Tag: Classical Music

Sophy Roberts: The Lost Pianos of Siberia

Before Iran, before Persian history, it was Russia, its music, literature, and history that I was preoccupied with for years. (Remember how I named a pet fish “Shosta,” after Shostakovich, who leapt out of the fishbowl to his doom, and died a very dramatic Russian death?) Adulting eventually distracted me from this obsession until Iran took over and began to burn as big a flame in my consciousness.

This book brought me back to my teen years of being fascinated with Russia. As I turned the last page of this beauty, the traveler, the pianist, and the lover of stories in me were all brimming.

After all, Russia is the country of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, of Rachmaninoff, and “piano music has run through the country like blood.”

Sophy Roberts, however, zones in on Siberia, that immense region that covers eleven percent of the world’s land mass, and home to ninety percent of Russia’s natural resources.

So, what does it have to do with pianos? A lot, apparently. This account traces how the instrument began to grip the heart of the country during the reign of Catherine the Great, how this mania was fueled by concert tours by Liszt and Clara Schumann, and how political prisoners from Poland, the land of Chopin, and Decembrist intellectuals (members of the unsuccessful revolt against Tsar Nicholas I in December 1825) who were exiled to Siberia made culture flourish in the hinterlands by bringing their books, their learning, and their music with them, leaving precious pianos in their wake. It also poignantly mentions that the only thing that survived the Romanov massacre was the piano that the young tsarevnas brought with them and on which they played during their last days.

But who would be insane enough to go to Siberia and track the lost pianos of Russia’s history? Sophy Roberts. And she’s my kind of insane. This book is already making me dream of becoming this kind of journalist and writing this kind of book when I grow up. Haha

Which lost things should I go looking for? 

P.S. One simple paragraph also made me understand the rise of Putinism and why he still has a strong following. This doesn’t mean I’m going to start being a Putin apologist, far from it. But it is a sign of a good work of journalism when it makes you see the other side of the coin.

Haruki Murakami: Absolutely on Music

“Have you converted?” asked my best friend when he learned that I was reading this book. In other words, “Have you become a Harukist?”

Murakami became extremely popular in our circle during our teens and every reader we knew waved the Haruki banner high. But both of us shared a terrible secret: We were not into Murakami. We tried. We just somehow couldn’t.

Being both musicians, it was the biggest irony, because we love classical music, grew up with music by the Beatles, and listened to jazz — excellent and key ingredients in any Murakami work. (That After Dark opening? That is sheer music! I intentionally re-read it on a trip to Tokyo as the plane landed. Is there a better prelude to that megalopolis?)

But when we were younger, at what seemed to be the height of Murakami’s popularity, we instead entered a beautiful literary space occupied by the diaries of Anaïs Nin, the gushing streams of Clarice Lispector’s consciousness, and Colette. Perhaps we cannot be blamed if we felt like we weren’t missing anything by not being into Murakami.

Twenty-ish years later, I’m tiptoeing back into Murakami’s music room to eavesdrop on his conversations with Seiji Ozawa. (Recognizable to the younger generation and the world outside of classical music as the elderly conductor who, in a wheelchair and in tears, performed Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture with the Saito Kinen Orchestra — a performance broadcasted live to outer space on the International Space Station in 2022.)

Glenn Gould breathing through the piano in the background as Leonard Bernstein conducts reassures me that, at least for now, I do not have to think about Murakami’s treatment of women in his novels.

The conversations between the two are like musical counterpoints played in tempo giusto. Writing and music as two melodic lines that diverge but remain in harmony, which oftentimes meet in unison when what the two have in common, hungry hearts and a penetrating ear for sound, “dig deeper and forge farther ahead”. 

From the contrasting conducting styles of Bernstein and Karajan, to the presence of “ma” (a Japanese word for the musical quality of pauses and empty spaces charged with meaning in Asian music) in Gould’s interpretations, to the dissection of Brahms’ orchestration, to the difference of sound between the world’s best orchestras, to John Coltrane’s free jazz, to Mahler’s music and the art of his time… I came out from my eavesdropping feeling more enlightened as a musician and as a person.

What a dream to listen to these conversations all day whilst partaking of Yoko Murakami’s rice cakes…

“…you can’t write well if you don’t have an ear for music. The two sides complement each other: listening to music improves your style; by improving your style, you improve your ability to listen to music… So how did I learn how to write? From listening to music. And what’s the most important thing in writing? It’s rhythm. No one’s going to read what you write unless it’s got rhythm. It has to have an inner rhythmic feel that propels the reader forward.” — Haruki Murakami, Absolutely on Music