1. Maestro
Seiji Ozawa died a few months ago.1
I began writing this on the day it happened, and didn’t finish. I don’t think whatever the concept of this piece deserved (my imagined concept of this piece, or my investment in what this piece should be, that transcends anything my fingers could bring to this screen)—what an essay that dared introduce itself with Ozawa’s name and photo deserved—was with me yet.
In any case, I’m once again writing about a conductor.
The two attributes that I most often hear used to characterize Ozawa are his mop of hair and his physical style of conducting. As Anthony Fogg2 put it, “to watch Seiji conduct was like watching a great dancer.” With his body and mind as a vessel, he internalized the music he conducted to such an extent that he could bring it to life in—again Fogg’s3 words—a “corporeal” way.
I don’t entirely know why I felt drawn to write about Ozawa or why he had impacted me, but I think it has something to do with the Great Dancer Theory of his physical articulation. The dancers are everywhere. I remember learning once that Hilary Hahn took ballet lessons as a child—the kind of control this training gives a person over their physicality is hard to unsee. I don’t know that Ozawa feels like a trained dancer in the same sense, but he gives some of the energy.
I was not expecting to write about a conductor again so soon, and I also did not expect to be reading Murakami again so soon.
Basically, I believe that music exists to make people happy. In order to do so, those who make music use a wide range of techniques and methods which, in all their complexity, fascinate me in the simplest possible way. (Absolutely On Music)
If music makes its hearers happy, what of its makers? One of the most evocative pictures Murakami paints of Ozawa in the introduction involves the necessity of his work: after a few months of recuperation from his surgery for esophageal cancer, in 2010, Ozawa conducts a dramatic comeback concert with the Saito Kinen orchestra. He needs a full six months to recover from the extreme physical toll this concert takes on him.
Once he recovers, he takes to the podium again.
And again, this time in Geneva.4
And again, in Paris.5
Watching all this, Murakami comes to the conclusion that his friend can’t help it; he has to engage in his creative work, to periodically inject music in his veins, to feel alive.
It’s funny—ironic even—the things we will do to feel alive. For a maestro as for a mythmaker, the process that produces a spectacular Mahler 9, a novel bursting at the seams with life-force, involves that overused, persistent word that so many of us are familiar with and tired of: grinding. Watch Bo Burnham’s Inside, then watch him repeat two lines of “Welcome to the Internet” in the Outtakes, over and over and over6 again, until it just “feels right.”
This kind of repetition is inevitable, but it’s also dangerous in ways. With Sibelius, I’ve found a bistable equilibrium during practice sessions: I’ll spend a long time on the first movement’s heroic theme and feel a sort of emotional exhaustion as I try to “inject the music into my veins” and give it what resonance I can; I’ll finger the runs from the exposition or the arpeggios in the cadenza until they sound like nothing.7
The second disjunct feels like repeating a word again, and again, and again, until it seems to lose its meaning and fails to sound like anything at all. Instead of a bard almost singing a narrative, you’re a policy debater spreading D&G at 300 words per minute: energetic yet lifeless, articulate and monotonous. Did you even read Anti-Oedipus cover to cover, or are you just trying to win a round?
So, what do you do? How do you prevent your story, your symphony, from turning into word soup or into a student’s etude? You live, I guess. You trudge on, you observe people, you think about things. Murakami makes it sound like, if you do this for a long time, you will collect enough raw materials and thought-glue to craft something compelling.
But, again, what do you write? What do you compose? “THE NY TYRANT GUIDE TO NOT BEING A HORRIBLE WRITER IN THE YEAR 2010” instructs us not to “write what we know.” This article’s author is a modern-day Socrates8: how can you write what you know when you don’t know anything?
And, yet, at the same time, everything is material. Your failure as a violinist is your material for a violin concerto that intimidates even the best violinist. Your (terrible? great? erstwhile? future?) husband is material for your personal essays. Your friends are material for your essays about whether you have friends or not. Your argument about how nothing9 means anything10 and that music should only be a site for aesthetics is material for your symphonies.
I forgot about Ozawa for a few moments—this essay was supposed to be about Ozawa, or something related to Ozawa, so I should probably get back to the point (let’s collectively agree to forget, for the brief time you’re reading this essay, that there is no point, because there never is any point except the one you and I have materialized, is there?).
I wanted to understand what Ozawa was talking about when he discussed his differences with Herbert von Karajan, so I turned to something familiar. If you listen, side by side, to their recordings of Tchaikovsky’s 5th Symphony, you may start to understand why Karajan got so mad at Ozawa for “doing too much work.” When you listen to the first movement, you can more or less tell that Ozawa is consciously cueing each section of the orchestra in—you can hear each instrument distinctly, and the way their sound comes together is “bottom up,” for lack of a better term.
Karajan’s sound, by contrast, mimics his philosophy: set the tone of the piece, impose on your musicians the sound you want, and let them figure out the finer details of how they must work together to achieve that sound. Maybe this was another reason I liked Ozawa: there is something about his style that is quixotic and not quixotic. Ozawa was not a “natural” talent as a conductor; besides, opening up the door for the musicians in the orchestras he worked with to assert themselves did not make things any easier for him. Interpretation becomes a matter of debate. It demands argument. It could falter on a single string.
Ozawa “came of age” as a conductor under some of the greats: he learned from Karajan and Saito, was an assistant conductor for Leonard Bernstein. He witnessed Mahler—beyond the grave—ascend from ignored to a staple of the orchestral repertoire. In conversation with Murakami, Ozawa recounted an occasion when Karajan asked him to substitute as conductor for Mahler.
Separated by his teachers by the musical moment, the historical moment, by his life. Is it any wonder he sounds so different from them?
I like to imagine I can make something of Ozawa’s conducting with what feel like platitudes the moment I put them to paper: his dancing and physicality; his conception of orchestra as participatory democracy (though not quite). But these bare attributes, on their own, do not make Seiji Ozawa who he was. I can’t know Ozawa in the way Murakami or his friends or family or teachers or students knew them. I can only hope they carry the worlds of his presence in their hearts, lest the person he really was—and not my image of him—fade away.
2. Mythmaker
Just as conductors come in different shapes, sizes, and temperaments, so too do writers and storytellers. The Karajan-Ozawa comparison reminds me of another I’d made:
I wonder if Tolstoy is to Dostoevsky as Karajan is to Ozawa. Mikhail Bakhtin helped me find better words than my own for the flip in preference I experienced, returning to the Russians five years or so after I first laid eyes on Anna Karenina. Coincidentally enough, the best analogy I could find to compare the two, prior to reading Bakhtin, was about conductors: Tolstoy felt like a domineering conductor, overseeing an obedient orchestra in a brilliant, disciplined performance. Dostevsky’s character-worlds felt more emergent, the conductor flailing his baton and moving this way and that as he used his entire body to bring the orchestra in order. The orchestra’s sections—each player—acting on their own accord, somehow come together to produce a harmony no one could command from them.
And yet, you know that this threat of cacophony, every movement of bow on string, every breath, has been choreographed. Someone wrote the book, after all. Someone had to read the score, to interpret the piece.
I don’t know how cleanly we can separate the parts of reading and writing and performance that are mythmaking and those that try to preserve something of history, of the world as it existed through people’s eyes. Does it matter?
creative Fantasy is founded upon the hard recognition that things are so in the world as it appears under the sun; on a recognition of fact, but not a slavery to it. So upon logic was founded the nonsense that displays itself in the tales and rhymes of Lewis Carroll. If men really could not distinguish between frogs and men, fairy-stories about frog-kings would not have arisen (On Fairy Stories, 27).
So, for Tolkien, Fantasy generates a kind of paradox out of the Real. Where else do we find this in literature? In Joyce, we find a Dublin in proportions as expansive and limitless as the universe of Milton’s Paradise Lost, “an illusion of epic sweep and scope while contriving to stay closely in touch with [Joyce’s] home.” All of life is here. Why travel?11
The archaeologists of our most recent century sought to understand whether that deep Achaean realm from which emerges so much of our literary heritage came from sources real or imagined, single or multiple: was there one Homer or many?
The archaeologists’ Homer—one of the many Homers we find in the pages of Ulysses—proves an equally powerful “transposer of actualities,” transfiguring a single city into the whole world. Samuel Butler finds it natural that Homer was “richly endowed with that highest kind of. imagination which consists in wise selection and judicious application of materials derived from life.” That Butler feels material improvements upon the familiar result in inevitable failure feel, on face, at odds with the demands Fantasy places on its inventors.
Tolkien’s Fantasy was, as we know, informed by his real life—the writer himself would only admit that The Lord of the Rings had certain connections with the Great War. Historian Hugh Brogan wrote of these connections:
War and Faërie have a certain resemblance to one another. Both are set beyond the reach of ordinary human experience. Both are equally indifferent to the needs of ordinary humanity. Both can change those who return so that they become 'pinned in a kind of ghostly deathlessness', not just unable to say where they have been but unable to communicate to those who have not been there what they have seen or experienced. Perhaps worst of all, both war and Faërie can change out of all recognition the wanderer's perception of the world to which he returns, so that never again can it be what it once was.
Is Faërie the only setting in a work of fiction that can alter our perceptions of the world, the only kaleidoscope that brooks no return to the world of the naked eye? Upon logic we found nonsense. Upon War we found Faërie. Upon a few square miles we found the whole wide world. Somehow, perhaps, those of us who are capable do all this without demanding improvements upon that which is actually there.
Returning to Murakami: he has frustrated me at times. “Music exists to make people happy.” Is that it, or am I looking for something which isn’t there? In Novelist as a Vocation, he presents an incredibly prosaic picture of how his novels come to be. Somehow, I couldn’t meld together the person describing himself and the person who penned those lines I’d savored in a sterile cafe at 2am, one winter break in high school, as I watched the countless shapes of so, so many people I didn’t know:
Where was I now? I had no idea. No idea at all. Where was this place? All that flashed into my eyes were the countless shapes of people walking by to nowhere. Again and again I called out for Midori from the dead center of this place that was no place (Norwegian Wood).
I don’t know whether Murakami-the-morning-writer and Murakami-the-guy-who-produced-this-line are the same person, different souls living in the same body, something else. Proust warned in Contre Sainte-Beuve not to use information about an artist’s life as a person to inform one’s assessment of their art. But that’s not exactly what’s happening here.
It feels hard to take Murakami’s mindset about music, and imagine someone producing certain works of fiction with that mindset. Consider Joyce’s Dublin, via Kenner:
he worked to illuminate from within the actual fictions by which Dublin lived. His stories contain not only stories he might have written but did not, they contain also the stories people tell themselves: that there exists for instance on the other side of the world happiness with a man named (properly) Frank. They contain also ghosts of stories that have been more majestically told (The Pound Era, 40).
A literary “high mass” can’t come from a place that simply tries to produce happiness (its creator, probably, wouldn’t claim to know what happiness is). But part of this origin’s inscrutability is that, perhaps, it is just as much a mystery to the author we so admire as it is to us. Tom Mullaney, whose history of the Chinese typewriter so entranced me, began his Preface to The Chinese Typewriter with the following words: “What is your question?”
Watch him towards the end of this interview, conducted 14 years ago, and you’ll find that he didn’t know why he was pursuing the typewriter project. When I asked him whether he’d figured it out, he said yes, but it clearly wasn’t a straightforward answer or journey. Think again of Ozawa’s compulsion to return to the stage in the face of exhaustion—there is something there, motivating him to do what he does. Injecting music into his veins is one explanation, but is that it?
And think again of Murakami. When I try reconciling the man who writes the books he writes with the man who writes about how he writes the books he writes, some parts make sense: the women in his novels feel criminally underdeveloped at times (when you don’t think about this as underdevelopment, you sometimes have the experience of a mysterious, ethereal quality to their presence), and perhaps Murakami is limited by what he’s able to observe of the world around him. After reading four or five of his books, you start to notice the similarities in narrative structure and character roles, and it can start to blend together. Within the confines of a single novel, you might still wonder why the author had to produce the words you’re reading.
3. ???
A famous episode in the history of music remains one of the most controversial in the history of the distinguished New York Philharmonic. On April 6, 1962, Leonard Bernstein, about to conduct the first Brahms Piano Concerto with Glenn Gould at the keys, did something no one—no one—does at the beginning of a concert.
From the podium, Bernstein remarks:
I'm not, um, as you know, in the habit of speaking on any concert except the Thursday night previews, but a curious situation has arisen, which merits, I think, a word or two. You are about to hear a rather, shall we say, unorthodox performance of the Brahms D Minor Concerto, a performance distinctly different from any I've ever heard, or even dreamt of for that matter, in its remarkably broad tempi and its frequent departures from Brahms' dynamic indications.
So, in the face of disagreement, why conduct anyway? Bernstein answers the question himself:
But, but this time the discrepancies between our views are so great that I feel I must make this small disclaimer. Then why, to repeat the question, am I conducting it? Why do I not make a minor scandal – get a substitute soloist, or let an assistant conduct it? Because I am fascinated, glad to have the chance for a new look at this much-played work. Because, what's more, there are moments in Mr. Gould's performance that emerge with astonishing freshness and conviction. Thirdly, because we can all learn something from this extraordinary artist, who is a thinking performer, and finally because there is in music what Dimitri Mitropoulos used to call "the sportive element", that factor of curiosity, adventure, experiment, and I can assure you that it has been an adventure this week collaborating with Mr. Gould on this Brahms concerto and it's in this spirit of adventure that we now present it to you.
“In the spirit of adventure”—what a thrill it must be to watch a great inventor of the age show off his creation.
It is episodes like this where we get to see beneath the surface, just a bit, into the minds and disagreements between the artists we often mythologize. The artists and those around them play some role in the mythologies we are able to construct. To draw an example from mythos itself, Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein speaks about his duality as a conductor-composer: he carries around a public and a private personality, which generate tension within him.
Maestro sits among a number of recent works that—in various ways—have deglamorized the artistic process. Murakami’s Novelist as a Vocation fits the bill. And from the few experiences I have of critics discussing this, it seems that this deglamorization is a welcome trend.
I hope that the deglamorization of the artistic process doesn’t wrest from our hands the beauty we’re willing to attribute to art itself—the transcendental experiences it can generate for those who create and consume it.
wrote about how, in an excellent DJ, he saw “those who spend their free time languishing in the creative process, searching for divinity or salvation or something else entirely in an impossible task.”For all the weirdness I see in the AI world, one thing it does seem to get right is that what feels like a rote, mechanical process is somehow able to produce something that affects us deeply. You can describe a transformer, and be surprised what happens when you use an LLM; you can describe every physical motion Ozawa and his orchestra make, and sit in wonder at how they make you feel12. Languishing yields divination, maybe. If you’re lucky; if you’re brilliant; if something beyond you decides to unfold itself and allow you to glimpse its essence.13
I think I’ve said everything I have to say right now—I’ll tie up the loose threads in one of the possible futures. For now, I’ll leave you with this note from Peli Grietzer.14
on February 6, 2024, to be exact.
I could give you an epithet to tell you who Anthony Fogg is, or I could do what some writers do and not say anything because you’ll probably Google his name if you really want to know
he’s a trained pianist and vice-president of artistic planning for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. happy?
I visited Geneva once, in middle school, because I had a distant relation there—the only memories I have of Geneva are of a stomach flu that occupied nearly my entire stay.
I’ve also visited Paris twice, and both times found myself at the American Hospital. I get the feeling that Ozawa and I have something in common, in the physical tolls these places have exerted on us.
that’s three “overs”—he probably practiced this at least three times, but I’m willing to bet he did a little more than that.
or maybe they sound like Being, because Being, according to Hegel, is in fact Nothing. you can prove this in a few steps. noting that we’re at one part of the Logic, the whole section starts with “all of philosophy must begin with pure Being.” the argument, intuitively stated, proceeds with something like: pure Being can’t have any determinate qualities (is it red? no. is it shaped like a pencil? no. it’s pure. it can’t be described with any label in this way). it’s the mere fact that something exists. something without determinations is Nothing.
I think I don’t need to tell you who this guy is
Graham Priest has some really cool stuff on non-existent objects and mereology.
this is slightly incorrect, because Nothing is Being and not Anything (unless non-determinate Being is also Anything, but it’s also kind of not?)
Agnes Callard seems to think you shouldn’t. and that’s enough Agnes Callard discourse for five essays
something something Mary and the color red
I don’t know if I’m worth listening to about this, since I can’t claim to have created anything worthy of being called Art in the true sense.
who is this guy