Vo. 52,No, 2 Serexc/Suamer 2008 Disciplined Listening in Tokyo: Onky6 and Non-Intentional Sounds Lorraine PLourpe / Columbia University Music is not determined by its performers; what sounds are deemed as music or not is left up to the listener —Oromo Yoshihide (2004) When you are present at an Off Site concert, this intense listening is highly noticeable, The music is, let’s face it, hardly a picnic for the audience. Sitting on small stools on a concrete floor, they listen like they mean it. This listening that you can almost see, suspended in the room like colored light. —Clive Bell (2003:42) Introduction be the mid to late 1990s, the international avant-garde electronic music world was distinguished by a variety of new approaches to sound performance, many of which were influenced by techniques of mini- malism, free improvisation, and the rise in popularity of sound art This moment is seen by some scholars as indicative of an “auditory turn in con- temporary culture” (Cox and Warner 2004:xiii),a period in which questions of listening and hearing were foregrounded by media theorists, historians, and anthropologi as well as musicians. In Japan one such genre that emerged during this time is referred to as onkyd (sound)—an extremely minimal, improvisatory musical style and performance approach that pays particular attention to sound texture, gaps, and silences. One of onkyd's most distinctive characteristics is its seemingly utter lack of any discern- Je musical structure —rhythmic, harmonic, or otherwise —which is often performed at barely audible levels. Because of onky6's minimal sonic pres ence, the role of the listener came to occupy the site of various discourses and debates in Tokyo, including modes of listening, or chéshu (audition), as well as the presence and/or necessity of background or extramusical © 2008 by the Society for EthnomusicologyPlourde: Disciplined Listening in ToRyo = 2 = Zé t, sounds. The genre itself is inextricably linked with the now defunct Tokyo performance space and gallery Off Site, which was opened in late June 2000 by musician and artist Ito Atsuhiro and his wife Ite Yukari,’ who curated the gallery exhibitions. Drawing on cthnographic fieldwork conducted in Tokyo from 2004 to 2007 and participant observation and regular attendance at Off Site during its final year of operation, from 2004 to 2005, this article will convey the sensorial and social experience of listening at Off Site through ethnographic description and anatysis. | will also anravel the disjuncture beeween the musicians’ attempts to create a free (fia nu) and scemingly uncontrolled listening environment, and the audience's concrete experience of awkward tension and overly strict rules of spectatorship. As | argue. the discipline re- quired of the listener in order to properly comprehend onkyé is dependent on the recognition and usage of specific listening strategies. Such strategies are a tearned bodily technique highly contingent on public knowledge and discourse, which, in turn, facilitate “ proper” understanding and appreciation of onkyd. Listeners in this community are dependent on the constant pro- duction and circulation of such knowledge—in the form of public talks and performances, pamphiets and handouts at concerts, special issue journals and magazines, musicians’ blogs and everyday conversation—in order toachieve so-called proper listening and comprehension. By highlighting the listener and their physical and intellectual relationship to sound, this article seeks to contribute to the growing body of literature on practices of listening and their relationship to the urban soundscape. An ethnographic appecach to understanding localized—as well as “underground” —aesthetic forms will nevertheless reveal themes and issues that speak more broadly to the navi- gation and experience of everyday life in contemporary Tokyo and its urban soundscape. As Georgina Born notes in her discussion of the crucial role of ethnographic analyses of Western institutions—in her case, the French, computer music and research institute, IRCAM—“it takes a method such as ethnography to uncover the gaps between external claims and internal realities, public rhetoric and private thought, ideology and practice” (Born 1995:7). While the historical trajectory and practices of the Euro-American musical avant-garde are well established (Born 1995; Kahn and Whitehead 1992; Kahn 1999; Nyman [1974] 1999) there has been litte ethnographic research conducted on non-Western contemporary avant-garde music com munities, particularly in the domain of listening. This article will also consider the spatial and material conditions of onky0’s origins, in this the cramped, urban landscape of Tokyo. As a form that could have only emerged from an urban environment, how might the soundscape of Tokyo imprint itself on the musical style known as onky6?272 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2008 Modernity and Aural Culture In recent years, various academic disciplines, including history, anthro- pology, and ethnomusicology, have witnessed a resurgence of interest in questions of auditory perception and listening as a critical and often over- jooked dimension of modernity, which is often characterized by a regime of visuality,or ocularcentrism (Bull and Back 2003; Erimann 2004;Sterne 2003). Modernity can also be defined as a change in bodily experience, due to radi- cal disruptions in the sensory experience of the everyday (Benjamin 1968; Gunning 1995;Schivelbusch 1977).New technological developments in the nineteenth-century, such as the railway and cinema, generated ever-increasing assaults on the body, both psychological and physiological. Central to thi change in sensory experience was the shock of new sounds, particularly those generated by urban machinery. Following the processes of urbanization and industrialization, the modern soundscape of everyday life was radically reconfigured. Other recent works raise similar arguments, including the role of architecture in creating urban soundscapes in early twentieth century America (Thompson 2002), and a cultural history of listening which focuses on the shifting role of classical music listeners in nineteenth-century Paris (Johnson 1994) This article builds upon this recent scholarship on listening, yet extends the analysis to focus specifically on the auditory experiments of the con- temporary avant-garde in Tokyo. This is crucial, for it was the avant-garde, the Italian Futurists in particular, who seized these new sounds, noises, and sensations of the early twentieth century modern soundscape—especially those generated by industrial machinery and the sounds of warfare—and adopted them as explicitly modern musical aesthetics. In his infamous 1913 manifesto,“The Art of Noises,” Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo (1986) implored readers to“cross a large modern capital with our ears more attentive than our eyes.”? This manifesto, in fact, is generally scen as the first explicit attempt to engage with the concept of noise as music. Consequently, Russolo is often positioned as the forefather of not only contemporary Noise music, but also avcritical historical figure within the genealogy of postwar avant-garde music such as musique concrete. In order to make these linkages between the early twentieth-century Euro-American avant-garde with the contemporary avant-garde in Tokyo, the notion of coeval modernity is crucial. Historian Harry Harootunian argues that the Japanese experience of modernity must be understood as coeval, or co-existing with global modernity. Rejecting the categorization of moder- nity in Japan as an “alternative modernity,” Harootunian notes that coeval modernity highlights “the experience of sharing the same temporality, how: ever he follows this with the critical statement that,“ what co-eval suggests isPlourde: Disciplined Listening in Tokyo 273 contemporaneity yet the possibility of difference” (Haroortnian 2000:xvii) This approach is crucial in order to avoid cultural essentializing moves such as the interpretation “that things that are not obviously modern or Western are rooted in Japan’s cultural or historical deep structure” (moue 2006:5) For example, foreign media coverage of Off Site has a tendency to elide the material conditions of Tokyo housing, architecture, and the everyday urban soundscape at the expense of linking onkyd with “a Japanese tradition of stillness stretching back to the medieval Noh theatre” (Bell 2003:44), a link- age many of my informants vehemently denied. While acknowledging that onky6 performed in Japan was embedded within a larger, global network of musicians in the United States and Europe in the late 1990s with shared aesthetics, this article however, examines the development of onkyé within Tokyo and focuses on the local inflections of the genre’s performance and reception, Despite the frequent musical collaborations with international musicians, the local discourses surrounding the Off Site community, and the avant-garde music community overall, were, not surprisingly, largely in Jap: nese. Here, such discourse refers to regularly occurring music-themed public talk events, as well as concert handouts, free papers, journals, magazines, and musicians’ and critics’ blogs, all of which continues to be regularly produced, circulated and avidly consumed by Tokyo's listening public. Onkyo as Term, Genre and Performance Style Onkyo has been explained by musicians and music critics in Japan as a style in which the primary emphasis has shifted from producing or performing sound, to that of concentrated and attentive listening (meine wo sumasu) (S: saki 2001:221). The term onkyd is linked to the field of acoustics (onkpOgaka) thus highlighting the centrality of tonal color (timbre) and reverberation and its physiological effects on the listener as a crucial component of the genre. The word onkyo is composed of two characters; the first, on (cead as ofo in Japanese), meaning sound, and the second, ky6 (read as hibiki in Japanese), indicating reverberation or echo. It should be nated that onkyd is not used as an everyday term for sound in Japan; instead the term oto is most commonly used. The word onkyé is probably most known for its linkages with the high- end Japanese audio equipment manufacturer by the same name Because the question of listening and the consciousness and percep- tion of the individual listener are so central to the genre itself, the acoustic dimensions of the character compound are worth lingering over. As a genre that emphasizes the listener's conscious recognition of the reverberation of sound (fo no bibiki), onky6 has thus been described by its musicians as a genre specifically for the listener. The listener's auditory perception was nevertheless challenged by onkyo’s subtle and often faint presence, which274 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2008 was further complicated by non-intentional sounds occurring within the performance space or filtering in from outside. A reviewer of a 2004 onky6 recording writes:“It is absolutely impossible to judge whether the individual listener's perception of the seemingly imperceptible shifts [bisai na benkal is based on the listener's own consciousness or an actual physical occur- rence” (Unami 2005:217).Onkyo's emphasis on the listener has subsequently prompted numerous local debates within Tokyo's experimental music scene concerning proper modes of listening, physical conditions of performance space, and the nature of sound/music itself. Taking into consideration what John Cage referred to as non-intentional sounds (mon-musical sounds—such as traffic or a door opening—that accidentally occur within the live performance space), onky6 directly confronts the larger question of what constitutes music itself? The acceptance of such non-intentional sounds by the performers and listeners is seen as one of the hallmarks of onkyo’s live performance environ- ment, yet such openness on the part of the performers contrasts with the tense atmosphere within which onky6 is performed and heard. As an impro- visatory genre putatively for the listener and their individual interpretation, onkyé nevertheless unwittingly enforces certain modes of both fistening and spectatorship in its live performance context. ‘The history of the genre of onky6 has several versions. It is often said that the term was first used by an employee of the Tok ‘o-based record store, ParisPeking Records, in the mid-1990s (Otomo 2001:62). Onky6 was later adopted as a descriptive term in the late 1990s by one of its main propo- nents and performers, Otomo Yoshihide, to refer to a specifically Tokyo-based improvisatory musical style, which foregrounded the role of the listener and their perception and interpretation of the sounds generated by this music. This particular coterie of ‘Tokyo-based musicians came to be cited as onkyd-ba, the suffix of which designates them as a specific musical school, bound together by stylistic affinity, When Off Site opened in 2000, a small group of Tokyo-based musicians converged around the performance space and began to hold weekly or monthly improvisatory music series, often led by Otomo Yoshihide. These musicians eventually came to be inextricably connected with Off Site, to the extent that their style, in addition to the label onkyo-ha, became interchangeably known as Off Site-kei, thereby linking the style known as onky6 with the geographical location of the space The suffix -kei denotes a stylistic, and in this case, geographic and spatial affinity, and is often used in the popular music world. For example, the mid-1990s popular electronic music genre exemplified by such bands as Cornelius and Pizzicato § emerged in the Shibuya district of Tokyo and came to be referred in the media as Shibuya-kei Most musicians who were included in the category of onkyo by the media were quick to reject any connection whatsoever to this genre and itsPlourde: Disciplined Listening in Tokyo — 275 presumed sense of community. Otomo himself later came to regret his coin: ing of the moniker, as the term was eventually picked up by the media and circulated regularly throughout the experimental music world in Japan as well as the U.S.and Europe. That musicians would actively reject such categori: tion of their music into a fixed genre and/or community is not particular to the avant-garde. Ingrid Monson’s ethnomusicological study of jazz musicians in New York City revealed that many of them prefer the term ‘music, or “the music called jazz rejoinder to the implicit association of the term music with Western classical music, an association which relegates jazz to a lower status (Monson 1996:101). In the case of Tokyo's experimental music com- munity, however, the musicians’ rejection of the term onkyé-ha confronts a different set of issues. The artistic output by avant-garde musicians labeled as onky6-ha necessarily defies categorization and immediate comprehension; therefore, such facile pigeonholing goes against the knowledge, discipline, and concentration that this music demands of its listeners. In addition, many, musicians and Tokyo-based music critics critique the use of the word onkyd as an ultimately meaningless term. For example, music critic Sasaki Atsushi notes the fundamental strangeness (kinzy) of the term onky6-ha, arguing that the suffix -ba denotes a coherent, bounded comnuunity of members sharing common aesthetics, yet, in reality, most so-called onkyO-ha musicians persistently denied membership in such a community (Sasaki 2001:165).He further detects a tautology within the term itself, arguing that music (Le. sound) always already indicates the reverberation (bibiki) of sound, there- fore to term a music genre in this way is repetitive and tautological. Many of these so-called onky6-ha musicians preferred instead the putatively neutral term, sokkpy6 ongaku (improvised music), though over the last few years in ‘Tokyo, the term improvised has itself come under scrutiny. The notion of improvised music has been explicitly rejected by some musicians, who view the aforementioned onkyd community as a sect t Musical performances at Off Site often occurred as part of weekly or monthly regular series, such as the “Meeting at Off Site” series, the live re- cordings of which were later released by the Improvised Music from Japan label. This label began in 2001 as a counterpart to the website by the same name created in 1996 by Suzuki Yoshiyuki. This website provides up-to-date information, including tour schedules, profiles and discographies of Japanese musicians, onkyo and otherwise. In fact, the website and its accompanying. yearly magazine was a critical source of media for listeners to gather infor- mation such as interviews with onky6 musicians. Performances at OAT Site often ranged from varying permutations of a small group of Japanese musi- ipplemented by touring musicians from Europe or the at many choose to avoid. cians occasionally United Stat lasting twenty-five to forty minutes s. Most live performances were com posed of nwo sets, generally: ach, interspersed by an intermission276 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2008 between the sets that usually lasted fifteen minutes. Instruments used at Off Site ranged from acoustic, such as guitar, trombone or saxophone, to electronic, including the sampler and turntable. What is notable here is the particular instrumental techniques that were employed, which often involved using modified, or extended techniques, such as circular breathing or using foreign objects as additional implements. Guitars were often performed as prepared guitar,in which the instrument was laid flat on a small table in order to coax a wide breadth of sounds from the instrument. When performing on prepared turntable, objects such as clips or bent-up cards, were often attached to the needle as well as placed directly on the empty turntable as it spun. Such techniques often produced intermittent static, hums and glitches that occurred with cach revolution of the turntable. Cyclically recurring rhythms, however, would rarely develop or unfold during performances at Off Site. One of Off Site’s regular performers, Sachiko M, performed using a sampler. However, instead of drawing on and manipulating stored samples, the sam- pler was empty; her palette instead drew from the test tone sine waves that are built into the machine. Although most sets at Off Site were improvised, compositions, often using graphic scores, were also performed at Off Site. | In the case of improvised group sessions, many musicians did not react or respond to one another during the performance. Duration was often the only factor agreed upon prior to the performance. Instead of relying on eye contact in order to end a set, many musicians at Off Site, especially during composition sessions, employed stopwatches set to a pre-determined and synchronized period of time. Noise, Onky6, and Stoicism Japan is most frequently invoked as the primary inspiration and source of the contemporary genre of Noise music (oizu myujikke), a genre in which sound is produced through the extreme distortion, manipulation,and often deliberate misuse of technology, including guitar pedals, microphones and, more recently, laptop computers. The first-generation of Noise practi- tioners in Japan, such as Merzbow and Hijokaidan, began creating noise in the late 1970s. Noise became consolidated as a genre during the 1980s, a period when avant-garde music and art in general flourished amidst Japan's thriving bubble economy, During the 1990s, Japanese experimental music more generally, including Noise music, was circulated and consumed on a transnational level throughout the US and Europe (Novak 2006). Although Noise music, in which inflicting aural pain on the listener is a crucial component, appears to be completely antithetical to the extremely quiet sounds generated by onky6, some Tokyo-based critics and musicians have argued that the sheer masochism and excessive nature of Noise musicPlourde: Dist iplined Listening in Tokyo 27 draws on a similar extreme aesthetic of stoicism. in contemporary Japan, the term “stoic” (sufoikki) is frequently used as an everyday term to indi- cate a sense of asceticism and its usage is heard within the experimental music world as well, often in reference to Noise musicians. For example, Akita Masami, whose project is known as Merzbow, and Haino Keiji,are two longstanding musicians who are frequently described as stoic within Tokyo's experimental music scene.’ it is believed that both genres, Noise music and onky6, reflect opposite polarities of this aesthetic extremism. In Noise music the listener is assaulted by excessive volume, while in onky6, which draws on often barely audible sounds and the silences between them, the listener is assaulted by the virtual absence of sound Although listening to onkyo is not physically painful as in the case of listening to Noise music, the sheer brutality and subtlety within which such extremely minute sonic development occurs necessarily places particular and strict demands on the listener—such as straining one’s ears. The discipliniza- tion of the listeners’ bodies and ears is further revealed by the strategies many listeners utilize in order to adapt to onky6’s rigid listening environment. In addition, the space of Off Site itself, as 1 will show, creates an atmosphere that some listeners and musicians have experienced as full of tension. The specific conditions of onky0’s listening environment are a critical factor to the process which I refer to as “disciplined listening,” a mode determined in part by the architectural space—including Tokyo's soundscape—in which onky is performed and heard, as well as the social dynamics of the performance space. Here, the listener is expected to attend performances already possess- ing the knowledge and manner of onky6 and the proper mode of listening to this music. Possession of such knowledge and implicit rules of listening, necessarily creates certain exclusionary boundaries within the listening public, adding further to the demands that regulate this particular social experience of listening. Listening at Off Site: Ethnographic Reflections Immediately upon entering Off Site, audience members encounter the owner, Ito Atsuhiro, seated at the back of the stark, ground-level performance space, selling tickets. As is customary in Tokyo, one drink, often beer, wine, soda, or oolong tea, must be purchased, along with the ticket. Drinks are served on the second floor by Ito Yukari, Ito's wife and Off Site's co-owner, Tickets are typically 1,000- 1,500 yen, considerably cheaper than tickets for live-house performances in Tokyo, which can run upwards of 5,000 yen. 5 Inside the performance space, the audience sits on narrow aluminum-backed folding chairs that force one to perch uncomfortably close to one’s neigh bors, evoking a form of bodily tension akin to a subway commute during278 — Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2008 rush-hour in Tokyo. This tension (kinchdkam) refers to the disciplinization of the body—for both music spectator and rush-hour subway commuter—and its attendant social mores, including maintaining a sense of decorum (e., silence) as well as certain bodily cues or gestures, such as limiting eye contact with others and avoiding unnecessary collisions with other bodies despite confined, narrow physical spaces. This tension is inherent to onky6's tense performance environment at Off Site, in which listeners must strain their ears (mimi wo sumasi) in order to grasp traces of onkyo’s barely audible presence Those already familiar with Off Site’s specific ambience and exceedingly cramped conditions often arrive early and claim seats in the first row. At most avant-garde performance spaces in Tokyo both performers and listeners are seated throughout the performance, thus imposing a sense of order on the spatial dimensions of the live space. In addition, this arrangement perhaps imparts the listeners’ demeanor with an air of detachment or aloofness.‘ Seats at Off Site are arranged in neat rows of four to five seats per row, and are separated by a narrow, barely passable, aisle. Maximum capacity is between thirty and thirty five, though it is not uncommon for a performance to draw fewer than ten listeners. Because there is no stage and the seated musicians perform on the same level as the audience, sitting in the back often means limited visibility. Listeners wait in somewhat ceric silence, mostly limiting conversations to soft, hushed tones. Most sit rigidly in their chairs, often times with their hands folded in their laps, quietly waiting for the performance to begin, After lounging on the second floor the musician(s) enter the perfor: mance space, often ten minutes or so after the official start time, which is usually 8:00 p.m. A hush falls over the room and an almost palpable tension, which has been slowly accumulating over the waiting period, now becomes visibly apparent. As is customary at experimental music performances in To- kyo, several audience members have set up personal recording equipment, such as MD or DAT recorders, which are placed discreetly on the floor. Aware that the musician(s) will invariably generate a negligible amount of noise by shifting around equipment or setting up just prior to the performance, many listeners take advantage of this welcome rustling, however minute, to pointedly clear their throats or take a final gulp of their drink before gently placing it on the floor underneath the seat in front of them. They do this because once the performance begins, the listeners must follow unwritten codes of etiquette, including maintaining silence and concentrating closely on the music while avoiding any outward reactions. The tension is particularly heightened at Off Site because, unlike most music or theatre performances, the boundaries that mark the beginning of performance at Off Site are not as readily apparent—the listeners cannot simply sit back and relax. There is a thick atmosphere of uncertainty and perhaps unrest, as the audience'sPlourde: Di hy a iplined Listening in Tokyo ‘9 silence is intensified by its confrontation with a performance that is marked by minutiae, sparsity, and long spatial gaps. . Musicians at Off Site typically begin their performance without address- ing or even acknowledging the audience’s immediate physical presence, instead giving a simple nod of the head to the owner, should they request the lights be dimmed. The spectator is immediately struck by the seemingly inactive musicians, both physically and sonically, to the extent that the lis- tener wonders whether in fact, the performance has actually started or not. This ambiguity, which serves as one of the many layers of tension present in the live performance space, is further accentuated by the fact that there are often very few movements or visual cues of any sort by the musicians. In contrast to the notion of five musical performance as visual spectacle—Pete Townshend's guitar windmills would be the antithesis of onkyO—there is sometimes so little movement at Off Site performances that listeners often look anywhere but at the musicians.” Many listeners even close their eyes during the performance making it unclear as to whether they are listening intently or simply asleep. Off Site as Experimental Performance Space and Gallery According to its founder, Ito Atsuhiro, Off Site was to be an alternative 7 to Tokyo's rental gallery system, which has been the predominant system of art exhibition and music performance in Japan. In Tokyo's music world, most live music, whether rock, pop, punk, etc., operates according to.a quota-based (noruma) rental space system, in which the performers must quite literally, “pay to play.” Musicians must rent the performance space, called live house and operate on the premise of a guarantee. If the audience does not reach a predetermined amount, then the musicians must pay the live space owners for any potentially lost seats. Off Site’s oppositional stance towards Japan's primary economic system undergirding live music and art exhibitions is reflected in the naming of the space, which is,as Ito Yukari explains, a cross between offside (pansoku) and site (ich), and conveys Off Site’s distinct and deliberate intermingling of art exhibitions and live music performances ito 2002:88). Conceiving of Off Site as an experimental space (jikken kaif) through which performers could reassess and reconfigure the performance and lis: tening environment, Ito primarily selected musicians from his own group of acquaintances. The result of this was that Off Site had the feel of a tightknit community, yet could also give the air of an exclusive group of insiders that was difficult for outsiders to enter casually. Located near the east exit of To- kyo’s Yoyogi subway station and within striking visual distance of the impos- ing NTT Docomo tower, Off Site was situated in a small residential alley filled280 Ethnomus logy, Spring/Summer 2008 with detached wooden houses. Some of the more common types of housing structures in Tokyo are apdto (apartment), referring to older style wooden apartments that provide very little sound or heat insulation, and manshon (mansion), which simply denotes an apartment building reinforced by a steel or concrete structure and retains none of the lavish connotations of the English term. Off self occupied a small two-floor wooden house, with similar noise restrictions to that of apartment buildings (apato), in which sound easily penetrates the adjoining houses and apartments. One of the most striking characteristics of Off Site thus lies in its particular spatial and architectural conditions. Although it was located in a detached house, Off Site nevertheless placed certain demands on the musicians and listeners, in order not to disturb the neighbors who lived in very close proximity, All of the live performances had to be at an extraordinarily low volume, so low in fact, that outside sounds such as traffic, pedestrians’ footsteps or traces of conversations, would inevitably filter in and often overpower or commingle with the sounds of the performance itself. The music performance and art exhibition space occupied Off Site’s extremely spartan first floor with its bare concrete floors, blank white walls and neat rows of small stools. In conceptualizing Off Site’s spatial layout, Ito chose to retain the original design of the building’s previous owners who used the first floor as an office and the second floor as a living space. Ito wanted the first floor gallery and performance space to be as neutral and modest as possible, while retaining the lived-in quality of the previous owners’ oc- cupancy on the second floor. A narrow staircase led up to the second floor which featured a small bar, CD and book shop, couch, and several chairs and small tables. Following performances, many audience members would head upstairs to gather and mingle with the musicians or browse the book and CD collections, often featuring recordings by regular performers at Off Site. This casual bar or café atmosphere of the second floor was seen by some musicians as a salon or haunt (tamariba), wherein the informalness of the space itself gave impetus to aesthetic exchanges between a close-knit group of musicians and friends. Ito ultimately envisioned the second floor space as a refuge for both the mus s and listeners to linger following performances, in contrast to most gallery spaces in which the spectators leave immediately after viewing the artworks on display. Ito is quick to point out the contingent factors between Off Site’s devel- opment and onky0’s emergence as a definable genre. He notes that it wasn'ta situation where certain musicians gathered together and consciously decided to create a form of music using only small, minimal sounds. Ito, in fact, largely credits Off Site's neighbor's constant noise complaints for indirectly creating this new form of music. Music performed at Off Site was often half-jokingly called by some as oyajf (old man music), referring to—in a slightly deroga- iciarPlourde: Disciplined Listening in Tokyo. 281 tory manner—the person living adjacently who made these complain addition to voicing opinions about the physical presence of audience mem- bers loitering and smoking outside the performance space. As previously mentioned, Off Site’s extreme sound restrictions required that musicians comply with such performance rules. According to those involved, however, these restrictions were not felt as limiting at all,and in fact offered the musi cians a surprising sense of freedom not possible in a typical performance space. As Off Site’s owner, ito Atsuhiro, explained:“Musical instruments can always produce a large amount of volume but they can also produce’small sounds. So, what happened at Off Site was experimenting with what kinds of possibilities could be found within these small sounds” (p 17 November 2004, Tokyo).* ItoAtsuhiro, Listening to Tokyo’s Soundscape: Outside Sounds Much of the criti m of onky6 circulated within Tokyo describes the pro- cess of listening to onkyo as mimi wo sumasu (straining one’s ears). Indeed, this compulsion to strain one’s ears is crucial to Off Site’s overall aesthetic and is a phrase commonly affixed to descriptions of Off Site within Japanese media. This phrase in Japanese can also be used to indicate that one is listen- ing attentively, a connotation that suggests the aural discipline required on the part of the listeners. Yet despite this physical and aural stillness within the confines of onky6’s live performance, the listener is inevitably confronted by the intrusion of the aforementioned sounds of everyday urban life as well as sounds from the audience seeping into the performance space. Despite its status as a performance space with extreme sound restrictions, outside sounds and their co-existence with the musical performances came to be seen as one of Off Site’s distinctive and inimitable listening conditions. Accord- ing to Off Site’s owner, these sounds were integral to the live environment serving as accidental events that are inevitable and impossible to control or regulate. Referring to them as bapunings (happenings), lto described their relationship to the music performances at Off Site: “Sounds that penetrate the performance space, such as people passing by, ambulance sircns, fire trucks, etc., these sorts of happenings [hapuningu] are inevitable; such as a drunk person walking by,or someone walking by loudly;actually, the I yudest (and most common) sound is people kicking cans. But it’s fine,1 think, these kinds of sounds are good" (p.c., Ito Atsuhiro, 25 May 2005,Tokyo). The term bapuningu is an everyday term in Japanese which indicates an accidental or unexpected event. ‘The notion of non-intentional or outside sound happenings was @ topic that regularly emerged within Tokyo's experimental music community, vist s music such domains as print media, everyday conversations, as well282 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2008 blogs. Some musicians and listeners | interviewed, many of whom are directly involved in the onkyO music community, expressed openness to the penetra- tion of outside sounds into the performance environment, but with certain limitations. For them the notion of outside sounds was a more restricted— though ultimately subjective—category that did not extend to include sounds originating from the bodies of audience members, such as those who drew attention to themselves by breathing heavily or accidentally dropping a beer bottle. Both listeners and musicians at Off Site drew distinctions between acceptable and unacceptable sounds. One listener, who regularly attended performances at Off Site, admitted he had a particular taste for music that was influenced by environmental and/or ambient sounds but clearly added that the very category of outside sounds had limits. He went on to compare Off Site, describing it as a space where “pleasant city noises entered the performance space,’ to Art Land, another avant-garde performance space in Tokyo that featured non-intentional sounds of a radically different nature. Situated below a Japanese style bar, the sounds of ofd men singing karaoke constantly filter in and ruin the experience. The issue according to this lis- tener is not that the sounds themselves are inherently uninteresting sounds, but the fact that they completely wash over and obscure the sounds of the performance. Ito Atsuhiro, on the other hand, was more amenable to outside sounds that emanated from the listeners, referring to these often unpredictable and uncontrollable reactions during onkyo’s live performances as human hap- penings (ningen no bapuningu). These human happenings, according to Ito, are crucial to the live context,and by extension, to improvisation itself. For him, the ephemerality of the live improvisatory context was central to Off Site’s atmosphere, as such occurrences could never be repeated or occur again. He also recalled how during the early days of Off Site, when audience members were perhaps less disciplined, listeners would often fall asleep dur- ing a performance, and at the sound of applause, jolt themselves awake and literally fall out of their seats,causing a minor commotion and even laughter. These random acts were all a part of the show. ‘This idea of happenings to designate intermittent sounds—outside, human, or other—has its origins in the Fluxus group. Fluxus happenings originated in the U.S. during the early 1960s and became an international movement, with participation by European and Japanese artists in particular, including Yoko Ono and the composer and student of John Cage, Ichiyanagi ‘Toshi.? By its very nature, Fluxus as a multimedia art movement necessarily defied simplistic definition; one of its essential characteristics, however, was an emphasis on reconfiguring the relationship between performe: and audience—a relationship similarly disrupted and reconfigured in the genre of enkyd. As Ho explained to me,onky6 allowed the performer and audiencePlourde: Disciplined Listening in Tokyo 283 to be situated on the same level:“Previously, in live music performance, it was unidirectional, moving from performer to audience; the performer was the presenter [bappy6 suru gawa). However, in the case of onky6,both performers and audience are equally receptive to the sound and both listen [mimi wo motst}” (p.c., Ito Atsuhiro, 17 November 2004,Tokyo). While this statement might serve to represent the ideal—that both per- former and listener theoretically co-exist on the same level in onkyO’s per- formances—the human happenings, or accidental events on the part of the listeners, often served to dismantle this perceived equality between musician and listener. In contrast to live houses where musicians and-audience members. are explicitly separated by a performance stage, the performers and listeners at Off Site are physically close to one another with no demarcation, seemingly experiencing a sense of shared space and time. Yet listeners are expected to sit and listen quietly throughout the performance while refraining from emit- ting outside sounds of their own. These sounds that stem from the listening public, were in fact more often than not met with disdain by musicians and reveal the limits of tolerance regarding such sounds. More acceptable forms of outside sounds, however, were viewed quite fuvorably by musicians and had a dramatic impact on both muusicians and listeners at Off Site, to the extent that many claimed that their hearing had dramatically changed over the course of its five year existence. Soon alter Off Site's closing in 2005, Otomo Yoshihide noted on his personal blog:If it was five years ago, I would never have heard the subtle sounds which I'm now constantly aware of” (Otomo 2005). A regular listener at Off Site similarly noted how his hearing has radically shifted since attending performances at Off Site, and he is now able to hear much more delicate sounds (sensai 10 oto). He explained:“Before, } didn’t appreciate sounds that had no connection to music, such as a clock ticking. At the very least, 1 didn’t understand the condition of these sounds. But perhaps now, I still hate violent sounds, such as people's voices, especially patronizing or nagging tones, as well as the announcer's voice inside the subway. Aside trom these sounds, I'm not bothered by any other sounds now” (p.c., 23 October 2005, Tokyo). This notion that onkyo itself is believed to have generated new modes of hearing and listening is further linked to the notion of place—in this case, Tokyo—and more specifically Off Site. Here, ‘okyo’s soundscape cannot be disengaged from music performances, and for many musicians these outside sounds have become an integral part of the performance. Furthermore, these conditions are often cited by participants in this community as Tokyo ieki fii (Tokyo-esque). With its attention to silence, stillness, and gaps, onkyO is often explained in foreign media coverage as a quintessentially Japanese aesthetic, particularly in its putative adherence to Zen. Most of my informants in Tokyo however, strongly rejected this notion, arguing instead that onkyo284 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2008 was determined in part by Tokyo's specific housing conditions in which residents typically live in cramped apartments largely uninsulated from their neighbors. This functionalist, rather than aesthetic, explanation is mirrored in Marilyn Ivy’s ethnography in which she discusses small-scale variety theater (taishit engeké) in Japan features extremely loud musical interhides. When questioned as to the reason for such high volume, the primarily middle-aged and elderly audience members explained that it is necessary simply because the audience is generally hard of hearing (vy 1995:225). In his analysis of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, Peter Burger emphasizes the point that its members did not distance and isolate themselves from society as is often claimed, but rather, vehemently and aggressively strove “to reintegrate themselves and their art into life” (Burger 1984-xxxvi). In the case of onky6, given that musicians, listeners, and critics unanimously cite the importance of these outside sounds at Off Site, there is perhaps an implicit call for the reintegration of art with daily life. The musicians’ acceptance of non-intentional sounds has a limit, however, which does not necessarily extend to the listening public. In fact, one musician admitted to me that the ideal performance situation at Off Site was achieved when the room was completely empty, ie., without listeners present—art for art’s sake, or the complete dissolution of art as life or life as art. This musician somewhat wist- fully noted that the best acoustics occurred during the sound check,a period of time when only the performer and owner were present in the space:“Off Site sounds the best when absolutely no one else is in the room. During the rehearsal time, when no audience members are there, is the best time. Once people start to arrive .. there's the (oud) sounds of people breathing, which lessens the sounds of the performance ...When no one is in the room, the echo and reverberation is great” (p.c., 15 July 2005, Tokyo). Disciplined Listening: Not Moving a Muscle (mijirogi shinai) While sitting on thin floor cushions, the audience enjoyed the performance amidst an atmosphere of tension, —Hosoma Hiromichi (2005:71) with the dt For Adorno, the musical avant-garde was synonymous igna- tion of “new music? forms that demanded new modes of listening to cope with the “shock of its strangeness and enigmatic form” (Adorno 2002:127). The process of listening to this new music is characterized by contempla- tion, which operates in contrast to the regressive and infantile listening habits of the mass audience. Here, the new is linked with the necessity for art, particularly music, to be complex and thought provoking, in contrast to the patterned, standardized, and pre-digested commodities produced andPlourde: Disciplined Listening in Tokyo 285 promoted by the culture industry. The more incomprehensible new music is to the public—Adorno cites the work of Schoenberg—the more social relevance it will attain, and thus become even more socially meaningfuland progressive (ibid.:131). This question of difficulty and incomprehensibility is central to the notion of the avant-garde and one that both permeates and perpetuates the exclusive nature of the Off Site community, while at the same time, attracting new listeners who are allured by the very nature of onkyo’s esotericism and obscurity. Many listeners I interviewed referred to the process of listening at Off Site in pedagogical and disciplinary terms using such phrases as concentra- tion, comprehension, endurance, tension, and awareness or consciousness. What is interesting here is the crucial impact of written discourse concerning onky6 on the listeners’ reception and listening techniques. Some listeners 1 spoke with sought out musician Otomo Yoshihide's personal blog in which he devoted a regular series to the topic of listening and onky6. Several audience members explained to me that they continued to come to Off Site because they were unable to comprehend the music. One listener noted that Off Site was interesting specifically because he couldn't fathom what was going on; because he couldn’t figure out how to listen to and enjoy (aroshimeru) the performances, he returned numerous times. Yet another regular audience member explained that he enjoyed the first shows he attended, but could not articulate or comprehend why he enjoyed it, so he decided to attend more shows. For other listeners, however, the incomprehensible nature of onky6 performances was not a thought provoking or stimulating experience for the spectator, One listener spoke of the first few concerts he attended:*When I first went to Off Site | was bored [akichatta]. There’s very litte change or development in the music, which would be okay, except the sound wasn’t good either [kimochi ga yoknnai]. But then I saw Otomo’s homepage where he wrote about onky6 and listening [obdsbu) in various essays, and | read those and thought, ‘Ah, so that’s what it’s all about’ [laughs]. And I realized that | could now understand it in this way" (p.c.,5 February 2006, Tokyo). He further explained how after reading Otomo’s blog he also became aware of the outside sounds, which he didn’t notice or hear when he first attended Off Site. Such discourse concerning onkyd was regularly produced and consumed in Tokyo, and served a vital pedagogical function towards facilitating listeners’ comprehension and listening practices at Off Site One of the most ostentatious and significant feature century European avant-garde was their often violent attempt at oppositionality and confrontation with the audience. Dadaist performances of sound poetry at the Cabaret Voltaire café during WW1 often erupted in a cacophonous battle between the performers and spectators, a reaction that was desired by the art- ists (Kahn 1999:52). This interaction with the spectator was driven by their use of the early twenticth-286 Hthnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2008 of shock and was utilized as a productive force with which to both alienate and defamiliarize the viewer from their middle-class sensibilities. In his history of listening in eighteenth century Paris, James Johnson equates the period when audiences became silent (i.c., the social roots of silence) with the rise of the bourgeoisie and related notions of etiquette and respectability. Here, maintain- ing silence during a public performance was also a display of one’s social mores and such forms of etiquette were regularly circulated in etiquette books:“The emergent code of silence during performances was more than an innocent and unreflective consequence of a certain work ethic. Audiences reasoned on some level that if politeness was necessary to succeed, its absence signaled inferiority. Policing manners thus became an act of self-reassurance” (iohnson 1994:232), Dada performances blatantly attacked these societal mores and hoped to shake up their very foundations in acts of sheer nihilism, with often no apparent goal other than to cause chaos and disruption. In the case of onky6, the enforced silence and demands of listening are so amplified as to become reflexive. The audience member becomes aware of his/her own body and the demands placed on it. Listeners are expected to concentrate and listen carefully to the performance as well as the outside sounds, yet they themselves must not outwardly react to the music to the point that they give up any self-control. The atmosphere and subtleties of the . performance become oppressive to the point that it produces a heightened awareness of space and the sensation of time. The shock of onkyé as a new and unfamiliar form is completely internalized. Here, reception of the avant- garde techniques of shock and defamiliarization take the form of detached yet highly disciplined listeners, in contrast to the Cabaret Voltaire. Some listeners described the process of listening to onky6 performances as a test of endurance. One listener in particular, in referring to a musician known for his lengthy periods of silence as part of his performance, explained:“In Sugimoto’s performances, there might be ten minutes of silence so you have to really be patient [gaman ster), but of course during those times, I would start to focus more on listening to the outside sounds. And because of that, my ear has really changed” (p.c., 21 March 2006,Tokyo), By using the frequently uttered Japanese phrase gaman suru (patience) to describe his experience as a listener, he indicates a sense of perseverance that the spectator of onky6 must tolerate. Here, the idea of “grin and bear it? is relevant, for gaman suru also indicates the importance of enduring displeasure or suffering without complaining. Initially this might appear to be an odd choice of wording to use for describing one’s experience as an audience member, for live music performances should be enjoyable and pleasurable for the listeners. In the case of Off Site, onkyo performances were not presented or experienced as casual “entertainment, as one might expect at a five house performance. Instead, the music demanded rigorous,Plourde: Disciplined Listening in Tokyo — 287 concentrated listening, in order for audience members to “enter the music,” as one Off Site musician explained to me (p.c., 12 November 2004, Tokyo). ‘One listener explained the impossibility of listening to onky6 recordings at home as casual background music: E When | listen to this kind of music, I wy not to do anything else, otherwise it’s completely meaningless, When | listen to classical music at home for example, Til hear a gorgeous melody or dignified sounding chords. Or if I listen. to, opera such as Wagner, ll focus on the flow of the story. If I listen to jazz, "iL think about the improvisation and exciting interplay between musicians while I'm listening. But when you listen to onkyd, absolutely all you have to listen to is the sound, so you know, | really can’t do anything else while I'm listening,’ (p.c., 20 March 2006, Tokyo) Along these lines, most musicians, critics and listeners agree that onkyo is a genre that must initially be directly and physically experienced (aiken suri), One recent review of an emblematic onky6 recording by a musician who performed regularly at Off Site notes that attempts at an extremely simple description will never become a true explanation of the artwork, because “such a challenging work can only exist as a concrete and material experience, to be directly and intimately experienced within its live context” (Unami 2005:217). Textual analysis of onkyo such as in recording reviews or i m is a nearly impossible task, in which any attempt to pin down and ascribe meaning to such an clusive and abstract form—described by one critic as a genre that “exceeds hearing” (kiku Roete) (p.c., Hatanaka Minoru, 25 March 2005, Tokyo)—is an ineffable process, and one which seemingly defeats the premise of the avant-garde. One listener grappled with the inher- ent difficulty in evaluating or judging onky6 performances:"How do you do that? I don’t even know myself, but I continued to listen. You really can't de- scribe it, you know? I'm genuinely moved by this music, but if | try to explain it to people, they'll laugh. If you try to explain the sound of *piiii’ [imitates the sound of a sine wave] or a hissing sound to someone, it’s like a joke! [laughs] For me, that’s the ultimate mystery of music” (p.c., 20 March 2006, Tokyo). Although onkyo musicians release studio and even live recordings, it is the (anti)sensuality of onkyo’s live performances that are of the foremost significance. This condition speaks to the centrality of the unpredictable live experience, including outside sounds filtcring into the performance space which, in turn, engage with the sounds of the music and serve to trouble the tenuous divide between music and non-musical sound. ‘As stated earlier, within the category of outside sounds are sounds gencr- ated by the listeners themselves, which thus ises the issue of the intention- ality regarding outside sounds. While street sounds are certainly random and carry no intent, the human element opens up a completely different set of contingencies. Onkyo’s live performance context provokes its listeners to288 — Btimomusicology, Spring/Summer 2008 both create and adopt individual bodily techniques.One listener explained to me how he made sure to not drink any alcohol prior to the performance, to avoid falling asleep during the concert. Such preparation reveals the extent to which audience members have consciously absorbed certain modes of etiquette. Another listener adopted different strategies to stay awake: Even if Fm enjoying the shaw, I tend to fall asleep. At live shows [always have gam with me,and [would start chewing gum right before the performance. But because the gum starts fo get hard about midway through the performance, would end up making sourd,so f think that I actually unintentionally became one of the performers {laughs}, The main reason for chewing gum was to not fal asicep. On a certain level, the purpose was aiso to help with concentrating on the performance [shitchi]. 1f Horget to bring gum with me toa show, real i made a big mistake—it’s like going to a Noise show without ear plugs. suary 2006, Tokyo) During this same interview he explained his particular listening techniques, influenced by reading Otamo's blog essa’ would try to keep my mind completely empty [karappo né suri] and cease any kind of thinking, so 1 wouldn't have any sort of awareness or Consciousness: that ‘Pm currently listening to sound? 1 tried not to think or react at all to the music” (p.c., 3 February 2006,Tokyo). Another listener explained the appeal of closing one’s eyes during the performance by likening it to 3 dreamlike and otherworldly state, and noted that it was easier to concentrate on the “incredibly delicate, small sounds” if one's eyes were closed (p.c., 15 August 2005, Tokyo). If the listeners’ sare open,as she explained to me,the performance is not as interesting, and it alsa becomes difficult to focus and concentrate on the subtle sounds of the perfor mance. Similar to the previous listener, she had also read Otomo’'s blog, which facilitated her listening experiences and techniques at Off Site. She referred to a particular entry in which he discussed listening techniques he learned” in a workshop, wherein the listener attempts to clear their consciousness Cisbikt) and actively sever connections between sounds and their referents, for example, hearing the sound of a car and consciously thinking “that’s the sound ofa ‘As she noted:“He [Otomo] explained that in this exercise the listener clears their consciousness as much as pos ible, then gradually sound begins to dissolve. I think by clo: ing my s, there's a similar effect. When I close my eyes I try to get rid of these types of associations, such as ‘this is the sound of a chair? etc., as much as possible” (p.c., 15 August 2005, Tokyo). For both of these listeners then, the discourse and knowledge surrounding onkyo, as gleaned from Otomo’s writings, often preceded the performance itself and provided them with listening techniques that are crucial in order to meaning: fully enter the music. This movement reveals what Georgina Born referred to as the “pedagogic and prescriptive mission” (Born 1995:42) of the avant-Plourde: Disciplined Listening in Tokyo 289 garde in which listeners are challenged to approach the music discursively, rather than simply attending live shows as sheer entertainment, in the case of a live house performance. By learning to hear in this way, listeners at Off Site retrained their ears in order to perceive such outside sounds fundamental to Off Site’s live experience. In his analysis of habitus, Pierre Bourdieu describes the unconscious techniques of the body, such as sitting up straight, as the “cunning of peda- gogic reason” (Bourdieu [1977] 1992:69).1 discussed the topic of Off Site’s listeners with a musician who performed regularly at Off Site for all five years of its operation. This musician attributed the disciplined nanire of Off Site’ audience—and Japanese audiences more generaily—to Japanese pedagogical and schooling techniques. She explained:“I think you can say their manners [ogyégi} are good. 1 mean, Japanese people are the best at properly sitting down and listening quietly. And they learned this at school from a young age” (pc., 25 July 2005, Tokyo). In that same interview, she interpreted Off Site’ disciplined listening environment as a microcosm of Tokyo, which she views as radically distinct from and ultimately irreconcilable with the social context of Europe and the U.S. Here, the social etiquette and bodily comportment necessary to navigate through everyday urban tife in Tokyo signifies the polite, disciplined, and most importantly, /earned aesthetic conduct demanded of onky6’s listeners as Japanese citizens. She noted:"Japan is & cramped country, so you've always got to be moving. We're naturally trained [kunren] to be aware of this. For example, if you're in a small, narrow space, you've got to make sure to not bump into the person next to you" (p.c., 25 July 2005, To- kyo). Her usage of the term eviren implies training or discipline on the part of the Japanese citizen, particularly pedagogical discipline and recalls Mat notion of body techniques, “the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies” (Mauss [1950] 1979:97). These techniques, such as walking, running, dancing, and jumping, among others, are learned via training and education. For this regular Off Site musician, the cramped performance space at Off Site is a metaphor for public urban space in Tokyo, such as the subway, where people must attempt to avoid unnecessary colli- sions with their neighbors. They are able to avoid such awkward collisions due to their training from a young age, as she explained to me, Moreover, because the space itself is so cramped and the audience sitting so close to the performers, there is a feeling of inescapability, experienced by some of the musicians as well. This same musician explained to me that the tension and anxiety some musicians felt performing at Off Site was partially due to the extremely close proximity of the audience. A regular listener at Off Site also experienced this sensation, explaining that part of the tension she originally felt at performances w: £ so Close to the musicians. However, after she became personally acquainted with many of because the lis290 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2008 Off Site’s regular performers, primarily by hanging out on the second floor café space in the period following shows, she began to feel less tension (p.c. 8 August 2005,Tokyo). The performance and reception of onky6 ultimately relies on the cre- ation and maintenance of a disciplined listening public in Tokyo. The kind of disciplined listening found at Off Site may be partially traced to listening. practices at Japan’s jazz kissa (jazz coffee shops), which served as social, if cramped, spaces during the 1960s and 1970s for jazz aficionados to gather and listen to jazz recordings and obtain information regarding the music, such as magazines and handouts. The experience of collectively and intently listening to jazz was central to the jazz kissa experience. Eschewing the typi- cal background status of music at cafés in Japan, the volume at jazz kissa was deliberately and provocatively loud, rendering any conversation between neighbors difficult, if not impossible. Patrons were generally expected to be quiet. In his history of jazz in Japan, B. Taylor Atkins briefly mentions the role of listeners in jazz kissa, who must often agree to the establishment's rules of maintaining silence (Atkins 2001:4). In the case of Off Site’s listening public, the boundaries of this social group are often made visible at performances, in which new listeners— unaccustomed to onkyé’s performance conditions—question and critique the structured environment within which onky6 is heard. Although many musicians at Off Site proclaim to be open to these outside sounds, they also expect and demand absolute silence and stillness on the part of the audience, which ultimately drives certain listeners further away from the performers and reinforces exclusionary boundaries. Such boundaries further consolidate the insularity of the Off-Site community, to the point where certain Tokyo- based music writers or listeners make a deliberate point of avoiding perfor- mances at Off Site so as not to participate in this community. During Tokyo's typically muggy summer months, for example, the air- conditioning is often turned off during music performances as the constant drone of the air-conditioner overpowers the sounds of the music performance and creates 2 distraction in the listening environment. I attended one such concert during the summer where the air-conditioning had been turned off, which quickly caused the windowless room, filled to capacity, to become stuffy. The air was soon thick and heavy with humidity. During intermission, one audience member in particular, revealed their outsider status by directly confronting the musician and questioning their choice to shut off the air conditioning. After the musician explained the necessity ofa silent listening environment free from the sonic distractions of machinery humming in the background, the audience member stormed off angrily and left before the second half resumed. Such visceral reactions by certain audience members gnify the exclusivity of Off Site’s community, by revealing. the gap betweenPlourde: Disciplined Lis ening in Tokyo: 291 expectations of proper listening and improper listening. Here, proper listen- ing at Off Site, and other similar avant-garde performance spaces in’ Tokyo, is contingent on the inculcation of certain modes of behavior—knowledge of which only regular attendees would be aware. Regular attendees, includ- ing members of the tight-knit community of mus critics and listeners, would never outwardly or publicly question the unspoken rules governing Off Site’s specific listening conditions ianis These unforeseen events, which inevitably occur at onky6 performances, ultimately contribute to the highly disciplined and tense listening environ- ment—one which is seldom acknowledged as such by the performers." [fat first glance audience members attend live music performances as.an escape from the rapid-fire repetitions of capitalist life, then onky6 performances, with their inevitable penetration of the quotidian soundscape, ironically act as a reminder of the banality of urban existence. This eventfulness jolts the listeners and performers out of the repetitive high art/classical mu: environment and into the urban accidental realm of the everyday. Beyond Off Site: Post-Onky6-ha? ‘The final performance at Off Site,on 30 April 2005, perhaps not surpris- ingly, was marked by certain accidental events, or happenings, the aftermath of which soon began to circulate through public talk-forums, as wellas musicians” and critics’ blogs in Japan. Word quickly spread throughout Tokyo regarding Off Site’s impending closure, and the final performance was guaranteed to be well attended, Although tickets for Off Site performances could usually only be purchased at the door, in this c: se, advance reservations by e4nail were re- quired. A second show on the same night was even added due to overwhelming demand to see the final show. By this point, five years after opening, most were well aware of Off Site’s extremely cramped performance space, as witnessed by a sizable group already lined up thirty minutes prior to the doors opening for better seating. It was during the second show of Off Site's final performance that something occurred which threw off not only the other listeners in the room, but the performers as well.Soon after the musicians began amid a typi: cally silent audience, those in the room heard the faint sounds of breathing, which was soon followed by light snoring. As one of the performers that night explained to me:“This was our absolutely final performance at Off Site, so we were concentrating incredibly intensely and this heavy breathing (wei?) was jJouder than the sounds of our own performance! Because it was our last per- formance there ever,I decided that I simply did not want to perform alongside such noise, so I asked the person sitting next to the man sleeping to wake him up” (p.c., Sachiko M, 25 july 2005, Tokyo) Ito noted how this was actually the first time he had ever heard this mu-292 Kithnomusicology, Spring/Summer 2008 sician speak during the performance and address the audience. In reference to this incident, one local musician, who attended shows at Off Site regu- larly, admitted the incongruity between the musicians’ purported embrace of such outside sounds and their control and regulation over sounds made by the audience as witnessed in this final performance:“The musicians at Off Site were receptive to these outside sounds that entered the performance space, but the sound of snoring itself was heard as noise, which I realize is contradictory. For the listeners and performers who hear the performance as music, snoring becomes a disturbance or distraction [jyama]” (p.c., 23 October 2005, Tokyo) If music is that which must be heard (kikakertu beki mono), then onkyo, as barely audible sound, is meant to privilege listeners’ ears and their percep- tion and judgment of what is constituted as music or non-music. This shift in emphasis from reception to the sense of hearing requires the listener to undergo disciplinary techniques that affect both mind and body,and as such, the listener becomes integral to the experience of live onky6 performance. The discursive construction of onky6, as consolidated on musicians’ blogs, public talk events and in print media, was crucial in order for audience mem- bers to learn how to listen in a particular way. Off Site's specific spatial and material conditions generated new modes of listening and performing, and placed incredible demands on the body that at times were stifling. Ar the same time however, the allure of this incomprehensible and seemingly inaudible music—despite its disciplined and strained listening environment—led many listeners to attend repeat performances at Off Site. The contradiction that was the attraction of Off Site is perhaps best described by Otomo Yoshihide, “The limits of Off Site were not really limits but total freedom" (p.c., Otomo Yoshihide, 8 June 2005, Tokyo). Within this confined space and concomitant genre was the potential for minute transgressions that jolted the listener in such a way that was perhaps not the Cabaret Voltaire, but something much quieter. Acknowledgements This article is excerpted from a chapter in my forthcoming dissertation. Research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Tokyo between 2004 and 2007, and was supported by eeoareh funding from the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship Program and the International Dissertation Field Research Fellowship Program of the Social Sci- cnet Research Council with funds provided by the Andrew W. Melon Foundation.1 am indebred Coal the musicians, listeners, and critics at OfFSite who generously allowed me to conduct such clensive interviews, especially Ito Msuhieo, Otomo Yoshihide, Sachiko M and Akiyama Tew! Finally. this essay benefitted greatly from the critical and productive comments pro ided by editors Timothy Cooley and Barbara Taylor, the two anonymous readers, as well as Marilyn Ivy, David J. Kim, Lauren Mecker, and Jennifer Milioto Matsue. I welcome correspondence regarding this article, | can be ecached at: lorraine plourde@gmail.comPlourde: Disciplined Listening in Tokyo 293. Notes 1. Japanese names are represented with the family name first followed'by the given name second, except for certain musicians or artists who use their given name first, such as Sachiko M and Tetuzi Akiyama 2.1 is beyand the scope of this article to discuss the genealogy of Futurism in Japan, however, it is worth pointing out the contemporaneity of Italian Fucurism’s reception in Japan. ‘The founding manifesto of Italian Futurism, writen by Filippo Marinetti, was translated into Japanese and published in May 1909 by novelist and critic Ogai Mori, just three months alter its original publication in Paris. 3. John Cage, along with David Tudor, first performed in Japan in October of 1962 at the Sogetsu Art Center (SAC), which served as one of the most important sites for avantgarde activi ties in the 1960s. Cage's performance caused a huge sensation within Tokyo's avantgarde music and act community,to the extent that the aftermath was dubbed “Cage shock” (eéji shokku) by local music critic Yoshida Hid Galliano 2002:255). This shock of Cage's encounier with Japan was ultimately seen as productive and one that indirectly transfigured (henyd) the state of avant-garde music in Japan by sparking debates over indeterminacy in music and the role of enviromental sounds within the live performance context. John Cage and his philosophies of silence and non-intentional sound remain a fornvidable presence in contemporary Japan,a fet evidenced by the various special issues on Cage in Tokyo-based magazines and journals, as well as continued reference (© Cage in pamphlets and handouts distributed at contemporary five performances. At the same time, however, Cage’s legacy remains divided within Tokyo's avant- garde experimental music community. For some, Cage signifies the West's misunderstanding of Japan. During an interview with Tokyo-based music and film critic Kishino Yuichi, he argued: “You have peopie like John Cage and Allen Ginsberg, they all loved Zen, righ®? When European or American people encounter Japanese avant-garde music, as something which is unknown to them and difficult to comprehend, they always explain i¢ as Zen, This is just (00 simple” (p.c. 1 February 2006, Tokyo). 4 Itis perhaps not coincidental that both Akita and Hain ace Akita has recently become a strong proponent of the animal rights movement, a philosophy that he has begun to fuse with his musical output, His forays into animal rights activism and its linkages with experimental music and noise is documented in his recent 2005 book, Watashi no sitishoku sefkaise [cruelty tree life). Many musicians and crities | spoke with in Tokyo agreed that in the case of Akita and Haino, their stoicism was partly attributed to their strict vegetarian lifestyles, int addition to their extreme (kyokitare) and uncompromising musical aesthetics. 5.At the time of attendance at Off Site, the exchange rite of one US dollar averaged ap: proximately 105 Japanese yen. 6. For a fascinating discussion of the impact of the introduction of chairs into the Javanese gamelan performance setting, see Pemberton 1987. 7.In her ethnographic analysis of recent South Indian (Karnatic) classical music perlor: mance conventions, Amanda Weidman discusses the importance.and almost parposetul suuging, of uneventfulness within the live context, She explains that “the more classical the music, (he less there is co watch on stage” (Weidman 2003:135) 8.All interviews were conducted in Japanese and have been tran author. 9. Prior to first attending shows at Off Site one listener explained his musical fortys during this time as a period in which he avidly sought out CD's of Fluxus ane! minimalist music among others. 10. Not all musicians reacted negatively to these outside sounds on the part of the Tistences. “After one performance at Off Site, Loverheard an audience member apologize to the ownee for her coughing fit during the performance, His response was quite amiable; he pointed our hat her coughs had perl anch vegetarians /vegans, ed inte lish by the ps become a part of the music294 — Ethnomustcology, Spring/Summer 2008 References Adorno, Theodor, W. 2002. Essays on Music. Edited by Richard Leppert. Berkeley: University of California Press, |, Masami, 2005. Watasht no saishoku sefkatsn (Crucity-free life). Tokyo: Obta Bo Atkins, Taylor E. 2001. Blue Nippon: Authenticating jazz in Japan, Durham: Duke Univers Press. 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