Toward the Sound That Fades

A piano note is loudest when the key is struck. Afterward, it only decays. We usually listen for that first sounding. In his later years, Ryuichi Sakamoto attended instead to what followed: the long process in which a note grows quieter, loses its outline and finally disappears.

As a member of YMO and a film composer, Sakamoto was long affectionately known as the Professor. The melodies of Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and The Last Emperor remain in many memories. Yet his later work moved somewhere a little different from that familiar beauty.

On async, released in 2017, rain, footsteps and the resonance of damaged instruments stood alongside melody with equal weight. His work after cancer treatment included many sounds still taking shape or falling apart, rather than finished sounds. His final album, 12, released in January 2023, recorded daily piano playing under titles consisting only of dates. Restarts and hesitations were left intact.

Why do such unfinished sounds move us? Perhaps they carry a sense of something happening rather than something made. Polished music reassures us. A sound fading away exists only now, in this instant. Even recorded, it bears the quality of an unrepeatable event.

Sakamoto reportedly said during his illness that his time for making sound was limited. Perhaps his final choice was therefore to record how sound ends, rather than make it ring loudly. It looks less like resignation than an interest in time itself.

Everyday life shares that structure. Endings sometimes reveal a person more clearly than beginnings: how a conversation closes, work is put aside or a season turns. Character and the atmosphere of an age often seep through a quiet fading more than a dramatic flourish.

Sakamoto's last music does not tell us to listen more. It seems gently to invite us to listen beyond the sound that is ringing. This is an artistic question, but also a deeply personal one about spending finite time.