The recent news revealed that this year fishermen around the coast of Japan are catching large number of Bonitos. When this happens, the price of Bonito goes low. The other day, I found this nice Bonito-sashimi was in good price, and it looks tasty. So I bought it, but on that particular day, I could not have a clear image of what kind taste I wanted for my supper. The only thing came up to mind was, “How about if I make a pasta with Bonito?”. Then at night, I tried to make a cold pasta with Bonito. I tried a few things such as putting in some Japanese herb and make the sauce a bit Japanese.
As a result? It was awful!!
No clear image. Just mixed Bonito-sashimi and pasta to see what would happen. A perfect failure!! Total lack of image.
On some occasion I came across artists tried to create something new without a clear image or logic, just thinking, “It might be fun mixing this and that”.
Of course the world of art is totally free world, so there is no right answer and artist are entitled to do anything they desire. However I have not ever been attracted to this kind of art.
Someone who created something totally new, even something drastically new, must have some kind of logic or image or at least clear direction. Beethoven inserted a section o Turkish March in his Symphony. That is a middle section of his 9th Symphony. He must have spent a long time considering his logic. He even sent a letter to his friend about his intention of utilizing Turkish March. As genius as Beethoven was, he must have thought out his own image and logic. The harmonic structure the Impressionistic composers used was totally different from the period prior to their time. They had their own logic.
If you are not in music, those might sound like a music class and I have no intention of making this blog an music lesson.
So, let me choose the field, which I have totally no knowledge of. That is paintings. If you read my previous blog, you might remember my drawing, “a grasshopper”. I post it again just to prove how bad drawer I am. Not only I can’t draw, but I have almost zero knowledge of paintings or its logic behind it.
Having lived in Boston for long, I visited Boston Museum so many times, also during the tour, visited Gugenheim, Spain, British Museum, Metropolitan NY, MOMA. In most of my visit, I felt this big wonder of, “What in the world is this??” toward many of the paintings. Sometimes I even wonder what the artist wanted to express through certain paintings.
One strange thing is, though, that when I see paintings such as Van Gogh, Dali, even Vermeer, I can feel there is some logic or concept behind these paintings. Van Gogh must have known the real meaning of deformation in the art of painting and he must have had a clear reason to use his particular touch. He might not have had been able to explain those logic but maybe only feeling, but he must have had some logic somewhere within his perception. And the most significant is that even I, who wrote that famous grasshopper, can feel the emotion and its logic.
Artists don’t have to be able explain everything as we often do when teaching in the institution. Their words might be something that only they can understand. My eternal hero, a Jazz Pianist, Oscar Peterson once said in the interview that when pressing the sostenuto pedal on the piano (middle pedal) and play a fast passage, he can add a strong stream to the passage.
I am a pianist and tried this so many times but so far I have never understood what he really meant.
The kind of logic in artists are something like what Oscar Peterson described, which very often other people can’t really understand. We don’t actually have to, because it’s their inner feeling.
One thing is very clear, though.
Even a person so foreign to the paintings like me can feel the emotion within the art and enjoy them. The creation under the logic and clear perception, however personal and strange they are, the art created with a true perception and logic are the real thing, that can approach people’s mind a emotion.
So, getting back to the Bonito Pasta, “It was a crap!”. I will never cook without any concept or logic.
And this certainly applies to the music, too.