Night biking

After this afternoon's concert I went out with the cello and bass section to shabu shabu.  It's one of Japan's many experiential dishes:  a boiling pot of water (or fish broth) in the table and trays of meat and vegetables which one dips into the water to cook.  First round was beef, then pork and beef, then chicken (and beef?, but whose keeping track?);  all you can eat and drink (including alcohol) for two hours, 3000 yen per person.  Is that a good deal?  I'm still not sure (perhaps it depends on who you are) but it was an enjoyable evening and great company.  And I had a wonderful conversation with a Japanese bass player who had spent a lot of time in America and felt more comfortable there, but could speak to the feeling of being expected to be Japanese in her home country.  It aligned some of the cultural themes and challenges that I have been experiencing and I was thankful for it.  

Earlier in the day I felt my inner light flicker.  For all but a few moments I felt like a third party as I played Gershwin and Dvorak, watching the concert go by.  What is this experience and what can one do in the midst of it?  I think it is a really important question and experience.  At the end of the dinner, our guest section leader, the former principle of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra gave us advice for how to "survive orchestra rehearsals."  As we hand over our abilities to a conductor, it can be easy to loose our own artistic initiative, our own voice and inspiration.  We become one of the silent majority.  So many people here complain about the long hours of rehearsing, the repetition, the rehearsal method, the lack of control.  This is an issue I can hear not just in words, but in the sounds of the orchestra.  When I think and experience music in its pure form, without the weight of salary, it dances and sings.  But somedays it is work.  I bike to "work."  Really?  I don't ever want to work.  

I feel that we can choose this attitude to some extent, though.  Perhaps not everyday is magical, but we can cultivate an inner fire in ourselves and in each other.  My greatest recourse for action in times of being disengaged is to listen.  If we take care of one another, then there will always be a voice somewhere to which we can listen, one that will inspire us and remind us.  It will be our own voice, carried by another to whom we gave it for safe keeping.  But right now I can't hear it always.  Something in me is not in balance.  I don't know how to express it, or to share it, or to receive it.  But I also know that it is there and that it is merely a matter of constructing a way for it to come out.  I'm in a new place, one in which I feel slightly repressed in comparison to my American lifestyle.  

I remembered today that one of my reasons for coming to Japan was to encounter new challenges and to see how I identify them and react to them.  This is a process and an experience that I want to have.  For some, the primary goal here is to become a better orchestral player, or to make money, or to see Japan.  I appreciate all of these things.  But in the scope of life, one of my primary goals here is to learn something about new limitations and how I react to them.  I want to learn new challenges and find ways of playing with them.  

At intermission I made a list of things that give me inspiration or strength.  Things that I can do to remember myself in this new space, ways that I can interact with this new space.  It's an interesting exercise, one worth trying for wherever you are.  Some are temporary fixes, such as biking or or writing letters.  Others have a deeper internal structure.

In the second movement of the Gershwin Piano Concerto there is a melody that brings me outside of myself.  I can hear Bess singing it.  And it takes me home.  It reminds me of a voice in America that I love; an audacious, suffering voice that believes in the right to be heard.  And there are other voices that I love.  In the fourth movement of the New World Symphony, an unleashed joy after years of oppression.  And the second movement's brass choral canyons and deep dark caves.  

During the concert I thought about these voices and other things American.  After our dinner I said goodbye to everyone as they went to their trains and cars.  I went back to the hall and mimed my way into an after hours building to get to the parking garage for my bike.  I love biking at night.  It's impossible to see beyond three or four meters in front, and the path is still new to me.  But I went through the little streets of Nishinomiya to the river and found the way along the water, only passing two or three others on my way home.  

What is a challenge?  Sometimes seen and sometimes hidden.