Japanese Literature Challenge #2

I read this book for The Japanese Literature Challenge 15

村上の小澤征爾さんと、音楽について話をする (2014)

Absolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa - Haruki Murakami

A discussion about music and writing, in six informal conversations that took place between the conductor Ozawa and the writer Murakami, between 2010 and 2011, a period in which Ozawa, due to an operation for esophageal cancer, was not particularly well.

Murakami and Ozawa discuss topics from Bernstein to Karajan, from Beethoven to Bach, from Strauss to Tchaikovsky, from Brahms to Bartók, to Mahler and Bruckner, up to the strange enigmatic figure of Glenn Gould. The obvious warmth between interviewer and the interviewee animates these dialogues. They listen to and examine the recordings of some of their favorite performances. For the sake of the self-described ‘complete layman’ Murakami, Ozawa does not focus on the purely technical aspects of conducting, but rather on the conductor's job: using their own sensibility to identify the essence of the music and then untangling it from both the composer’s intentions in the score and how the orchestra’s musicians want and are able to perform it.

An orchestra conductor has to be receptive to the musicians who make up the orchestra he directs so that every single sound, with his interpretation too, becomes part of the whole, in as perfect a harmony as they can achieve. Ozawa says "We conductors have to get sounds out of a group of musicians, that's the starting point. We read a score and imagine a sound in our mind, then, together with the members of the orchestra, we transform it into real sound. And from there many things are born. Interpersonal relationships, the importance given to certain aspects of music ... everything has to be taken into account. "

Similar is the writer of a story, who brings together characters, listens to their individual voices, and gives a rhythm to the writing, so that the reader can immerse himself in the flow of the narrative, as does a listener of a piece of classical music. Flow is key. Murakami says, “No one ever taught me to write, and I’ve never made a study of writing techniques. So how did I learn to write? From listening to music. And what’s the most important thing in writing? Its rhythm. No one’s going to read what you write unless it’s got rhythm. It has to have an inner rhythmic feel that propels the reader forward.”

I listen to both jazz and classical music, but I don’t know much about those genres in a technical sense. These interviews are, I think, serious musicological conversations. While there are no excerpts from scores, the talk would be better appreciated by people who know well the compositions they are talking about. Also, Murakami plays the part of the respectful layman and makes statements like “I don’t get any story from the first movement in Mahler’s first symphony” that elicit from Ozawa curt statements like  "Now that I think about it, I’ve never thought about music in such a way.” Musicians and music lovers, I sometimes think, are not always on the same wavelength.