Music and Soy Sauce

Luis Dias

A year ago, I had begun listening to podcasts while exercising at home during the pandemic. I listened to the classical music podcast series ‘Sticky Notes’, presented by conductor Joshua Weilerstein. I learned a lot about many works and aspects of music while also keeping fit.

One episode was quite intriguing: ‘The connection between language and music’ where Weilerstein interviewed Chinese-American pianist Yundu Wang who had just submitted this doctoral thesis to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. It was so interesting that I emailed Weilerstein later, who put me in touch with Wang for a copy of her thesis.

Many parts of the interview, which Wang elaborates on more fully in her thesis, resonated with me. In the fifth chapter of her thesis, ‘East Asian Musicians in Western Classical Music’, she argues that “even as the transcendent view of classical music remains the predominant discourse in society and in education, the historically based –and equally entrenched—understanding that Western classical music is ‘the embodiment of European essence, achievement and tradition’ still looms large, if in the shadows.” This “shadowy” view presented itself to her more than the “transcendent” one.

While many Asians interviewed in research she quoted were “critical of the racial stereotypes of being robotic, technically proficient, but unemotional or insufficiently sensitive to the music” they played, they “eventually come to internalise, accommodate, and even authenticate” such stereotypes. Wang affirmed this from her own experience.

This issue has come to the fore again, very prominently. All the music education and violinist forums I’m subscribed to are abuzz following the insensitive, racially stereotypical remarks made by the esteemed 72-year old Israeli-American violinist, violist and conductor Pinchas Zukerman at a recent online master-class, part of this year’s virtual Starling-DeLay Symposium on Violin Studies at The Juilliard School of Music. His statements were deemed so offensive that the video of the session was taken off the website and an apology issued by the organisers.

Laurie Niles, founder of the popular website violinist.com watched the virtual class and reported about it on her blog. An accomplished sister duo from New York participated, playing Spohr’s Duo Concertante. A video of them playing the work was submitted to all symposium attendees; Niles had listened to it and loved it. “I could listen all day,” she wrote.

But when the sisters played live at the master class, Zukerman found their playing “almost too perfect”, urging them to think more about phrasing, laughing as he recommended adding “a little more vinegar – or soy sauce!” to their playing. They played again, but now it was “too boxy”. Then he asked them to let the violin “sing the music”, lamenting, “I know in Korea they don’t sing». When the sisters said they were not Korean, but of half Japanese descent, he retorted: “In Japan they don-t sing either,” going on to “mimic a sing-song style that has been stereotyped as Asian”, in Niles’ words. “That is not singing. Violin is not a machine.”

This could well have been a master-class on ignorance and tactlessness. Obviously Zukerman is ignorant about the worldwide following of K-pop (Korean popular music). Even if you forgive him that, he ought to know of the South Korean opera singers performing at the world’s leading opera houses.

I instantly thought of Wang’s interview on ‘Sticky Notes’, as she had a near-identical experience. She and a Japanese colleague played a Mozart sonata for two pianos at a master-class for a renowned pedagogue (whom she didn’t name, but who was white) and received similar snap judgments, assumptions, pigeon-holing, stereotyping.

Sadly, both in my personal capacity and as project director of Child’s Play India Foundation, I’ve come across such stereotypical judgments, remarks and behavior from a few overseas musicians.

Let me first qualify this by saying that for the most part we’ve had wonderful experiences in the eleven years of our existence. But we’ve also had some Western teachers who come with a ‘saviour’ complex, who, without first hearing the children play and even listening to an account of their progress prior to their arrival, insist on beginning all over again.

Such condescending assumptions often conveniently work to the advantage of such teachers, especially for those coming for a limited time-span. It is easier to downplay children’s potential, getting them back to basics, and for choral teachers to dismiss even video evidence of children having sung three-part harmony and in counterpoint in previous concerts, so that these teachers can go back to singing in unison all over again. It’s less work, simple as that.

When I read of Zukerman’s sing-song mimicry of Asians, it reminded me of how a few visiting musicians would do this to the children’s (and our) voice inflections. And several are tickled pink by the ‘head-bobbing’ thing we do when we agree with what the other person is saying. It’s funny the first time they notice it, but it quickly gets old. After months or even years spent here, feigning continued incomprehension about its meaning (“Do you mean yes? Or no? In my country we nod for yes, and shake our head for no? But I can’t understand what this means”) is quite baffling, if not downright rude.

The assumption is that the western way for doing or perceiving anything is the ‘correct’ way, and that any deviation from it is therefore ‘wrong’, even worthy of scorn.

Then you have the stereotype about poverty. You will have read of some of the skepticism about refugees from Syria and other war-torn countries streaming into Europe: “They can’t be that destitute if they have mobile phones and wear shoes.” We’ve actually had this said about our children too. Perhaps they were expecting to see half-naked children in rags running barefoot, with swarms of flies buzzing overhead. Just for the record, most of our children don’t have mobile phones, which is why it has been so difficult for us to continue during the pandemic. The few that do, share it with their parents, siblings and family.

Another musician spent barely a half-hour with our children some years ago, and then returned home to find some weeks later, that he had contracted Hepatitis B. He actually had the temerity to ask me if, in my capacity as a doctor, I thought it possible he could have got it from the children! I sent him a link with information on the ways in which Hepatitis B is contracted. I’ve not heard from him since.

It hurts even more when sweeping racist statements are made by people of Asian origin who have spent a significant portion of their lives in the West. I was horrified when such a musician said at a prestigious music conference some years ago, that Indian children could not start learning to play stringed orchestral instruments as early as their South-East Asian counterparts, because “their physiognomy is different”! Such absurd assertions fly in the face of any scientific evidence, but are still quite deep-rooted. I challenged the person who said this, but he was unmoved.

Zukerman has apologised, of course, promising “to do better in the future.” But this soy sauce stain might be hard to wash off from his otherwise formidable legacy.