The Last Samurai

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?