Hard and Soft

The persisting snow of yesterday has melted down finally.
During the long period when walking on the slippery ground was so scary, I drove my car very slowly and cautiously. The melted snow froze and covered the roadways with ice. Driving on it was so dangerous.

The thermometer indicates minus 2 to 4, even during the daytime the air is chilled and it stubs my lungs as I breathe.
I experienced something similar 30 years ago when I visited my sister studying in Salzburg. My mother, who also came with me, later suffered from afebrile pneumonia. What a souvenir!

These days, we have too hot summer from the global warming and too cold winter. One part of the earth is too dry to have wild fires and another part is flooding. Both are excessive. What is happening to our mother earth?

Scientific and humanitarian issues aside…, I see the soft lay of sun light after the hard winter.
Trees are loosening their wings which have been huddled up until this day.
The sunshine is too bright to my eyes… It's the energy of Spring.

Nature teaches me a lesson.
"Softness" does not exist without "Hardness". The opposite is also the same.

We can say that's similar to Music.

Now I am practicing a concerto of Brahms.
This is like “laying a stone after a stone to construct a magnificent cathedral”. I often use this expression.

As I practice the concerto, my hands stop when there's a problem. I don't just let it pass and continue to the end.
My method is that I decide "OK, I will get done with this issue in 5 minutes" and devote all my resources to this one single tone during this 5 minutes.
15 minutes or 30 minutes are too much, that happens only in very serious cases.

I am not trying to idealize my style…, but does the audience eventually feel comfortable with the music built up like this?

My professor Mr. Eto once said to me "Construction of Music is just as oil painting". Meticulous touches in the close range are important, that naturally makes the whole oeuvre sound refined when looked from afar.

Alas, meticulous work makes my shoulders stiff.

"At first, your shoulders had bumps like computer mouses" somebody said to me yesterday in the Katsugen exercise.

The bumps got melted down gradually….
I fight against irresistible temptation of sleep.

Anyway, I finally set my foot onto the 2nd chapter of Brahms with my violin.
It really takes time as I work on one bar after another.

Suddenly I felt "Oh? my violin sounds different" when I lightly played some sequences.

I was feeling the violin doesn't sound nicely after all the troubles since August. In fact, the change happened around the 3rd position of D string, which is called "the soul of violin". This is where we hear the violin's most characteristic sound; not brilliant high tone, not robust bass tone, but the normal voice of each violin.

So when somebody asks me for an advice for buying a violin, I say "Do try the 3rd position of D string, and if you don't like it, don't buy it". It's because "the normal voice of violin" doesn't change at all. You should not adapt yourself to the violin.

It's the same with people!

The bumps in my back have softened but I've started coughing and my eyes get dry. I caught a cold?

"Softness" does not exist without "Hardness". We should not hesitate to play hard sometimes. And I adore the sensation of softening which always arrives like Spring after long Winter!

In Japan, we appreciate a famous Zen phrase, （日々是好日）“everyday has its own charme” Thanks to those days, my "Guarneri del Gesù" might get back to its original shape.

The end of January 2013, in Brussels