Tim Anderson - Tune in Tokio

But one evening as we drank Asahi beers in his neighborhood in Yokohama, Toru had somehow convinced me that I should just go for it and not worry that the entire audience would be silently judging me and wishing I’d taken a few more years to rehearse. At first I was absolutely against it.

“Don’t get me wrong, Toru,” I explained. “I loooove playing the viola. Love it. But only in a room by myself with the shades drawn and sirens blaring outside. Or in a fifty-piece orchestra where the sound of my playing can’t possibly be heard.”

Toru’s brow furrowed.

“Or, you know, with a guy going to town on a gigantic grand piano right next to me.”

“What means ‘going to town’?”

“I absolutely can’t be the only viola player in the room. I need a buffer.”

“What means ‘buffer’?”

“Besides, you don’t want me publicly embarrassing you, do you? You’re a great player! What if the wrong person should see us playing together? You could be ruined. Ruined, I say!”

“You are so afraid,” Toru laughed. “Why is it? You are American. Americans aren’t afraid of what other people are thinking.”

He’s right. After all, we did invent the deep-fried Twinkie.

“All Americans are not the same,” I said, enumerating in my head all the differences between myself and the Olsen twins. “Do all Japanese people have black belts?” I asked Toru.

“Yes,” he replied. “Anyway, it not important, the concert. We can play fine at performance, and besides, no people will come.”

“Do you really think so?” I said hopefully. I do love Toru’s streak of negativity whenever it comes to his own musical prospects.

“Yes, we will invite people and no one will come to see. It will be fine.”

He’d said the magic words.

“Oh, OK, I’ll do it. But nobody better come.”

So now here I am, sweating bullets as I prepare to fool the world (or at least a dozen or so people) into thinking I have musical talent. I’m tempted to make some amendments to the flyer Toru designed, in order to lower folks’ expectations just a little. A few that come to mind:

Concert for

Piano and Cheap Secondhand Chinese Viola

and

Tim Anderson on Viola,

In His First Public Performance

Since the Accident

But Toru won’t give his consent to these changes, so instead I’m going to make my grand entrance by walking onto the stage with a limp.

The studio space has a maximum capacity of fifty people. Toru, in spite of his earlier declaration that no one would come, thinks we should plan on having about twenty.

“You think we’ll have that many?!” I stammer, panicked.

“Just in case,” he says. He has invited his family and some family friends as well as his piano teacher and some of her other students. And me? Well, despite my mortal fear of playing the viola in public, I decided that, screw it, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do my best to make people that I know sit through it. So I post flyers at work and give a few to friends.

“It’s always been a dream of mine to one day wake up and be able to play the viola,” my colleague Udo from South Africa says to me as I hand him a flyer.

“Oh God, me too,” I say. “Wouldn’t that be awesome?”

On the big day, we arrive early and set up all fifty chairs, and it turns out that the good Steinway people weren’t lying with the “fifty person maximum” line. We would’ve had to tear down a wall to get a fifty-first chair in there. We warm up on our instruments and wait for the people to start trickling in. Toru’s mother and sister arrive quietly and sit down in the front row. A few minutes later Toru’s piano teacher walks in and sits in the last row, increasing our total attendance to three.

Once we’re all warmed up and loose, Toru and I hop off the small stage and mingle with our public. Toru talks to his piano teacher, and I engage in some Japanese small talk with his mother.

Me: Hi, how are you? It’s been a while since I’ve seen you.

Her: Fine, thank you. Your viola playing sounds nice.

M: No, it sounds horrible. I need to practice for five more years.

H: No, it’s very pretty.

M: No, you’re wrong. My viola is a disaster. A musical earthquake.

H: [silent smiling]

M: Do you like my necktie?

Rachel and Tami, her clubbing sidekick, waltz in with water bottles and bug eyes, proving to everyone in the room that I do in fact have friends-sweaty friends hopped up on drugs, but friends nonetheless-and saving me from having to come up with another way to insult myself in Japanese.

“Did you guys get in really late last night?” I ask.

“We just left the after-party about an hour ago,” Rachel says, her kaleidoscopic eyes blazing. And now they’re at the after -after-party.

A few others show up in the next few minutes: my housemate Akiko and her friend, Kenji and Midori from my work, and an employee of the Steinway Salon, who gives us our receipt for the rental before politely declining my kind invitation for her to please please please have a seat and join in the fun.

Since we only have the place reserved for a few hours, Toru and I decide we should go ahead and start playing, even though our audience is only ten strong. I get up on stage, start the show with a few words in Japanese and English-thanking everyone for coming, inviting them to enjoy the show, and requesting that they please not throw anything-and then Toru and I launch into our Brahms sonatas.

People say that when you’re nervous on stage, you should simply imagine the audience in their underwear and it will calm you down. Or people always say that people always say that, but anyway, I decide it’s inappropriate to imagine Toru’s mother, sister, and piano teacher in their underwear. I find I always respond much better to imagining Marky Mark and the lead singer of A-ha lying on a double bed in their underwear. So this is what I do. It relaxes me and strengthens my bow stroke.

Now, I’ve also found that playing the viola on a bare stage with piano accompaniment and a silent and respectful audience is quite different from playing drums in an experimental rock trio with no discernible song structures and a singer who wouldn’t know a melody if it kissed him full on the mouth. For one thing, if you make a mistake in the latter, it may be noticeable, but it’s also the nature of rock and roll to take mistakes and run with them. Further, you can blame it on the booze and the drugs. However, if you make a mistake on the viola, there’s nothing to cover you. You are left naked and neutered in front of an audience that wants every note to be precise and clear; that counts on the steady harmonic cooperation between viola and piano; that is not likely to readily accept that you fucked up that high C because you were doing Jaeger shots before the show or because you are still reeling from the cocaine you had one of your roadies inject into your anus before you came onstage.

It’s the expectation of precision that scares me. One’s ear need not be classically trained to hear a stringed instrument falling far short of the intended note. But, thankfully, Rachel, knowing I’ll be on the verge of a nervous breakdown, gave me a Xanax yesterday, which I downed about twenty minutes before beginning to play, so instead of fearing that every note I hit is being ruthlessly judged as hopelessly deficient by the audience, I’m floating on a cotton-candy cloud, playing my golden viola flawlessly for an audience of young virgin males in tunics. Drugs make everything so much easier!

Jo and Grant sneak in at the tail end of the first sonata, bringing the audience total to twelve and giving me that extra burst of adrenaline I need to attack the furious climax of the piece before bringing it to a soft and sweet, if slightly squeaky, conclusion.