This is an English translation of an article published in Nikkan San on May 2, 2019, as a part of my column, “The Way of the Pianist.
“Without music, life would be a mistake,” Nietzsche famously said.
Where does music exist? – not in the mind of the composers. Not in the sheet music. Not even in time. I believe that music exists between people.
“Bravo!” I once saw an old man in the audience jump up to his feet exclaiming, and then fall. In his enthusiasm, he forgot that he needed a cane to stand.
On a different night, at a party, I heard a lady in her 90’s sing a lullaby by Brahms. She had been an opera singer in 1930’s, until Nazis loaded her onto a crowded train with the other Jews. They rode on a terrible journey only to arrive at a concentration camp. That first night in the barrack, her inmates asked her to sing. After her Brahms lullaby, they thanked her for transporting them out of their reality as she sang. Listening to her aged voice sing Brahms and recount this story, the party that night was transported to her first night at the concentration camp, standing with her inmates.
There are these moments when the composer, the performer and the listener become one. That’s the heart of music. Maybe the old men who fell regained his youth through becoming one with a younger performer, and the composer. What moved Brahms to write his lullaby for a friend’s newborn must have comforted the Jews on their first night at the barrack. And the survivor of the Holocaust who sang for us that night at the party, taught us how precious peace is, by sharing everyone’s despair from that night decades ago.
For the next several month, I will be traveling with a program titled “Piano Waterscapes,” featuring pieces inspired by water. Among the pieces is an exception that is not about water: Debussy’s Feux d’artifice (Fireworks). I will play it side by side with Poissons d’or, a piece depicting koi fish splashing water with their energetic swim. Did Debussy successfully distinguish the splashing water from the flickering fireworks in the night sky? Can I draw the two contrasting images with Debussy’s notes at the piano? Can the audience identify the fireworks and the splashing water? I am excited to find out!