Ensemble
Kawashima had gone from Fukui, a provincial backwater on the Sea of Japan, to Germany to study pipe organ. Instead, he fell in love with the harpsichord and decided he must have one of his own. He spent two years painstakingly assembling a kit harpsichord that he’d ordered from Zuckerman in Connecticut, and then spent the remainder of his ten-year stay in Germany mastering the instrument. It was a small, French-style, single-manual instrument that he painted a garish shade of royal blue with yellow striping, and it sounded beautiful.
In March 1986, my then-wife and I had gone to Fukui where I was to teach English at Fukui University, the small national university in Fukui Prefecture. We both taught and, although teaching had its own rewards, we often felt like human tape recorders: push the button and we’d play back the same English expression again…and again and again.
I had brought a few of another sort of recorder to Japan: Baroque recorders. Since the mid-1970’s, I’d played the soprano and alto recorders. In college, I performed with the Collegium Musicum, at least until players more proficient than I auditioned and I was cut from the group. I loved the music of Handel, Telemann, Vivaldi, etc., and the recorder was easy to learn and forgiving enough for me to play at a passable level of skill. (I learned soon enough that it is in fact a very difficult and unforgiving instrument to play well.)
Lisa sang, and before long she joined the “Cosmos Chorus” (named for the flower, not the universe). This women’s chorus rehearsed at the small community center around the corner from our house which sat on the narrow road parallel to the oddly-named Sokobami-gawa (“bottom-biting river”). Tanaka, a local arts center administrator and amateur musician, led the chorus, tirelessly exhorting the women to sing on key and with more expression. Lisa was drafted to correct the other singers’ pronunciation of lyrics in English.
Lisa told Tanaka that I, too, was an amateur musician who would like to play in a group. Tanaka also played the recorder and knew of a harpsichordist, Kawashima. Tanaka introduced me to Kawashima and this marked the beginning of our trio.
Kawashima kept the harpsichord (at the time, one of only four in the entire prefecture) in a small, L-shaped music room carved out from the far end of his family’s fabric shop in Fukui City. Customers entered the shop at street level, bolts of cloth arranged on several rows of tables. At the far end of the room was a glass partition with curtains separating the shop area from the music room. This is where our trio, Kawashima, Tanaka, and I, practiced and worked up our repertoire of Baroque music.
From Kawashima, I learned the importance of aachikyureeshon! (articulation), the lack of which left my playing formless and muddy. I’m sure I never achieved the level of proficiency he had in mind for me, but I did improve. Tanaka was a more naturally-gifted musician than I. Together we became good enough to take our act on the road. Baroque chamber music for the masses in Fukui Prefecture. I don’t think our group had a name.
We would heft the harpsichord off of its triangular stand and gingerly muscle it into a small van powered by a 550cc engine. The van was just large enough with the rear seats down to slide the harpsichord inside with its narrow end atop the folded-down front passenger seat. The loading and unloading took place under the watchful gaze of Kawashima’s mother. The mother was simply a smaller version of the son: a round, flattish face, a twinkle in the eyes signaling mischief, distrust, or some combination of both.
Over a two-year period, the three of us played the music of Handel, Telemann, and Kawashima’s beloved composers of the French Baroque. We performed at community centers, pubs, a ferro-concrete Buddhist temple and, perhaps most bizarrely, a Toyota dealership, with the harpsichord set up between Corollas and Mark II’s. The best acoustics were in the Buddhist temple, an echoey space that allowed the harpsichord to ring out and the recorders to reverberate. Tanaka and Kawashima performed a magnificent arrangement of Michio Miyagi’s shakuhachi and koto classic, Haru no Umi (“The Sea in Springtime”). Kawashima commissioned another suite for recorder and harpsichord based on poems from the 8th century collection, the Manyōshū.
Our audiences were invariably polite, and some were actually enthusiastic, but I think our audiences mostly came in to experience the novelty of our music and presentation: two Japanese men and an enormously tall white foreigner. What musical skill I can claim reached its high-water mark in those performances. I had traveled far from home, far even from Japan’s centers of popular culture, to arrive at an understanding of the power of music and art and the fellowship of being on the road.
Years later, I returned to Fukui for a short visit, a sentimental journey. By that time, Kawashima had married and had a house built for his family. In the design of the house, he made sure to include a true performance space, a lovely, bright hall that could accommodate an audience of as many as 50-75 people. He still had the royal blue Zuckerman harpsichord. On the occasion of my visit (with my Fukui-born 10-year old son in tow), Kawashima had invited a pair of shamisen players. The shamisen is something like a three-string banjo, and the women, elegantly-clad in kimonos, played a style of folk music, Tsugaru-jamisen, from northern Japan. It’s a music marked by jagged, percussive rhythms and spikey phrasing. Most remarkably, their performance included several “dueling shamisen” improvised numbers, like a jazz cutting contest played on ancient Asian instruments. Just as in a jazz club or on the front porch of a cabin in Appalachian, one performer would play a particularly challenging passage, and the other would respond, her face faintly smiling but essentially impassive, with her own version of the passage, only a little a more challenging. And so it would go, upward, upward through dizzying heights of virtuosity.
Unlike our Baroque music performances, the audience went wild, with cries of “So-re!!” and “Yos-sha!!” (loosely, “That’s it!” and “Go for it!”). Despite their reputation for staid attentiveness, Japanese audiences are not always completely buttoned up.
