外刊| 经济学人 坂本龙一：倾听万物的声音

Asia

亚洲

Electronic music

电子音乐

The sonic outernationalist

声音的外部民族主义者

Sakamoto Ryuichi heard how the world sounds—and changed it

坂本龙一听到了这个世界的声音，并改变了它

 

SAKAMOTO RYUICHI, who died on March 28th after a long battle with cancer, once described his musical method thus: “I open my ears to the world.” But what Mr Sakamoto heard, few others could. As a member of the Japanese techno-pop band Yellow Magic Orchestra, he helped pioneer modern electronic music. As a composer of epic film scores he enlivened the work of directors such as Bernardo Bertolucci and Alejandro Iñárritu. In his later solo work, he grappled with mortality in haunting ambient soundscapes. His passing elicited tributes from musical luminaries around the world, testimony to the influence of his genre-spanning career.

 

坂本龙一在与癌症长期斗争后于3月28日去世，他曾这样描述自己的音乐方法:“我向世界敞开耳朵。”但坂本先生听到的，很少有人能听到。作为日本电子流行乐队黄色魔术交响乐团的成员，他帮助开创了现代电子音乐。作为史诗电影配乐的作曲家，他为贝纳尔多·贝托鲁奇和亚利桑德罗·伊纳里图等导演的作品注入了活力。在他后来的独奏作品中，他在萦绕不去的声音环境中与死亡搏斗。他的去世引起了世界各地音乐名人的悼念，证明了他跨流派的音乐生涯影响力。

 

Mr Sakamoto was born in Tokyo in 1952 and took to music early. He graduated from one of Tokyo’s top conservatories, where he studied Western classical music, becoming especially enamoured with Claude Debussy. There, he also explored an interest in the traditional music of Japan’s Okinawa prefecture as well as in that of India and Africa.

 

坂本先生1952年出生于东京，很早就喜欢上了音乐。他毕业于东京一所顶级音乐学院，在那里他学习西方古典音乐，并特别迷恋克洛德·德彪西。在那里，他还建立了对日本冲绳以及印度和非洲传统音乐的兴趣。

 

Early in his career, Mr Sakamoto trained his ears on the sound of technology. Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO), a group he formed in 1978 alongside Hosono Haruomi and Takahashi Yukihiro, used synthesisers in instrumental songs intended for dancing—a novel combination at the time. “Errors or noises absorb me and I wonder if new cultural currents could emerge from this deficiency,” Mr Sakamoto said in “Tokyo Melody”, a 1984 documentary about his experiments. That was exactly what happened: Mr Sakamoto’s music helped inspire what would later become techno and hip-hop. His early work also presaged the bleeps and boops that became the soundscape of the modern digital world. (He would take a turn at composing some of those too, including ringtones for early Nokia mobile phones.)

 

在音乐生涯的早期，坂本先生训练自己的耳朵去听电子音。他在1978年与细野晴臣和高桥幸宏一起组建的乐队“黄色魔术交响乐团”(YMO)，在舞蹈器乐歌曲中使用电子合成器——这在当时是一种新颖的组合。坂本先生在1984年关于他实验的纪录片《东京旋律：一部关于坂本龙一的电影》中说:“错误或噪音吸引着我，我想知道新的文化潮流是否会从这种缺陷中产生。”事实正是如此：坂本先生的音乐激发了后来的电子音乐和嘻哈音乐。他的早期作品也预示着哔哔声和嘭嘭声成为现代数字世界的声音环境。(他也会轮流创作其中的一些，包括早期的诺基亚手机铃声。)

 

YMO’s success made Mr Sakamoto a star in Japan, leading to a role opposite David Bowie in Oshima Nagisa’s 1983 film “Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence”. Mr Sakamoto agreed to act in the movie on the condition that he could score it. His compositions, which blended melodic piano chords, sweeping synthesisers and Javanese gamelan, propelled him to global fame—and established his bona fides as an artist who could bridge east and west.

 

YMO的成功使坂本先生成为日本的明星，并在大岛渚1983年的电影《圣诞快乐，劳伦斯先生》中与大卫·鲍伊演对手戏。坂本先生出演的条件是为这部电影配乐。他的作品融合了旋律优美的钢琴和弦、覆盖全面的合成器和爪哇加美兰音乐，使他享誉全球——并成为一名促进东西方交流的艺术家。

 

“I want to break down the walls between genres, categories or cultures,” he said many years later. He described his philosophy as “outernationalism”. “Being outernational is like Moses in the desert. There’s no country.”

 

“我想打破流派、类别或文化之间的壁垒，”多年后他说。他将自己的人生哲学描述为“外部民族主义”。“坚持“外部民族主义”就像沙漠中的摩西。无国界限制。”

 

In the second half of his career he turned towards the sound of nature. “He listened to the wind blowing and the water falling, he listened to the rocks moving and to the leaves fluttering, and he introduced those sounds—consciously and subconsciously—into his music,” says Roger Pulvers, an author and film director.

 

在他职业生涯的后半期，他转向了自然之音。作家兼电影导演罗杰·普尔弗斯(Roger Pulvers)说:“他听着风吹过和水落下的声音，岩石移动和树叶飘动的声音，他有意无意地将这些声音融入到自己的音乐中。”

 

His sonic interests dovetailed with his politics. Unusually for a Japanese musician, Mr Sakamoto used his fame to speak out on social and political issues, including environmental preservation and the oppression of Okinawans. Nuclear power was a particular bugbear. “They know nuclear power is unnecessary and dangerous,” he railed in an interview in 2006, five years before an earthquake and tsunami rocked north-east Japan and triggered a nuclear meltdown in Fukushima. In the wake of the disaster, Mr Sakamoto travelled often to the region to support local residents.

 

他的音乐兴趣与他的政治相吻合。不同寻常的是，坂本先生利用自己的名气谈论社会和政治问题，包括环境保护和对冲绳人的压迫。核能尤其让他担忧。“他们知道核能是不必要的和危险的，”他在2006年的一次采访中抱怨道，那是在地震和海啸袭击日本东北部并引发福岛核泄漏的五年前。在灾难发生后，坂本先生经常前往该地区支援当地居民。

 

In 2014 a first cancer diagnosis shook Mr Sakamoto’s life. But even that could not mute his longing to hear more. The next year he composed the score for Mr Iñárritu’s “The Revenant”. Two years later he released “async”, an ambient album constructed around collages of poetry and music that was recorded partly on a water-damaged piano he found in a schoolhouse after the tsunami. In “Coda”, a documentary about Mr Sakamoto released the same year, he can be seen traversing the North Pole and dropping microphones underneath the ice. “I’m fishing the sound,” he says, grinning at the camera, before declaring his catch “the purest I’ve ever heard”.

 

2014年，首例癌症诊断震动了坂本先生的生活。但即使这样，也不能减弱他想听到更多的渴望。第二年，他为伊纳里图先生的《荒野猎人》谱曲。两年后，他发行了“async”专辑，这是一张围绕诗歌和音乐拼接而成的作品，其中一部分音乐是在一架被水损坏的钢琴上录制的，它是由阪本先生在一所遭遇海啸的校舍里发现。在同年发行的关于坂本先生的纪录片《坂本龙一：终曲》中，可以看到他穿越北极，将麦克风放在冰层下。“我在把声音钓上来，”他对着镜头咧嘴笑着说。随后他宣布自己抓到的是“我听过的最纯净的声音”。