The Mahan Esfahani Challenge

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Mahan Esfahani

Ten years ago Mahan Esfahani was by his own account a nerdy anorak at Stanford University, obsessively tutoring himself with the aid of old records in the hope of realizing what seemed an impossible dream – to make his living on that Cinderella of keyboard instruments, the harpsichord.

A few months ago, now thirty, he carried off the award for Gramophone magazine’s Baroque instrumental album of the year, and the Guildhall School has appointed him professor of harpsichord. Not bad from a standing start, and for a total outsider. But perhaps – in addition to exceptional talent, and sheer slog – that outsiderness is the key.

When he was four, he and his parents left Tehran to join the Iranian expatriate community in America, where making good financially was the imperative. Mahan started playing the piano at six and developed an obsession with Bach from the moment he was first given the score of a two-part invention. “The counterpoint sounded so exotic as to be almost Chinese, and so logical” – he dashes over to my piano to demonstrate – “that I knew I was going to spend a lot of time with music like that. Something clicked for me.”

But his parents wanted him to be a doctor, and at Stanford he started a pre-med course, only to realize after two lectures that it wasn’t for him. Law was their next idea – “as I like talking” – but he gravitated instead to the organs and harpischords of the music faculty and began to immerse himself in scores, contemporary accounts of Baroque music-making and the recordings of his heroes, with the great harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, who had been virtually self-taught, prominent among them.

His next eureka moment came when he heard a recording by that sacred monster of harpsichordism, Wanda Landowska: “And I realized why the Bach I had been playing and hearing had never sounded quite right. I now know that she wasn’t particularly ‘authentic,’ but to me she got the spirit of Bach, and I think he would have nodded in approval if he’d heard her play. What I like about her is [that she doesn’t] let a set of prescribed rules for performance practice dictate what [she’ll] do with the music.”  This is said with a pugilistic fire to which we will return.

Without a harpsichord of his own, and with no agent or sponsor, he knocked about playing to anyone who would listen until 2008, when an invitation came out of the blue to join up as a BBC New Generation Artist. “They’d been quietly watching me. They said it need not entail much, and I wouldn’t have to live in London; I’d just do a couple of projects per year. I replied that I didn’t actually have a career, I didn’t have any concerts planned, and I had no income, so why didn’t I just come to Britain? And I presented them with a long list of projects I could do. I came here to live, and one thing led to another.” One of the perks of the scheme was a Wigmore recital which got him his first-ever reviews (one of them by me). “That was my first properly paid concert – when I got the check from the Wigmore I’d never seen that much money, £1,800! I thought – wow – I could really make this work.”

But he’s not averse, when necessary, to biting the hand that feeds him, and the BBC’s obsession with presenting the musicians of the past as being “just like us” makes him bristle with scorn. “That’s really dumb – people in the past were very different. If you ever found your grandmother’s habits strange, how could you seriously imagine that you could understand people who lived three centuries ago? We laugh when we hear recordings from eighty years ago, so how can we possibly claim to know how music was played in the much more distant past?”

More ire is directed at the early-music industry. Disdaining the conventional keyboardist’s tight-arsed silence – “This isn’t a gun club, it’s music!” – he talks to his audience, illuminatingly and amusingly, between the pieces he performs: he may be a serious musicologist, but he wears his learning lightly.

Get him on prevailing attitudes to his instrument, and he really takes off, becoming very exercised about critics who, while praising his recordings, add the ritual rider that his playing “transcends the harpsichord’s limitations.” “If someone comes up to me on Twitter and says they hate the harpsichord, I always offer them a free ticket, saying come and see what you think. And nobody has ever said afterwards that they didn’t like it. They say ‘I didn’t know that it could sing like that’. But of course it can, it’s an incredibly vocal instrument. Its sound is clear and precise, and has a great deal of color.” And the spurious contest between harpsichord and Steinway should emphatically not, he argues, be seen in terms of decibels. “That shirt you are wearing is not a ‘loud’ shirt, but it has a lot of colors in it, it’s loud in a different way. The harpsichord enables you to hear much more subtlety, and it has a sensual quality. If any pianist wants to slam it” – and one prominent pianist routinely does – “be ready to have a public discussion with me, and have a piano and a harpsichord ready on stage.” Any takers?

This engaging contrarian is full of future plans, including a Scarlatti splurge, new commissions for his instrument, and – something really original – commissioning a keyboard that will allow Persian tuning. He leads a dedicated life, practicing most of the day and reading fiction by the great Russian masters plus his favorite American novelist, Philip Roth. ‘“An American Jew, he speaks to me as an Iranian – the irony, the overbearing mother, the guilt complex.” How Iranian does Esfahani feel? The answer comes out like machine-gun fire: “I’m sentimental, quick to judge, and quick to apologize; I’m a loyal friend; I like good food; and I hang on every word from my mother. Yes, I’m very Iranian.”

And his ultimate ambition? “To record on the harpsichord every keyboard piece Bach wrote. I reckon it will take me twenty years.” That’s him sorted, then.

Michael Church – The Independent

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Richard Powers on Music

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bacteria, brain, computer programmer, Darwin, digital game, English, Galatea 2.2, genetic code, Genie, Goldberg Variations, MacArthur Fellowship, Messiaen, music notation, musicology, New York, Orfeo, Peter Els, Richard Powers, Stanford University, Steve Reich, television, The Echo Maker, The Gold Bug Variations, The Origin of Species, The Wall Street Journal, Twitter, video game

Richard Powers

Did you ever read a book review and realize that you have to get your hands on a title you’ve never heard of? That happened to me years ago, when I read a review in The Wall Street Journal of The Gold Bug Variations, a new novel by Richard Powers. In one sense, the plot was a love story about two different couples. It was also about many other things, including the intricacies of the genetic code, and composer Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations [BWV 988]. Powers immediately became one of my favorite writers.

Known as a brainy literary fiction writer – he won a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1989 – Powers has attracted an intense following. The former computer programmer and physics major (he later switched to English) always puts in a great deal of research into science, musicology and other disciplines, but his novels also explore the pleasures of romantic love, music and literature. His ninth novel, The Echo Maker, won the National Book Award for fiction. The main character has suffered a brain injury in an accident, but while you’ll learn a lot about cognitive science, the judges also must have been impressed with the clever mystery story that showed off Powers’ ability to construct a good plot.

Powers’ latest novel is Orfeo, about a modern classical music composer who attempts to obtain an immortality of sorts by rewriting the genetic code of bacteria, thinking that his biological “compositions” will live on when his music is forgotten. Instead, in the current atmosphere of fear about terrorism, he is labeled the “bioterrorist Bach” and becomes a fugitive from the US government. Ironically, the bad publicity finally allows his music to become better known.

Powers is the the Phil and Penny Knight Professor of Creative Writing in the Department of English at Stanford University in California. He answered my questions after flying back from New York City, where he did a reading at a concert that featured music mentioned in Orfeo.

Tom Jackson (TJ) One of my hobbies is listening to modern classical music – not a common pastime – so when I read Orfeo, I had a weird feeling that one of my favorite novelists had written a book for my personal enjoyment. Were you worried that a novel that discusses Steve Reich, Olivier Messiaen, etc. would lack mass appeal?

Richard Powers (RP) Well, I was sure that it wouldn’t have mass appeal! But then, in a time when there is so much creative work in all forms, and when the audience for books is dwarfed by those for film, television, games, and the Internet, I’m not sure that “mass appeal” is a meaningful goal for a literary novelist. The book itself takes art and connection as one of its subjects, and the life of Peter Els (the book’s hero) is a constant exploration of the trade-off between the expressive potential of music and the need to connect with large numbers of people. Orfeo is in part a meditation on the difficulty of making art in the age of “mass appeal” and the diversity of art that still gets made in obscurity. So I was pleasantly surprised, having written a story about a composer whose performances always have more people on stage than in the audience, at the numbers of people who bought, read, and wanted to talk about the book. A lot of people who thought they could never hear and enjoy “difficult” music discovered new sounds as the result of reading the book, and that thrilled me as much as any larger audience could have.

TJ Do you listen to music when you write, or do you prefer to work under silence?

RP Several of my eleven published novels have featured music of one kind or another in a starring role. One of the reasons I have come back to that subject again and again is that it gives me the chance to steep myself in listening, during the years that it takes to write a book. I can’t write at the same moment that good music is playing; the sounds are too interesting to concentrate on anything else! What I do is alternate, all day long: an hour or two of writing, then half an hour to an hour of intense listening, for refreshment and inspiration. It’s a great, two-stroke engine. When I wrote The Gold Bug Variations, I must have listened to one or another of Bach’s gems thousands of times.

TJ The Gold Bug Variations, Genie and Orfeo all discuss the genetic code. Do you view the genetic code as the primal code behind all other codes, such as language and musical notation?

RP Self-replicating molecules have set every living thing in motion, and that pattern-making impulse, at the inanimate level, is, in some profoundly mysterious way, the mother of all animate pattern-making and pattern-seeking urges. Of course, there are a lot of changes in nature as you move from molecules up to neurons and then to social institutions. But kinds of natural (and unnatural!) selection are at work all the way up and down the great hierarchy. Meditation on our molecular roots is tremendously inspiring, and thinking about the journey from the first self-replicating molecules to the pinnacles of human achievement is the deepest kind of spiritual reflection. As Darwin said at the end of The Origin of Species, “There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

TJ Did you find that readers of Galatea 2.2 assumed that the character “Richard Powers” was in fact Richard Powers? If they assumed that, were they largely right?

RP Readers (and even some sophisticated critics) often confuse a central character with the author. Our high school English teachers tell us not to, but we can’t help it. And when the central character has exactly the same name, age, and biography as his author, the invitation for conflation is pretty strong! Galatea is me having fun with this most basic of reading fallacies, as a way of reflecting on the power of fiction and imaginative reinvention. Nevertheless, the Richard Powers at the heart of that story is himself an invention and one who finds himself in the heart of one of the oldest fictions in the world: the one where a person’s creation – in this case, an artificial intelligence program – comes alive.

TJ If we are waiting for you to pop up on Twitter, will we have a long wait? (Orfeo includes Tweets from the book’s protagonist).

RP I’m afraid so!  I’m a long-form guy. I need space. But I did once write a six-word novel: “Lie detector eyeglasses invented; civilization collapses.”

Tom Jackson – Sandusky Register

As Cultures Intersect

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Shi Shuai

Shi Shuai is the face of classical music’s most promising new frontier: a young and gifted violinist, born in Shanghai and trained by some of the West’s most prominent musicians who is eager to return to China to perform and teach in a burgeoning symphony scene. And Fuling, the pretty outpost of 1.2-million at the nexus of the Yangtze and Wu Rivers, has the trappings of a new home for Mozart and Bach. Like dozens of smaller Chinese cities, it boasts a gleaming grand theater that just opened this year and has, in its initial season, brought Canada’s National Arts Centre (NAC) orchestra to perform.

The future of classical music, many have grown fond of saying, is in China – and Ms. Shi’s arrival in Fuling with the NAC seems emblematic of the new sound echoing here. Classical music was banned during Mao’s time. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that it was allowed back in, and it has exploded in recent years, winning converts and attracting students. But the real test lies in smaller centers, such as Fuling, and Ms. Shi is keen to put her talent and passion on display.

“I don’t have a good voice to sing,” she says. “Violin is like my voice, to sing out what I’m feeling.”

But if Fuling is the future, it’s one where the quiet concluding bars to the second movement of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony no. 5 in E minor must compete with the loud chirping of a bird ringtone. As numerous others, as Google and Home Depot, have discovered, exporting Western commerce and culture to China is often not as easy as it seems. The potential of a middle class burgeoning among 1.3-billion new customers continues to thrill, but the work of attracting interest is filled with pitfalls.

The orchestra was recently in China as part of a broader Canadian campaign that included visits from Governor-General David Johnston and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird. While the NAC works to build a potentially lucrative long-term music relationship with China, Ottawa is hoping cultural diplomacy can help smooth relations still frayed from years of neglect and, more recently, the tension over Chinese buying up Canada’s oil sands.

Partway into Mozart’s Violin Concerto no. 3 in G Major, music director Pinchas Zukerman turns to face the noisy burbling of the crowd and vigorously points his finger to his lips; later, Ms. Shi stands up to ask for quiet in Chinese. Nearly all of the theater’s 1,038 seats have been filled, thanks in part to local authorities that bought up numerous tickets and handed them out for free, but not all the patrons are captivated.

In a place where many are hearing this music for the first time, orchestral music occupies no sacred space, no tradition of reverent listening. Classical music has arrived in a cultural market furiously trying out new things. The NAC orchestra sits on the Fuling Grand Theatre schedule somewhere between Mamma Mia! and a Michael Jackson tribute show. The symphony opens not to its own music but to the thundering bass track of a video ad for the theater’s coming shows, with bare chests and thrusting pelvises flashing on the bright screens.

This, then, is orchestra in one tiny part of China outside the major centers, in a place where it must compete for the ears of 19-year-old Ni Sha – Lisa, she calls herself – an English student whose tastes run to blues, country and her current favorite, Taylor Swift.

“I don’t think everybody here can understand this concert, including me,” she says, as a swelling crowd and she gather outside the theater high on the banks of the Yangtze. “But I really want to know.”

When Peace Corps volunteer Peter Hessler, author of River Town, came to Fuling in 1996, it had been a half-century since an American had lived in an isolated place still reached primarily by boat. Today, it’s a quick drive down a four-lane highway. The end to isolation has brought visible change, in shiny new apartment towers and roadside advertisements for a residential complex called, in English, “Hot Springs City.” Less visible is the curiosity it has sparked about a broader world people are now more able to explore.

“Before this theater opened its doors we had almost no contact with Western music,” says Yang Xiao Lin, 43, a realtor who has come to hear the orchestra. High-speed Internet and Youku, a Chinese equivalent to YouTube, have given people a chance to sample orchestral music ahead of its arrival, and Ms. Yang likes what she has heard. Not only is the NAC concert a chance to taste what she calls “high-rank joy” – status music, in other words – but she finds something spiritual in it. “The cello is so deep,” she says.

That appeal – status and sound – has won classical music growing numbers of converts in China, where it had already gained a small foothold pre-Mao, with the Shanghai Symphony opening its doors in 1879. Nine conservatories are now pumping out graduates. Many of their teachers are foreigners or foreign-trained Chinese. Beijing now has at least ten professional symphony orchestras.

The numbers of young Chinese people studying piano and violin far exceed the population of Canada. Some of the top luthiers on Earth draw out rich tones from Chinese woods; earlier this month, Shenyang, China-born pianist Lang Lang was named International Artist of the Year. Even The Julliard School is planning a new location not far from Beijing amid hopes that Chinese ears will prove more hungry for symphonic sound than those in North America, which have left orchestras facing bankruptcy and salary cuts.

But it’s far from clear whether symphonies will truly find a home in China. Even in Beijing, “the National Centre for the Performing Arts after five years is doing roughly half as many international well-known orchestras as they were at the beginning,” says Wray Armstrong, a well-connected, Beijing-based impresario.

Classical music is, in some ways, an expression of a culture foreign to China. “I don’t know if China can save Bruckner or Wagner,” says Jindong Cai, the director of orchestra studies at Stanford University and author of Rhapsody in Red – How Western Classical Music Became Chinese.

There may, however, be a future for symphony with an Asian lilt. The Chinese pipa has found its way into symphony performances in major North American and Australian concert halls, while Chinese composers are experimenting with new orchestral sounds. There’s even an argument that it is no more difficult to lure Chinese audiences to Mozart than to Michael Jackson as both are unfamiliar.

That doesn’t make it easy. The raucous concert in Fuling is “proof that we’re a long way from bringing Western culture to the hinterlands” of China, Mr. Zukerman said. “And the hinterlands are what makes a country. It’s not Shanghai, and it’s not Hong Kong.”

Still, even in Fuling some see an innate appeal in symphony. Ms. Yang, the realtor, emerged from the concert bearing a broad smile. It was, she said, “really, shockingly good. Sometimes it sounds like a young girl is telling a love story gently, and sometimes it feels like you’re in a deep forest.” Her husband, however, thought it could use a slight tweak. “It would be better,” he said, “if they could add a few more Chinese characteristics.”

Nathan Vanderklippe – The Globe and Mail