Why so many Asians study classical music

A conversation with Mari Yoshihara on the prominent role of Western classical music education in Japan, China and Korea

Asians comprise about six percent of the total population of the United States, but at Eastman School of Music, a top conservatory, 70 percent of the piano students are Asian. Have you wondered why?

Mari Yoshihara is a scholar at the University of Hawaii and the University of Tokyo, and her book Musicians from a Different Shore (2007) traces the history of how Western classical music took root in East Asia and was sent back to the West. Yoshihara’s argument is that classical music came to East Asia as part of a modernization project, but it has evolved well past that into something Asians have made into their own. Here is our interview:

Ian Buruma: The president of the college where I teach part of the time, Bard College, Leon Botstein, once said to me, “The Chinese are the saviors of Western classical music.” What he was referring to was the prominence of musicians, usually with an East Asian background — Korean, Chinese, and Japanese — in Western orchestras, conservatories, and so on. How would you start by explaining it?

Mari Yoshihara: Hello, thank you for having me. He was very kind to blurb my book, Musicians from a Different Shore, when it came out. So I know he has a lot to say about the subject, and I know that statement is deliberately a little hyperbolic. So I’m not sure I would entirely agree that the Chinese, or East Asians in general, are the saviors of classical music. But it’s definitely true that East Asians are numerically overrepresented in the field, especially in the United States.

If you look at the demographics of major music conservatories, or orchestra rosters and so on, there are definitely a lot more East Asians represented than in the overall population of the country. So that numerical overrepresentation of East Asians — that’s definitely a thing.

Chang Che: Can I ask — my experience is similar to yours. You start your book with a kind of memoir of growing up in Japan and having a piano in your house. I also had a piano growing up in my house. And just like you, I felt it was quite normal. I didn’t really notice it as something out of the ordinary. In fact, when I was reading through your book, I just realized that this topic is something I’ve always been wondering about, but haven’t been able to articulate.

So I had a more personal question for you: when did this become something that wasn’t just normalized for you? When did you begin to estrange yourself from this phenomenon — the overrepresentation of Asians in classical music — and take it on as an analytical object of study?

Mari Yoshihara: So how did I get here, is what you’re asking?

Chang Che: What was the point in time when you were like, I could write a book about this?

Mari Yoshihara: It’s kind of a long story. As you say, I grew up in Tokyo — I grew up in the ‘70s in Tokyo — and I played a lot of piano growing up. And just as you say, it seemed like a universal thing, especially among middle-class urban girls. I was pretty serious about it, and I was moderately good at it, so I thought that’s what I was going to do in life. I thought I was going to go into a music school. I’m not sure if I had a concrete idea of being a concert pianist — I don’t think I even knew what that meant — but all I knew was that was entirely my identity.

Things started to change a little when I was eleven years old. I moved to California with my parents because of my father’s job, and we lived there for a few years. At first I didn’t speak a word of English, so it was really hard. I was thrown into just regular public school in Cupertino, California. So life was hard. But then I adapted, I assimilated, I learned to speak English. And then a few years later, we had to move back to Japan, which was also hard.

But once I moved back to Japan, I was still playing piano, but I was no longer just the girl who played the piano. Now I was a girl who spoke English. I had this whole new identity, and a whole new set of things I could do better than many other people. So that gave me a new kind of confidence, and the idea that maybe I don’t have to play the piano — maybe there are other things I could do in life.

This was also around the time I became kind of a budding feminist, through reading and so on. I realized that in order to have an independent life and career in this male-dominated society called Japan, I needed some kind of tool for empowerment. So I decided not to go to a music conservatory, and I studied and got into the University of Tokyo. I still kept taking piano lessons privately, not as seriously, but I enjoyed the piano itself. I kept taking lessons until I graduated from university, and then I moved to the United States to go to graduate school. And all through my graduate school years and beyond, I hardly touched the piano at all.

Now I was becoming a scholar of American studies, which is all about the critical study of race, class, gender, nation, imperialism, colonialism, et cetera. My doctoral dissertation topic was about white women and Orientalism. So I became a devoted reader and fan of Edward Said and all these theories of Orientalism. And in that context, I could not reconcile my past as a devoted classical pianist who was really into Rachmaninoff and Chopin — basically all these dead white European men. And then by day, I was a scholar of American studies critiquing all these dynamics of race and colonialism. So I had put my piano past into the closet, so to speak, and compartmentalized my lives and identities almost completely.

Until — after I got my doctorate, and I’d published my first book based on the dissertation, and gotten tenure at the University of Hawaii — I was starting to think about what to do next as my scholarly project. It suddenly dawned on me that my personal interest and background in classical music, and my scholarly interest in issues of race, gender, nation, et cetera, could be combined into one project.

That moment happened when I happened to be watching TV and Seiji Ozawa conducting the Vienna Philharmonic New Year’s Concert came on. And I was like — that was my moment. So that’s a very long-winded answer to your question of how I came to this topic. I had left it for I don’t know — ten, fifteen years — until Seiji Ozawa appeared on my TV screen. That’s when I decided I should combine my scholarly interest and musical background together into one project. So that was the early 2000s.

Ian Buruma: It’s very interesting what you’re saying. Edward Said himself was a classical pianist as well. And he talked about Orientalism in the Orient, where he really meant the Middle East. So why do you think the topic at hand — namely, the prominence in Western classical music — is pretty much confined to East Asia, that is to Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and China, and not to Southeast Asia or India?

Mari Yoshihara: I think that has to do with the history of how Western music — basically, what we’re commonly calling classical music — was introduced to East Asia, as opposed to other parts of Asia.

As I write in my book, in the case of Japan during the Meiji era, the Japanese government took initiative and made very specific policies to introduce Western music into Japanese society. It came through military band music, and it also came through the Christian church and missionaries. It was disseminated through public education — through the composition of Western-style school songs, adapting Western harmony and melody and oftentimes using Japanese words.

So through these mechanisms, in places like Japan, Western music or Western-style music became a lot more popular, a lot more disseminated through the masses, rather than staying the pursuit of the elite. The same thing happened slightly later in the Korean peninsula, and then later in China as well. And it has to do with colonial history too. Western music came partly directly from Europe and the United States to Korea and China, but a significant number of Chinese and Korean musicians who studied Western music studied either in Japan or with Japanese teachers. So there are these multiple complicated layers of colonialism through which Western music was introduced to these Asian nations.

I think because of the different history of colonialism in Southeast Asia and South Asia, the route through which the music came, and also the segment of the population it reached, was different between East Asia and the rest of Asia.

Ian Buruma: Could another explanation possibly be that in India, for example — or indeed in Iran or Persia — their own classical tradition was still very much alive, whereas in China and Japan and Korea it does still exist (there is gagaku and so on), but as a popular thing, the classical music tradition has dwindled considerably?

Mari Yoshihara: It dwindled very rapidly. It’s quite interesting — as I’m doing this research about the culture of piano lessons in Japan now, I’m realizing even more than I used to that in the early years, when piano lessons were becoming popular — I would say even before World War II, the 1920s and 1930s — a lot of women from well-to-do families were studying piano, but they were also doing things like nihon-buyo, traditional Japanese dance. So there was a period when a lot of people were doing both — kind of traditional pursuits and then Western music.

But then very quickly, it was overtaken, overwhelmed by piano, violin, ballet, and these Western pursuits, especially after World War II. I’m realizing — especially during the US occupation and beyond — the aspiration for things Western and things American in Japan was just so much stronger. That was very strong: this aspiration for things Western in the texture of everyday life, the kind of music people were listening to, the things they wanted their children to pursue, et cetera.

Ian Buruma: When you say that young Japanese women of a certain class would do flower arrangement and Japanese dance and that kind of thing at the same time as learning to play the piano — there may not be a contradiction there, because the idea, I think, was that in order to be an educated young Japanese woman or Korean woman, and to have a good marriage and so on and so forth, you had to be cultured and cultivated. Which is a very German idea, really, much more than American — though I think it had an influence in America too. It’s that idea of Bildung of the nineteenth century, that to play an instrument is essential to be a bourgeois person. So do you think the German influence in Japan, as well as in America, plays a big role?

Mari Yoshihara: Yes, especially in terms of classical music — because even to this day, the Austrian-German influence among classical music fans in Japan is very strong. There’s a very strong inclination toward the German tradition in terms of which composers most people listen to, which conductors are most respected and adored.

Orchestra culture in Japan, for instance, is all about Beethoven. I’m exaggerating a bit, but in terms of what people were listening to and playing — orchestra culture in Japan really emerged out of university or student orchestras, because it took a while for professional orchestras to get established, and the orchestra culture really grew in places like Keio University. And by far the most popular composers were Beethoven and other German traditions.

Ian Buruma: Yes, I was thinking more in terms of class — that in the nineteenth century, for German Jews too, the way to join the bourgeoisie, to become more upper-middle class, playing an instrument was an essential thing. And that’s now almost disappeared in the United States. But in East Asia, it seems that particular tradition has survived. At what stage did it also become a marker of class?

Mari Yoshihara: I think it was always a marker of class. Before World War II, piano was still becoming more common, but it was still a very expensive instrument. Most middle-class people could not purchase one or have access to one. Then I would say afterwards too — it’s really in the 1960s that an average middle-class person could aspire to buy a piano, because manufacturers like Yamaha and Kawai succeeded in producing high-quality, mass-produced upright instruments.

So now, an average salaried family could purchase an upright piano for their children. And also with the development of pedagogy — like the Suzuki method that I know you’re familiar with, and the Yamaha music school pedagogy — your parents or grandparents, your family, didn’t have to be a musical family. You could be a complete layperson, and for relatively reasonable tuition you could get pretty decent music lessons. So that really popularized music lessons for a lot of people in Japan. From the 1960s onwards.

And 1979 — I think that’s the peak of piano production, the manufacture of pianos as well as sales in terms of numbers. And then it starts going down. So the 1960s and ‘70s — that’s really the full blossom in terms of piano specifically.

Chang Che: Before we get to the bourgeoisification of piano — could you correct or confirm my understanding of how classical music entered East Asia? It’s surprising that it seems to be structurally quite similar across China, Japan, and Korea — that the general pattern was that it initially began as a kind of tool of states trying to adopt Western classical music almost as a way of nation-building. Can you speak a little bit about this? Because it’s a little counterintuitive to think that a country like Japan or China, in their effort to build nations, wants to learn about Beethoven or Bach. Why is that the case?

Mari Yoshihara: It wasn’t initially Beethoven and Bach. The key is that it was initially the military band — that was the entrée. So in order for the Meiji government, in an effort to build a strong industrial, militarized nation — they felt they needed a kind of disciplined military and other workforce. And they somehow decided that military bands instilled this kind of discipline and rhythm.

Ian Buruma: But there was also the Rokumeikan culture of upper-class Japanese — sort of dancing and waltzes and so on.

Mari Yoshihara: Yeah. So aspiration for Western, especially European, bourgeois —

Chang Che: There were two elements. There’s a class element to it. But there was also a very practical, militaristic element to it. And then there’s also a religious element to it, right? There was also the missionary aspect.

Mari Yoshihara: Yeah, exactly. So it’s a mix of utilitarian and also cultural, social — all of that come combined.

Chang Che: Got it. And then one step before we get to the more commodification of classical music, including Yamaha and the companies we’re all familiar with now — there’s a period where all three countries, Korea, Japan, and China, repudiate that tradition in some aspect, right? You have interviews with musicians who are going through the Cultural Revolution, where that was an extreme. Can you talk a little bit about that darkening period?

Mari Yoshihara: Yeah. The Cultural Revolution in China is really a dark moment in the history of China, but especially the history of Western music in China. So Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution — anything to do with what they saw as Western bourgeois culture was persecuted. So people who were studying or practicing, performing, composing what they considered Western music were sent off to the faraway countryside or sometimes imprisoned. Some really tragic things happened to the lives and careers of these musicians. And so one could say that really stalled the development of Western music in China during that period.

But even before then — during the revolutionary years in China and also during Japan’s colonization of Korea and other Asian nations — it’s very complicated, because there were a lot of these anti-colonialist movements in these areas against Japan. And the kind of songs that these Koreans, Chinese people, workforce masses, soldiers composed and sang were often Western-style songs that originally sometimes came through Japan. So they were using Western-style music that some of them learned from Japan to fight against the Japanese.

I think that’s a very interesting twist in history, and one of the examples of the multiple meanings that any music has. Western music — just because the instruments, the compositions, et cetera, originated in Europe or the West — doesn’t mean that’s all the music means. Western-ness is not the only meaning the music has. People — Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, or anybody who adopted it for whatever reason, through whatever route — make their own meaning out of that music and use it for their own ends, whether nationalistic goals or spiritual goals, beyond the original intentions of the composers or the cultural, national origins of where it came from.

Ian Buruma: But the Cultural Revolution, I think, was a reaction unique to China. When Japan in the 1930s had a reaction against the West, Western classical music was never banned, because German and Italian composers were still okay, right? So what exactly was banned in those years after 1937? When they had the banning of enemy culture, was it only American and English?

Mari Yoshihara: Yeah, a lot of music. Some of the Japanese musicians who loved Western music, they changed the programs of their performances. This is a little bit different from Western classical music in Japan during that time — but in the 1920s and 1930s, Hawaiian music was very popular. There were a lot of Hawaiian music bands, some of whom were Japanese immigrants who were living in Hawaii and learned Hawaiian music. They were performing Hawaiian music in Hawaii. Some of them came back to Japan, or moved to Japan, because they were so popular. Hawaiian music was very big and popular in Japan at the time.

But after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaiian music was banned. A lot of them changed the names of their bands. They used similar tunes, similar kinds of instruments, but they changed the names of their brands. So they didn’t use words like Hawaii or aloha or marijuana [marimba?]. They changed it to some more generic name. And then they changed the lyrics to more Japanese, nationalistic-sounding lyrics. They made a lot of adaptations. And I think similar things happened with so-called classical music.

Chang Che: Can we talk about the Suzuki method? Did you learn —

Chang Che: I think I — I don’t remember if it was called the Suzuki method, but I just think it’s an incredible story, and it’s an example of the kind of reverse flow of culture, of classical music back to the West. Can you just explain a little bit of what the Suzuki method is?

Mari Yoshihara: Yes. The Suzuki method is a very effective method of music pedagogy that was initially designed by this violinist and violin pedagogue, Shinichi Suzuki, who studied in Germany in the 1920s and then moved back to Japan. He had this philosophy that music should be — and is — accessible to everybody, regardless. It doesn’t have to do with one’s innate talent or your family background. Everybody, with proper methods, will be able to learn music and do it well, through things like immersion and strong parental guidance. He initially developed a structured series of pieces for kids to learn, initially for violin, and then a similar method was adapted to other instruments — piano, cello, flute, et cetera.

This became extremely successful, especially after the late 1950s, when a bunch of American violin teachers came to Japan to study with Mr. Suzuki. They were amazed by the level of playing among young Japanese kids who were playing in complete, perfect tune, complete unison in big groups. So these American pedagogues — violin teachers — studied with Suzuki and brought it back to the United States and other parts of the world. Later on, the Suzuki method actually became even more popular outside of Japan than in Japan proper. It’s a very structured and effective method of music pedagogy.

Chang Che: I think Jimmy Carter’s daughter, right? You mentioned that Jimmy Carter’s daughter was a student of the Suzuki method.

Mari Yoshihara: Many prominent professional musicians today — people like Sarah Chang — being started with the Suzuki method, especially among violinists. A lot of people started playing the instrument through the Suzuki method.

Ian Buruma: But the Suzuki method doesn’t quite explain why even today, classical music seems to be so prominent in households in East Asia, whereas in the United States it’s become a kind of niche thing for specialists, and popular culture has completely swamped it. Why do you think that is? Why has it survived much more in East Asian countries?

Mari Yoshihara: I think classical music still carries a lot of cultural cachet in East Asia, much more so than in the United States.

And also — now that I’m studying the culture of piano in Japan today, I get the sense that the meaning of piano lessons today has changed compared to, say, when I was growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s. Not as many children study the piano in Japan today. For one thing, there are far fewer children in Japan today than decades ago overall. But also kids’ pursuits have diversified a lot more. There are many more lessons — like English lessons, [tucker?], et cetera — that kids do. So piano lessons are far less universal now than they used to be. But it’s still very popular. It’s one of the top two pursuits — lessons that kids take today.

I think a lot of it has to do now with the fact that learning an instrument, especially piano, is associated with strong academic skills. A lot of people believe in the Mozart effect — they believe that if you play a lot of music while you’re pregnant, the baby will come out good with cognitive development, et cetera. And a lot of people believe — I think not wrongly — that learning to play an instrument like piano develops a lot of skills that are applicable to other things in life, especially academic and other professional skills.

So I think that kind of motivation is driving piano culture now, more than aspiration for Western culture or veneration of Beethoven. The thing that people like to see in music lessons today is different from, say, the 1970s.

Chang Che: I wanted to ask, Mari, whether you had thoughts about the flip side of this — that in the United States, classical music attendance has been falling consistently. There are regional orchestras that are reducing performances or cutting wages. And the Trump administration, in their effort to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, was also threatening a lot of symphonies. What do you make of that process in the United States? Or maybe you might know a little bit more about that than I do — could you describe what we’re seeing in the United States with respect to classical music over the past decade?

Mari Yoshihara: I think the place of classical music in American culture in general has changed a lot. It’s not even that recent of a phenomenon. I have written a book about Leonard Bernstein, who was a huge star — he was the American musician of the twentieth century. He was hugely popular, a very big celebrity even beyond classical music fans, because he was so multi-talented and charismatic, and just so popular in so many different fields. But even during his heyday, the share of classical music recordings in the overall recording market was shrinking very rapidly. Through his Young People’s Concerts series and so on, Leonard Bernstein could pack the hall. But even then, the recording industry and the media industry generally were shifting more and more of their weight into popular music. So that has been the case for decades.

Things like orchestras are a very difficult thing to run financially, because even if every single concert is sold out, it would only pay for about 30% of the cost of the musicians. That’s just how the operation is. So I think it’s becoming more and more difficult, especially with the changing media landscape and the way many people listen to music. It’s a difficult thing to sustain as an economic enterprise, in a lot of cases.

Ian Buruma: There may be another reason too, which is a political one — that in the first decades after World War II, there was a sort of consensus in Europe and the United States that it was, in some ways, the duty of a government, and of public broadcasting and education, to elevate the cultural level of the masses. And so to subsidize music as well as other things. Whereas right now, in an age of populism — and right-wing populism — everything that is considered to be elitist… But that’s also said amongst people on the left, that anything elitist has to be discouraged, no longer subsidized, and so on. And of course classical music, opera and so on, which is very expensive, is very much associated with the elites.

Mari Yoshihara: That’s true, which is very unfortunate. Because I’m working on another research and writing project, which is kind of a sequel to my book Musicians from a Different Shore. So about twenty-some years after the publication of the book, a lot of things are changing in the classical music industry, especially in the United States. I’ve gone back to many of the same musicians I interviewed twenty-some years ago, and I’m also interviewing a lot of other musicians today and writing about that.

From that research, I can say that I think what we call classical music is very much alive. It’s very vibrant. A lot of very talented, very visionary, very audacious young — and less young — musicians are doing great things in music, either in terms of composition or performance, conducting, directing, producing, et cetera. They have very creative ideas and are doing a lot of new things. Many of them are playing Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, et cetera, brilliantly. But they’re also doing a lot of other things, like creating new music, using the traditions and instruments — instruments not just in terms of musical instruments like the flute, but the tools of classical music — to do great new things.

And I find that a lot of music organizations like orchestras — especially regional orchestras and regional opera companies — are oftentimes doing very interesting things, more so than the more established big organizations. Because the smaller the organization, the fewer board members you have to convince, so you can actually do more interesting things. Bigger organizations tend to be less nimble in terms of trying out new things.

So I think a lot of great, innovative things are happening in so-called classical music. But it takes a while for that to reach a wider audience, or for the general audience to get that message, or even just have a chance to experience it and learn about it.

Ian Buruma: Right. At the same time that there is this anti-elitist wave in the West — and here, Chang, I think you should come in — in China that does not seem to be the case.

Chang Che: I was looking at the statistics in China around classical music today, and it has been growing at a really rapid pace. There are currently 2,600 or so youth symphony orchestras in China, which is crazy — and 50% of them had been established in the preceding five years, which means they didn’t really exist before roughly 2018. So it’s really only in the past six years that this has been the case.

There are stories — and a lot of them are from state media, so I think someone needs to do some more independent reporting on this — but state media are reporting on orchestras in like the poorest regions of China. And all of them are tied to the Education Department. So it’s a government-affiliated approach.

In my understanding — Mari, I’m really curious how you understand this — but, one, Leon Botstein, Professor Botstein, may have a point. There’s certainly an initiative that is growing in China. My sense is that, similar to what you said, Ian, about how there was this kind of initiative after World War II to educate the masses — part of this is certainly educating the masses. The Education Department’s role is to raise the spiritual quality of the masses. So that is certainly a part of it. There’s also, I think, this general fascination — that, Mari, you mentioned — with the West, just the cultural cachet of Western music. It seems that, at least maybe less within the central government, but these local governments are on board with supporting Western classical music. Are you aware of the recent boom in classical music in China?

Mari Yoshihara: Yeah, definitely. In the last ten, fifteen years — the rise of orchestras all over China, and also the building of big concert halls everywhere in China. A lot of American music schools, for instance, music conservatories — they often say that they really could not survive without, quote unquote, “the China market,” in a lot of ways. American orchestras or soloists would go tour in China because they can pack the halls and they can make a lot of money. American music conservatories send their faculty to China to give master classes and lessons, in the hopes of recruiting students to come study in the US. Some of them, like Juilliard for instance, even set up a branch of the Juilliard campus in China. And other organizations have launched various kinds of partnership programs and enterprises with China.

So yes, one could say that the classical music industry is very much dependent on China as a market — as a source of students, listeners, et cetera. Also, piano manufacturers like Yamaha — for a while, China was a very important market. I think it has changed quite rapidly in the last few years, because the government’s position on music education has drastically changed in the last few years. But yeah, a lot of people, a lot of performers, go perform in China, go recruit students in China, et cetera.

Ian Buruma: Can we change the subject a little bit to another aspect of your book, which is the gender issue, and the prominence especially of female musicians from East Asia or Asian Americans — the influence of their looks, and that there’s a certain exotic image that is being projected. How did that evolve?

Mari Yoshihara: Independent of music or classical music, there has always been historically these gendered and sexualized perceptions of Asian women in the United States. Asian women have stereotypically been viewed as exotic, sensual, also diminutive, subordinate, weak, et cetera — all these things that white male gaze wanted to project upon them, regardless of the reality of Asian women. But these gender, sexual stereotypes of Asian women have also been applied to how Asian women musicians have been perceived and treated in the classical music industry.

I have encountered a lot of Asian female musicians who felt that in music schools in the United States they were not treated as seriously by their faculty, and some of them experienced outright harassment by their faculty. They were not given as rigorous training, or expectations as high as other male musicians, et cetera. And — I guess this happens somewhat less frequently now, but like twenty-some years ago, when I was researching and writing the book — it was also still quite common for the media representation of these Asian women musicians to use very explicit, sexualized language, to focus more on their looks than on their playing, or to project that kind of filter onto their perception of these musicians.

Chang Che: Can I ask a question about authenticity? This is regarding your last chapter. I wanted to give you an example from something I know a little bit more about, which is the Chinese interest in the Greco-Roman classical tradition. This is the classics in a different sense.

There’s this kind of tension I noticed between people who are actually studying the classics — Chinese who are actually experiencing studying Western classics — versus the meanings that society ascribes to that action. Oftentimes when I talk to Chinese classicists, they don’t really see Western classics as white or Western. They just see it as kind of pure — like the Odyssey is such a beautiful story, and so I want to continue to read it and continue to study it in college. But then, especially in this age of populism, there are populists who want to search for roots of identity. And so they oftentimes co-opt the classics as theirs — that Greek and Latin is a part of the West, and the Confucian tradition is a part of the East. And so we Chinese must learn the Confucian tradition, and you Americans must learn the Western canon. There are these debates going on.

I was surprised to learn from your book that there are people who believe that about classical music as well — that there’s something innate about Europeans, white Europeans, who might have better access to classical music. So I was wondering whether you could speak to how you navigate that tension between the interviews you conduct and the kind of impressions people have of what’s going on.

Mari Yoshihara: This is complicated. This is a complicated topic for classical music specifically, because classical music is a genre of music that places a lot of weight on origins. Unless you’re playing contemporary music, basically what classical musicians do is perform music that was literally written and published. There is a score. And it is generally considered that the performer’s job is to faithfully realize the composer’s intentions.

So in order to do that, the performers should really understand deeply the origin and the context of where that music came from — the composer’s biography, the culture he was living in most of the time, and all of the stylistic and other elements that make up that music — and faithfully recreate it. That’s the job of the performer in the case of classical music. That’s the commonly held belief. So it’s very different from other genres of music, like jazz, which is very improvised — that’s a very different kind of music.

So when I interviewed musicians about what they think about this issue — by which I mean how they understand the relationship between the European origin of the music they play and their own non-European identity, how they reconcile or think about the relationship between these two — I was surprised by the wide range of answers my interviewees gave. Some musicians said very firmly that they did not believe one’s racial, cultural, ethnic background was a factor — as long as you are a serious musician who understands and studies the music deeply, and you relate to the music in an authentic way, you can achieve the composer’s intentions. Whether you’re Chinese or Korean or Japanese, you will be able to play Beethoven just as well as a German musician. So in that sense, music transcends borders. It’s universal. A lot of people say that very firmly.

But on the other hand, I was also quite surprised by the number of people — and these are not just people who didn’t make it; they’re not saying it because they couldn’t make it in the classical music world. Some of these answers came from people who are very well known, prominent professional musicians. Some of these people said music is like a language. There is something quite Germanic, essentially Germanic, about German music. There is something essentially French about French music. And there’s a big difference between somebody who was born and raised in Germany, or whose family have been living in Germany for generations, or somebody who’s a native French speaker — those people would have a different relationship to German language or French language. And the same goes for music as well.

So if you grew up in Japan listening to Japanese music, and then studied French music or German music or Italian music, you have a different relationship to that body of music. It doesn’t mean you can’t do well — it’s just that you have a different relationship to it. So I’m calling these people kind of “particularists,” as opposed to the “universalists,” in terms of how they understand the nature of music as a form of language.

I don’t know where I myself stand on this question. I think you can draw a lot of analogies between music and language, as well as other things like food. I do believe there are cultural differences across different things. To what extent your upbringing, your ethnic, racial background, has to do with your understanding of a product of another culture — I don’t know if there is a clear answer to it.

Ian Buruma: Race in America always comes up in many ways. It’s a bogus thing, because I remember an American woman saying something that one does hear quite a bit — that Asian musicians, East Asian musicians, are technically perfect, they’re fantastically good, but they don’t really understand the soul of Western music because they haven’t been raised in it. And the same woman who said that herself was raised in Southern California, where she’s just as far removed from the German and French and Italian origins as any Asian.

What you’re saying reminds me of another experience I had, which was in the ‘80s. I was having dinner with a Korean writer — he was a bit of a nationalist — in Seoul, and we were sitting in a traditional Korean restaurant. Suddenly we heard a tape of classical music played by Kyung-Wha Chung. He went silent, and he said to me, “This is the soul of Korea. This is the Korean blood showing through her music.” And she was playing Bartók or something like that. There are a lot of bogus ways to approach this subject, is my point.

Mari Yoshihara: Yeah.

Chang Che: So you interviewed Asian musicians. If Asian musicians actually at the top of their craft are telling you, “Yeah, there really is something about this music that we Asians can’t access” — how does that particular view square with what I think you’re arguing in the book, which is that Asians in classical music are not just joining some tent, they’re also reimagining, reinventing? We just spent some time talking about the Suzuki method. I feel like language is not exactly the right analogy, because then what the Suzuki method would be is like Americans adopting a Japanese person speaking English. There’s something about music that’s a little bit more porous culturally, and can be brought in and incubated in a different culture or context.

Mari Yoshihara: Yeah. So what I was trying to get at in that chapter about authenticity is that musicians can and do have a wide range of ideas, positions about this question of authenticity and how their racial, ethnic identity relates to the European origin of the music. And because, as I said earlier, classical music is a genre of music that places a lot of emphasis on its origins, there can be a lot of different ideas about it. But I don’t think the goal of classical music or classical musicians is necessarily — the ultimate goal is not necessarily to play Beethoven like Beethoven would have. Maybe some people want that, but not everyone is trying to play Beethoven the way Beethoven would have.

After all, it’s all an interpretation, and a performance of the interpretation. Just like anything else, in order to interpret something very deeply, you have to do a lot of studying, a lot of thinking, a lot of analysis. And then out of that, you create your own interpretation and performance of it. So I think the ultimate goal is not necessarily to play German music like a native-born German would, or play French music as if a Parisian would do, but to come up with your own understanding of what that means and do it your way. Because otherwise everybody would end up playing the same piece of music the same way. And what’s the point of that?

Ian Buruma: Yes. That raises the question of whether there really is such a thing as a national style of performing. I think you were talking earlier of a national style in composition — because Verdi operas clearly are rooted in Italian popular music and so on. But the idea that there should be a national style in performing sounds to me very suspect.

Mari Yoshihara: I think with certain instruments, there actually — it’s not so much because, well, I don’t know if it’s so much national, but there are traditions of pedagogy. There are certain kinds of like a Russian style of pianism that’s different from, say, French style. But the thing is, because of globalization and the flow of people, et cetera, a lot of people — for instance, prominent Japanese piano teachers were trained in Germany or the United States. Some of them are more German style, and some of them are American style. Same with violin pedagogy. Certain prominent violin teachers — like Dorothy DeLay, who taught at Juilliard for a long time — her style was different from, say, another violinist from France or Belgium or wherever. So I think there are styles of pedagogy that get passed down through generations of students, but it doesn’t necessarily correlate with national or ethnic identities.

Chang Che: Great. Thank you so much, Mari. I really, really appreciate it.

Ian Buruma: Thank you.

Mari Yoshihara: Thank you for having me.