My initial (musical) impressions were not so wrong after all

Image from Video: Shumei Taiko: Japanese Drums

My Asiaphile emails are trickling in, although the hatemails are much fewer in number after I threatened to sue the authors, or worse yet, send their emails to the Human Rights Commission for racism. Yes, they can get their own medicine back.

A few have been genuinely trying to communicate with me, and not spill out their condescending good will trying to reform me into a model multi-culti citizen of Canada.

Here is one who sent me this information who, without disclosing his name, I can say does have the musical qualifications (being part of several classical music groups) for me to take his point of view seriously.

I will quote from his email:

Perhaps it is [a] valid to ask if there is an Eastern inability to
understand those Western historical, cultural subtleties.

An interesting (in a train wreck sort of way) site where I'm gleaning some pertinent information is a post that some guy called P. Z. Meyers (from what I can tell, he's a science instructor in a university and not a musician at all) has put up on his website where he's got about 250 comments (90% negative, and about 10% suable) on my position. But there are a few interesting, informative posts. Here are a few:

pitbone62 (commenter #188) writes:

There’s certainly a social stigma among some Asians (particularly older generations) which has them discourage their children from playing brass instruments, but it’s gradually changing.

Now, I don't know if this discouragement is something which Asian societies developed for physical/physiological reasons (i.e. difficulties or inabilities in playing percussion and brass instruments), and which consequently developed into cultural or societal stigma.

Here is Quodlibet (#219) who comments on perfect pitch:

And most musicians I know (including me) would prefer not to have perfect pitch. Perfect relative pitch, yes (being able to hear, identify, and reproduce all intervals).

Here is Brownian (#222) replying to Quodlibet:

I recall a discussion with a researcher on CBC around 2000 or thenabouts in which he said that those with perfect pitch (the former) seemed to have more difficulty with chords than those with great, good, almost, or boo pitch.

This supports my observation that Asians demonstrate greater ability at memorization and scale-like exercises. Memorization and scale-like abilities have more to do with reproducing a piece. The "perfect relative pitch" that Brownian mentions above perhaps requires the kind of synthesis that I wrote about, where one note guides the direction of another, which make the chord, then a combination of chords and notes, and finally a synthesized whole. This requires some kind of intellectual input from the player, rather than an automated, fast scale-like playing or reproduction of notes. Art requires not just skill, but thought as well.

One other fascinating thing is that a few of the commentators at Meyers's site have linked to Japanese Kodo drummers as evidence that Asians have the physical capacity to play percussion instruments. Kodo drummers play a type of Japanese drumming called Taiko drumming. Here is a Los Angeles based taiko center which explains taiko drumming, and describes one of its functions to be for use in battle:

Taiko, which means large drum, is a dynamic art form from Japan...

It was used in battle to inspire soldiers, communicate messages, boost morale, frighten enemies, and deceive enemies by making the battalion appear larger than it really was.

And here is a site which describes the rigorous, almost inhuman, training the drummers have to go through:

To become a Kodo drummer, students are put through two years of hell. But these apprentices will endure anything to make the grade.

In the Kodo drumming camp, students practice for around 20 hours a day. Cigarettes, alcohol, and TV are banned, there are no holidays or weekends off and their bodies are pushed to extremes. The day starts with a 15 km run up a mountain and ends when the students are too exhausted to continue. "I'm amazed at how far I can go," states one.

Perhaps Japanese drummers have to go through this holistic, communal boot camp in order to force their bodies to be able to perform the kinds of feats required of these heavy, difficult drums. Culture is refining (redefining) nature to create something human. Taiko drummers seem to push, even force, human nature to perform in extraordinary, superhuman, ways. In my assessment, the force and drama that I found lacking in the Korean choristers is overcompensated for in the drummers, perhaps to fill in the artistry gap with the spectacular. It is difficult to overcompensate for a classical choral piece with the spectacular without making it, well, spectacular. So the Korean choir's Messiah remains insipidly, monotonously, pretty, lacking the contrasts of drama and gentleness that the piece requires.

And finally, I'm getting emails informing me that the audition system for classical orchestras is blind, which means that the musician plays behind a screen during the audition to prevent bias (originally this was set up to prevent bias against women musicians). But, audition pieces are played out of context, and could be considered to be some sort of exercise. For example, when I started out playing the piano, I used to have book with excerpts from classical composers (the ones I remember most are Mozart's). I took (or my teacher told me to take) these excerpts as exercises, and I practiced them as exercises, e.g. to get the notes right, to play the right tempo, to understand how the melody developed etc. I didn't play them as the whole pieces they are, until much later. Then I played them very differently, with much more musicality (or at least, my teacher by then made sure I played them thus).

So, in my assessment, audition pieces are played differently from whole or complete pieces, and they may actually favor Asians.

I wait with interest what other insights and information I may get from these musicians (they are coming from as far away as South Carolina, and as close as Hamilton Ontario). But, I am pretty much done here, and will, perhaps arrogantly, say that my initial impressions were not so wrong after all.