The Last Samurai (26 page)

Or people would say Do you think you’ll ever go back to Africa

and he would say Well I’d like to go back someday because my last visit wasn’t as helpful as I had hoped from a musical point of view.

ST: How did this lead up to what people have called the Wigmore Hall debacle?

Yamamoto: Well my agent had made the booking a long time before. What I thought at this time was that music was not about sound but about perception of sound which means in a sense that to perceive what it is you need also some sense of what it could be but is not which includes other types of sounds and also silence.

ST: The Wigmore Hall?

Yamamoto: To put it another way, let’s just take a little phrase on the piano, it sounds one way if you’ve just heard a big drum and another way if you’ve heard a gourd and another way if you’ve heard the phrase on another instrument and another way again if you’ve just heard nothing at all—there are all kinds of ways you can hear the same sound. And then, if you’re practising, you hear a phrase differently depending on how you’ve just played it, you might play it twenty or thirty different ways and what it actually is at any time depends on all those things it might be—

ST: It sounds a little like Gould’s decision to leave the concert stage because he could get a better piece of music in the recording studio.

Yamamoto: No, not at all, Gould would play the same piece nine or ten times and probably each one would be perfect and different and then using the technology he’d produce a single version which would amalgamate one or more of those, in other words there’s the idea that multiplicity and the possibility of failure and perception of the taking of decisions are only for the performer, what you give the audience is a single thing. As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t really matter whether you give them that one thing in a concert hall or in a recording that lets them play around with the settings on their sound system.

ST: The Wigmore Hall?

Yamamoto began to talk about the idea of a fragment, he said for instance when you were working on a piece you might take a section in one direction, let’s say you might keep scaling it down and down until it was barely there & then that barely there section would sometimes be enchantingly beautiful but you would realise when you came to relate it to the next section that you could only get from that to the next section by means of something crass and stupid, some stupid violent crescendo that wasn’t right or even an abrupt transition that wasn’t right or it might be that you could get from one to the other but still you wanted the next part to be hard & bright and you didn’t want something quite so bare before. Well everyone knew there were unfinished pieces Schubert’s unfinished symphony the Mozart Requiem Mahler’s Tenth Moses and Aaron & what made them unfinished was the stupid fact that the composer had not put an end to them, but if you worked on a section & got an enchantingly beautiful version that could not be used what you had in effect was a fragment, a thing that was not part of the finished work. Once you saw that you saw that you could potentially have dozens of fragments that could not be part of the finished work, and what you saw was that it was perceiving these fragments as fragments that made it possible to have a real conception of what wholeness might be in a work—and once you saw this you naturally wanted an audience to see it too because otherwise

ST: But people already complain that people listen to music in too fragmented a way. There’s already a tendency to play single movements. Aren’t you just taking this toward playing not even a movement but just part of a part of a piece? Where does that leave the composer?

Yamamoto said he thought you had to be able to hear how something did not work as part of a bigger thing to hear how it did and it was precisely because people couldn’t hear that that they were willing to let movements be taken out of pieces.

He said: Getting back to Gould I think he had a, maybe horror is the wrong word but something like a contempt for what you could call the surface of a piece, for the aspect of a piece of music that is somehow tied to the instrument, the place where you would see showmanship. The funny thing is that I somehow feel I agree with him more than anyone else even though in a way I totally disagree with him, because I agree that what you can do physically is not the thing that’s interesting. I mean, say you do a run of double octaves and maybe there’s one person in the audience who could do it or maybe nobody else in the auditorium that day could do it, that’s completely uninteresting, but of course if you’ve worked on a piece and thought about it you don’t just (you hope) play it more intelligently you hear it more intelligently, and if you’re the only person in the room really able to
hear
it that’s horrible. But I think you get around that by showing people as much of the surface as possible

The
Sunday Times
said: Getting back to the Wigmore Hall

Yamamoto said: Sure, well I said to my agent that I’d really like to play the same piece twenty times or so to give people an idea of the piece and he said even with my name the Wigmore Hall would not be able to sell tickets.

His agent had reminded him of various clauses in his contract and he had reminded him of the obligations of a professional musician.

Yamamoto said: My agent always liked to say that you could count on a Japanese to act like a true professional. He kept saying that the booking had been made and people had already bought tickets in a way that was obviously meant to appeal to a true professional. I thought: What does that mean, to be a true professional? What’s so Japanese about that?

Well, as you probably know the exchange of gifts is quite a big thing in Japan and part of it is that the gift has to be wrapped up the right way. People go there and they miss the point. They think the thing the Japanese are really worried about is wrapping it up to look right it doesn’t matter if what’s inside is a piece of shit. I thought: That’s what I’m supposed to do, they’ve already bought the wrapping paper and now I’m expected to give them a piece of shit that will fit the paper, I’m supposed to be a
true professional
and feel good about it because I gave them something that would fit the paper. I thought: There’s no point in talking about this.

Well, the big night came and people had bought their tickets to hear I think it was six Chopin Mazurkas the Barcarolle three Nocturnes and a Sonata. I thought: Well as long as I play the Mazurkas Barcarolle Nocturnes and Sonata it can’t matter what
else
I play. I’m not saying the total package was what I would have chosen but I wanted to have the sound of the piano against the contrast of percussion in its purest form and the Chopin part had already been agreed. So I had I think it was about four hours of the drums and then also six Mazurkas one Barcarolle three Nocturnes one Sonata and six Mazurkas.

ST: With the result that a lot of people missed the 11:52 out of Paddington and were not very happy.

Yamamoto: With the result that people missed the 11:52 out of Paddington.

ST: And now you haven’t given a concert in about two years?

Yamamoto: That’s right.

ST: But you’ve promised the Royal Festival Hall that no one is going to miss their train this time.

Yamamoto: Nobody is going to be walking the streets of London at two in the morning.

ST: Was that hard?

Yamamoto: I feel pretty good about it.

It said at the end that Yamamoto was appearing that night at the Royal Festival Hall.

L though not complaining looked miserable. I kept thinking about the enchantingly beautiful fragments which could not be part of the finished whole. I kept thinking of the Mazurkas against a background of percussion in its purest form. Then I thought I should be attentive to the needs of my child, who looked absolutely miserable.

I said: How would you like to go to the South Bank Centre?

L looked surprised.

I said: We can get a table to work at, and afterwards we can go to a concert.

He said: I don’t want to go to a concert.

I said: You can have a table all to yourself.

He said: Can I have an ice cream?

I said: Yes

He said: Can I have Häagen-Dazs?

I said: Yes. If they have it.

He said: Done.

I said: OK. Try to act like a rational human being.

We went to the Royal Festival Hall and I found a table as far as possible from any place selling something to eat. Ludo spread out
Call of the Wild, White Fang, Fergus, Pete, Tar-Kutu, Marduk, SQUID!, SHARK!, WOLF!, KILLER WHALE!
, and
True Tales of Survival
on a separate table. Every so often he ran off to run up and downstairs then came back then ran off then came back to work on
Odyssey
24. Oh well.

I had already bought Ludo a pencil flashlight at Embankment. I now bought two tickets for the concert at the cheapest price. At 8:00 I checked the pushchair, minus
Call of the Wild
, at the cloakroom over stiff opposition from an unhelpful attendant, and I explained to Ludo that if he got bored he could read
Call of the Wild
. I took him to the toilet and he said he didn’t have to go. I pointed out that he now knew where the toilets were, & I said that if he needed to go in the middle of the concert he could go because we had aisle seats.

I bought a programme because I thought it might have some more interesting remarks by Yamamoto. The programme for the evening was: Beethoven: 15 Variations in E
and Fugue on a Theme from Prometheus, Op. 35 (Eroica Variations); Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann, Op. 9; Webern: Variations for Piano, Op. 27. Interval. Brahms Ballades, Op. 10: No. 1 in D minor, based on the old Scottish ballad Edward; No. 2 in D major; No. 3 in B minor; No. 4 in B major.

There was a certain feeling of suspense (or at least I thought there was) as the concertgoers walked through the doors, because people were half expecting to see a collection of drums. Instead there was only a grand piano. Yamamoto walked onstage and there was a round of applause. He sat down and began to play the Eroica Variations.

The Eroica Variations came to an end and there was a round of applause. Yamamoto walked offstage and returned and sat down. He began to play the Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann.

The Variations on a Theme by Robert Schumann came to an end and there was a round of applause. Yamamoto walked offstage and returned and sat down. He began to play Webern’s Variations for Piano, Op. 27.

The Variations for Piano came to an end in six minutes flat and there was a round of applause. Yamamoto walked offstage and it was time for the interval.

I bought Ludo an ice cream and I read the Scottish ballad Edward, which was reprinted in the programme.

The interval came to an end. It was about 9:00.

We walked back into the hall and there was a soft noise as of eight out of ten people laughing softly in quick succession in the audience. There were a lot of things on stage that had not been there before. There were a lot of drums, and a set of hand bells, and two glasses of water on a stand—you couldn’t take in everything all at once. Yamamoto came back onstage to a round of applause and sat down and began to play.

At first I thought he had begun to play Op. 10 No. 1 based on the old Scottish ballad Edward, a piece I had never heard before. I realised after a while that this was not what he was doing. He was playing a couple of bars—maybe five or six chords—over and over. I had no idea whether these featured in Op. 10 No. 1 or not. Sometimes you see a painting where the painter has put paint on the canvas and then scraped almost all of it away; at first he seemed to be scraping the sound away until there was almost nothing there, but even the softest sound on a piano dies away & 9 or 10 times he seemed to bring in a pedal at different stages of this dying so that you heard the other chords over different forms of the first, or he used the sustaining pedal or no pedal at all. It was hard to know what was going on—I thought maybe this phrase did come from Op. 10 No. 1 and you were supposed to see that these were variations, but though in a sense they were variations they were not a piece. This went on for about 20 minutes or half an hour. Then there was a pause, and then he began to do the same thing with a different phrase. This went on for about 20 minutes or half an hour. Then there was a pause, and then he began to play a piece which seemed likely to be Op. 10 No. 1 based on the Scottish ballad Edward, and which did contain the two phrases he had been playing for the last hour. This went on for seven minutes. He stopped and there was a round of applause.