New Musical Friends
About a month ago, I had the great privilege
of playing two concerts with people I had just met – one of the many Beauties of
Music - and thus making new very interesting friends: two beautiful musicians
from Japan came to Canada for just over a week and offered me the occasion to
learn a little bit more about their culture…just enough to have a glimpse into
how much I really do not know, and even that, it was just a glimpse.
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| After our concert in Toronto |
Takayo and Yasutaka (www.x-iksa.com) come from Matsue, a town on a river that connects two close lakes, hence acquiring sometimes the nickname of the Water City - a Japanese Venice?
Of course I had to check on a map: first of
all I discovered that Matsue is very close to one of the oldest Shinto Shrines
of Japan, Izumo Taisha, just on the other side of one of the lakes.
That’s when I first discovered that, really,
I knew NOTHING of Shinto. This ancient native Japanese religion recognizes
the presence of the divine spirits in nature: mountains, forests, and even rain,…can
contain a kami, which is a worldly
manifestation of the spiritual powers.
These spirits, which give life to humans, will return to nature after
the death of a person in a renewable cycle. The physical “residence” of kami, a shintai, is a physical object such as Mount Fuji, waterfalls,
mirrors, swords, jewels, such as, for instance, a Magatama!
Thus I discovered that the wonderful pendant I often wear and that was brought
to me from a recent trip to Japan, is actually a comma-shaped bead whose
history can be traced back to Japan’s culture already in 1000BC! In ancient times
it was made of stones, of course, and only successively mostly in jade.
It is such an important symbol that it is found also as part of a bridge in Matsue!
Interestingly, it was the beginning of
agriculture which determined the need to attract the life spirits – kami -to ensure good harvests, and so
the first shrines appeared. Around the 6th Century, though, Buddhism
made its way to Japan, introducing the idea of a shrine that would now be
permanent. For a long time the Buddhist temples and the Shinto shrines
coexisted, with the temple built next to an existing shrine. From an
architectural point of view, an interesting fact is that Shinto shrines were
traditionally rebuilt at regular intervals, strictly following each time the
original plan and design, and so are preserved till today almost intact, to
protect the shintai and the kami which inhabits it.
Back to Matsue, one of its most famous
ruler, Matsudaira Fumai, was a great enthusiast of the Tea Ceremony – a ritual that I have been finding incredibly intriguing lately - and a renowned tea master
himself, and thus in 1779 built a famous tea house, which is still there: Meimei-An.
There are special sweets – Wagashi -which
are consumed during the Tea Ceremony, and Matsue is famous for several kinds, but the Wakakusa is the most famous one, the Spring one! I will have to visit my new friends in the Spring.
A big discovery for me during this concert was
the music of Toru Takemitsu, which I had of course studied in school, but never
really worked on closely. I played his Rain Tree Sketches II, written in
memoriam Olivier Messiaen. Not much is written in English, but I discovered that the whole concept of the
Rain Tree comes from several stories by Nobel laureate Kenzaburo Oe, where the
infinite tiny leaves of this life tree collect the rain and disperse it during
droughts. It is beautiful and magical music, which, from a purely pianistic point of
view, feels incredibly like playing Ravel, in particular my beloved Jeux d’eau.
A little Japanese side story - not
surprising, knowing me -: on my way to my European Tour this past Fall, I met on the plane
a wonderful Japanese Shiatsu Practicioner who lives in Toronto and with whom I
became fast friends. Naturally, I invited him and his wife to our Japanese
concert and it turns out he was coming with a great friend who is a violin maker here in Toronto, Mr. Masa
Inokuchi. So, of course, after our concert we all were invited to see this incredible
place where this wonderful family works untiringly on shaping, tapping,
scraping, drying wood to make violins, violas, cellos and double basses! (www.inokuchiviolin.com)
With the not so good wood they make cutting
boards: I got one as a gift and now proudly chop my veggies on a missed back of
a violin.
Please allow me one last Japanese thread: all
this thinking of Japan brought me to have a special eye for anything Japanese
in my daily life and so, looking at the wallet I carry every day, in a
Proustian leap I suddenly went to two wonderful neighbors I had when I lived in
Vancouver: Jun Wada and his wife Mary, who came to many of my concerts and gave
the wallet to me on one occasion. As I discovered only after moving to Toronto,
our quiet and friendly neighbor is in fact an incredibly famous neurologist,
whose major research changed the world in the field of epilepsy. But then
again, many of the people who lived on that street are very very special human
beings.
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| This is from wonderful Mary |
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| ...and these are from my beautiful Friend Becky |
また近いうちに
