Inside music, with one of the new masters

REVIEW music itself. Perhaps Murakami thought that his outsider perspective — although extraordinarily familiar with the genre, he is not a musician — would ensure that Ozawa did not overly rely on technical descriptions, and thus the book would find a common language for music.

Unfortunately, this does little to allay the feeling that a critical sensory component is absent from the experience, like a movie with the sound off. Without hearing (for example) Ozawa’s conducting of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique across the decades, it is difficult to savour the development of the maestro’s style and particular nuances. History has gifted us a number of pithy quotes about the inadequacy of language to describe music, and they are apt for a reason. A reader can perhaps intuit what it means that Gould’s performance has “tension” whereas Mitsuko Uchida’s playing is “so graceful, so transparent,” but the finer details, the richness that only music can provide, is sorely missing. Psychologists refer to this as the qualia of a phenomenon: someone can read everything there is to know about the colour red, but if you have never seen the colour itself, it is impossible to appreciate what redness truly is.

Absolutely on Music therefore relies on the reader having some familiarity with the music and with Ozawa’s storied career. This is the second major hurdle of enjoying these conversations.

All this said, Murakami’s new book perhaps functions best as an inspiration to explore a beautiful genre of music that is considered niche. Thanks to Absolutely on Music encouraging me, though, I can now tell you that Beethoven’s piano concertos sound overwrought and unemotional to my ears, that Brahms is better and Berlioz better still, and that opera is just as painful as ever. In that sense, this collection of pleasantly meandering conversations is a success.