Kobucha

Kobucha is a work for piano solo written in 2020, in a period when I was diving into Japanese art and culture, especially aesthetics and the influences of Zen-Buddhism. In addition, I was taking Japanese lessons from a native speaker. In one of those lessons, my teacher gave me a Japanese kelp tea to drink, Kobucha.

Drinking this tea made a deep impression on me. I couldn’t say that the tea was delicious in the way people commonly call foods and beverages delicious – that is the antonym of tasteless. It wasn’t sweet at all and it wasn’t easy to drink. Each sip was a salty hurdle! However, the direct, impulsive and authentic taste was intense, even mind-blowing. In fact, I did like the tea. It was a pleasing experience. Not because of its questioned deliciousness, but because the tea was itself, its authentic self. Taking into account the tea’s pungent aroma, I was forced to do nothing but drinking this tea, swallowing one drop at the time.

If I have learned one thing from studying Zen-Buddhism, it is that ‘’things are not two’’. One could interpret this as an expression of non-discrimination. Analysing, rationalising and conceptualizing lead inevitably to discrimination. Somehow not conceding to these habits, admittedly not easy taking into account the busy and down-to-earth living most of us have, allows for things to just be itself. This means that one can make a choice: things can be regarded as itself, or things can be expressed as a concept (representation). Any tea can be classified as something delicious or tasteless (a classification essentially derived from the immemorial separation between good and bad). Nonetheless, one can also choose to appreciate the thing just as it is. To me, the latter was already pleasing enough.

Read more in the introduction of the work.

Maurick Reuser, 7 June 2021