Hostage Justice

I spend a lot of time these days reliving the past and among other things I have been singing the praises of Japan, a country I came to call home after twenty-four years of residence there. After some initial awkwardness, I quickly came to appreciate its many obvious virtues, starting with a people who are fundamentally other-oriented, nature-loving, and who share my view that life ought to be lived in avoidance of violence and deceit.  Japan has been very good to me; it provided me with an occupation which enabled me to buy a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a husband I love dearly. I am at home with its hot springs, its cuisine, its civility and its mostly modest ways.

On the downside, what I find fault with are largely trivial things.  I often cite the line, "How can Japan know so much about what it beautiful and so little about what is ugly?" which addresses the garishness and tackiness of its cities. But there is one thing about Japan which startled me the first time I heard of it as incongruent with its order, civility and safe streets, and that is the fact that over 99% of police indictments lead to conviction. Defenders of the system will say that is because the police are careful to build an open-and-shut case before they indict; I'm with those who worry it speaks to the extent the police will go to get lawbreakers to confess to their crimes.

Japan has what is called a "hostage justice" system where suspects are held in prolonged physical detention and denied bail to pressure or coerce them into confessing to crimes.  Human Rights Watch attributes the high conviction rate to the fact that Japan prioritizes confessions over due process.  There is an upside to this: if one shows proper contrition, the sentencing may be light because, one assumes, there is a consciousness of a national community in which expulsion or some other kind of excommunication is viewed as unduly harsh. But woe betide those who maintain their innocence.

Listen to a couple testimonies of victims of this Japanese "guilty until proven innocent" approach.

Which brings me to the reason I've brought this topic up in the first place.  A former colleague of mine mentioned on a Facebook page that she had just made a visit to Chiba Prison to visit Chris Payne, an American fighting a wrongful conviction. The Tokyo High Court reversed his guilty conviction when they found that DNA evidence used to convict him had been falsified. Yet, astonishingly, he has remained in solitary confinement for the last four years and nine months. He was moved from Tokyo to Chiba recently for retrial purposes, but apparently due to the court’s scheduling congestion the retrial date is not set to begin until next April, a full eight months from now. In solitary confinement! The injustice is glaring. The conviction was based on a falsified DNA analysis. And while the analyst goes scot free, Chris sits in solitary. Something here stinks to heaven. 

Where are the good guys here? Where is the American Embassy? Chris is from Indiana. Where are his Senators and Congressmen? The U.S. press covered the story initially, but where has it been since?

(I urge you to follow the links here, here and here and get the background to the whole story.) 

My colleague managed to meet with Chris and was distressed to hear of his untreated health conditions and disturbed by the fear she heard in his voice. 

I have no direct personal knowledge of Chris Payne's case, but I do trust what my colleague has posted on her Facebook page and the reports from the press seem credible. There is so much injustice floating about these days that this may not strike you as worth more than passing interest, but I find the case so egregious that I simply had to take the time to call it to your attention.

Help me make this injustice go away.

Rainbows and things

 One of my favorite pieces of music of all time is Judy Garland's rendition of Over the Rainbow in the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz. Come to think of it, The Wizard of Oz is probably my favorite movie of all time.

"Birds fly over the rainbow; why, oh why, can't I?" Nobody ever put hopes and dreams and longing into music better, and whether we're dreaming of a better world, relief from pain, or just hoping that tomorrow will be better than today, there is something powerful about tying that longing to a rainbow.  It's not an accident that the LGBT movement has taken on the rainbow as its iconic symbol. Because it embraces diversity - we just want to stop being excluded - and because, more simply, because its beauty is uplifting.

I've been on a serious Chopin kick for the past couple of years, as well as going all out as a follower of that young piano genius from Korea, Lim Yunchan. I've followed a couple dozen pianists' careers, but nothing has blown me out of the water like Yunchan's superhuman talent has.

If you've missed the link I'm trying to make, here it is: One of Chopin's most notable pieces is his Fantasie Impromptu in C-sharp Minor (Opus 66).  All sorts of famous pianists have made memorable recordings of it: Artur Rubenstein, Daniil Trifonov, Sviatoslav Richter, and Evgeny Kissin, to name just a few.

There is a melody in the Fantasy that became a popular song called I'm Always Chasing Rainbows.  Judy Garland picked it up in 1940, the year I was born, and now had two memorable songs to her credit about rainbows.  

Two different genres, both inspiring.

Here's a version of it by a guy who picks the Chopin version apart and explains why it's such a difficult piece to learn.  I sat through it this morning and appreciated the close look at the piece.

I then went to a version by Yunchan.

Performed when he was nine years old.

So there.

Those piano lessons were not in vain

Music.  Right up there with food and drink.  As essential to life quality as a good night's sleep and the company of people with whom you share love and express affection.  I can go many a day without reading a book.  I cannot go a day without music.

I lucked out as a kid.  My parents sensed that I might take to the piano and my father went out and found an upright in a junkpile for $25.  At the age of six or seven I started piano lessons.  I believe they cost my mother $1.25.  That was back in the 1940s.  My piano teacher supplemented her living as an organist at the Second Congregational Church, complaining that the preacher got a whopping good salary for his contribution to the community and she had to supplement her meager church income by teaching tone deaf kids and telling them to keep their fingers out of their noses.

I was a dutiful student of hers, but it was clear I was never going to be a prodigy - or even anything more than somebody who could read notes and recognize key signatures. I steadfastly refused to practice my Czerny finger exercises and never acquired anything resembling virtuosity.  I did get good enough to get a job as a church organist for a time (I think they were at the point of desperation, but never mind), but I knew instinctively that, unlike my cousin Bernard, becoming a professional musician was not in the cards for me.  What I did get, though, from those early years of piano (and later organ) lessons was, if not a chance to impress the world with talent, something far more lasting - a love of music.  

My luck continued into my teenage years.  We had a music teacher who visited us once a week and taught us to sing.  She happened to be the organist at the church I attended and directed both the church choir and the high school glee club, which she sat me down in front of as accompanist. I also got jobs keeping time to the step-kick-plié efforts of the local girls' at ballet.   All small town musical activities that never quite made it as springboards to professional musical careers. 

No matter.  I am more than thankful to have had sufficient exposure to music to enable me today to fill the hours with the rich array of musical recordings available on YouTube, even now when I am confined to the house and cannot get to public concerts, the opera, or other musical events.  And I've often wondered if the same holds true for those little girls now sitting with their grandkids and snatching every opportunity to take in a ballet.

So much for trivial background information; what I'd like to put out here are some of the musical pieces that keep me going through tough times.  Let me dive in:

There are so many pianists I think one should become familiar with: Alexander Malofeev, the Jussen Brothers, Martha Argerich, Yuja Wang, Vyacheslav Gryaznov, and Garrick Ohlsson all come to mind, my favorites to listen to, and not necessarily pianists I would put at the head of the line. There is one guy I would, however, put at the head of the line, the Korean teenager Yunchan Lim.

Let me give you a couple reasons why.  Liszt and Chopin, as you probably know, were not only performers; they were also teachers and wrote pieces they called "practice studies" for their students. Liszt, I am convinced, was a sadist at heart.  Some of his "Etudes" as they are called, are not so much suitable for developing skills at fingering as they are exercises to show off your inadequacies.  He started out in 1826 with a dozen and went on to develop them into twice that many a decade later, although today the core of these etudes are known as the "Transcendental Etudes," and reflect the entirety of Liszt's career as a composer.  Here is Yunchan playing all twelve at the Cliburn Competition in 2022.

If you don't have the time or the interest to listen to them all - a little cake goes a long way - listen at least to Number Five, known as "Feux follets."  And remember, at this performance this kid is just eighteen years old!   

But as good as he is in this Cliburn Competition, I think he outdoes himself playing Rachmaninoff's 3rd Concerto with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, directed by Marin Alsop.  How often does a soloist bring a conductor to tears?  [a brief aside here: if you want to hear a good analysis of this performance and of the chemistry between Yunchan and Marin Alsop, there's this piece by Chopin expert Ben Laude.]

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Much as I am regularly captivated by piano music, I am equally enamored of the human voice. Here, for example, are two of my favorite tenors: Jonas Kaufmann and Dmitri Hvorostovski (the latter, alas, no longer with us), singing the famous duet from George Bizet's opera, "The Pearl Fishers."

Where I want to end up in this blog entry is not with arbitrarily selected pieces of music but with the observation that music enriches in all its many forms.

Not just classical, but simple melodies, and sometimes accompanied by plain everyday emotions as well.  Longing, for example. Consider these pieces which, although quite simple, have stood the test of time. I'm talking about Judy Garland's rendition in the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz of Somewhere Over the Rainbow.  And a second piece from Weimar Germany, the 1920s tune, with an analogous sentiment, Somewhere in the World, sung by the Comedian Harmonists, a group which had to disband because of nazi persecution.  The music lives on in Weimar nostalgia.  Here's Max Raabe singing it.  And here it is again, with a chorus of lovely young voices.  And again, sung by Jonas Kaufmann.  

I find musical joy and satisfaction in almost all of its several forms (short of hard rock): instrumentally, or through the human voice, in complex classical forms, jazz, gospel, blues, choral, folk songs and simple harmonies.  I love it when it lifts me out of my seat and makes my arms and legs move, and I've listened to "Sleep my little prince, sleep" at least 1000 times.