Transcriber: Chryssa R. Takahashi Reviewer: Helena Galani
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(Music ends)
(Applause)
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When I was still a beginner learning the piano,
I remember at some point
someone told me an inspiring story,
that a man was lost in New York and he was looking for directions.
So he stopped a stranger in the street
and asked him how can he get to Carnegie Hall.
So the stranger looked at him very seriously,
and said, "If you want to get to Carnegie Hall,
you need to practise, practise and practise."
(Laughter)
This story became my prayer.
I took this story a little bit too seriously,
so I practised, and I practised, and I practised,
and I worked day and night through birthdays, holidays,
Christmases, New Years,
and I had a clear dream in my head
that I wanted to become a good pianist.
And the proof for this for me would be to perform on the stage of Carnegie Hall.
In my early 20s I was lucky to achieve this dream,
and before I was 27, I was fortunate
to have performed in Carnegie Hall three times,
only to realize that my dream all this time
had been exactly like this photograph, a static photograph.
I didn't know I was after this.
I had gone through all this training, through all this practising,
and had failed to ask the most important question.
Why am I playing music?
I started looking at myself.
I started looking at the music I was playing.
I started looking at the audiences I was playing,
and I started wondering,
"Why am I only playing for people who can afford to buy a ticket?"
In the middle of this crisis,
and with the thought very clearly in my head,
that perhaps I should stop playing music altogether
and do something else,
I thought I would give it one more try
and go as far away as possible from the concert halls that I knew
and try to find a completely new audience
that knows nothing about the music that I was playing.
I decided that the best place for such an adventure
would be a place really far away, far away from my civilization.
So before I knew how I was going to find this audience,
I bought a plane ticket to Ecuador, the source of the Amazon river.
It felt like a lie when I was there,
that it was the same person,
playing the same music that would be playing on a stage like this,
on a refined beautiful stage like this,
that I was playing in the jungles of Ecuador and Peru.
It became very obvious very quickly
that the biggest challenge in reaching these communities
and trying to find an audience,
would be to be accepted.
Yes, there was some curiosity when I would arrive
but there was more suspicion as to my intentions.
"Why are you here? What do you want from us?"
I quickly found out that the best way to be let in was to simply ask.
It didn't matter if I had gone through
all sorts of difficulties, all sorts of hardships,
I had fought with ants and tarantulas on the way,
the final say had to come from them.
All I had to say is, "I'm here to play music. Do you want to listen?"
And the answer was almost always, yes.
I went to the Amazon not knowing if I will continue playing music,
and I found a new audience that gave me acceptance.
Back in this world, over here,
I was used to playing for people that would put on their nice clothes,
that would buy a ticket,
that would schedule listening time in their busy lives
for an evening of entertainment
that is usually based on some high ideals of our culture.
But out there, none of this existed.
The ideals did not exist. They did not know about these ideals.
They did not know who I was.
They didn't know the music I was playing,
and the feeling that everything I stood for,
the music I was playing
and indeed, I could be rejected at any point
made the sharing experience so much more real
and so much more alive.
This was me with an 88-key electric keyboard, the generator,
a whole team of people helping me document
and helping with every step of the trip,
yet the most powerful message was coming from this new audience.
I found acceptance.
The Amazon was only the beginning.
I wanted to see with my own eyes
and really feel in my hands
what the music I was playing can really do.
So, I travelled to West Africa, to Sierra Leone,
a country that had just been through a 10-year civil conflict,
a very brutal 10-year civil conflict.
And I arrived in Sierra Leone,
expecting to find stories of war, of suffering, of survival,
only to find out that these stories of the past
that unite these people of this African nation
were not the same ones that defined them in the present.
A visitor like myself, could almost miss the wounds of the past,
and I think it is because of the spectacular spirit
of the people of this country.
Classical music of course, as I expected,
was completely new, completely unknown.
But what I didn't expect was that music, classical music, any music
would be felt by the heart
and would be danced so beautifully.
Music would inspire and would be shown spectacularly through music.
I played for a group of blind students
who jumped off their seats and started dancing to the music of Chopin
in the most beautiful way I had ever seen.
Perhaps because no one told them that they couldn't.
Or a few days later, I played for a group of sex workers,
and again, they jumped on their feet
and started dancing to the music of Tchaikovsky.
One of the most horrifying experiences I ever had in my life
was playing for the prisons in Freetown, in Sierra Leone,
where I started playing the music,
and the prisoners, the inmates started looking at each other,
thinking, "What is this?"
And then, as if by a wave, one by one, they realized there is rhythm,
and they started moving their feet,
moving their bodies to the music of Handel
in the most wonderful way I had seen,
and they almost started a riot.
It is being happy that reminds people they are alive, not sadness.
And Sierra Leone has had enough sadness from the past,
but music for Sierra Leone, as I found out,
could only be part of this happiness.
I could go as far as saying that for the first time in my life,
I met an audience, and I felt, fist hand,
that music can make the world a better place.
One of the most powerful and intense audiences
I ever came across was in Japan.
In the post-earthquake, post-tsunami, post-nuclear disaster Japan.
In the emergency shelters,
every face had a face of survival, of life and death,
of the tsunami, the sirens, the missing friends.
It was all engraved in the faces,
and this was my audience in Japan.
An old fisherman that lost everything in the disaster,
or a volunteer that helps others,
straight away after losing her own father.
Or a 10-year-old child with the face of a grown man.
There was a gentleman that after an improvised recital in a hospital
a hospital that happened to be the front line
for measuring the effects of radiation on people,
wanted to talk to me.
So after the recital, he asked to be brought closer with his wheelchair,
and he tried to talk, and he couldn't.
He tried again, and again, and only tears would come out of his eyes.
In the end, with wrinkles of pain in his face, he gave up,
he looked at me and he said, "Arigato".
There was a lady who used to own a little toy, a little music box,
with music from "The Nutcracker"
that broke into tears when she heard music by Tchaikovsky
played again in the evacuation center.
And of course there was a gentleman
that after one of the recitals in the emergency shelters,
he came very shyly to say thank you,
and he said thank you many times
and with tears in his eyes he hugged me,
and he said thank you again and again,
"Thank you for thinking of Japan in this difficult time."
And as I was leaving, I found out that this gentleman
had lost his family six months before in the disaster,
and actually he hadn't spoken to anyone since that day.
Smiles and tears without translation, without words, without language.
Everyone had their own powerful and unique way of saying thank you,
of showing their gratitude.
Yet, I found myself feeling guilty again and again accepting it,
because for a musician, the biggest reward, the greatest reward
is an audience ready to listen,
and I was definitely rewarded very generously.
For one more time, I was discovering
that the most powerful message was coming from the people I was playing for.
Music can give hope and encouragement
in the times of the greatest and deepest crisis.
I left a part of myself in Tohoku, in that part of Japan,
still aching with the fresh wounds,
and I very selfishly took a part of Tohoku with me.
The generosity, the dignity, the kindness to share with the rest of the world.
There were many more adventures,
many more trips to discover new audiences.
In Uganda, I played for young children,
that were really happy to listen to this new music for the first time,
but they were even happier to share their own music,
to sing songs of their own music -
children that had been living with HIV for many year already.
In India, I discovered that expression through music,
through sounds, through colours, through smells,
has absolutely no class barriers,
and in the deepest of poverty, people are still happy.
In the two years since the first trip in the Amazon,
this movement became global
and more than 10,000 people around the world
living in extraordinary circumstances
have been touched by music, in one way or another.
Now, local musicians go to these areas of crisis
and they play music themselves,
or they teach music themselves.
And more musicians from our part of the world
keep going back to share music.
A few months after that first trip in the Amazon,
I was sitting backstage at Carnegie Hall after the final rehersal,
and I felt the responsibility,
the responsibility that people have been dressed up nicely,
have bought a ticket and have expectations.
I was nervous.
A very familiar feeling.
So I sat down and I asked myself,
"Was I nervous when I played for children in the Amazon,
where they were all running around
or sitting around the keyboard under the Amazon sky?"
No, of course I wasn't nervous.
There was nothing different that night.
There was a piano, there was a pianist ready to share music,
there was an audience ready to listen.
All my life, I had been focused on the music I was playing,
on refining the music I was playing,
or even worse, on my persona, on the stage,
but had been ignoring the third and most important element of music-making:
the audience.
So, when the door opened that night and I had to walk on the stage,
I realized that the universal message of music
had remained completely unchanged.
From the depths of the Amazon,
to the evacuation centers in Japan,
to the slum communities in India and West Africa,
to the stage of Carnegie Hall,
to connect, to share, to communicate.
And for the first time in my life,
I walked on the big stage not feeling nervous
because I knew why I was playing music.
Thank you.
(Applause)