Beyond Composition compositions—space, time and architecture is my attempt as a musician to construct music using an art exhibition as my chosen mode of expression. In today’s world, there now exist any number of methods to compose music, many of which involve restructuring recorded audio data into music, but traditionally the act of composition has consisted of putting musical notation on paper, the meticulous arrangement of each and every note. But this exhibition goes beyond merely structuring sound and notation into a composition. It is an attempt to compose the entire surrounding environment. As the title suggests, “space,” “time,” and “architecture” denote the elements that comprise the exhibition’s music; they are interchangeable with melody, rhythm, and harmony—three basic elements of music in the Western tradition. In this exhibition, I position sound between time, space, and people to resonate with the Aomori Contemporary Art Centre’s architecture, which acts much like a musical instrument. The very environment itself emerges as music. And so the artwork can only be realized when time is released from the absolute control of the composer and entrusted to the audience, who must collect the fragments of orchestration interspersed throughout the space in order to fully appreciate the artwork. I believe that music composed beyond the time axis of past, present, and future can also be seen as a hallmark of our freedom to rethink our current existence. Shuta Hasunuma
