2: Black Keys
He was feeling much better than the First Round. Of course, he was nervous, but this was a good nervousness.
Akashi knit his fingers together.
The anxiety before the First Round was incredible. He’d never been so anxious, so afraid, in recent memory, if not in his life. But that one experience—that one success—fortified him, changed him.
I became a musician. It’s that I became a musician.
This physicality, this fulfillment. Onstage, real life was so far away, infinitely far away; the gleaming grand piano, right before him. Walking to it, focusing on his music, receiving the audience’s warmth and attention, and the sheer satisfaction of giving them something in return. Their applause, like an enormous rustling wheatfield in the wind.
He felt the chill and thrill of that moment, the excitement, the golden warmth that had smothered him.
Yes, this is where I belong. This is what I’d been looking for. Even while living my life and loving my family, every day, this is what I had wanted.
He was turning over this certainty in his mind as he stood backstage. For the fact that he could be feeling such emotions in this moment, he sent his gratitude to the Almighty far above.
Thank you, thank you so much for allowing me to stand here.
But even so, as his turn approached, he found a rock where his stomach normally sat. He somehow felt insubstantial and massive at the same time. His body did not feel like his.
The Second Round: forty minutes. A considerable amount of time; no small feat to keep one’s focus throughout. Not letting the audience get bored and keeping command of the music, all the more difficult.
Creating his program had been at once fun and difficult in its own way.
Proving that he had technique, that he could play any composer thrown at him, was, he thought, the goal of the Second Round. At the same time, he had to show off his strengths and his musicality. All while staying within the repertoire’s limitations, especially the premiere.
He first gathered all the recordings that he liked and that fit the requirements. He listened to them on repeat, he listened to them in every order, he played through them and thought about whether he liked them, and whether they liked him. He consulted an old friend, tossing ideas back and forth, and finally settled on a program.
And then he began to practice.
Repertoire. The performer’s eternal task.
Whether one will be thought to have a broad repertoire, or to specialize in Mozart or Schubert or someone else. Whatever one desires, a solid core of repertoire is paramount.
How cruel, how he could learn a piece for months and forget it in a week. Relearning didn’t take as long, of course, but a convincing performance was damn near impossible no matter what.
He was to perform some dozen pieces throughout the competition; he’s counted plenty of contestants with seventeen or eighteen. Some pieces were half an hour alone, and others were two minutes of utter madness. Learning each piece took so much work. Keeping them up, even more.
If only I were a genius, he had thought on so many occasions. There were plenty of geniuses who could reproduce pieces, note for note, which they’d heard or seen just once. There was one he’s heard of who learned a program just by reading the score on the flight to a recital to take place later that night. In a way, score-reading and technique are all one needs, they say: why even bother practicing?
Akashi thought himself good at sightreading, but was nowhere close to that. If lack of practice didn’t get to him, nervousness about the lack of practice surely would.
Of course, as a working adult, the first thing to go when he needed to practice was sleep. He’s fought against insufficient sleep pretty much all of the last year. Even when he sleeps, it’s fitful: he bolts upright in the middle of the night, Schumann’s arpeggios or Beethoven’s trills wavering before his eyes. More than once, he’s found his fingers two or three minutes into a piece he had been playing on his lap without even noticing.
First Round: three pieces. Second Round: five pieces. Third Round: four pieces. He memorized them all fairly early on, but still didn’t feel satisfied with any of them. Is this enough, is this enough, is this enough: the question has haunted.
Leaning into his competition experience from years past, he first learned them all until he felt they were all at least passable no matter how much time passed since he’d played them last. And then he started to rotate through them, as farmers leave fields fallow, so that they could mellow and age in his mind.
Though there are almost as many practice regimens as pieces, Akashi decided on a three-month cycle. He took all twelve pieces and practiced them in the order he’d be performing them, and then, at the start of another three months, start again. He did this four times over the last year; by the start of the competition, he felt he’d successfully maximized depth while minimizing burnout from any one piece.
But on some days, he just felt minimally practiced and maximally doomed. The last piece of the Second Round, Three Movements from Petrushka, was a struggle every time it came around; the longest piece and his finale for the Third Round, Kreisleriana, usually took a month on its own. He didn’t think he had spent more than three weeks on the Bach over the entirety of the past year.
One relief was that those pieces which he thought difficult as a student now came to him easily, much more easily than expected. He could feel himself digesting them faster. And his maintaining his technique over the years through hours of exercises and études had paid dividends: his sense was that he had a fighting chance against the young contestants.
He recorded himself practicing every day. Listening every day for months on end, he often couldn’t tell whether he was progressing or regressing. But there was no better way, short of getting a lesson every day, to be brutally honest with himself.
Great, this is pretty good, this’ll do, he thought on some days. These are all garbage, what the hell am I doing, he thought on others. If he was out after the First Round, all the work on the Stravinsky, the Schumann—useless.
He didn’t even touch his concerto in the last cycle.
After telling himself that he’d be glad even to qualify for the Final Round, he ended up deprioritizing it, consciously or not; the challenges of finding someone to play the orchestral reduction with him and of having a practice room with two pianos did not help. The only practice he’s had with another person for the concerto was a few sessions after the store where he worked closed for the day.
But those days of practicing, for hours at a time and for ten minutes a day, seemed a lifetime ago. He felt both too heavy and disembodied and torturously light: he was acutely aware of living his dream every second and was overwhelmed by a feeling that it was in fact not at all real, but a mere dream. But perhaps this was how real competitions felt: to be deeply, emotionally, viscerally invested in a competition; to want to do well with every bit of one’s being; to need to prove something to oneself.
He felt a jolt of fear.
What’s next? What comes after this? After these few days, what awaits me?
The applause, like so many scattered marbles, roused him from his reverie.
The performer before him had finished.
He let out a sigh. A break. And then he was up.
Up for what might be his last ever performance. Up to show them who he was.
He closed his eyes and imagined the scene.
The first piece, Spring and Havoc, was the problem. If he could just perform this respectably, the rest of the pieces were familiar, known quantities to him.
This piece had given him the most trouble, even more so than the Chopin concerto.
If he were a conservatory student, he could have puzzled through the piece with his professor, finding filaments of melody or fragments of structure amidst the havoc. He could have exchanged feedback with other contestants at his school. He could have had his cadenza revised by a composition professor.
He talked it over with his contact from school, but he was not in a position to make anything more than token requests. His old professors had current students, students against whom he was competing. Having left the nest, it was more than a little awkward to come back. In the end, it was just him against the piece.
But this, Akashi had almost hypnotized himself into thinking, was where his age was his greatest strength.
He’d always enjoyed the Japanese arts, and had even had a Miyazawa Kenji[1] phase long ago. He had reread some of his works in the past year during commutes and even added in some criticism, trying to imagine and absorb the worldview and cosmology of the era. He even spent a precious weekend day going to Kenji’s birthplace in Iwate and saw where he used to live.
The piece was unyielding, stiff, fantastic, hyperdimensional. It was touchy, sensitive, frustrating, maddening. It was materialist and hallucinatory, sometimes at the same time.
He closed his eyes to the swaying of the subway and imagined scenes corresponding to the music.
Here are the beaches of Iwate, this feels like The Night on the Galactic Railroad, and this is definitely “Morning of Death” from his poetry collection Spring and Havoc …
Yes. That’s it. Let’s put the lines of the poem as lyrics to this cadenza.
It came to him one day, as if by divine illumination.
Just one snowflake.
Just one snowflake.
Kenji had adopted his younger sister’s last words into his poem. Suffering from a high fever, delirious and hallucinating, she asks for something to cool her down. Asks for just one snowflake to slake her thirst and cool her body. It’s a scene of such despair, and yet such beauty—the beauty of siblinghood and love.
Akashi was never good at improvising, but was complimented on his “spontaneity” in musical performance. He’d taken some composition classes long ago, and read up on the basics of composition before he sat down to begin writing.
Alright, so the right hand will be the little sister, hovering between life and death, wondering whether to heed the call of the heavens. The left hand will be the mortal, material Kenji, who has traveled all the world and all the void, doing his damnedest to keep her alive.
As soon as this basic structure was set, the melodies, the music had just flowed out of him. After a week, his cadenza had become over five minutes, and so he trimmed it down until three minutes. Knowing his other pieces, it couldn’t be longer than that.
But it was a difficult task to murder one’s darlings. One day, in frustration, he played his whole cadenza to his wife. She had said it “sounds crowded and heavy.” His wife, who had nothing in particular to set her apart from any person off the street (musically speaking), sometimes gave him the best, most unbiased, most honest advice.
He remembered sitting down at his desk and destroying it all.
He then wrote down his ideas afresh; when she heard that version, she had smiled and nodded: “I like it.” A few days later, he even heard her whistling his “just one snowflake” motif while doing the dishes; he hoped it would stick similarly in the judges’ minds.
And so only when he had finished his cadenza to Spring and Havoc did he think his odds of passing the Second Round non-negligible.
Besides his wife, the world premiere of his cadenza, and the last-ever performance of this cadenza, would be today.
He felt it was something of a waste—it was really good!—but that made him want it to be perfect even more. He had heard that the composer himself, Hishinuma, would judge for the Second Round and give a special prize.
How will my cadenza do? How will it stand up to the harsh glare of the audience, the composer, the world?
While he meandered over those thoughts, the five-minute bell clanged through his consciousness.
I’m next.
He straightened his back.
* * *
He felt much better once he was onstage. The four or five hours backstage and outside had been much worse. But that, in turn, had been much better than the hours and days before the First Round.
Indeed, he was glad just not to have to wait anymore.
I want to play. I want to become one with the audience. I can’t take it anymore.
His heart cried out to play, but he thought maybe it was the condemned wishing that the executioner would hurry the hell up.
In his experience, he’s had plenty of times when he had become overexcited before a performance. He tended to become energetic, antsy, feeling like he could sprint a mile or jump to the moon.
And then he would take that feeling straight onstage.
In the past, as soon as he began to play, he knew whether it was a good excitement or a bad excitement. Whether he was just trying to escape the crush of pre-performance nerves, or whether he really couldn’t wait to start playing.
Is today’s excitement real? he asked himself. He felt no response.
How had it been that previous concert? When I made it to finals?
He tried to remember, but it was nothing more than a smudge in the panorama of memory.
How did I feel. Was I accepting, content, calm? Was I levelheaded?
I think so.
Or maybe I just want to believe that.
He pressed his hands into his lap. The keyboard gleamed before him.
Maybe I just want to believe that these hands were confident, that they pulled it off, that they could pull it off again.
He felt a breeze. He looked out, but he only saw the eager faces of his audience, no open door or cracked ceiling.
Everything was still.
He pressed harder into his lap. He felt a calm come over him.
He looked out into the audience again. There was a door just barely ajar.
Beyond that door, my grandmother’s silkworms live on.
He glanced at the audience and found Michiko, on the left side, fifth row, aisle seat.
There she is. How did I find her so easily.
He put his hands on the keys. There were no feelings—no joy, no excitement, no nervousness.
* * *
He fell into the piece as he would music he’d known since childhood.
He walks along the mung bean bushes where the silkworms chomp and poop and chomp and poop and produce the material for beautiful, impossible fabrics.
Kenji walks along his childhood paths, the creeks, the greens, the groves.
He looks up at the night sky. He feels the void above him.
All substances are eternal; all return to the void. We exist but for a moment—a moment too brief even to register in the history of the universe.
The universe churns. The universe swirls.
And the music channels its aimless, chaotic energy.
He’s reached the cadenza.
Just one snowflake.
Just one snowflake.
Kenji’s voice echoes through the landscape. A lonely echo, spreading and spreading through the void. His cadenza likewise echoes, tolls, fades.
He finished out the piece austerely, tersely.
Everything goes gray, dies out into a flat colorless plane. The universe is become a void—but it will come again.
The last chord, aching and unresolved, pianississimo.
Akashi takes his hands off the keyboard, and lets the sound disperse through the hall. It is quiet.
Now. Chopin. “Black Keys.” He’s practiced it so much that he felt his hands had been created with the knowledge of how to play it already within them.
His fingers scampered smoothly.
Am I OK?
Akashi blinked as he played. It felt as though someone else was playing, as though he was hovering just outside his body.
The brisk, cheeky étude. Akashi, you’re doing pretty well. It’s even a little roguish—I like it!
Next, the Liszt-Paganini étude. Number six: theme and variations.
It’s an étude that brings the energetic theme to life. It’s fiery and fleeting. He loved this one.
I like your agitato. The fingers, the arms, the shoulders feel good too. Keep on bringing the theme out to the foreground, just like that.
It was pretty incredible how his fingers just danced and danced. He couldn’t believe that they were his. He felt like a puppet.
He felt good.
Good, but in control when he needed to be. He paced himself, keeping things to a reasonable tempo, not letting sentimentalism or bravado get the better of him.
The piece ended triumphantly. He didn’t feel at all tense, but even so, he let out a sigh. He had the Arabeske and Petrushka ahead of him.
Suddenly, he felt as though he had mainlined some serum of fear. The Arabeske is more than a little difficult, and so harmonically simple that any wrong note was immediately noticeable. Noticing your own wrong note makes you more nervous, which leads to more wrong notes, which … well, he might as well go home at that point. He loved the piece, but it was where he was most likely to crash.
He liked Schumann, a lot. He wanted to play his Fantasy in C someday.
Whenever he played the Arabeske, he thought back to his childhood for some reason. Around when he began to play, he had gone to his grandmother’s house, and heard a silkworm eating for the first time. The minute yet unearthly crunching sound scared him—and inexplicably made him want to cry.
He couldn’t place the memory or even know whether it was real, but there you go.
Oh, it’s over?
I can’t believe the Arabeske is over.
Just one piece left now.
Three Movements from Petrushka.
Let’s send my music forward, outward into the world. A music as clear and hard and certain as a bell.
Glissandi, charming and pearly.
Colorful chords and bursts of energy.
Akashi felt a change come over him.
I feel as though I can see colors. The colors of Petrushka. Bright and modern and soulful, tempered only by the limits of possibility.
The music rang out joyfully. The hall overflowed with Akashi’s glowing, warming tones. The air trembled.
And the climax.
Akashi sprinted from the fortississimo to the finish in a single breath. The music crashed over itself like a colossal wave breaking against a spire of stone.
It’s over.
When he stood up, he realized the audience had been holding its breath as well.
He couldn’t believe it was over.
But amidst the thundering applause, watching tears stream down Michiko’s face, he could begin to accept and process it.
Wow. The Second Round is over.
1. “Miyazawa Kenji (1896-1933) was a Japanese novelist and poet of children's literature from Hanamaki, Iwate, in the late Taishō and early Shōwa periods. He was also known as an agricultural science teacher, a vegetarian, cellist, devout Buddhist, and utopian social activist.” –Wikipedia