This week has been one of performing with an orchestra in the Chicagoland area. Come here me strike a tam-tam and bass drum in Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony at Elgin Symphony tonight at 8 or tomorrow at 3:30  (http://www.elginsymphony.org .) So appropriately, I will try to entertain my beloved readers with my concert experience in Japan from my trip last year. As always, if you detect an error or disagree, please feel to utilize the comment button located below (unless it’s regarding the election, in which case, you’ll have to find another blog to comment on.) On that note! Go grab your coffee, colored-popcorn (Jewel sold it in the early 90′s – it tasted like crap, but looked cool,) and read about my stumbling upon Tokyo Geijutsu Daigaku 東京藝術大学 , Tokyo University of the Arts. 

On my trip last year, I decided to take a late-evening walk through Tokyo’s GORGEOUS Ueno Park (shown above, I’ll blog about it in detail in a future entry.) One the outskirts of the park, I saw what looked to be music school…(Seeing and hearing instrumentalists through the windows suggested this to me.) While pretty much everything on campus was in the japanese writing system, I managed to make out some names on a board next to what looked to be a concert hall. The only words i understood were “Weber” and “Mozart” This was enough of a hint that there was a music performance, and it displayed the date and time in how westerners are used to seeing them (with 24 hr time format, of course…) So, when I got back to the hostel, I asked my vegemite friends (shown below, right) if they wanted to see it the following night. “Sure, we’ll go if you try some vegemite!” I sacrificed my tastebuds to vegemite and in turn was accompanied with a few friends the following night.

We arrived and walked in through the front doors of the building to the lobby. Greeted, we were, by several female ticket personnel. We asked for tickets, and all of a sudden the ticket people started discussing something that seemed to be of utmost and urgent importance (in Japanese of course.) It was as if I told them that the Chinese were coming to invade and they had to prepare the battle plans… Well, semi-long story semi-short, I had read the time wrong on the bulletin the day before, and we showed up about 20 minutes late, so they were probably discussing how ignorant westerners were… But since they’re Japanese, they were very polite about my stupidity (so polite, they made it seem as if they did something wrong) and allowed us to go in right after the first piece was over; It is said that the Japanese are extremely punctual people. They never arrive late each morning (unless they are still working in the office from the night before) and always work past when the boss goes home. If memory serves me right, the tickets costed 1000 yen each (~10 U.S. Dollars.) For those that are curious, what you see below is what a 1000 yen bill looks like. It’s actually a slightly older print of the 1000 yen, but this one’s cool because it has a picture of Natsumo Souseki, author of a great novel I read -Kokoro- in Japanese History class last year (to not digress too much more, I’ll simply put a link to the wiki page for the book so you can read more. Kokoro If you’re in the area and would like to borrow it, just let me know.) So yeah, we were very unjapanese-like when it came to attending a concert.

 So, getting back to the concert (or as they teach ushers at Ravinia to say to the patrons, “performance” – it sounds more like a $200.00 bottle of wine rather than a $10.00 bottle, to make the wealthy happy or something…) We sat down in the lovely hall (show below, right) and enjoyed a unique concert experience. The entire orchestra was Japanese, but the soloists were German. And the age of the orchestra looked to be well above the average university student age, too so so there’s a chance it could have been a regional community orchestra that utilized the university’s hall, because they did look much older than your typical university students… I have the program somewhere, which is not your typical orchestra program in the sense that it is a large 8.5/11″ which is relatively thick and could probably hold half of Shakespeare’s works…For all I could read of Japanese at the time (none,) it might have actually contained that… Once I find the program, I will begin translating it (the author of a podcast I listen to, A Year In Japan recommends finding a native japanese publication (text, sound, video) and use it as a gauge, so the more you learn over time, the more you can translate and gauge your progress.I think I might just do that)…Anyways, I digress again.

As expected, the audience was extremely quiet and respectful of the musicians. It didn’t, however, seem as formal as one might expect of the Japanese. I even might say that people in the west are a bit more “serious” when viewing concerts, at least the 40+ aged people. (Once I have more exposure to the culture I’d like to write an entire entry about old people in Japan… They’re pretty tough people… for example, one podcaster said that he sees old lady riding bikes all the time. I don’t see that much here… perhaps it’s all the squatting japanese women (and men) had to do to use the toilets, so their legs are strong and they are fit…) I can feel safe saying this, having attended hundreds of concerts in various parts of the U.S. Perhaps a little Japanese bias is sneaking in here, but they just seem to be more relaxed and peaceful when they have the time… My impression and observations of many (not all) middle-class americans seem to include this image of a husband and wife running around doing errands before going to work each day, doing a couple errands at lunch break, go back to work and maybe take care of a couple errands during work, then coming home and doing other things like business dinners, etc. I am well aware that the typical Japanese businessman work long hours, and that the country has one of the highest suicide rates in the world… but there’s a certain element about that suggests peace. Their culture has been rooted with Zen and Shinto ethics, which are peaceful by nature… And this confusion, ladies and gentlemen, is what shakes me to learn more about this country…soooooo, the concert was great, despite having no clue what pieces they were playing, and a small idea of the period of music. Overall, it was a very positive, musical, and harmonious experience in all senses of those words.