PMFアーティスティック マネージャー、ニックによるエッセイ [from Nick] のvol. 2を公開しました。今回から3回シリーズで、音楽、言葉、平和について語ります！ ※英文のみ
*I actually don’t think so, but I will get into that in the next post.
For now:
Imagine a way of communicating that did not require people to know each other’s spoken languages, that allowed them to immediately share something deeply personal. Imagine that through it they could make something together, even in their first meeting. Imagine that it naturally went above political or philosophical or religious differences – all you had to do was want it to, then it was easy.
A pretty large percentage of communication among musicians, just by nature, is non-verbal. It’s common for us to casually mix singing into conversation, or for a conductor to sing to an orchestra, to show instead of trying to tell. And there is a connection that can form without any words at all, entirely through the music. Two performers on a stage may have never spoken to each other, they may be 20 meters away from each other, but they can experience connection, and they can influence each other’s music. One person bringing out the joy of a certain phrase in a certain way, for example, is something that can spread to a group of musicians very quickly. Maybe someone thinks “that’s how I want to express that joy too!” and then another, and a sort of consensus emerges in real time. Precisely what the ensemble wants to communicate to the audience can be “decided” by the group in moments like this. In an orchestra, a big part of the conductor’s role is to steer these emerging decisions, to craft them into a larger shape, increasing their communicative impact. I think we in the music world sometimes take it for granted just how much non-verbal communication is happening among players. The language of music is at work here.
And then there’s the audience. They see this group of young musicians from all over the world, they know that some of them can barely speak to each other, and that some are from countries in various states of tension, and yet here they are on one stage, working together. They are creating a unity, and the audience can feel their passion for the work. It’s not just a symbol, though it is that too – the symbol of this unity does speak powerfully – but it is also a thing they are making, it exists, the air in the room is vibrating and everyone vibrates with it. It’s music! and it communicates with a pure directness to the audience too. They go on the emotional journey of a great piece together. When things click, it’s a deeply moving experience for musician and audience alike. And PMF makes things click. The language of music is at work here.
The last thing I’ll say about music as a language is this: music has come from every human society that ever existed, and so there are a lot of musics out there, and yet in my experience, even very divergent types of musicians understand each other’s musical expression with such immediacy that I have to think there is something in common underlying them, underneath even “clashing” aesthetics, like some kind of pre-grammatical framework, something that allows understanding between music-makers who, well, you might guess they would be completely unable to understand what the other was doing. At PMF we have occasionally given our classical musicians opportunities to play traditional Japanese instruments for example, even to play some Noh music (about as far from classical music as you can get), and they get it immediately. Though you couldn’t tell by listening to the different musics, I feel like something in common underlies them both. Something innate in human expression? In any case, somehow, I think the language of music is at work here too.