was a Japanese multidisciplinary artist born in Tokyo, Japan, and working in New York City. He graduated from Chiba University in 1957 with a major in Japanese Literature. An important figure in postwar Japanese art during the 1960s, he was active in many facets of the Tokyo art scene. He was a central member of the early noise music collective Group Ongaku and was associated with a number of other Japanese art groups such as Neo-Dada Organizers, Hi-Red Center, and Team Random (the first computer art group organized in Japan).
Tone was also a member of Fluxus and one of the founding members of its Japanese branch. Many of his works were performed at Fluxus festivals or distributed by George Maciunas’s various Fluxus operations. Relocating to the United States in 1972, he henceforth gained a reputation as a musician, performer and writer working with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Senda Nengudi, Florian Hecker, and many others.Yasunao Tone Bio at Lovely Music http://www.lovely.com/bios/tone.html Tone is also known as a pioneer of "Glitch" music due to his groundbreaking modifications of compact discs and CD players.
Tone died on 12 May 2025, at the age of 90.
Early life in Tokyo While in high-school Tone became interested in Japanese Avant-Garde poetry and prose of the 1920s and 30s. After entering the Literature program at Chiba National University, where he was enrolled from 1953-1957, Tone’s interest in literature expanded to a more general interest in the modernism of the interwar period.William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 17. During this time, Tone was particularly influenced by Assistant Professor Tsuneyoshi Shigenobu and the instructor Isamu Kurita. Under Shigenobu’s guidance, Tone and his classmates translated Maurice Blanchot’s La Part du feu over a two-year period. Kurita, on the other hand, taught Tone about Bataille as well as introduced him to critics and poets of his own generation such as Yoshiaki Tōno, Kōichi Iijima, and Makoto Ōoka. Tone, meanwhile, continued to seek out prewar Japanese avant-garde culture in journals such as "Shi to Shinron", "Ge.Gjgjgam.Prr.Gjmgem", "Bara●Majutsu●Gakusetsu", and "Fukuikutaru Kafu-yo" and through the work of Tomoyoshi Murayama and his Mavo group.William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 18. Tone then wrote his thesis on Dada and Surrealism, interviewing many of the prominent figures of the 20th century avant-garde in Japan in the process such as Katsue Kitazono, Shūzō Takiguchi, Kōichi Kihara, and Sansei Yamanaka.Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yasunao Tone, “Interview with Yasunao Tone,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 63-75, 63.
Group Ongaku and other early artistic activity In the late 1950s, Shūko Mizuno, Tone’s classmate at Chiba University enrolled at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku, abbrev. Geidai) and began musically improvising with classmate Takehisa Kosugi.William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 19. Kosugi played a tape for Tone and asked him to join their sessions. Tone was affected by Kosugi's gesture, who seemed to show no regard for Tone’s lack of formal musical training. He joined their group, buying a saxophone from Kosugi and a Sony open reel tape recorder. Mieko Shiomi, Genichi Tsuge, Mikio Tohima, and Yumiko Tanno also joined, making Tone the only member not enrolled at Geidai. Mizuno’s house became an important meeting place for the group. The group’s experimental endeavors were further informed by the young ethnomusicologist Fumio Koizumi, who became a part-time faculty member at Geidai in September 1959. As historian William Marotti describes, “The different ‘ethnic’ instruments were each bound to a complex performance tradition outside of a western orchestral frame—and thus provided a variety of rich alternatives to the latter’s conceptual dominance of music with its particular, narrow, and oppressive systematicity.” Tone recounts influence by Noh music, Indian music, Jazz musicians like Ornette Coleman and Eric Dolphy and Kabuki music, among others.Hans Ulrich Obrist and Yasunao Tone, “Interview with Yasunao Tone,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 63-75, 65. According to his own account, Tone saw music as lagging behind the experimentation present in other art forms of the time and therefore providing a rich ground for the transformative capacity of art.William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 22.
Tone also wrote about the group, first in August of 1960 where he emphasized the role of chance and their endeavoring in “an experiment concerning an absolutely new music.” At this time, the group also decided upon its name as “Group Ongaku,” “ongaku” meaning “music” in Japanese.William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 25. As Marotti points out, this emphasis on chance was part of Tone's and the group’s exploration of a Surrealist-inspired automatism in opposition to artistic egoism.William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 23. The group’s improvisational approach to collective art making therefore had wider theoretical consequences for the social import of art. Inseparable from this work is its contextualization within the massive protests against the renewal of U.S.-Japan Security treaty (abbreviated as Anpo), as seen in their performance from the van of Tone’s family’s business during the Anpo protests.William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 31.
Among his early influences, Tone cited Concrete Music, John Cage’s experiments with sound, Jackson Pollock’s action painting, and Art autre/Art informel.William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 14. A former literature major, Tone became a fixture within the Japanese contemporary art scene. Tone was involved with the Neo Dadaism Organizers group, attending and sometimes participating in their events such as those conducted at Masunobu Yoshimura’s “White House” in Shinjuku,William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2006), pp. 13-33, 29. In the early sixties he became involved with the international Fluxus movement. For example, his 1961 score Anagram for Strings was published and distributed by George Maciunas’s Fluxus Editions in 1963. This work was Tone’s first graphic score, and it was performed during the first Fluxus festival, a 1962 tour around Europe.Dasha Dekleva, “In Parallel,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 39-54, 41. Dasha Dekleva describes the score, writing that it “is populated with small white and black circles and dots, and with random whole numbers (positive and negative) along the top and left edges. The realization of the piece involves drawing a line across the score and using basic arithmetic calculations that determine how a series of downward glissando is to be performed.”Dasha Dekleva, “In Parallel,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 39-54, 42. Among other shorter scores, Anagram for Strings was translated to English by Yoko Ono. In another 1961 work, Days, Tone recorded himself counting to past one hundred at a low volume. He then played the recording back at a high volume, re-recording it. This process was repeated multiple times until the distortion has completely obscured the sound to unintelligibility. In 1961 Tone also produced Geodessy For Piano in which he “experimented with the inevitable indeterminacy of a precise execution of sounds,” according to art historian and curator Alexandra Munroe.Alexandra Munroe, “A Box of Smile: Tokyo Fluxus, Conceptual Art, and the School of Metaphysics,” in Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky (New York, NY: H.N. Abrams, 1994), 220. In this work, Tone stood elevated on a ladder above an open piano. He then took various handheld objects such as a tennis ball or cork and dropped them one-by-one onto the exposed strings. Tone would also modify the method by ascending or descending the ladder to increase or decrease the distance from which the objects were dropped.
1962 saw a multitude of notable events in Tone’s oeuvre, including his first solo concert “One-man Show by Composer” in February. The concert occurred at the former Minami Gallery space with assisting performers seated on tatami mats on the floor. Compositions performed here include Anagram, Smooth Event, Silly Symphony, and Drastic, in which the performer took a large amount of laxatives and performed on the drums until they had to use the bathroom. 1962 also saw the Yamanote Line Incident, by Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Jirō Takamatsu, and Hiroshi Kawani. Tone and Kosugi also participated, although they performed on a different spot along the circular loop of the Yamanote train line than the other group.William Marotti, “Sounding the Everyday: the Music Group and Yasunao Tone’s Early Work,” in Yasunao Tone: Noise Media Language (Errant Bodies Press, 2007), pp. 13-33, 32. Tone and Kosugi were supposed to meet up with the primary group at Ikebukuro, but the primary group ended their performance prematurely when Nakanishi became too nervous to continue. Tone and Kosugi, on the other hand, completed the circuit of the Yamanote line, playing mobile tape players so that the sounds from the tapes and the sounds from around the train lines intermingled.