Current Research Interests

My current aesthetics research interest is in the conceptions of time and simultaneity in Zen and Kegon Buddhism and their philosophical descendants, especially Kyoto school philosophy and aesthetics. I have written a lot on Ueda Shizuteru, and continue to engage with in his theories of poetics and play and creativity. Nō theatre, especially the works and treatises of Konparu Zenchiku, is also of abiding interest. All of these interests feed in a virtuous circle into my artistic practice.

Books

Experimental Music and Japanese Aesthetics: Silence, Nature, and Hollow Listening

Monograph published by Bloomsbury Academic
 

Abstract:

A rich, interdisciplinary exploration of music through Japanese aesthetics that calls for a new way to think about nature and the role of silence.

The art, aesthetics, and philosophies of medieval Japan and its contemporary Kyoto School lie at the centre of this book. Daryl Jamieson applies East Asian aesthetics, rooted in nature and ways of being that are very different from those of late-capitalist subjects, to critique contemporary experimental music from both Japan and the western world.

Introducing the unique features of Japanese aesthetics, Jamieson connects it to the North American music tradition that includes John Cage and his deep interest in Zen and Fluxus artists such as Yoko Ono. His original interpretation of sound constructs a new way of being in the world, showing how we can cultivate a more ethical way of hearing which is grounded in our environment.

This is a treatise for an aesthetics grounded in Buddhism and a music based on the ethics of respect for the environment. For anyone interested in cross-cultural interpretations of art and reality, it tells us why listening to difficult, challenging and obscure music matters in our present era of crises.

Keywords: Japanese philosophy, Japanese aesthetics, Buddhist aesthetics, aesthetics of music, aesthetics of nature, experimental music, nō, Konparu Zenchiku, Zeami, Ueda Shizuteru, Kyoto School, Jo Kondo

homo audiens

by Jo Kondo, translated by Daryl Jamieson
 

Abstract:

Jo Kondo – one of Japan’s most celebrated living composers – sets out his conception of music as a ‘shared object of listening’, an ultimately hopeful vision of music as a purposeless – non-instrumentalised – activity that brings together composers, performers, and audiences as equal partners in the shared creativity of listening. At once an exploration and critique of the aesthetics of absolute music from German Romanticism to the present day as well as an argument for diversity in both interpretation for its own sake and as a reflection of our polystylistic society, this is also one composer’s reflections on music that has affected him, from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 to John Cage’s 4’33”. In essence, homo audiens is a book about the primacy and importance of listening in all musical activity.

In addition to the main text (a translation of Kiku hito, published in 2013), the two appendices present essays from earlier in Kondo’s career, providing background to the main text and addressing Kondo’s own compositional practice. The translator’s preface (which can be previewed here) sets out a brief biographical sketch of Kondo which situates his work in relation to his life, influences, and collaborators.

Published Papers or Presentations

Zenchiku’s Mekari: Staging Ambiguous and Hollow Worlds

in Humanities (open access)
 

Abstract:

Konparu Zenchiku (1405–c. 1470) was the son-in-law of Zeami Motokiyo. Zeami is the most famous nō actor–writer–composer–showman–impressario, but Zenchiku brought nō back from the shōgun’s court to the temples, effectively resacralising the art form for a troubled, violent age. This paper asks whether Zenchiku’s approach to theatre has anything to teach us as contemporary creators and audiences in our own unstable era and, simultaneously, whether contemporary modes of interpretation, such as queer musicology, can highlight new aspects of Zenchiku’s work. Focusing on the under-studied and under-performed play Mekari—which dramatises a ritual cutting of seaweed at the Kanmon Strait between the islands of Kyūshū and Honshū as the new lunar year dawns—this paper explores how Zenchiku’s work plays with—crosses back and forth over—multiple physical, temporal, and spiritual boundaries in both its text and performance, leaving the audience with a sense of ambiguity and questioning the received wisdom of conventional capitalist reality. This paper concludes with a look at Kyōto School philosopher Ueda Shizuteru’s concept of the hollow expanse, or a place of limitless possibility. This paper argues that the audience viewing these ambiguities cultivated by Zenchiku’s sacred dramas—via the music, words, and staging together—might themselves be given a glimpse into the radically open place of the ‘hollow expanse’. The first full English translation of Mekari is included in Appendix A.

Keywords: Konparu Zenchiku; nō; Mekari; seaweed; Japanese aesthetics; Kyōto School; queer musicology; queer theory

An Artist’s Response to the Climate Crisis Through Japanese Mappō Thought

in Yin-Cheng Journal of Contemporary Buddhism (open access)
 

Abstract:

Over a three-year period from 2014–2017, as part of my artistic research into how aspects of mediaeval Japanese philosophy and aesthetics could be usefully revived in response to the climate crisis, I wrote and produced three music-theatre works collectively titled the Vanitas series. The first work addressed Japanese conceptions of landscape through the Buddhist and kami-venerating aesthetics of Konparu Zenchiku’s nō. The second work took as its focus the fugal nature of overlapping cyclical patterns of rising and falling, with mappō as the central conceptual frame. The third work was structured around Kamo-no-Chōmei’s Hōjōki, a lament for the degenerate mappō age through which he was living.

In this paper, I delve into the aspects of Japanese mappō thought that inspired the Vanitas series, showing how mappō thought can inform works (comprised of narrative texts, collage texts, or no text at all) that are about contemporary environmental degradation. The series title, Vanitas, refers to a sixteenth–seventeenth-century style of painting in the Netherlands (as well as to Salvatore Sciarrino’s 1983 opera of the same name). I also discuss the underlying theme of comparing Christian and Japanese Buddhist eschatological artistic traditions. Through my explication of the Vanitas series and its mediaeval Japanese inspiration, I show the contemporary practical uses of mediaeval Japanese Buddhist aesthetics for writers, interpreters, and audiences of music and theatre wishing to find alternative ways of addressing the climate crisis today.

Keywords: mappō, vanitas, music theatre, eschatological art, semiotics of music

Does a Sound have Buddha-Nature? Kegon Thought and the Aesthetics of Sound

in The Journal of East Asian Philosophy
 

Abstract:

In his 2013 book Kiku hito (English translation Homo audiens, 2022), composer and musicologist Jo Kondo outlines his interpretation of music as the interrelationship between notes, each of which ‘has its own entity and life’ and yet is only meaningful in relationship with other notes, an assertion which echoes 15th-century nō composers Zeami’s and Zenchiku’s writings on the life and death of each note in a nō performance. Though in his own writing Kondo restricts himself to the tradition of western aesthetics, in a 2023 interview he acknowledges that his system of musical interpretation is rooted in the Kegon Buddhist concept of Indra’s Net (which illustrates the idea of ultimate reality as the ‘unimpeded interpenetration of phenomena and phenomena’ jiji muge hokkai). In this experimental paper, I will explore the aesthetic implications of this idea: is a listener’s interpretation of the relationships between sounds in a musical work (‘work’ defined as broadly as possible, inclusive of all forms of deep, active listening, from contemporary sound art to nō to Dōgen hearing a sūtra in the voices of monkeys) merely a metaphor for the ‘unimpeded interpenetration of phenomena and phenomena’, or is it an example of it? What are the implications for the interpretation of all types of music and sound art if sounds – like other nonsentient (hijō) phenomena such as water and mountains – have Buddha-nature (busshō)? And does this interpretative frame have ethical implications for interpreters – listeners, composers, and performers – of music and sound-art in this age of imminent environmental collapse?

Keywords: Kegon Buddhism · Aesthetics of music · Japanese aesthetics · Aesthetics of nonhuman sound · Aesthetics of nō

Spirit of Place: Zeami’s Tōru and the Poetic Manifestation of Mugen

in Japanese Studies
 

Abstract:

Zeami Motokiyo was one of nō’s most important theorists and practitioners, and mugen nō one of his most sophisticated innovations. Using the play Tōru as a model, this article explores how Zeami’s nō utilised waka theory and Buddhist aesthetics that were current in his time. I will particularly focus on his use of utamakura, a poetic device of intertextual allusion via place names. In the second part of the article I will analyse Tōru’s text and music through the lens of Kyoto School philosopher Ueda Shizuteru’s theory of language. In positioning poetic spirits of place on stage, Zeami shows the power of language to manifest something like conventional reality. When watching mugen nō, the music and poetry combine to create a place wherein the audience shares the aesthetic-spiritual experience of the spirit of place manifesting in our communal mind. His staging of the opening up of the hollow expanse is the beauty of Zeami’s art.

Keywords: Zeami, nō, Japanese aesthetics, Buddhist philosophy, Ueda Shizuteru, Kyoto School, aesthetics of music

Field Recording and the Re-enchantment of the World: An Intercultural and Interdisciplinary Approach

in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism vol 79/2, pp 213-26
 

Abstract:

Nonfictional field recording is a genre of music (sound art) which offers a glimpse of art beyond our late-capitalist age. The ongoing ecocide which we, in a state of abject detachment, are witnessing and abetting calls out for artists to reconnect and reengage with the nonhuman world that has been deemed valueless by our civilization. Countering the disenchantment of nature wrought by scientism, human-centrism, and above all capitalism necessitates a dissolving of the barriers we set up between ourselves and our environment, a task which can be only accomplished via religion or art: an art—like field recording—which affords reconnecting its audience with the enchantment of the ignored world surrounding them.

In this article, Toshiya Tsunoda’s exemplary Somashikiba (2016)—recorded in locations forgotten by civilization—will be examined via interpretive tools adapted from Ueda Shizuteru’s Kyoto School aesthetics and Takahashi Mutsuo’s poetics. Ueda’s philosophy offers a way of understanding perception which eliminates the subject-object division. Takahashi’s project of recovering the spirituality of place through poetry is a model of historically and politically engaged art. Looking, as these contemporary Japanese thinkers have done, to the precapitalist, pre-formalist past to rediscover (sound) art’s function as a medium which reconfigures the listener’s perception of reality, I argue for the urgency of sound art such as Tsunoda’s which aids in the re-enchantment of the world to a future beyond capitalist, humanist “civilization.”

Keywords: field recording, Toshiya Tsunoda, nature, Japanese aesthetics, ecoaesthetics, Buddhist philosophy, Ueda Shizuteru, sound art, aesthetics of sound, Takahashi Mutsuo

Icelandic Kami

in Nordlit 46, pp 318–331. https://doi.org/10.7557/13.5473 (open access)
 

Abstract:

Utamakura is a traditional Japanese technique of recognizing, interpreting, and utilizing the web of intertextual meanings which have accrued around particular place names over centuries of poetic practice. In general, these utamakura places were originally (in the 7th-9th centuries) associated with Shintō gods (kami), though in later periods the web of meanings in most cases came to include (and often became dominated by) secular rather than spiritual associations. Japanese poet Takahashi Mutsuo, who has published both poetic and theoretical works on the subject of utamakura, seeks to recover the original spiritual power of utamakura place names. He has also expanded the concept to include places of mythic spiritual importance outside of Japan, mostly in the Greco-Roman world.

Taking inspiration from Takahashi's revivification of this mediaeval poetic device, I am currently in the midst of a three-year project to write a series of (at this point seven) multimedia chamber music pieces called the utamakura series, pieces inspired alternately by traditional Japanese locations and locations in Northern Europe. My 2018 piece utamakura 2: Arnardalar for violin, piano, and fixed audiovisual media is an exploration of the Icelandic valley of Arnardulr in the Westfjords, the setting of a key early scene in the Fóstbræðra saga. My work draws on both the saga's descriptions of the place and the current place as it is today, highlighting the flux of time and exploring the power of art to infuse itself into – and change perceptions of – physical locations.

In this paper, I will explain the conceptual processes involved in writing the piece, with an emphasis on the intercultural aesthetic of my work and how Japanese philosophy of art and religion can offer a creative new perspective on the Scandinavian lands which are the settings of the North's oldest literature.

Keywords: utamakura; Ueda Shizuteru; Takahashi Mutsuo; Nō; Japanese aesthetics; Icelandic sagas; Fóstbræðra saga; Intercultural artistic practice; Multimedia music

Canada’s Musical Mosaic and Cultural Appropriation

paper presented at the Japanese Musicological Society regular meeting, 11 July 2020
https://rcjtm.kcua.ac.jp/pub/msj/#0711
 

Abstract:

Canadian culture prides itself on being a mosaic, that is, a space where different immigrant cultures come together without losing their identity. In terms of music, Canadian composers have been variously influenced by cultures which are not their own – for example, Colin McPhee was one of the first western composers to explore Gamelan music, Harry Somer’s adapted a Nisga’a song in his masterpiece Louis Riel, Canada’s most famous composer Claude Vivier undertook a major formative journey to Asia (including Japan), and Christos Hatzis makes post-modern collage music from a wide range of European and native Canadian sources.

Recently this kind of intercultural borrowing has been problematised and criticised in both the popular media and academic circles as cultural appropriation. By looking at some classics of Canadian contemporary music through this lens, this paper will ask where the balance between freedom of artistic expression and sensitivity to cultures outside your own lies. I will also consider whether this debate has any implications for Japanese artists and audiences.

Keywords: cultural appropriation, orientalism, Canadian contemporary music, Claude Vivier

Uncanny Movement through Virtual Spaces: Michael Pisaro’s fields have ears

in MUSICultures 45 (1-2), pp 238-54 (open access)
 

Abstract:

Michael Pisaro’s fields have ears is a series of ten pieces that embody an ecological approach to composition. The guiding idea behind the series is that the location of a sound is as (or more) important than its timing, and that how a listener understands a sound is affected by both the listener’s and the sound’s position in space. This paper uses the series as an exemplary example of James Gibson’s ecological thought in composition through its foregrounding of motion and space, and its creation of uncanny virtual worlds combining musical sounds, noise, and field recordings. It also explores the idea that Gibsonian perception has significant affinities with Kyoto School aesthetics, and analyzes Pisaro’s music utilizing methodologies from both disciplines.

Keywords: Michael Pisaro, Wandelweiser, ecological perception, Kyoto School

Hollow Sounds: toward a Zen-derived aesthetics of contemporary music

in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism vol 76/3, pp 331-40
 

Abstract:

To attempt to fill a perceived gap in Japanese aesthetics concerning music, this paper sketches a possible way into conceptualising a Zen- or Kyoto-school-derived aesthetics of contemporary music. Drawing principally on Kyoto-School philosopher Ueda Shizuteru’s theories of language’s three levels (signal, symbolic, and hollow words), the author proposes a similar distinction between different kinds of musical experience. Analogous with Ueda’s analysis of poetry, the oscillation of signal or symbolic sound and hollow ones is found to be what gives certain contemporary music its spiritual power. By applying this poetic-religious theory of language to music, an entirely new way of understanding contemporary music becomes apparent. As test case of this new approach, Morton Feldman’s 1970 work The Viola in My Life (2) is analysed. The final section addresses the differences between this method of understanding via nothingness and traditional Idealist approaches via the Absolute.

Keywords: Kyoto School, Ueda Shizuteru, Morton Feldman, Jonathan Harvey, aesthetics of contemporary (atonal) music

I also wrote a short introduction to the ideas in the paper which was published on the blog Aesthetics for Birds.
 



I have always been interested in both the theoretical aspects of music as well as the practical business of music making. When I was a PhD student, I published two musicological articles, the abstracts of which are below:

Real Frogs in an Imaginary Pond: Magical Realism and Morton Feldman’s Untitled Composition for violoncello and piano

presented at the 2006 International Musicological Society’s annual meeting in Gothenburg, Sweden
 

Abstract:

The crucial phrase in the Oxford Dictionary of Art’s definition of magical realism is that art which is magically real ‘infus[es] the ordinary with a sense of mystery’. Meanwhile, Morton Feldman claimed in 1977 that the most important thing that his music can do is ‘make... something idiomatic sound fantastic, even though it’s conventional.’ In this paper, I explore further aspects of magical realism as a broad, multi-disciplinary artistic movement spanning eight decades of the plastic and literary arts, and ask whether there is anything in abstract music that could also be described as ‘magically real’.
 
After the validity of musical magical realism is established, I look in-depth at how magical realism works in a single piece, Morton Feldman’s Untitled Composition for violoncello and piano (1981). Feldman, whose aesthetic aims, towards the end of his career, seem allied with those of magical realism, is an ideal candidate for exploring the outer fringes of the magical realist technique because of his deep knowledge of art and his painterly (as opposed to literary) approach to composition. I focus on Untitled Composition because of its conventional (‘ordinary’) instrumentation (violoncello and piano) and its fantastic, magical, mysterious, yet idiomatic use of those instruments.
 
 

Marketing Androgyny: the evolution of the Backstreet Boys

Popular Music (2007), 26/2, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp 245-58.
 

Abstract:

The trend in popular culture away from idealising mature, strong ‘men’ in favour of young, androgynous ‘boys’ can in part be traced to how pop music impresarios such as Lou Pearlman present sexuality to their huge market of young listeners. During their time under the management of Wright Stuff, 1996–1998, the Backstreet Boys were the most popular manufactured boyband in the world, and as such influenced the sexual development of millions of young women and men. This paper examines how, during this period, the presentation and marketing of the Backstreet Boys, and their youngest member Nick Carter in particular, encouraged queer readings, and how those subtle queer subtexts in the music and videos may have affected their (mostly) young, uncritical audience.