The Last Samurai

He said that at the time he had this idea that drums were percussion in its purest form & that he would never understand the piano until he understood percussion in its purest form. He said he had come to see later that in a lot of ways this was an overreaction and that any sound that the instrument could make was obviously a sound it could make so that it was oversimplistic not to let it sound like a voice or a cello to the extent that it could, but at the time he was obsessed with drums & percussion.

ST: Interesting.

Yamamoto said the other thing his teacher had always emphasised had been what she called the backbone of the piece. It was not enough to perfect a beautiful surface which sounded like the human voice or a cello or some other non-percussive instrument because in the final analysis attention should not stop at the surface but be directed to the musical structure.

He said that when he was small he would sometimes work day and night to get some passage the way she wanted, at last he would think Yes, that sounds good & she would say Yes, that is very pretty but where is the music? And she would say of this or that international star, Oh so and so, he’s just a virtuoso, with the utmost contempt, because if someone was not a musician he was a charlatan.

ST: Interesting.

He said: Now the thing is of course I could see what she meant, but later I started to think, Yes, but why are we so afraid of everything and what are we afraid of? We’re afraid of the surface, we’re afraid it will sound like what it is, what terrible thing will happen if we stop running away from these things?

Then when he was 16 he came across a book called Drums over Africa.

Drums over Africa was written by an Australian named Peter McPherson who had travelled around Africa in the early 20s. He took with him a wind-up gramophone and several recordings of Mozart, and the book was full of amusing episodes in which he astounded the natives with the machine or kept his wits about him to keep them from stealing it.

Most of the time people simply admired the machine itself without commenting on the music, but in one village he met a critic. This man said that the music seemed thin and uninteresting, and when he had said it several other people agreed but they could not explain why. At last they brought out a collection of drums and began to play on these—it is common in African music for two competing rhythms to be played simultaneously, but here the players unleashed six or seven. McPherson said it took some time to get used to, but as no one showed the slightest interest in appropriating the gramophone he stayed there for some time. For two months he saw nothing but the small-to-medium-sized drums brought out on the first day, but one day he saw an extraordinary ceremony.

The village was described by McPherson as a 20-day trek from St. Pierre, in a kind of desert scrub, on the edge of a small desert lake, with a sheer rock bluff at the other side, and though the first mountain foothills were maybe 20 miles away this seemed to be the same kind of rock. He had often noticed one hut a little distance from the rest, but when he had once approached it he had been warned away, and he had never seen anyone enter or leave it.

One day in the late afternoon he saw seven men enter the hut. They came out each carrying a drum taller than a man, and they carried the drums in silence to the edge of the lake and set them down in a row on the shore. Then a group of women came from another house. They carried a boy on a pallet; he seemed to have some fever, for he was wasted away and shivered and trembled as they carried him. They were singing a song in which one woman called out a line and then the others called softly back, and they laid the pallet on the shore. They stopped singing and stepped away.

The sun was near the horizon; at any moment it would be dark, for it sets quickly in the tropics. The sky was a deep dark blue. The men tilted the drums against wooden rests; they began to tap the drums very lightly with sticks, and the sound seemed to melt away over the lake. Then they stopped, and at a gesture from the leader they struck the drums a single louder blow. They stopped. Another beat. Another beat. Another beat. When they had struck the drums six times like this the sun vanished and they struck the drums once, very loudly, and stopped. Several seconds went by, until at last, from over the dark water, the sound of the drums came back. Again they struck the drums, and again the sound came back, and when this had happened seven times they laid down their sticks and walked away, and the women picked up the pallet and walked away, and McPherson saw that the boy was dead. In the morning the drums were gone.