Official HIGE DANdism’s “Chessboard,” green growing through black and white

The most revealing thing on the board in “Chessboard” may be the grass rather than an expertly moving piece. Chess suggests black and white squares and precise rules, yet the song begins with no king or rules supplied. Its comparison places people who do not know where they can go on that board. Reading the title as advice for managing life cleverly misses the uncertainty the song deliberately retains.

Its origin as the junior-high-school set piece for the 90th NHK National School Music Competition brings that uncertainty closer. It is a work for people still finding a role to sing together. A question beginning for one singer may have accompanied another for years. The music makes space for voices before anyone has acquired a complete method for living.

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Traces that resist a verdict in black and white

Grass does not ask which colour of square permits it to grow. Once that image enters the board, past movements become harder to divide into success and failure alone. Time may remain in a place of hesitation or frustrated progress. Green supplies a way to see what the division left out, rather than choosing the better side of black and white.

The image need not become a promise that every failure eventually contributes to success. A memory can continue to feel useless; a time may remain somewhere a person would never return. Present judgment still cannot erase that time completely. Growing grass briefly interrupts the accounting of achievement and brings attention to the trace of someone having lived there.

A person choosing a path

In ordinary chess, the permitted movements of each piece are established. Life in “Chessboard” starts without receiving those rules first. A choice therefore exceeds calculation towards a correct move. It becomes a process of making a place and encountering people. The game in the title offers no completed map for living.

Sharing a board does not mean sharing a route. Someone can stand beside another person and later become separated, or encounter a different person in an unexpected square. Heard this way, the solitary piece acquires relationships. Instead of explaining someone by a single outcome, attention rests on people meeting now after travelling through different places.

Individual time inside a shared song

In a school chorus, many people pass through the same words with their own voices. Knowing those words does not make the time each singer imagines identical. One may hear a future; another, an existing regret. Singing together without erasing that difference fits the image of a board that cannot be explained in black and white alone.

Returning to the band’s version need not mean seeking a voice that already knows the outcome of life. Beneath the orderly title remain people still without answers. When the eye moves from the squares to the small grass, the efficiency of the next move loses its monopoly on importance. What a person has left by passing through, and whether another can recognize it, remain quietly in view.