"The world you never seen"

The world you never seen. This was a drama that reenacted psychic experiences, my favorite drama in my childhood. I always felt summer had come when a series of the drama started on TV. Vengeful spilt, Ghost, the world I never seen. Certainly, I did not know about the world. However, What a beautiful world that we never seen!
Shabby performance of Psychic drama at that time used to give me imagination of the world.

When I was nine years old, living at Kyoto, my grandmother died. My family arranged at home her funeral and Buddhist service held on the seventh day after her death. Do you know "Goeika"? It means that chanting more melodious sutra than that of ordinary one, while ringing a beautiful sound of bell.

At nigh, a family Buddhist altar was decorated with all sorts of beautiful flowers and lights shaped like candles, shedding light with pail yellow mixed with ivory, as well as mysterious paper lantern with pale lights(lights with seven colors such as pink and blue rounding inside).
This seemed to me a Japanese planetarium at that time. With good smell of incense and chirping of insects, I felt in my childhood what a beautiful place to where a death was going to go !

There were Takase River in my memory of childhood.This used to be very beautiful canal that appeared in a novel written by Ohgai Mori.The river ran through next to my house in 1970’s during which I spent my childhood.

Economic growth was expanding rapidly at that time without being heard about a word, ecology at all. Beautiful Takase River began to be contaminated with wastewater from factories, turning into psychedelic color every day.
When I went to a home of my friend at evening during which a siren was resounding around the town, I saw him squatted down there suffering from photochemical smog during which air was filled with a sweet smell from factories of confectioneries nearby. In such a time as this, I felt that I was going to the world I never seen.

Music can not be created without any feeling. It is a kind of fruit of my sense of value nurtured from my childhood experiences and a way of thinking as well as my position and feeling at present.

Ah! How can I write music in such a logical way?No, I can't.
Writing music requires image and a way of conveying it to listeners. However the most important thing is to have an impulse instead of logic.
An act of writing music is based on much more primitive impulse that that of writing books, drawing pictures and other forms of art such as architecture and sculpture.

In the old days, primitive arts were all used for communication or Shinto rituals that referred to a festival. They were used to show gratitude to God for a good haul and harvest of the year and to appease revenge of god that would bring about illness and disaster, mishaps. In those days, human being always felt awed for big mountains, darkness at night and other immeasurable things.
They played music impulsively instead of logically.

Today we must have inherited a gene of impulse that desires to play music.

When we face our feelings, please take care of "impulse" from the world you never seen. You must be able to hear your own voice.

-Essay Yoshitaka Hirota 2000"From column" A story of writing music"by SACNOTH's homepage