This is the English translation of my Japanese article for Nikkan San, a part of my bi-weekly column, “The Way of the Pianist.”
“Do you compose?” It’s one of the questions people ask me, regularly.
I did study composition from high school to grad school. But while I get the itch to practice/perform and to write words, I don’t get the same urge for composing music.
Composers who don’t play any instruments, and instrumentalists who don’t compose became the norm, in part, as a result of the Industrial Revolution and its division of labor. Before composing and instrumental playing became separate expertise, there was a time when musicians danced and dancers were musicians.
As a result of the increasingly specialized division of labor, we now live completely dependent on machines and systems that we don’t know the workings of. In the performing arts industry, for example, the “consumers” passively admire the professionals with specialized education and training at a distance. And as a pianist with hundreds of concerts played from memory under my belt, I would still be drenched in cold sweat if I were to be put on the spot to improvise. I am a classical pianist, trained to faithfully and scrupulously recreate notated musical compositions by composers with equally specialized training who often have little idea how piano-playing, or live acoustics, work.
It is easy to criticize how things are. Mass production and technological development made convenience and abundance wide-spread. While benefiting from these things, most people feel little responsibility for its ecological burden. They feel removed from the climate crises, partially because of their feeling of inefficacy, again, as a result of the division of labor.
But what good are these pessimistic observations? Instead, we can flip the argument around. What enabled these division of labor, and the development of this industrialized world, has been our incredible ability to cooperate, and create systems and machines beyond our own individual myopic imagination, limited by our short time on this earth. How unbelievable has our development been since the Industrial Revolution! Now, if we can invest all that cooperation and ingenuity to face our current and future threats, we can surely overcome most things!
One note alone is not music. But there are music that would not exist without that singular tone. Similarly, an individual cannot change this society, or its system. But many individuals combined have created this society and its trends, and now many individuals, including you and I, are creating our future. As a musician, I will remain proud to insist on my unabashed optimism, singing the praises of our humanity.
I contemplate a world where cooperation is the standard rather than the exception. Where untold amounts of wealth are expended in order to help humanity, rather than for the building of weapons of war. I imagine a world where music joins us. A world where humanity joins to heal, rather then to destroy and conquer.
“In the performing arts industry, for example, the “consumers” passively admire the professionals with specialized education and training at a distance. “—–I can only hope that the distance between the professional that wrote this and I will diminish, as I greatly admire her works.
Without imagining it, how can we know which direction to walk towards to realize our dreams? The world you imagine is beautiful. Thank you for sharing.