Yasunao Tone, 1935–2025
By Karen May Wai Plumptre
Portrait of YASUNAO TONE. Courtesy Exit Art, New York.
Yasunao Tone, a Japanese composer, theorist, and experimental sound artist associated with the Fluxus movement, has passed away due to age-related complications, according to Artists Space—a New York-based venue which mounted his first US retrospective in 2023. He was 90 years old.
Tone was a pioneer in performance, sound, and digital composition who explored the potential uses and misuses of emerging technologies, as well as various unorthodox methods of sound-making. Born in 1935 in Tokyo, Tone developed an interest in the arts early on. As a high school student, he became fixated on Japanese avant-garde poetry from the 1920s and '30s, later majoring in Japanese literature at Chiba National University, where he wrote his graduation thesis on Dada and Surrealism. During this time he was invited by his peers from Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (Geidai) to participate in impromptu music sessions, despite having no formal instrumental training. This experience eventually led to his cofounding of the experimental music collective Group Ongaku (Group Music) in 1961 with the session members, together with composer Shuko Mizuno, composer and violinist Takehisa Kosugi, and artist-composer Mieko Shiomi.
Tone’s worldwide reputation rose when George Maciunas—founder and leader of the Fluxus movement—published his 1961 score Anagram for Strings in Fluxus Editions in 1963. Performed at the first Fluxus Festival in 1962, the piece was Tone’s first graphic score, featuring black and white circles of varying sizes corresponding to the length of a glissando.
In 1972, Tone moved to New York, where he fostered collaborations with American visual artists, dancers, and musicians such as Blondell Cummings, Allan Kaprow, Senga Nengudi, and Butch Morris. Significantly, he composed music for Merce Cunningham’s Dance Company, alongside American composer and theorist John Cage.
Known later as a precursor of the “glitch” musical genre, Tone also started to create paramedia—a method of deviating technological devices from their intended purposes to “create pieces that are simultaneously multipliable and nonrepetitive,” as he put it—with scratched CDs and digital disruptions.
Recent years saw Tone’s ongoing engagements with newfound digital technologies, resulting in MP3 Deviations (2011) and AI Deviation (2016)— projects for which he experimented with corrupted audio files and artificial intelligence, respectively.
Karen May Wai Plumptre is an editorial intern at ArtAsiaPacific.
