Харуки Мураками - Absolutely on Music

MURAKAMI: Oh, really?

OZAWA: The performers have to forget what they were just playing, adjust to a new mood, and completely immerse themselves in this new melody.

MURAKAMI: You mean to say that the people who are making the music aren’t supposed to think about meaning or inevitability? They’re just supposed to devote themselves to playing what’s written in the score?

OZAWA: Well … hmm … let’s see. How about thinking about it like this? First comes the heavy funeral march, then the part like a coarse folk song, and then the lovely pastoral. Then it changes dramatically again back to the grave funeral march.

MURAKAMI: So you mean we should just think about it in terms of that line of development?

OZAWA: No, maybe it’s more like you just accept it as it is.

MURAKAMI: Not thinking about the music as a story but just accepting the whole thing—boom!—the way it comes?

OZAWA [ pausing to think ]: You know, talking about these things with you like this, it’s gradually begun to dawn on me that I’m not the kind of person who thinks about things this way. When I study a piece of music, I concentrate fairly deeply on the score. And the more I concentrate, probably, the less I think about other things. I just think about the music itself. I guess I could say that I depend entirely on what comes between me and the music.

MURAKAMI: Not searching for meaning in the music or in each of its parts, but just accepting the music purely as music?

OZAWA: Exactly. Which is why it’s so hard to explain to anybody. I have something that enables me to get completely inside the music.

MURAKAMI: Maybe it’s a bit too much to be talking about “special powers,” but there are these people who have the ability to simultaneously take in all parts of some complex object or some convoluted idea all at once, like taking a high-resolution photograph of it. Maybe you have something like that going on with music rather than understanding it through logical analysis.

OZAWA: No, I’m not saying that at all. It’s just that when I stay focused on a score, the music quite naturally slips inside me.

MURAKAMI: So you have to take the time to concentrate on it.

OZAWA: That’s right. Professor Saito used to tell us to concentrate on reading scores as if we had written them ourselves. For example, one time I was invited to the maestro’s house along with my classmate the composer Naozumi Yamamoto. The first thing the maestro does when we get there is hand us some blank score sheets, and he tells us to start filling them in with the score of the Beethoven Second Symphony, which we’ve been rehearsing.

MURAKAMI: You mean, he wants you to write the full score?

OZAWA: The full score. It’s a test to see how much we can write in one hour. We had kind of suspected that we might be asked to do such a thing, so we had more or less prepared ourselves beforehand, but this is a very tough assignment. Sometimes I’m knocked out before I can write twenty measures. I’ve got the French horn and trumpet parts all wrong, and there’s no way I can write the viola and second violin parts correctly.

MURAKAMI: Is there really not much of a difference when it comes to memorizing relatively straightforward music like Mozart’s and the convoluted music of someone like Mahler? Is it no different in terms of internalizing the whole?

OZAWA: No, not really. Of course, the ultimate purpose is not to memorize it but to understand it. There’s a great deal of satisfaction when you finally come to understand a piece of music. The ability to understand is far more important for a conductor than the ability to memorize. After all, you can look at the score while you’re conducting.

MURAKAMI: So for a conductor, memorizing a score is just one result of all this, but it’s not that important in itself.

OZAWA: No, it’s not that important. No one would ever say a conductor is great because he memorizes or bad because he doesn’t memorize. The one good thing about memorizing the score, though, is that you can make eye contact with the performers. In something like opera, especially, you can watch the singers while you conduct, and you can trade signals with them.

MURAKAMI: I see.

OZAWA: Maestro Karajan used to have every note memorized, but he kept his eyes closed the whole time. I had a close-up view of him the last time he conducted Der Rosenkavalier, and he had his eyes tightly shut from beginning to end. You know how you’ve got the three female singers together at the end of the opera? Well, they had their eyes locked on the maestro in total concentration, and he never once opened his eyes.

MURAKAMI: Closed-eye contact?

OZAWA: I wonder. The singers never took their eyes off him for a second. All three women might as well have had cords connecting their eyes with his. It was a very mysterious sight.

The funeral march emerges again at the end of the pastoral (7:00–7:14).

OZAWA: Here, this is another very difficult transition. The gong comes in [ 6:54– 7:00 ], the three flutes do a quiet setup [ 7:01– 7:12 ], and that first sad, simple melody of the funeral march comes back again [ 7:14 ].

MURAKAMI: And the shift from major to minor happens in the blink of an eye.

OZAWA: Right. Now, listen to this tiny little clarinet part [ 7:39– 7:44 ]— taa-ra-ra-ra, beep and, beep and.

The clarinet adds an indefinably mysterious touch to the melody, the strange tones of a bird crying out a prophecy deep in the forest.

OZAWA: We’ve got a very simple piece of music here, but even in the simple way it’s combined with the rest, it changes everything. Things like this were just inconceivable in the music that came before Mahler … but he’s written in the score exactly how he wants it played.

MURAKAMI: He gives very detailed instructions, doesn’t he?

OZAWA: He does. He knew the orchestra inside out, the qualities of every single instrument. He brings out the full power of the orchestra, and in a way quite different from a composer like Richard Strauss.

MURAKAMI: In very simple terms, can you tell me some differences in their orchestration?

OZAWA: The biggest difference is that Mahler’s orchestration is—how to put this?—kind of raw.

MURAKAMI: Kind of raw?

OZAWA: Yes, he draws something raw out of the orchestra. In Strauss’s case, it’s all there in the score, kind of like: Don’t think, just play it exactly as it’s written, and you’ll get the music. And in fact if you do perform it as written, you get the music as it’s supposed to be. Mahler’s music is not like that—it’s much more raw. Strauss has an all-string piece like Metamorphosen, for example. It takes the fine-grained precision of the all-string ensemble as far as it can possibly go, in pursuit of an established form. Mahler probably never even thought of going in that direction.

MURAKAMI: I guess you mean Strauss’s orchestration has more technically demanding parts. Certainly, when you’re listening to something like Also sprach Zarathustra, it feels as if you’re enjoying a magnificent painting hanging on the wall.

OZAWA: I suppose so. But in Mahler’s case, the individual sounds rise up and come right at you. In the crudest of terms, he throws this raw sound at you in its most basic coloration. He can be very provocative in the way he draws out the individuality or idiosyncrasy of each and every instrument. By contrast, Strauss uses sounds after he has blended them together. I probably shouldn’t be making such simplistic declarations.

MURAKAMI: When it comes to the techniques he employed in orchestration, it must have been a major factor that Mahler—and Strauss, too, for that matter—was also an outstanding conductor.