by Helen Dewitt
Most of the time people simply admired the machine itself without commenting on the music, but in one village he met a critic. This man said that the music seemed thin and uninteresting, and when he had said it several other people agreed but they could not explain why. At last they brought out a collection of drums and began to play on these—it is common in African music for two competing rhythms to be played simultaneously, but here the players unleashed six or seven. McPherson said it took some time to get used to, but as no one showed the slightest interest in appropriating the gramophone he stayed there for some time. For two months he saw nothing but the small-to-medium-sized drums brought out on the first day, but one day he saw an extraordinary ceremony.
The village was described by McPherson as a 20-day trek from St. Pierre, in a kind of desert scrub, on the edge of a small desert lake, with a sheer rock bluff at the other side, and though the first mountain foothills were maybe 20 miles away this seemed to be the same kind of rock. He had often noticed one hut a little distance from the rest, but when he had once approached it he had been warned away, and he had never seen anyone enter or leave it.
One day in the late afternoon he saw seven men enter the hut. They came out each carrying a drum taller than a man, and they carried the drums in silence to the edge of the lake and set them down in a row on the shore. Then a group of women came from another house. They carried a boy on a pallet; he seemed to have some fever, for he was wasted away and shivered and trembled as they carried him. They were singing a song in which one woman called out a line and then the others called softly back, and they laid the pallet on the shore. They stopped singing and stepped away.
The sun was near the horizon; at any moment it would be dark, for it sets quickly in the tropics. The sky was a deep dark blue. The men tilted the drums against wooden rests; they began to tap the drums very lightly with sticks, and the sound seemed to melt away over the lake. Then they stopped, and at a gesture from the leader they struck the drums a single louder blow. They stopped. Another beat. Another beat. Another beat. When they had struck the drums six times like this the sun vanished and they struck the drums once, very loudly, and stopped. Several seconds went by, until at last, from over the dark water, the sound of the drums came back. Again they struck the drums, and again the sound came back, and when this had happened seven times they laid down their sticks and walked away, and the women picked up the pallet and walked away, and McPherson saw that the boy was dead. In the morning the drums were gone.
Yamamoto said: There was something about this, the idea of percussion in its purest form coming through the air & at the same time over water, and at last hitting rock & coming back, you know coming through this very thin medium & also over a denser one & against a very solid one—& I thought I just have to hear this. I don’t know how but I’ve got to.
For the next few years whenever Yamamoto met someone from Africa he would describe this episode in Drums over Africa but no one seemed to know about percussion in its purest form and the rock and water and air.
When he was 19 it was arranged that he would spend six months studying in Paris. One of the other students was from Chad, and Yamamoto asked again about percussion in its purest form and the student was rather annoyed, because whenever people thought of African music all they thought of was drums.
Drums drums drums, said this friend, if anything the most important element in African music (insofar as it made sense to generalise about African music which it did not) was the voice.
Don’t talk to me about the voice, I said, I am not interested in the voice but in percussion in its purest form, & I told him about the drums & the lake, & I said it was a 20-day trek from a place that used to be called St. Pierre
& he said he did know of a place that used to be called that but it couldn’t be the one because the people in that area had a totally different kind of music, they have these professional musicians, these griots who sing ballads and nothing like what I had described would happen there
& I said But is it a desert and is there a lake
& he said Yes but it can’t possibly be there
& then he said Forget about Africa, you don’t know what you want, I’m getting together some people to put on Boulez’s Eclat/Multiples stick around & you can have the piano
ST: So you went to Chad.
Yamamoto: That’s right.
Yamamoto said that when he finally found the place there was something almost magical about it—the lake was there, and the hill, and the hut a little way apart, and the people who would play a piece of music with six or seven rhythms all at once. The things they played while he was there melted away over the lake, and he never got to hear the other drums.
Yamamoto: I’d managed to set aside two months, which was practically unheard of; got to Chad; incredible hassle getting out to the village, isn’t there some movie about a guy who tries to take Caruso up the Amazon?
ST: Yes?
Yamamoto: With Klaus Kinski?
ST: Yes?
Yamamoto: Well, that gives you some idea, and then to top it all I get maybe two weeks, maximum, in the village with the drums and then Kaboom! It’s gone.
ST: This is the part a lot of people find hard to believe.
Yamamoto: I know, I know, how could I even think of going two months without practising? Sometimes I have trouble believing it myself.
Yamamoto had been staying in the village and one day he bicycled over to the mountains to see some rock paintings, taking a boy from the village as his guide. He had noticed a lot of soldiers around but he had never had the time to be interested in politics. When they got back to the village everyone in it was dead. The boy said they would kill him if they found him and Yamamoto had to help him get away. At first Yamamoto said there was nothing he could do but the boy said you’ve got to help me.
They were alone in a village full of dead bodies. Yamamoto said Don’t you have to beat the drum for them? Or is that only for the dying?
The boy said I am too young, and then he said No, you are right.
He went to the hut. Yamamoto followed him. Inside were seven drums, but five were almost eaten away by termites, and one was quite badly damaged, and only one still stood upright. The boy took it from the hut and set it up on the shore of the lake. It seemed to be made from the trunk of some hardwood tree, though Yamamoto had never seen anything but low twisted bushes of scrub in the area.
The boy tilted the drum back against a stand, and when it was late afternoon he began to strike the drum very lightly with a stick. When the sun was close to the horizon he struck eight louder blows, and then, when the sun dropped below the horizon, he brought the stick down on the drumhead with all his might. Then he held the stick at his side and waited for several seconds, but no sound came back over the water. Again he struck the drum, and again the sound died away over the water and did not return. Then he struck it a third time so hard the drum quivered and trembled, but no sound came back and he dropped the stick in the sand.
No, he said, it will not come back, there is nothing to come back to—
And he said that they must cut it open and he would hide inside and Yamamoto would take the drum with him when he went.
Yamamoto said this was a stupid plan, the boy would be safer just—
But he couldn’t think of some way the boy would be safer.
The boy was 16, the age Yamamoto had been when he first played Carnegie Hall. He said All right, we’ll see what we can do.
The boy took off the top and got inside, and Yamamoto fastened the covering back on. Then he bicycled to another village and he said he needed transportation back to N’Djamena. He managed eventually to get a small truck that could take the drum, and they drove back to the village. The drum stood by the shore. The boy was inside it. The owner of the truck put the drum on the truck and they drove off.
Fifty miles down the road the truck was stopped by troops. They made the driver take the drum off the truck and they said what�
�s in that. Nothing said Yamamoto it’s just a drum I’m taking back to Japan. All right then play it said one soldier and Yamamoto tapped it lightly with a stick.
A soldier took off the cover but they had fitted another cover just inside so that it looked as though the drum was solid inside.
Yamamoto said: You see there’s nothing there.
A soldier held up his machine gun, aimed at the drum, and fired a round. There was a scream, and then a whimper, and then all the soldiers fired at the drum while splinters flew up and blood seeped out onto the dirt and when they got tired of shooting they stopped and there was silence.
The soldier said: You’re right there’s nothing there.
Yamamoto thought his turn would be next. A soldier swung up his gun by the barrel and hit him once on the head with the handle. He fell to the ground. He said later that he wasn’t afraid at first because he assumed he was going to die. Then he realised that his hands were lying in the dirt next to the boots of a soldier. He thought they would destroy his hands and he could not move for terror. Then three of them kicked him in the ribs, and he passed out.
When he came to the soldiers and the truck were gone. All that was left was the drum riddled with bullets, the ground beside it wet with blood. His papers and money were gone. His hands were all right.
He checked to see that the boy was dead and he was dead. He had nothing to bury him with, so he started walking. He walked for two days without food or water. Twice trucks passed him and refused to stop. At last one stopped and much much later he got back to Paris.
People were prepared to be sympathetic but he alienated everyone by saying Well obviously my trip didn’t work out the way I’d hoped but the one bright spot is that I got back in time to take part in a production of Boulez’s Eclat/Multiples.
Or people would say was it hard to put it behind you and Yamamoto would say Well when I got back Claude said I was stupid to go he said why are you so obsessed with drums drums are beside the point listen to Messiaen’s Mode de valeurs et d’intensités—
—so the first thing I did when I got back was listen to the Messiaen which is about, well basically it’s about the dying sound. That’s what a piano produces, a dying sound. You know, the hammer strikes the string and then it bounces away again and you just have the string vibrating until it stops, and you can just let that happen or you can prolong it with a pedal or and this is where it gets interesting you have the fact that other strings will vibrate in sympathy with certain frequencies & you can just let that happen or you can come in with a pedal at one place or another as it dies—
Or people would say Do you think you’ll ever go back to Africa
and he would say Well I’d like to go back someday because my last visit wasn’t as helpful as I had hoped from a musical point of view.
ST: How did this lead up to what people have called the Wigmore Hall debacle?
Yamamoto: Well my agent had made the booking a long time before. What I thought at this time was that music was not about sound but about perception of sound which means in a sense that to perceive what it is you need also some sense of what it could be but is not which includes other types of sounds and also silence.
ST: The Wigmore Hall?
Yamamoto: To put it another way, let’s just take a little phrase on the piano, it sounds one way if you’ve just heard a big drum and another way if you’ve heard a gourd and another way if you’ve heard the phrase on another instrument and another way again if you’ve just heard nothing at all—there are all kinds of ways you can hear the same sound. And then, if you’re practising, you hear a phrase differently depending on how you’ve just played it, you might play it twenty or thirty different ways and what it actually is at any time depends on all those things it might be—
ST: It sounds a little like Gould’s decision to leave the concert stage because he could get a better piece of music in the recording studio.
Yamamoto: No, not at all, Gould would play the same piece nine or ten times and probably each one would be perfect and different and then using the technology he’d produce a single version which would amalgamate one or more of those, in other words there’s the idea that multiplicity and the possibility of failure and perception of the taking of decisions are only for the performer, what you give the audience is a single thing. As far as I’m concerned it doesn’t really matter whether you give them that one thing in a concert hall or in a recording that lets them play around with the settings on their sound system.
ST: The Wigmore Hall?
Yamamoto began to talk about the idea of a fragment, he said for instance when you were working on a piece you might take a section in one direction, let’s say you might keep scaling it down and down until it was barely there & then that barely there section would sometimes be enchantingly beautiful but you would realise when you came to relate it to the next section that you could only get from that to the next section by means of something crass and stupid, some stupid violent crescendo that wasn’t right or even an abrupt transition that wasn’t right or it might be that you could get from one to the other but still you wanted the next part to be hard & bright and you didn’t want something quite so bare before. Well everyone knew there were unfinished pieces Schubert’s unfinished symphony the Mozart Requiem Mahler’s Tenth Moses and Aaron & what made them unfinished was the stupid fact that the composer had not put an end to them, but if you worked on a section & got an enchantingly beautiful version that could not be used what you had in effect was a fragment, a thing that was not part of the finished work. Once you saw that you saw that you could potentially have dozens of fragments that could not be part of the finished work, and what you saw was that it was perceiving these fragments as fragments that made it possible to have a real conception of what wholeness might be in a work—and once you saw this you naturally wanted an audience to see it too because otherwise
ST: But people already complain that people listen to music in too fragmented a way. There’s already a tendency to play single movements. Aren’t you just taking this toward playing not even a movement but just part of a part of a piece? Where does that leave the composer?
Yamamoto said he thought you had to be able to hear how something did not work as part of a bigger thing to hear how it did and it was precisely because people couldn’t hear that that they were willing to let movements be taken out of pieces.
He said: Getting back to Gould I think he had a, maybe horror is the wrong word but something like a contempt for what you could call the surface of a piece, for the aspect of a piece of music that is somehow tied to the instrument, the place where you would see showmanship. The funny thing is that I somehow feel I agree with him more than anyone else even though in a way I totally disagree with him, because I agree that what you can do physically is not the thing that’s interesting. I mean, say you do a run of double octaves and maybe there’s one person in the audience who could do it or maybe nobody else in the auditorium that day could do it, that’s completely uninteresting, but of course if you’ve worked on a piece and thought about it you don’t just (you hope) play it more intelligently you hear it more intelligently, and if you’re the only person in the room really able to hear it that’s horrible. But I think you get around that by showing people as much of the surface as possible
The Sunday Times said: Getting back to the Wigmore Hall
Yamamoto said: Sure, well I said to my agent that I’d really like to play the same piece twenty times or so to give people an idea of the piece and he said even with my name the Wigmore Hall would not be able to sell tickets.
His agent had reminded him of various clauses in his contract and he had reminded him of the obligations of a professional musician.
Yamamoto said: My agent always liked to say that you could count on a Japanese to act like a true professional. He kept saying that the booking had been made and people had already bought tickets in a way that was obviously meant to appeal to a true professional. I thought: What do
es that mean, to be a true professional? What’s so Japanese about that?
Well, as you probably know the exchange of gifts is quite a big thing in Japan and part of it is that the gift has to be wrapped up the right way. People go there and they miss the point. They think the thing the Japanese are really worried about is wrapping it up to look right it doesn’t matter if what’s inside is a piece of shit. I thought: That’s what I’m supposed to do, they’ve already bought the wrapping paper and now I’m expected to give them a piece of shit that will fit the paper, I’m supposed to be a true professional and feel good about it because I gave them something that would fit the paper. I thought: There’s no point in talking about this.
Well, the big night came and people had bought their tickets to hear I think it was six Chopin Mazurkas the Barcarolle three Nocturnes and a Sonata. I thought: Well as long as I play the Mazurkas Barcarolle Nocturnes and Sonata it can’t matter what else I play. I’m not saying the total package was what I would have chosen but I wanted to have the sound of the piano against the contrast of percussion in its purest form and the Chopin part had already been agreed. So I had I think it was about four hours of the drums and then also six Mazurkas one Barcarolle three Nocturnes one Sonata and six Mazurkas.
ST: With the result that a lot of people missed the 11:52 out of Paddington and were not very happy.
Yamamoto: With the result that people missed the 11:52 out of Paddington.
ST: And now you haven’t given a concert in about two years?
Yamamoto: That’s right.
ST: But you’ve promised the Royal Festival Hall that no one is going to miss their train this time.
Yamamoto: Nobody is going to be walking the streets of London at two in the morning.
ST: Was that hard?
Yamamoto: I feel pretty good about it.