Харуки Мураками - Absolutely on Music

MURAKAMI: You really did get special treatment, didn’t you?

OZAWA: It was out-and-out favoritism. And it happened so suddenly that, psychologically, I wasn’t the least bit prepared to perform! I almost panicked, but I gave it my best and got terrific applause at the end. It was a great success. The same kind of thing happened two or three times after that.

MURAKAMI: I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone conducting just the encore.

OZAWA: No, it never happens. I felt really bad for the other two assistant conductors.

MURAKAMI: What kind of salary does an assistant conductor get?

OZAWA: Next to nothing. I was single when I started, so I got $100 a week. You can’t live on that, of course. When I got married, they increased my pay to $150, but that was still not enough. Altogether, I was in New York for two and a half years, in cheap apartments. The first one cost $125 a month, and it was a basement apartment with windows at sidewalk level. When I woke up and opened the window I’d see legs going by. After I got married and my salary went up, we moved into an upper floor. But New York summers are horrendously hot, and of course we didn’t have air conditioning, so when we couldn’t sleep, we’d go to a nearby all-night movie theater—the cheapest one we could find—and spend the night there. We lived near Broadway, so there were plenty of theaters. But they made you get out of your seat whenever a movie ended, which meant that every two hours we’d have to wake up and go out to the lobby to kill time.

MURAKAMI: Did you have time for a side job?

OZAWA: A side job? I had no time for that. It was all I could do to study each week’s music.

MURAKAMI: You must have had a lot to learn if you could be called on at any time to take the stage and conduct.

OZAWA: Sure, you have to prepare every last detail. And then there were the two other assistant conductors. They were in charge of the rest of the program, but there was always the possibility that one of them might not be able to appear. So you had to learn their music, too. I never had enough time for anything.

MURAKAMI: I see what you mean.

OZAWA: I had nothing else to do then, so I’d spend every spare minute in Carnegie Hall. They used to accuse me of living there! The other two assistant conductors, though, did have other work, I seem to recall. I think they were conducting Broadway musicals and maybe conducting some choruses. So sometimes they’d come to me and ask me to fill in for them. Then I really had a tough time! I’m pretty sure I was the hardest-working of the three of us. If I hadn’t taken on their share, and something came up, we’d have had a real mess.

MURAKAMI: It sounds as if you were doing the work of three people.

OZAWA: Well, think of what would have happened if Lenny suddenly became ill when one of his assistants was working on Broadway! We couldn’t have had a performance! So I learned all the music. For better or worse, I was always hanging around backstage.

MURAKAMI: By “learning the music,” you mean, specifically, closely reading the score, correct?

OZAWA: That’s right. They wouldn’t let us run the actual rehearsal, so all we could do was read the score until we had it memorized.

MURAKAMI: And I suppose you were there, watching, when Bernstein rehearsed?

OZAWA: Yes, naturally. I’d watch and memorize every little movement of his. There was a small room in the auditorium designed for that purpose. You could hear everything but the audience couldn’t see you. There’s a room like that [at the former Philharmonic Hall, now David Geffen Hall] in Lincoln Center. In Carnegie Hall, too, there’s one like it, though not so specialized. It’s positioned a little above the conductor at an angle and has just enough room for four people to sit. I watched a concert once from that room with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

MURAKAMI: No kidding!

OZAWA: They were there as Lenny’s guests. It was at the height of their popularity, so it would have caused too great a commotion for them to sit among the audience. “Why don’t you take them in to sit in your place, Seiji?” Lenny said. So the three of us squeezed in there—literally [ laughter ]—and watched the concert. I remember they spoke to me, but my English was so bad, I didn’t know what to say.

MURAKAMI: But anyhow, living like that, so closely attached to one orchestra, you must have learned a lot.

OZAWA: It was a tremendous learning experience. I’m just sorry my English was so bad. For example, Bernstein had a television series called Young People’s Concerts and I would attend the meetings for every broadcast, but I hardly understood what he was saying. It was such a wasted opportunity. I still feel bad about it.

MURAKAMI: Yes, you could have learned even more.

OZAWA: Exactly. But when it came to actually conducting, Lenny gave me lots of opportunities.

Talk about still feeling bad—I still feel sorry for the other two assistants.

MURAKAMI: Do you know what they’re doing now?

OZAWA: Maurice Peress was active on Broadway and did some big shows. He also performed in London and New York. John Canarina was conducting a rather small orchestra in Florida or somewhere. You know, some people who remain assistant conductors too long end up as assistants. I did it for two and a half years. As I mentioned before, we were supposed to be replaced by new assistants after one year, but none of us had positions to go to after our first year with Lenny, so we all stayed on. I even ended up house-sitting for Lenny when he went on sabbatical.

Close Reading of Scores

MURAKAMI: So it was during that time that you came to like reading scores? Or at least you put a lot of energy into reading them?

OZAWA: Well, sure, because I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I didn’t have a piano at home, so I’d spend hours studying scores backstage, using the piano on hand to sound them out. But come to think of it, it was the same for me while I was in Vienna, until quite recently. I didn’t have a piano at home, so I’d go to my room in the opera house nearby and play until all hours of the night. I had a really good grand piano there. I found it very moving at times, to think back to those days when I was doing the same thing in New York. There was a piano in the conductors’ room in Carnegie Hall, and I’d go there late at night and practice to my heart’s content. Those were easygoing days, with hardly any security, so you could do something like that rather freely.

MURAKAMI: I’m not too sure what’s involved in reading a score, but I think of it in terms of the translation work that I do every day. I sit there reading English books and converting them into Japanese, and sometimes I’ll come up against a passage that stumps me. I just can’t figure out what it means, no matter how much I think about it. So I’ll just sit there with my arms folded, staring at the lines for hours, and sometimes I manage to get it, but other times not at all. So then I’ll skip that passage and go on to the rest of the text, and every once in a while, I’ll go back and have another look, and after two or three days of doing that, it finally dawns on me, like, “So that’s what it says,” and the meaning will just rise up off the page like nothing at all. At first glance, the hours I spend staring at the passage would seem to be a waste of time, but I think that’s the time when I’m really getting it. I can’t help feeling that reading a score is a similar experience.

OZAWA: A difficult score can often be like that, it’s true. Except, well … this is kind of like exposing trade secrets, but a musical staff has only five lines, you know. And there’s nothing at all difficult about the notes themselves. They’re like the letters of the alphabet. But the more they pile up, the more difficult things become. You might know all your letters and be able to read simple words, but the more they’re combined into complex sentences, the harder they become to understand and the more background knowledge you need to understand what they mean. It’s the same with music, but that “knowledge” part gets really huge. It’s precisely because the symbols used to write music are so simple—simpler than the written word—that when you don’t understand something, you get seriously lost.