Tracing it back he reaches Gregorian chant, founded on arsis and thesis, leap and rest, where the rest is not resting but preparation for the next leap, so that the chain of preparation and leap makes the chant's dynamics. Everyday rest is the same, always preparation for what comes next; the only rest that truly does nothing is death. The last section ties the essay to his later work. In 1952, with the postwar world only beginning to recover and every movement swirling in art, one attempt pointed at the direction of contemporary media: Cage's 4'33", in which the pianist sits for four minutes thirty-three seconds without playing and withdraws, the audience gathering the sounds audible in that silence and listening to them as music. The piece is hard to understand and can look like a joke, he concedes, but what matters is that the music is completed not on the musician's side but on the listener's — an epoch-making proposal about the form in which the information called music is handed over. Read as media, this was the proposal, at that date, of 「アクセス側の主体性に於て成立するメディア」, media constituted by the initiative of the access side. People named: 端山貢明 (Hayama Komei) — author, ジョン・ケージ (John Cage), for 4'33" (1952), ベートーベン (Ludwig van Beethoven), for the piano sonatas. Noted: The file is an image-only scan of a clean typescript with no masthead, date or page numbers, so the attribution to 『め』, September 1983, rests entirely on the archive's record. The nō plays are named only as 「道成寺」 and 「石橋(しゃっきょう)」, with no performance or performer cited. No publisher is given for 『め』. This is the earliest statement in the library of the idea that carries the whole of Hayama's later media theory. Having worked through silence in Noh, in Gregorian chant and in Beethoven, the essay closes on John Cage's 4'33" of 1952 and draws the conclusion that the music is completed not on the musician's side but on the listener's, which he calls 「アクセス側の主体性に於て成立するメディア」, a medium constituted by the agency of the access side, and says is becoming, on the basis of computer technology, the infrastructure of contemporary society. The same phrase is a keyword of Towards a Net Museion I (2000) and of the electronic arts information library chapter (2005), both in this library.