Before sound becomes music, it already exists as a possibility.
It seeks a voice, a movement, a string, a space — a form through which it can manifest. And perhaps the musician's task is not always to invent it or subdue it. Sometimes true creativity begins at the moment when a person stops deciding in advance what the music should be and allows it to show the way itself.
On 12 October 2026, at the Venice Biennale, the Japanese composer and performer Keiji Haino was awarded the Golden Lion for his contribution to the development of contemporary music.
He is called a "poet of noise." But behind this definition lies not a desire to create chaos, but a rare philosophy of listening: for Haino, sound is not a passive material in the author's hands, but an independent participant in the birth of a work.
Not to repeat what has already been traced
Keiji Haino avoids the word "improvisation" when he speaks about his music. He is closer to the Japanese concept of nazoranai — "not to repeat," "not to follow a traced line," "not to reproduce a form that already exists."
This is a principle opposed to mechanical repetition.
The musician does not come on stage with the intention of restoring a construction known in advance. He enters the space and listens: what already exists in it right now? How does the hall respond? What is happening with the body? Which voice is ready to be born in this very second?
That is why the same performance cannot be repeated. The space changes, the person's inner state changes, the interaction with the listeners changes — and together with them, a different music is born.
In the interpretation that was heard during the award ceremony, Haino perceives sound as something possessing a will of its own: what matters to the artist is not to suppress it, but to allow it to manifest.
When music passes through the body
Haino's creative practice exists at the intersection of many directions: rock, blues, free jazz, noise, electroacoustics, drone, folk and medieval music.
However, the musician himself does not strive to belong to any one of them.
Over more than fifty years of creative activity, he has released over 200 recordings and given more than 2000 concerts. He works with guitar, voice, percussion, electronics, synthesizers, wind and string instruments. But for him, an instrument is not merely a device that produces sound. It is yet another form entering into contact with a person.
During a performance, everything sounds: breathing, the tension of muscles, a gesture, the distance to the microphone, the movement of the hands, and even the pause in which nothing has yet happened.
Sound becomes a bodily experience — primary, unpredictable and unrepeatable. It is precisely the interaction of sound, body and space that the Venice Biennale named one of the most important features of Haino's art.
A premiere without musical boundaries
Two days before the award ceremony, on 10 October, at the opening of the 70th International Festival of Contemporary Music, Haino presented the world premiere of the work It Has Become Something Like This — "Это стало чем-то подобным."
In the 70-minute performance, voice, percussion and the hurdy-gurdy — an ancient string instrument whose sound is born thanks to the rotation of a wooden wheel — came together.
But more important than the unusual lineup was the concept itself.
Haino invited the listeners to free themselves from the habit of immediately defining the music. What is this — rock, contemporary composition, ritual, noise, improvisation? For the author, such categories limit the direct experience of sound.
The very title of the work seems to leave the form open: it does not assert what exactly the sound became, but allows each person present to encounter it without a ready-made answer.
Thus music ceases to be an object that must be correctly deciphered. It becomes an event happening between the performer, the instrument, the space and the listener.
A Child of Sound
The theme of the 2026 Venice Biennale is A Child of Sound, «Дитя звука».
The artistic director of the festival, the Italian composer Caterina Barbieri, proposes seeing in music a space of primordial openness. A child encounters the world before learning to divide it into genres, rules and permissible ways of perceiving. It does not ask whether what it hears sounds right. It explores it with wonder.
Such hearing is still free of expectations.
Therefore a "child of sound" is not an indication of age, but a state of consciousness in which a person is able to hear the familiar for the first time. Music returns us to a perception that exists before evaluation: to a pure encounter with vibration, movement and the present moment.
And Haino's work perfectly reveals this idea. He does not offer the listener a convenient melody or a pre-prepared emotional road. He leaves the space open — so that each person can discover their own response in the sound.
Who creates music?
We are used to saying: the composer wrote the work, the musician performed it, the listener heard it.
But in the living creative process these roles cease to be separate.
The instrument possesses its own timbre and the resistance of its material. The space alters every wave. The musician's body translates an inner impulse into breath and movement. The presence of the listeners influences the tension and rhythm of what is happening. The sound itself, once it has arisen, returns to the performer and suggests the next gesture.
Music is not born at a single point. It arises in interaction.
Therefore to hear means not simply to receive something already created. The listener also participates in the work: with their attention they single out certain shades, connect them with their own experience and allow the sound to continue within themselves.
What did music remind us of today?
That creation does not always begin with control.
Sometimes the idea is already sounding in the silence, the movement is already present in the body, and a new form is ready to manifest — but we do not hear it, because we are trying to repeat the familiar.
Keiji Haino proposes another path: not to walk along a pre-drawn line. Not to force the new to resemble the past. Not to define the form before it has had time to be born.
The person, the sound, the instrument and the space are not separated from one another in the moment of creation. It is a single living process in which each possesses its own voice and at the same time hears the whole.
And then music is not performed by a person — it recognises itself through them and enters the world for the first time.
