1: The Sorcerer's Apprentice
The Second Round, lasting three days, starts tomorrow morning.
The First Round takes five days and welcomes nearly a hundred participants; the sheer volume causes the audience headcount to swell and shrink day by day, contestant by contestant. But starting with the Second Round, contestants’ loved ones and devoted fans are the vast majority, and the headcount stabilizes as well. One can almost feel the audience’s concentration intensifying.
The Second Round’s performances must be within forty minutes, double the time of the First Round; the requirements are as follows:
1) Two études by Chopin, Liszt, Debussy, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Bartók, or Stravinsky; the études must be of different composers.
2) One or multiple pieces by Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Ravel, or Stravinsky.
3) Dadaïki Hishinuma’s Spring and Havoc, commissioned for the Sixth Yoshigaë International Piano Competition.
The guidelines compel the question of where to place the only contemporary, and only brand-new, piece in one’s program.
As is evident from the title, Spring and Havoc is a reference to, and inspired by, the Tale of Genji. Its style is best described as atonal, and it lasts about nine minutes—about a quarter of one’s allotted time. The question of placement is paramount.
Given its explicitly programmatic title and its marked contrast from anything else allowed by the guidelines, most have opted to place it at the start or the end of their performances.
“It’s so unimaginative to place it at the start or the end.”
“But given the other pieces, it only makes sense. It has to strike a balance with the other pieces. Are you going to place it between two études and a Romantic piece?”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right. I put it at the start too, after all.”
The two people whispering furiously, each holding one side of the program, were Masaru and Aya. Masaru’s performance would be the next day; Aya’s, the day after. They were sitting side by side, listening to the first day’s contestants. (They had shared numbers the day before and met at the hall.)
Alexei Zakayev, having survived the First Round, had just concluded a comfortable, elegant performance and was retiring from the stage after generous, warm applause.
Meanwhile, Kanadae was staying in Tokyo that night and was planning to come down the next day.
However tired I am from competing, Kanadae’s traveling must be even worse, Aya thought. I’m sure she’s being grilled by Maestro Hamazaki every night. Well, at least I spared her from having to say that I failed the First Round.
Aya stared at Masaru’s program.
“But your pieces go from East to West, so it kind of works. If you pretend that France is east of Germany. But I like it.”
“I knew I could trust you to see my plan.” Masaru smiled broadly.
“But Maya. On a serious note. Do you think you’ll be able to finish in time? You never know how long sets of variations will take when you perform live.”
Masaru’s last piece, Brahms’s great Paganini Variations, could easily take up twenty-five minutes if taken casually. Fitting the other three pieces in fifteen minutes would be a rush in the best of times.
“I’m not worried. I may speed up, but I never slow down. You might think, based on my programs, that I’m too cavalier about time, but I’ve never been penalized for going over. Anyhow, Ajang, you’re at least putting your money where your mouth is. Your ‘Spring’ is in the middle—and after ‘Feux Follets.’”
“Well, void, weather, I tried to have a program with something atmospheric to it.”
“Oh, and Variations Sérieuses, good choice.”
As Masaru and Aya talked programs, they were both feeling Maestro Watanuki’s prescience in their marrow. Though neither knew, both thought of those words which he had murmured so long ago:
—There’s something about the two of you.
Like Masaru, Maestro had had a flair for concocting intriguing programs. They both enjoyed listening to their peers, and could enjoy competitions they themselves had entered. It was hard to pin down, but it was something about the timbre of their musical souls.
“Maya, you’re playing Prok Three?”
The Final Round’s concerto is any piano competition’s great show. One usually plays a piece much liked, perhaps one with a special memory or association.
“And you, Prok Two. I’ve never seen that in a competition before.”
“Oh, yeah?” She felt self-conscious all of a sudden.
A lifetime ago, the piece she had been supposed to stay before she walked away from performance had been the very same piece: Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in G Minor, op. 16.
A question sublimated itself out of her consciousness:
Did I choose it subconsciously?
Aya hurriedly shook the thought from her mind.
“I, yeah, I like all the Prokofiev concerti. Prokofiev’s a dance composer, you know?”
“Dance?”
“Yeah. If I were a dancer, I’d dance to his music. Even when it’s not written for a ballet, I can imagine the dances one would dance to his music. I can so believe Diaghilev commissioning a ballet from Prokofiev after listening to the Second, even though the reviews were so bad.”
“Ha. I guess it’s not so absurd if the first thing that comes to mind as I listen to the Third is Star Wars.”
“Yep. The Third is definitely sci-fi. And the Second would be noir.”
“That’s exactly it. Some dark, impassioned thing.”
The two looked at each other and laughed. Aya felt a fresh wave of shock: she’d never met anyone, not even close, who listened to, and thought about, and enjoyed music as she did.
“I sort of get Rach Three vibes from you, Maya.”
“Well, maybe Rach One or Two. But not Three. At the end, um, there’s a certain excess to the pianist’s part. After the Second was such a hit, I think Rachmaninoff got carried away. In the First and the Second, he could suppress his rhetoric a little, but in the Third, I don’t think it really worked.”
Aya was numbed. “Maya, where did you even learn the Japanese word for ‘excess?’”
“From a Japanese international at Juilliard. I bullied him into eating with me so that I could practice my Japanese. Borrowed his manga, too.”
Aya didn’t often think about how impressive Maya’s fluency was, but sometimes it hit her, she supposed.
“And now, the honeybee prince, let’s see … yep, Bartók Three. Talk about on brand.”
The honeybee prince. Jin Kazama. Even Masaru was watching him.
“He’s pretty incredible, right?”
The thrill of his First Round performance came alive again in her heart. Masaru nodded forcefully.
“Yeah, I couldn’t believe it. I’d never heard music so alive.”
“What occurred to me was that he was loved by the god of music.”
“Blessed for sure. But, if you were to listen to gossip, the judges seemed divided on him.”
“What? Why?” Aya couldn’t hide her surprise. She even remembered the energy radiating from the audience.
“I don’t think they all appreciated the life coming from the music. Bach, but it’s too progressive, you know? Competition ratings are usually decremental.”
Masaru was calculating.
“Oh, that’s what you mean.”
A dense, unpleasant nervousness forced its way into Aya’s consciousness. The competition, where the world’s attention is trained upon you. If such a brilliant, original performance could not be recognized, what was talent for? What were competitions for?
“I wanted to play Bartók too, but the orchestra,” Masaru murmured almost to himself.
“What about the orchestra?”
Masaru scratched his nose. “I went and listened to some of the records of the orchestra we’d play with. Their brass are just decent. Japanese orchestras tend to be like that.”
“But brass is more and more popular these days.”
“That doesn’t matter if they’re not up to par. Especially for Bartók. They undergird all the music. Maybe something could be made to work if we were to rehearse for a long time, but we don’t even have that luxury.”
She couldn’t believe he had even studied the orchestra he’d be playing with.
Because he surely would be playing with them, next week.
She felt her heart drop at his degree of preparation. He was a born strategist. Most people are happy just to last until the Final Round; how many of them think about the orchestra they’d play with?
“By the way, Maya, I heard you even play the trombone.”
He looked at her with some surprise. “Who’d you hear that from?”
“A Juilliard friend of mine.”
The conservatory grapevine cannot, must not be underestimated. Maya grinned.
“I wanted to play a non-keyboard instrument. I have long arms, so I figured the slide would be fine too. I picked it up for fun, and gosh, is it fun. I still play sometimes. What did you do after you quit piano?”
The way he so casually mentioned her own past after their separation jarred, and rather hurt, her. She couldn’t blame him for having heard, what with it being such a scandal. But she couldn’t help but shrink her shoulders.
“I only quit performance, not piano. I was in a fusion band, and a jazz band. I played guitar for a while, not that I have anything to show for it now.”
“Classical guitar?”
“No, jazz guitar. It’s not like I was following pop or anything, but I did play along to Pat Matheney and Joe Pass.”
She remembered those days for maybe the first time since conservatory. It was all she had done through her teens.
“What I’d give to listen to that. Ajang, playing the guitar.”
“Shove it. The guitar’s for men, anyway. Especially rock and jazz.”
“You really think so?”
“I’m telling you so. I learned after I played the guitar what the male ego was. What a wretched thing.”
Maya laughed, as if understanding. “But, so, we have to jam when you’re in New York.”
“If you really want to.”
Maya turned himself toward her, his expression coolly serious. “Ajang, come with me. After the competition.”
“To Juilliard?”
“Of course, Juilliard. And everywhere else.”
“‘Of course?’”
“Yeah.”
Aya decided it’d be best not to think too deeply on what he said right now. She chastised her surging heart and changed the subject.
“Up next is your friend, Maya.”
“Who?”
“Jennifer Chan. Isn’t she a favorite to win? I wanted to hear her First Round performance but I missed it.”
Maya nodded and hummed. “Jennifer’s great. She has great power and technique. She’s perfect for the stage.”
Aya thought she detected an edge in Maya’s words.
“Now I want to hear what you think of her performance, Ajang.”
As if on cue, Jennifer Chan, draped in a brilliant scarlet dress, walked onstage. A great roar and noisy applause greeted her.
“Wow, another red dress. But a different one. It suits her well.”
“She’s said she’s going to wear red the entire competition.”
“Really? It must really be a lucky color.”
Jennifer Chan eyed the audience with her sharp gaze as she marched toward the piano.
* * *
Jennifer Chan likewise had put Spring and Havoc as her first piece. But unlike him, her program may as well have been epigraphed, “I was forced to play this piece.” The program bespeaks the musician.
It would be interesting to see how Jennifer Chan handled the equivalent of a world premiere. It would be what everyone, judges included, would be looking for. Without any recordings to lean on, what would a contestant make of the music?
Her score-reading is perfect. I would never have thought to play it this way.
Aya was blown away by her titanium-alloyed interpretation.
When Japanese musicians play Japanese composers, they have a tendency to play it in a Japanese way: unintrusively, with a minimum of fuss. Westerners, in contrast, play “linearly,” barreling ahead no matter what the music might actually suggest.
But Jennifer Chan was neither. She analyzed, distilled, and titrated the score, passed it through an X-ray and a spectroscope, and understood what note to play at what time in what manner at what volume. Aya imagined Jennifer Chan could rewrite the score, note for note, if called upon to do so.
Within her music was contained the entire epic of the Tale of Genji. The space, the love, the hope and despair. All with the unique twist of the ever-practical, ever-methodical Jennifer Chan.
It was a standard.
Aya watched her taking a moment after her perfect performance.
As if called upon by the gods to impress, she leapt into Chopin’s étude op. 10 no. 4—the 100-meter of piano études: one of the shortest études in the repertoire, and one without a moment to catch one’s breath. A finger-breaking Liszt étude would follow.
As imagined, it was pyrotechnic, fantastic. The audience murmured and stared.
But Aya, despite her awe, was disappointed.
It’s so much, and yet so … hollow. Her technique is perfect. But there’s nothing behind it. It’s like eating the richest dish in the world until you can’t eat another bite.
She perfectly understood what Masaru said, or didn’t say.
Aya, if being honest, was never one to analyze others’ performances. She listened naïvely, one might say. Maybe she was paying especial attention because of what Masaru had said, but she doubted it.
Why could such brilliance not impress?
Aya tilted her head. She recalled the words of a director she liked, said during a recent interview—that recent Hollywood movies were not entertainments, but attractions. Jennifer Chan’s performance felt like an attraction.
Over the course of the twentieth century and two successive World Wars, capital and power and therefore music and musicians had flooded into the United States. And music had along the way become popularized, mass-marketized. And that meant that it had, and had to have, become simpler. Digestible. Appealing.
For example, a perfect technique showcasing all the tricks of the trade, shown off in a hall unimaginably large to those reposing in quiet European salons. In the process of being democratized, music had too often given up its essence. It was shinier, flashier, emptier.
Audiences no longer wanted pique, or charm, or improvisation. They wanted to hear those pieces they knew and loved, performed well. Fringe or contemporary pieces were uninteresting, and heterodox interpretations ruined a perfectly good evening.
CDs had ended up the same way. If CDs were more durable and cleaner in their audio quality in their records, they were also bereft of the highest and lowest ranges of dynamics, as well as the palpable “liveness” of performance. Jennifer Chan was a pianist made—no, born—for the American market: perfect, palatable, pretty. She was called into existence by the forces that be: market forces.
Jennifer Chan finished her Second Round performance without a missed note or beat. Manic fans screamed their heads off.
Starting with the Second Round, encores are permitted. Jennifer Chan walked offstage, and then, with a smile to stop any recipient’s heart, came back onstage to oblige her fans. Her aura as she bowed and received her fans had no compare.
“How was it?” Masaru whispered to Aya amidst the applause that knew no end.
“There’s nothing she can’t play. She has incredible power.”
“Right?”
“I feel as though I’m in Disneyland. Like I’ve just ridden a rollercoaster. She’s an attraction.”
Masaru opened his mouth, closed it, and then looked at her. He seemed pale.
“Ajang, I didn’t know you could be so blunt.”
“Me?”
Masaru looked deep in thought. “But you’re right. Jennifer’s an attraction. Yeah—you know, I’d been trying to think of what word would be right to describe her, and it’s that: ‘attraction.’ It’s very apt.”
“The audience really likes her. She’s very appealing.”
“But don’t you say that to her face. Her fury would be the color of her dress. It’s deeply offensive to an artist. But in this case, it’d be correct.”
Aya became nervous.
“You can’t tell her what I said.”
“Would I ever.” He playfully nudged her, and she felt her heart slow.
“I actually liked her Spring and Havoc. I think she helped me understand the piece.”
“I thought so too. Jennifer’s biggest strength is understanding a piece’s structure.”
“I liked her cadenza too. Do you think she wrote it?”
“No, it was probably her mentor, Blin. Jennifer doesn’t know how to improvise. Probably like most performers.”
Spring and Havoc has a cadenza, a stave entirely black save for the instruction “Freely, while feeling the void.”
Freely, while feeling the void.
How are we to feel the void which is nowhere near our physical, material world—and yet all around us?
While studying the piece, Aya had tried various readings, seeing which fit with her persona best, but was still unsure how she would play it.
She though Jin Kazama would have an easier time with the “void” bit. After all, he lived all his life around bees, which in turn lived all their lives in the air—around the void.
Like a hallucination, she saw him in her mind. Not his image onstage, but in the practice room, wearing street clothes.
“Maya, you wrote the cadenza you’ll play, right?”
Maya looked over with a why-bother-asking face. “Of course I did. Did you?”
“Yeah. Have you had it printed?”
“Mhm. To get some professors’ and friends’ feedback.”
“Makes sense. I guess that’s what you should do.”
Maya looked startled. “You didn’t?”
“No, not yet. So I guess I won’t before I perform. Some sections have a few versions, actually, but I don’t know which I’ll play yet. I think I’ll just decide on the spot.”
At Aya’s words, Masaru made a choking, yelp-like sound. “On the spot? Are you crazy?”
“That’s the spirit of a cadenza, right?”
Masaru looked dumbfounded. “You’re really fearless, Ajang. Didn’t your teacher say something?”
“Of course my teacher did.” She thought of the incident. Gosh, that incident.
Most classical musicians, in a cadenza or other improvisatory section, play something written down long ago, just like the piece itself.
In discussions with her teacher about what to do with the cadenza in Spring and Havoc, there was no opposition to Aya composing the cadenza herself. But when Aya said that she would decide how to play large sections of the cadenza on the spot, her teacher could not have been more opposed. Gambling during a competition was unthinkable, were the exact words.
—But Maestro, Aya had said. Sometimes, you know, it rains, and sometimes, it’s snowing. I’m supposed to play freely, while feeling the void. How am I supposed to play freely when I’m trying to perfectly mimic playing freely?
And then she, with a quick “If I could just ...”, played half a dozen versions of her cadenza, “on a rainy day,” “on a clear autumn morning,” “during a storm,” and so on.
“And then Maestro said to do whatever I wanted.”
Masaru stared. “Only you, Ajang.”
“Only me what?”
Masaru was at a loss for words when she tossed his quip back at him. Looking at her, earnest and oblivious, he couldn’t help but start laughing.
“You’re just incredible.”
Even as he laughed, there was a bitter edge to his expression, his tone. Almost inaudibly: “Really. I wish we weren’t competing in the competition.”
Aya flinched. Masaru seemed surprised at the words that had come out of his own mouth.
All these contestants have their own music, their own voice. And, in two days, half of them will be sent packing. The immeasurable is measured, and judged, and ranked.
“Competitions are so absurd,” Aya sighed.
“No kidding. And yet we’re both here,” Maya replied dryly.
“I guess so.”
The two were silent, staring at the stage, waiting for the bell signaling the imminent entry of the next contestant.