Solitude

A soloist does everything alone, whether practicing, packing bags or taking a taxi.
I travel by air, changing planes, and take a taxi from the airport to a hotel in an unfamiliar town.
At times an organizer comes to see me, but I am alone most of the time. Since I am always the last to arrive, I have to go immediately to the rehearsal venue to practice with an orchestra.

When playing with a pianist or playing chamber music, there is a certain amount of conversation, but with an orchestra, communication tends to be limited to making rough arrangements. When rehearsal finishes, everybody leaves immediately. I call for a taxi and go back to a the hotel.

When I arrive at the hotel, I feel like relaxing, being tired of traveling. It is evening.If I'm hungry, I have to go out by myself again into the unfamiliar town and find a restaurant. I can avoid that nuisance by going to restaurant in the hotel, but when I ask for a table for one, I'm ceremoniously relegated to a table off in the corner by a solemn waiter. After I order, there is an interval of waiting until the food arrives. Feeling the eyes of the waiter on me, I open a book, otherwise I cannot fill the time. What's more, I cannot even buy a book at the hotel, because I only read Japanese books. It would be nice to lose myself in a good mystery, but the truth is, my eyes are tired, too. In short, the situation is far from relaxing.

There is usually a concert the following day. When I finish and retire to the hotel without staying for the second half of the concert, I am alone again. The excitement of the concert lingers, but I am again faced with my book. Occasionally, I am invited out after the concert, but since my hosts are strangers to me, I often feel that being alone is better than the stress of being entertained.
I have become fed up with this life, and the days when I felt good about the title of "jet setter" are long gone.

I got married 14 years ago. I bore a child soon after. Suddenly, being alone became an unthinkable luxury. Bringing up a child for 24 hours a day was so different from 30 minutes concentration in a concert. They were extreme opposites - like the North Pole and the South Pole.
My daughter made me feel removed from society in a different way. My policy of child care is to give a top priority to the rhythm and comfort of my child, sacrificing my own schedule and free time.

When someone kindly invited me for dinner, it was understood that I would bring my daughter. However, my hosts did not have much sympathy for the whims of my child. For my daughter, they were not whims, but natural behavior, such as "I want to stand up", "I want to go outside", "Hold me".
I took care of her requests, and at first, my friends said it was good of me, but eventually they got fed up and started saying I was like a slave to my daughter, and the distance between them and me widened.

This period seemed to continue forever, and I asked myself where I was and who I was. I felt as though I were alone in the world. My daughter was singing and playing in her sandbox just before my concerts. I was irritated and practiced in my head, feeling cornered and desperate. But I practiced. I concentrated on my music for 40 minutes every morning no matter what, and I constructed my performances as if piling up stones to make a cathedral.

I hired a helper. Whenever I said "It's time for me to practice", my daughter cried, and even worse, expressed deep sorrow on her face as if to say " Mama has gone to the violin", even though I was just 1 meter away.
I felt guilty, as if I were doing something really wrong. My helper was a very good nanny and my daughter took to her well. She was from Africa and had four children of her own. She wrapped my daughter in a sheet and carried her on her back.
She would go out for a walk like that, and after my daughter fell asleep, she would deftly put her to bed. To me, it seemed almost like a miracle.

Having finished practice as soon as possible, I would go to see my daughter. I could not help giving yuki (hand healing), even though she was fast asleep.

I took her everywhere.
From the time she was she was 3 months old, she traveled with me across continents. During my concerts, she stayed in my dressing room while I was on stage. I nursed her, then rushed back to the stage to perform Bach's Unaccompanied Sonatas. In retrospect, it was really brave of me to have done all that.
A mother, who is able to give birth, has the capability and physical strength to raise her child.

Then I had a second child. Even a devoted mother like me could not take two children on a concert tour. Also, I did not want to see my daughter's lonely expression again, "Mama, violin?" My son never had that sorrow, so I believe, at least.
He is also better at getting attention from me. "Come home soon" is always the message he leaves on my answering machine.

I organized social activities even less than before, and perhaps I had distanced myself from society. I befriended nature instead. Every day I went out to the forest in Brussels. We went to a park by the forest, with my son in a baby carriage. As soon as we entered the park, my daughter, who could walk by herself, started running around and screaming, as if letting her self-restraint burst out, since she had a younger brother and was starting to be independent from her mother.
"Let's bring rice balls to the forest. Don't forget bread for the ducks in the pond" Without a watch and a cell phone, time went by, and we wandered around with no particular destination. The forest healed me to a great degree.

This was, in retrospect, such a luxurious way of spending time.
There was the day when I took my daughter to kindergarten for the first time.
She was prepared, even to the extent of keeping herself from crying.
I parked the car as far away from the kindergarten as possible, and we walked the rest of the way. I didn't want to let go of my daughter's hand.
Now, she slams the car door shut, saying "OK, I'll go". Who could have imagined this scene at that time. She turned 13 today.

On my son's first day of kindergarten, when we got to door of the classroom, he clung to me, wailing "no no no", and refused to go inside, even though he had been put in same class as his sister.
The teachers tried to persuade me to leave my son there, saying how would he know if he liked school or not unless he tried it? But I replied that this was the way I raised my children, and I took him home.
My son and I spent the whole day together, following the garbage truck and looking at bulldozers and power shovels at a construction site. It was around this time that I met Aunt Therese, who has been so good to my children. She encouraged me, saying, "If you can't spend time with your son now, when can you?"

Just as I thought, within a year my son started to go to kindergarten willingly. He came to like the kindergarten so much that he wanted to live there. He liked his friends, and whenever he was invited somewhere, he would go without a moment's hesitation.
Real independence comes from real interdependence.
When my son started going to elementary school, I could no longer take them for walks.
I saw him off to school in the mornings, watching the small figure walk away carrying a backpack that covered his entire back. It was around this time that I began teaching. I was fortunate to find a vacant post at the Conservatoire of Brussels.
It was my first experience with teaching.

My social contacts spread instantly from babies and small children to university students. Topics of conversation changed from bulldozers and dirt to music. I interacted with young people who were full of curiosity. As with my own children, I never felt as if I were raising them. Rather than seeing others objectively, I tend to get into their world. It is because of my personality and I would never be a parent or a teacher in an ordinary sense. By now, everybody around me has accepted this.

When I teach, I do not prepare teaching steps, select certain pieces or make a lesson plan in advance. I listen to my students play and give advice. When I started teaching, I surprised my students when I said I would practice a piece along with them. Of course, they would not make progress if I simply played the Caprice of Paganini myself. However, I remember the students in my first year very well.

As with my children, even though I feel as if they are going to stay for ever, my students graduate and leave. I take this obvious fact as such now that I have taught for 5 years.
For me, there has always been music.
Even without my violin, it is there in my heart.

I like the deep blue color of the dusk.

Being comfortably tired.

The sound of a car horn on the way home.

A warm spring wind A Dvorak melody comes to mind.
Perhaps music that goes straight to the heart exists because each of us has our own solitude.

The physical solitude of being alone in a hotel,
the solitude of being separated from society, being occupied with children,
the solitude of not really knowing anything about your neighbors.

You need a strong heart to cope with that darkness.
That's where true music comes from.
Like Dvorak, Brahms, Faure, and Mozart.
They faced their solitude, then produced real music.

Solitude is to listen intently.

To purify one's mind.

Something comes to my ear.

Something comes into my heart.

Perhaps solitude is not so bad after all.