3: Rondo Capriccioso
In the corner of the lobby sat a boy with his hat on firmly, swaying slightly as he listened to the music being broadcast from inside the hall. Sitting low, in simple clothing, he was hardly noticeable. He looked like a neighborhood boy who had stopped by for a moment, not a qualifier for the Second Round and a favorite to win the entire competition.
The first thing the boy had felt when he had heard that he was continuing to the Second Round was relief.
He was one step closer toward getting a piano.
This was his honest reaction.
He hadn’t been confident he’d make it. Forget concert experience, he’d hardly had any performance experience, so he couldn’t really tell how good or bad he was. But Hugh von Hoffman had said, “Jin, you just play as you always do. You don’t need to pay any mind to what anyone else says. You are precious.” And so he played freely, as he always did.
Those contestants he had heard were all smooth and splendid in their musicianship. He was very, very impressed. Their technique was flawless. But he wasn’t insecure or questioning of his own music—he just liked their music, too. He had absolute faith in Maestro, and if he supported him, then all he had to do was play.
And anyhow, no matter how technically perfect they were, if he let his thoughts wander for a second, the music never seemed very interested in keeping up the conversation, either.
The boy, who happened to be named Jin Kazama, has always had essentially a physiological reaction to music. When he hears music he likes, he sways. And when he listens to music that’s technically flawless and not much else, he falls asleep.
He doesn’t know it, by the way, but he also sways when he’s dozing—or asleep. So onlookers can’t exactly tell—maybe they think he’s always dozing, or that he’s always intensely focused.
—Listen, Maestro had said. Listen, Jin. The world is full of music. Only those who can hear it all can truly make their own.
Jennifer Chan’s music made his eyes go wide at first, but then he jolted awake and realized he had fallen asleep.
I was having fun.
He rubbed his eyes.
Also, he found himself thinking, every piano really was different. As different as one person to the next. He’s played lots of pianos, occasionally in shall we say unusual environments, and so he’s learned to draw out his music no matter where he happens to be.
He could tell a good piano from an okay one almost just by looking at it. He remembered the nearly sacred feeling he had looking at his First Round piano. He had wanted to caress it, to embrace it. And, even when he’s far away from a piano, he can usually make out whether it’s a good one or not. Good pianos seemed almost to shout at him, “Over here, I’m over here!”
When he was walking by the conservatory at night a few days ago, that cry was what he had heard. He hadn’t expected to be caught, and certainly not to be caught by the pretty girl he saw onstage yesterday.
He didn’t fall asleep during her performance, no sir.
He thought that competitions were an odd way to judge pianists, but he was having fun. He’s never heard so much music in his life.
He’s dampened by the sound, the sound seeps into him and throughout his body, he breathes the sound in and lets it out … and in the process, he loses all sense of time, and his mind floats away.
The Second Round’s standard of performance has been much higher than the First; he’s been able to drink it all in and just enjoy it. But he also hears Maestro’s words in his head.
—You have to know what your own music sounds like, Jin. You have to understand how it will be heard by others. The instrument, too. You have to know what your music will sound like on this instrument versus that instrument. Don’t make your music fight the instrument. Let it flow through the instrument.
—Music has to be “present.” It can’t be some artifact in a museum’s display case—it has to breathe, and live, and die. Otherwise, it—and any art that isn’t alive—is nothing.
He felt a breeze on his cheek. The hall’s doors had opened.
He really liked the performance he had just heard, Akashi Dakashima’s. A pond’s micro-ripples; a passing wind, a void dark as death. Akashi also knew how to express his music.
He thought that something about the music felt like the textured muteness of falling snow.
The snow brought him back to a day with Maestro, when they had played an electric keyboard he had found in the motel he and his father were staying for the night. They had traded melodies back and forth, improvising on the theme they received and adding new ones. Playing, having fun, not counting the minutes or hours passing by.
The winter wind whistling by, the roar of the nearby highway making the windows shudder in their panes, the heater hissing out bursts of steam. And an unstoppable stream of music.
If only I could recreate that music now. On that stage, with that piano, alongside Maestro.
The boy was saddened then. He was sad for the music. When he first sat in the hall, he couldn’t close his mouth. He could hear the music so well, every note so well. The hall let the music wrap around him. The piano was perfect.
But after a few days, he felt uncomfortable, claustrophobic.
In the hall, he could focus and listen, but he didn’t want to trap the music in this dark room, built of brick and stone. He wanted to let it be free.
He imagined countless bees being released from a chamber into the vast world beyond.
The sound would be absorbed, and interfered, and blocked. It’d be harder to hear. But the sound would make friends, friends with the sound of nature.
But a few days after that, the boy had a different thought.
There might be nature here. Nature in the performers. In their hometowns, and experiences, and memories, and dreams and fears. In their eyes, at their fingertips, on their lips, within their stomachs. The nature in them manifests itself unconsciously, as they play their music and search their memories.
And, with good music, he could feel that nature. In the case of Akashi, he felt himself floating in that void conjured by the music.
But he couldn’t improvise, not in the way he did with Maestro. That was his one complaint about competitions, the one thing he really didn’t like.
Great music, music he wouldn’t tire of no matter how much he heard it—it was great, but also just a little constrictive. He knew it was written down, of course, and he knew it can be played in infinitely many ways. But still.
—The world is a little constrictive, Jin, isn’t it?
He remembered a conversation he had had with Maestro years ago. It was the first time he had entered the Paris Conservatory as a precollege auditor. When he murmured that he wanted to take the music that was all wrapped up in appropriate decorum and lighted just so in the perfect space out into the open, Maestro had chuckled. And he had said, as though a thought had just occurred to him, Then do it, Jin. Bring the music into the open. Into the world.
He had been confused.
Maestro looked at him with a bottomless depth in his eyes. He frightened him when he had his look.
—But, Jin, it won’t be easy, he had said. Bringing music into the open, and being true of heart in the process, is so, so hard. You know what I mean, right? It’s not the hall, or the church, which is keeping music locked up. It’s people. People are locking up the best music. Can you really say you’ve brought it into the open just because you’re playing music somewhere outside, somewhere pretty? Can you really say you’ve freed it?
Jin, in all honesty, didn’t have much of an idea what he was going on about.
In truth, Maestro had just given Jin an unfathomably difficult, unfathomably heavy task.
Sometime after that, Maestro had suggested the competition to him. Maestro was sick by then, rarely leaving home, even more rarely receiving visitors. Not for lack of them, of course—he just didn’t want to show himself in his state.
Jin had been inconsolable. Here was his only Maestro, a Maestro who occupied in his imagination the role of a second father. Because of his nomadic lifestyle, following his (real) father about, finding a teacher or a piano had been no easy task.
It had been two weeks since he had seen Maestro last when he sprinted to the door and jammed the doorbell. But there had been no response. He peered into the windows, and saw all the rooms dark and cold. He felt a shiver run throughout his body.
Not even Madame is here!
In his anxiety, he felt as though his heart would crumble. Not having any way of knowing where they were, he sat down on their stoop like a lost puppy and fell asleep.
—Jin!
The next morning, Maestro and Madame arrived—purely by chance. They had been away for Maestro’s treatment, and, when they saw Jin outside on their lawn, they both screamed and began scolding him, what if they hadn’t come back for a week, he could have gotten a cold, why didn’t he use the key they told him about (he had forgotten).
—Madame Daphne wasn’t here, and, and, I just—
Jin began crying like a small child.
—Let’s go inside. I’ll make you some cocoa.
Maestro tussled his hair. I’m not leaving yet, not while you’re still here weeping when something like this happens. Because one day, I’ll leave, and I won’t come back. You have to be strong, Jin.
Jin nodded, holding back tears.
—I’m not afraid, Jin, he said as he patted Jin rather hard on the shoulders. Jin, you’re the gift I’m leaving the world on my way out. A gift more beautiful than anything else in the world.
—No, Maestro, don’t leave.
—Damn it, Jin. I haven’t left yet, so stop your blubbering, Maestro laughed, jolly and avuncular.
He couldn’t remember seeing Maestro so happy. As though he was about to play some grand prank, barely holding in a laugh as he watched from behind a bush.
Maestro, how can I bring my music into the open?
The boy realized he had tears rolling down his cheeks. He asked and asked, swaying to the music, but didn’t hear anything.
On day, I promise you, I’m going to bring it out.