Memories of Kazuhiko Yoshida: Part 4

Looking back, the first installment covered my initial meeting with Kazuhiko Yoshida, the second was about the private lessons I received from him at the Priester Seminar, and the third was about my experiences at a piano school during my elementary school years. Therefore, the "Junior High School Chapter" begins with this installment. What I particularly realized while writing the previous article is that everything I experienced regarding music since my childhood is fundamentally and directly linked to my current work.
Needless to say, I am not a music teacher. By some twist of fate, my profession is to "teach the philosophy" of Rudolf Steiner, a German mystical philosopher from the early 20th century.
My basic stance in doing so is: "How can I teach 'music' through a cognitive approach to my former self, who was dull in all things because I lacked musical talent?"
The flow of this is extremely simple, as I believe Steiner's philosophy should be "grasped artistically." For example, in seminars dealing with Steiner's philosophy, there is academic study using the "head" in the morning, and workshops using the "body" in the afternoon—such as drawing, eurythmy, and, of course, music. It is said that by engaging in both "academics" and "art" in this way, Anthroposophy permeates the human being more deeply... but I do not necessarily agree.
This is because, in many cases, the academic study is approached merely intellectually and logically, followed by art time that is merely approached emotionally. In contrast, I believe that academics should be approached with a sensitive element, and art should be approached with an intellectual and cognitive element. Without such a clear intention, contrasting morning academic time with afternoon art time is no different from someone who has used their "body" and become exhausted at a construction site during the day, then lying on the sofa at night watching a movie, i.e., refreshing themselves using their "head."
In the end, after studying abroad in Germany for a long time, I would end up fighting against this idea of "art as entertainment," but I will save that story for another time.

Now, the "Ayagami/Ayanan Wrestling Club" I belonged to in the latter half of my elementary school years had a mysterious tradition. It was that once you graduated from elementary school, you would quit wrestling and join the junior high school handball club. I have a rough idea of the origin of this mysterious tradition.
That is because there was a superhero named Masuda-kun, who was six or seven years my senior, and this person had won the national championship in wrestling during his junior high school years. He was also a member of the handball club in junior high, and he gave up competing in the wrestling world championships to participate in the national handball tournament.
This Ayanan Junior High School handball club was a powerhouse that had participated in the national tournament four times in the past. When I entered junior high school, I was supposed to join this Spartan sports club and aim for the national tournament in a student life unrelated to music... but that did not happen. This is because I was put into the choir club, and I would end up aiming for the national tournament there instead.
Just as I found myself enrolled in a neighborhood piano school when I was in elementary school, my "passive relationship with music" is evident here as well.
I was scouted by Mr. Nakagawa, a music teacher with a face like a hippopotamus who was the advisor for the choir club, and before I knew it, I was in the choir club. Therefore, I do not remember writing a club application form or a withdrawal form. I have two ideas about why this happened.
First, when you enter junior high school, you are made to memorize the school song in music class. At the end of the first semester, there was a hellish exam where you had to sing the school song solo in front of everyone in the class, and I was the only boy to get a perfect score. Incidentally, there was also one girl who got a perfect score, and her surname was also "Takeshita." So, for a while, we were teased with things like, "Are you two twins?"
The town I live in, Ayagawa-cho (then Ayanan-cho), has a population of less than 20,000, but if you open the phone book, there are only four households with the surname "Takeshita." Needless to say, one of them is my home, another is the "Takeshita main family," which is my
father's grandmother's family home, and there is one other new house (branch family) separate from ours. That means there is only one "Takeshita who is not a relative" in the town where I live. In other words, the daughter of the only "Takeshita who is not a relative" in my town was my classmate, and we happened to be in the same class out of the seven classes in junior high school, and we were the only two who got perfect scores on the school song music exam. Isn't this as rare as the "coincidence" seen between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy?
And the Takeshita legend continues. This happened when my father was a junior high student; when he moved up to the second year, there were four Takeshitas in the same class, including my father. Yes, in other words, all the Takeshitas in my town gathered in one classroom. They say that Stand users are attracted to other Stand users, and it seems Takeshitas are also attracted to other Takeshitas. I have discovered a new law of the universe.
Incidentally, the home of the "Takeshita-san" who was in the same class as me when I was in the first year of junior high was the only non-relative Takeshita family in town from our perspective, and we call them the "Ono Takeshita-san." I ended up graduating from junior high school without ever speaking to their daughter, Takeshita-san.
The second reason is even more trivial than this. At the time, in a TV commercial for a luxury car from Toyota or somewhere, a white boy soprano like the Vienna Boys' Choir was singing in a high-tone voice. As a first-year junior high student, my voice hadn't changed yet, so I was singing in the hallway imitating this boy. I intended to be joking by doing an impression, but Mr. Nakagawa, who happened to hear it, praised me with a serious face. My boy soprano seemed to be quite well-regarded, to the point that it even reached the ears of my father, who was a junior high school teacher at another school at the time.
With that, I started choir practice from the second semester of my first year. The competition was the following summer, that is, the first semester of my second year, and from the second semester of my second year, we prepared for the following summer with new sheet music. Just to be clear, I was also properly in the handball club, so in short, I was "juggling both." And since I think there were about a dozen or so "male voice" members like me, the teacher had scouted and gathered the boy who was the best singer in each class.
Since almost all of these members belonged to sports clubs, practice was held during lunch break. That was during the second semester, and when we entered the first semester of the following year, we practiced after sports club practice, that is, after the general dismissal. This story of "squeezing in practice time" is somewhat similar to Mr. Yoshida's piano lessons.

Now, changing the subject, music is broadly divided into instrumental and vocal music. Needless to say, the former is playing music using instruments, and the latter makes one's own "voice" the instrument. Since we divide it once more by whether it is done alone or with others, musical genres can be divided for the time being into four: solo performance, ensemble, solo singing, and choir.
To visualize this, it is best to use the X-axis and Y-axis coordinate system learned in junior high school math class. In that case, I recommend placing your strongest field in the upper right. Then you will see that the upper left and lower right are adjacent areas that you are relatively familiar with, but the lower left is something you are a bit weak at.
This comes before classifications like jazz, classical, or pop. For example, popular songs are basically solo singing, but there are solo songs not only in pop but also in classical music. Also, an orchestra is an ensemble, but jazz is basically that as well.
And like blood type fortune-telling, by knowing which of these four you feel is your "home," that person's "musical temperament" becomes clear. For example, I am clearly a solo singer or solo performer, and I feel the greatest motivation in tracing melodies precisely. Also, I love listening to symphonies (ensembles), but I don't really want to do them. And what is clearly "away" for me is choir.
Incidentally, among these four classifications, only the piano occupies a special position. First of all, since the piano is played by one person, it looks like a solo performance, but since you play both the melody and the accompaniment with your right and left hands, it can also be said to be a "one-person ensemble." And piano and vocal music seem to have no relationship, but this is a big mistake. This is because the piano is the furthest from the human voice among instruments, excluding percussion, so the player is required to "sing." Therefore, the right hand does the solo singing, and the left hand does the choir.
That is why Mr. Yoshida always said, "Whether or not you have properly studied vocal music has a decisive meaning for a pianist. A pianist who only knows instrumental music cannot 'sing' on the piano" (and it is a well-known fact that Chopin encouraged his piano students to take vocal lessons).
Therefore, for me, the piano is like the 100m dash in track and field; while it is true that anyone can produce a sound, it is also the most difficult thing when you try to create something "musical" from it.
Pianists have long been mocked, saying, "Even a cat can make a sound if it walks on the keyboard." This is a completely correct point; in the first place, for most instruments other than the piano, you are made to struggle quite a bit just to produce a "clear sound" long before you play a melody. In that sense, the violin for me is like pole vaulting, where the performance itself is like an acrobatic feat.
To return to the subject, I learned this four-part classification of solo singing, choir, solo performance, and ensemble from a fellow student named René during my Priester Seminar days. According to him, people who play the piano are always thinking about "balancing" unconsciously in music. That in itself is not a bad thing, but depending on the situation, it can make the music itself cramped. That is why his advice was that Tetsuo should also start a melody instrument, no matter what it is, and experience "going wild" to his heart's content within an ensemble.
Incidentally, I believe René played the piano when he was young and switched to the clarinet when he grew older. And I think you can see that what he is saying is not far from Mr. Yoshida's statement above. In short, because the piano "can become anything," there is a possibility that it "becomes nothing."
And I was unconsciously carrying out René's advice. In other words, I would intentionally play different notes during choir time, and I was often scolded by Jesse for it.
I think it is sufficiently clear from the above story, but I am a person who is decisively unsuited for choir. I think it's enough to be in the Guinness Book of World Records. "The man who is the least suited for choir in the world, despite liking music."
First of all, what is confusing about being in a choir is that you cannot hear your own voice. So I used to practice with one ear covered, but Hikaru next to me told me that I should stop doing that because it would throw off my pitch. Also, what is incomprehensible to me about choir is that, in the end, I think it wouldn't affect the overall sound whether I sing or not.
In short, it's not that I am "bad" at choir or "dislike" it, I just "don't know where to put in the effort." And this "syndrome of not wanting to harmonize with others" of mine is quite "severe," which is why I didn't even attend Mr. Yoshida's choir class at the Priester Seminar.
Therefore, if there is a destiny that says I "should experience choir," then there is no choice but to be forced into the choir club by someone with a face like a hippopotamus saying, "Let's go to the nationals!" I am truly and sincerely grateful for this encounter. Because if Mr. Nakagawa hadn't been there, I think I would have passed by choir with a straight face for my entire life.
And, I, who have been permanently expelled from such a choir, have only once in my life come close to realizing the "fun of choir." The one who taught me that was neither Mr. Yoshida nor Mr. Nakagawa, but a certain choir teacher whose name I have forgotten, as usual.
I believe this person was a music teacher at Yodogawa High School in Osaka, and this high school has won the national championship several times. So, since I don't think I can remember this person's name no matter how hard I try, I will call him "Mr. Yodogawa" for convenience. And perhaps, through Mr. Nakagawa's organization, I had one opportunity to receive guidance from this Mr. Yodogawa, and I took a lesson at a venue somewhere other than the school. First, what overwhelmed me was that he wouldn't even let me sing the first measure properly. In other words, the moment the prelude ended and we entered the start of the singing, Mr. Yodogawa would shout, "Wrong! Wrong!" and stop the song. And then, after a long lecture from there, it would continue with "One more time." However, the moment we started singing, Mr. Yodogawa would again shout, "Wrong! Wrong!" and resume the lecture, and as soon as the singing started, he would stop it, and then another lecture... this was repeated dozens of times.

This kind of instruction might be an everyday occurrence for those who have experienced a slightly strict chorus club, and to an outsider, this teacher might look like a persistent power-harassing teacher.
As for me, thanks to this nagging instruction, I felt like I was slowly waking up for the first time in my life to what it means to "get better at choir." In other words, it wasn't that I "got better" in this lesson, but I had the feeling that I "understood" what it meant to "get better" for the first time in my life. Furthermore, towards the end of this lesson, I even thought that if this teacher would whip me into shape for a full year, I would grow accordingly.
In the end, the only time I received this teacher's instruction was this one time. However, perhaps I was so infatuated with this teacher that I even suggested to Mr. Nakagawa, "I want you to teach me like Mr. Yodogawa." However, this is an impossible request.
Because musicality is that person's personality itself; it is not something that can be changed easily, like the clothes on a dress-up doll.

So, Mr. Nakagawa, I'm sorry about that time.

Part 5 🎹

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Part 1
Part 2
Part 3