Харуки Мураками - Absolutely on Music

OZAWA: True. Ha ha ha. The Mozart was with Chicago, wasn’t it?

MURAKAMI: No, that was the New Philharmonia. Most of the others were with the Chicago Symphony, though. But that Beethoven piano concerto with Peter Serkin we talked about before was with the New Philharmonia Orchestra, wasn’t it?

OZAWA: Right, right, that odd piece. As I said earlier, I had never played it before and never did it again.

MURAKAMI: This op. 61a was a violin concerto that Beethoven himself revised for piano and orchestra. It’s kind of a stretch, sonically, for the piano, don’t you think?

OZAWA: Very much so. But Peter was that kind of guy back then—he wanted to play things other than what his father was playing. It was really too bad, because that way he couldn’t perform ordinary Beethoven pieces, but he wanted to play Beethoven, so he chose works that his father wouldn’t. After his father died, though, he started playing the same pieces—Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, for example.

MURAKAMI: I’m very fond of another performance of yours from this period: Orff’s Carmina Burana. It’s marvelous—lively, colorful.

OZAWA: That was with the Boston, right?

MURAKAMI: Right.

OZAWA: That was before I became the music director. I also played Carmina Burana with the Berlin Philharmonic, when Maestro Karajan was still there. I performed it at the famous “Silvester Concert” on New Year’s Eve in 1989, and I brought the entire Shinyukai Choir from Japan. Carmina Burana might be another good one for the Saito Kinen. We’ve got such a good chorus to work with.

MURAKAMI: I’d love to hear it.

How Could Someone Young and Unknown

Do Something So Amazing?

MURAKAMI: As we listen to these recordings, many of which you made when you were young, I feel a little mystified about something. You were still in your twenties when you debuted in America in the mid-1960s, but judging from the records you made back then, you were already a complete musician. Your musical world was fully formed, vital and dynamic—and very exciting. Of course, there was still room for maturation to come, but at that point in time, your world was already there in its totality, with its own autonomous, irreplaceable magnetism. There was no—how can I put it?—no trial-and-error. Of course, there was inevitably some variation in your level of mastery of certain pieces, but there was no trial-and-error, no tentativeness at any point. How was such a thing possible? You left Japan, you went to a foreign country where you had no connections, and the next thing you knew, you were conducting the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony, putting your own musical world on display and captivating foreign audiences. How could someone young and unknown do something so amazing?

OZAWA: Well, ultimately, it’s because I had it drilled into me from a very young age by Professor Saito.

MURAKAMI: But surely that can’t be the whole explanation. Not all of Professor Saito’s students went on to have careers like yours.

OZAWA: Well, I can’t explain it …

MURAKAMI: It seems to me that you must have a tremendous power of organization—a way of turning parts into a unified whole. It’s consistently there for you, without a hint of uncertainty. Do you see this as a personal strength?

OZAWA: Look, let me just say this. I’ve had this technique physically fixed inside me from the time I was young, a technique that was instilled in me by Professor Saito. Most conductors have to work like hell in their youth to internalize their technique.

MURAKAMI: By “technique,” do you mean the act of waving the baton?

OZAWA: Sure, sure, the technique of using it to prepare an orchestra for a performance. During the performance itself, it almost doesn’t matter how you move the baton. No, that’s overstating it, but it’s really not that important. What really matters is how you wave your baton during rehearsals, in order to get the orchestra ready. That’s what I learned from Professor Saito. In my case, right from the beginning, I never lost focus on that piece of advice. Oh, I suppose there has been some change as I’ve aged, but for the most part, it’s remained pretty consistent.

MURAKAMI: But there must be a lot of things that a musician can only learn while in the thick of it, through accumulated experience. It’s the same with novelists. Do you mean to say that you already had these things in place?

OZAWA: Well, I can say that I never struggled with those things from the start. I rarely felt inadequate, and I suspect that’s because I had such a good teacher. So then, when I got to observe Lenny or Maestro Karajan conducting close-up, I pretty much understood what they were doing. I could see what they were trying to do. I could look at them analytically. So it never occurred to me to mimic their techniques. By contrast, someone who still doesn’t have his own technique in place ends up imitating someone else’s outward form, just superficially copying another person’s movements. That didn’t happen with me.

MURAKAMI: Is waving the conductor’s baton difficult?

OZAWA: Difficult? Hmm, I don’t know if it’s so difficult. But I had already internalized the technique in my late teens. Maybe I was special in that sense. I mean, I started conducting in my third year of middle school. I’ve been at it a long time! Before I ever got to conduct a professional orchestra, I had already been conducting for seven years.

MURAKAMI: You were already studying conducting in middle school?

OZAWA: I conducted the school orchestra.

MURAKAMI: The Toho Gakuen orchestra?

OZAWA: Correct. I had four years of high school and three years of university education. By which I mean I did my first year of high school at Seijo Academy and then again at Toho. There was still no music department at Toho then, so I waited a year until they got it together. Then I went to the university for two and a half years. For that entire seven-year span, I conducted student orchestras, so I had plenty of experience before I ever conducted the Berlin or the New York Philharmonic. Come to think of it, nobody ever gets that much experience under their belt. I’m sure Professor Saito thought it was bound to be good for me.

MURAKAMI: Lots of people play an instrument from the time they’re little, but not too many young musicians aspire to be professional conductors.

OZAWA: That’s true. I didn’t know anybody else like me. And the reason I was able to communicate with orchestras and convey to them what I wanted them to do—even though I could hardly speak their language—was because I had mastered the fundamental technique that had been drilled into me by Professor Saito.

MURAKAMI: Yes, but even before that—you have to have a clear image in your own mind of exactly what you want to do and how you want to do it. If you’re writing fiction, say, it’s important to be able to write, of course, but before that you have to have a strong sense in mind of something you are determined to write about. As far as I can tell from your records, at least, you always had a strong self-image from the time you were young. Your music always has a very clear, tight focus. It seems to me that the world is full of musicians who don’t or can’t do that. I probably shouldn’t generalize about all Japanese musicians, but I can’t help feeling that while they have a high overall level of technical mastery and can perform music that may be technically flawless, they rarely communicate a distinct worldview. They don’t seem to have a strong determination to create their own unique worlds and convey them to people with raw immediacy.

OZAWA: That’s the worst thing that can happen in music. You start doing that and the very meaning of the music is lost. It’s just one step away from elevator music, which, to me, is the most frightening kind.