On Music
Music has figured in my life from early on. When I was five, our neighbor took me and his son to see the Singapore Chinese community’s cortège honoring the late King George VI. Traditionally decorated, it was accompanied by what sounded like the Cantonese operas I heard on the kitchen radio in our house. At some point I learned to whistle, and when my parents built a house in New Jersey, I joined the choir. That experience was heady and humbling in turns. As a boy soprano, you carry the melody, hit the high notes, and are startingly ignorant of harmony. I still can’t read the bass clef and harmony eludes me. When my voice broke, my range fell and shrank. I could still carry a tune, but no longer in the context of a choir.
Later in the 1950s, my father built a hi-fi from a kit that sat in a teak cabinet he built from the wooden crates our belongings were shipped back in. I listened to his collection of classical recordings — mostly symphonies, solo piano work, and the odd quintet like “The Trout.” These are still in some ways reference points, although the symphonies’ appeal has diminished.
In the second half of the 2000s, I went often to concerts, hearing a wider range of classical music and some new music. I still go to concerts, but mainly to early music in smaller venues when possible. I prefer small halls where the performers are right there, the audience not simply a mass obscured by the spotlighting. The house and barn — the backyard shed where I often write — have several stereos. Streaming is in the picture, a way to hear new recordings. I bought two British music monthlies for a while, but the local bookstore stopped carrying them. So, I just peruse what’s featured, try it out. I look at my CDs — there are many — and wonder what will become of them.
In my concert-going half decade, I heard U.C. Berkeley Professor Davitt Moroney perform four or five times. He would either accompany his performances with commentary or give a talk at the start, and I learned a lot from both. He tackled whole works, like J.S. Bach’s clavier partitas on one or several versions of that era’s claviers. A partisan of these plucking instruments, he argued for them as the better vehicle for Bach’s intent. I like Murray Perahia’s interpretation on a modern piano, but I appreciated Moroney’s enthusiasm for his instruments. The mother of one of my childhood friends had a gorgeous rosewood Steinway grand piano in her living room. She played. Her piano is another point of reference. It’s surprising to me how many grand pianos lack resonance.
Recently a woman I know who’s involved with raising funds for the university’s performance enterprise moved over to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The performances are free, and many are by student musicians. As with the early music scene here, the talent is striking. The students are less polished, more worried. One played a convoluted piano piece and ran off the stage upset over a defect lost to us and probably to most of the audience. The ensembles are especially good, energized by each other’s presence. “The Trout,” which I heard in Tokyo in 1997, played by friends of friends from Zurich, seems to have that energy embedded in it. (The first violinist was from Tokyo, surrounded afterward by local students of the instrument. Her husband, Swiss, was the pianist.)
A year later, I flew from Rome to Zurich to attend my friends’ wedding party on the lake there. They had yet another small ensemble playing. I intuited that the violinist, who led it, and the cellist were an item. The former was as flamboyant as his predecessors must have been. Such music was once contemporary and popular, I thought, and here it is again. My friends are still married, 22 years later, the husband in his 90s. They were musicians, too, but amateurs — he an architect-professor and she a psychoanalyst who worked with children. There was music on stands in their apartment. I don’t play, I only listen. Singing was my only musical talent.
I’ve been to concerts with friends who appeared absorbed, even overcome by the music. My listening is less intense. Music prompts thoughts, and I sometimes carry a pen and notebook with me to write them down. At points, with luck, the musicians catch fire. This is the thrill of live performance, spontaneous and unexpected. I heard a famous violinist demonstrate his complete mastery, but nothing more. I had no desire to hear him again.
