Yosuke Kawasaki Interview Transcript Conversations with Musicians with Leah Roseman
Leah Roseman:
Hi, welcome to episode three of Conversations (with Musicians) With Leah (Roseman), and my guest today is none other than the concertmaster of the orchestra I play in, Yosuke Kawasaki. Welcome.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Hello. Thanks for having me.
Leah Roseman:
This is so great, you agreed to talk with me. I have so many questions, there's so many things I want to cover.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Okay.
Leah Roseman:
I'll start with, this year's been weird, we're talking during the pandemic. Is there any violinistic go-to you've had as part of a routine that just keeps you centered?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Well, the first thing that I looked for when this whole thing started a year ago, I think we all quickly realized how much we put an importance on routine. We just didn't have any anymore. In our family, I have two little kids. The older one was in first grade at the time, so we revolved our schedule around her, all of a sudden, and her needs. Then I realized that one student in particular that I teach privately, she also needed a routine, as well. It was a win-win situation. So, I just met with her every day at 10 in the morning, and did a half an hour of teaching, or anything really. I found that to really provide that center that you're talking about. Otherwise, from there I motivated myself to keep in shape, practice, and learn repertoire that I haven't learned yet.
Leah Roseman:
There's a repertoire you've been working on that's been really interesting for you?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
I would say it was more out of necessity. It really centered around teaching a lot. There were so many concertos that I haven't really learned during my time at school that students play as standard concertos now these days, like Korngold. It wasn't as standard when I was growing up, so I'm studying that. But other pieces that I haven't studied well, so both of the Prokofiev concertos, really. There were some ... Schubert fantasy, you play that. I thought that was great for just basic technique work and just playing in tune, and clean. It was great work. Oh, that was another thing. I realized that when I sing, vocally, I don't sing in tune at all.
Leah Roseman:
I heard you say this in another conversation we were having. The thing is we have to realize is we're not trained singers. It's really hard to sing in tune. It's just technique, I think. It's not your ear, right?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Right.
Leah Roseman:
But if you tried whistling, it's much easier to whistle in tune.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah. Jessica mentioned that. Jessica's my wife. She's also a violinist in the orchestra. She mentioned that I whistle better than I sing, but it was shocking to me, because I thought that I sang in tune. So, that has something to do with my ears, I'm sure. It was because my daughter was singing something for her school. Exactly a year ago, she was recording something, and the parents were encouraged to sing with them. So, I was singing at octave lower, trying to provide this carpet of bass for her to sing on. Of course, she wanted to play back immediately. So, we started listening to it together. That's when I first noticed that I was horribly out of tune. I started getting paranoid that everything that I've been practicing, perhaps I'm not hearing it quite in tune, and there was a period there for several months where I started really doubting my intonation.
Leah Roseman:
Did you find you recorded yourself more at that time?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah, I did a lot. Pretty revealing. I've noticed certain tendencies, especially in first position when we play.
Leah Roseman:
It's comfortable, right?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Of course.
Leah Roseman:
First position, you'd think it would be more of, but-
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah, it's comfortable. I think that comfort also is very deceiving because you stop listening and relying to muscle memory. And so for me, in particular, my Cs and Fs in first positions, they're always high.
Leah Roseman:
Actually, what I was saying, is it's less comfortable, I think. Well, because you have to stretch further and your hands more open, third position to me is super comfortable, it's middle of the ...
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
You Know what I mean?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah. I've also experimented with using shoulder rests and not, and now I don't use one, but my technique really changed when I decided not to use it. So, I don't think I properly adjusted at the time. This was 10 years ago now, because I was on my own already. No one was teaching me how to do it. So, I figured it out how comfortable I am, but maybe there were things that someone else could have pointed out 10 years ago that would've helped.
Leah Roseman:
I remember my teacher saying at a certain point, you're going to have to teach yourself and it's so true, right?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
That's the big transition. You studied at Julliard, you studied with many, many famous teachers. I'm curious, you were 10 and you started in Julliard, pre-college. What was that experience like? What kind of experience kids have in a program that?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
That's a good question. It's hard to recall everything. It's just flashes of things here and there. My father is currently a violin teacher. He's teaching at Julliard. A lot of my friends, I suppose, were his students, maybe. Yeah. I don't know. It's hard to describe. I didn't have a sense that I was doing something different. It was always part of my life. Saturdays were fun for me. It was a day that I got to see a lot of my friends that shared the same interests as me. Of course, I had friends at school during the week, but there wasn't a special connection there, I suppose.
Leah Roseman:
Did you have orchestra ... Were there chamber music opportunities for the young? I'm curious about all that.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah. The day started off with orchestra. There was chamber music, but that was optional, I believe. I only started doing that a little later, but it was orchestra. Then we had classes. Ear training classes, theory, what else do we have? Well, of course, individual lessons and master classes.
Leah Roseman:
Were the master classes fairly often? Would they bring an outside people?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
At the time, we didn't have access to outside people. At least I wasn't aware of it. Every studio was pretty siloed off. So, we had master classes within the studio. So, my teachers were Hyo Kang, my primary teacher, and Dorothy DeLay.
Leah Roseman:
I've heard stories with her that she was always running late and people would wait in the hallway for hours for their lessons. Is this true?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah. There are funny stories on why that happened too. There was a summer, as she always taught in Aspen Music Festival in the summers, and there was one summer, I forget how this came to be, but she took in, I guess, she was a motherly figure and she took in four students. This was, I guess, in the late '80s. I'm not going to mention who they were, but I think she had late nights, not partying with them, but really just having a good time, living with her students and sharing a space, and talking about music I'm sure. I'm sure there were some card games going on as well, but, and ever since then ... That's the story. I don't know if it's true, but she's adopted this late night ritual and it's just hard for her to get up, I guess.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
The day didn't start until about two or three in the afternoon. We were all just waiting. I've been at her house in the morning sometimes when she asks for students to just come and have an extra lesson here and there, and for some students it's because they're preparing for a competition or something like that. For me, it was always like, "I need to whip you into shape again. So, you need to come over." So, I would be at her house in the mornings. Even then, there was no sense of time, there was no sense of like, "Okay, I arrive at 10 and I end at 11." It was always I arrive early, of course, try to be there on time. Then we're just sitting there. She's having coffee and she's offering me something to eat, and then she'll get a call from various competitions all over the world and schools, and she was a political figure in our world. I think she used those mornings just to make phone calls, they didn't have emails back then.
Leah Roseman:
Would she have you practicing your scales while she was doing that or you were just waiting?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
No, I would just be sitting there. Sometimes she said I could go practice, but most of the time I was just sitting there.
Leah Roseman:
When she coached you on repertoire, and maybe other teachers too, was there a big focus on how to do things technically, or just assuming that you knew and more about the music?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
She always had a technique class and she had a brilliant way of doing it. She had her older students teach the younger students, and she knew how to pick the older students too. It was always the ones that needed the technique themselves. So, I was also teaching technique class to the younger kids when I got older. So, we just concentrated on basics. So, scales, arpeggios, shifting exercises, all the Ševčik.
New Speaker:
exercises. Not really etudes. Really basics and maybe vibrato exercises, things like this.
Leah Roseman:
You have a really beautiful vibrato. I'm curious. Do you remember someone teaching it to you? Or what exercises do you like to give students?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Such a personal thing, and everyone vibrates differently. Some people vibrate from the arm, some from the wrist/finger combination, no one ever really taught me my vibrato, I suppose. I always just tried to emulate sounds that I heard. Growing up, my father was a huge fan of Pinchas Zukerman, so I just heard a lot of Pinchas Zukerman in my house.
Leah Roseman:
Then on stage, he was our music director for almost 20 years.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Right. My first day, I thought, "Wow."
Leah Roseman:
I was going to ask, you've been a concertmaster, not just here, but many orchestras, your whole orchestra career, I believe, was being concertmaster, right?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah. There were festivals where we rotated within the section.
Leah Roseman:
But did you aspire to be a concertmaster when you were younger?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
No, not really. I was in a studio with Dorothy DeLay, Hyo Kang . These were teachers that taught Gil Shaham, Sarah Chang, Midori. There was just a lot of violin virtuosos in her studio. I think the younger generation, especially, just aspire to ... Oh, Perlman, Itzhak Perlman being another one. So, we all aspire to be soloists. And being that young, when I was 10, for example, we didn't have any clue what the politics were in classical music, or how difficult it would be to actually have a solo career. But that's what we all strive for. So, in our practicing, the routines that we had, Dorothy DeLay always had a five hour routine. So, you start with basics. This is in general, but hour of basics, hour of scales, hour of etudes, hour of Bach, and then an hour of concerto. If you have a short piece, sonatas, you have to add that onto those hours. I never really practice five hours a day, but definitely three, I would say.
Leah Roseman:
When you first started filling the role of concertmaster, a lot of people don't understand why are you late for every concert. Concertmaster comes out alone, takes their bow. But it's people have said to me, "Oh, they lead your section." They don't realize what an incredibly responsibility it is. Did you have surprises when you first started acting in that role?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah. I'm trying to remember the first time I might have sat in that chair. I don't think I was even aware of what the responsibilities were when I first started doing it. The one advice that I always followed was my father's advice, which was just try to do the best that I can in whatever I'm doing, whether that's playing solo or playing at a wedding, or playing in the back of the section of the orchestra too. Just do the best that you can. I think that was initially what I was trying to focus on. As you're doing it, I suppose, you start to pick up on a lot of things. I started playing in orchestra when I was 10 in pre-college, but at Aspen Music Festival, they have different orchestras there, as well.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
It's a nine week festival. And the first audition I took, I was 12 or 13. They put me in the chamber symphony orchestra, which performs every week. It was new repertoire. It's what we do, professionally. I was just thrown into this situation and I was sitting last stand, second violins. The youngest in the orchestra, and my stand partner was, I don't know, 16 or 17 year old Korean, her name was Angela Ahn. She plays in a piano trio. She's just showing me the ropes like, "Okay, first of all, you have to have a pencil."
Yosuke Kawasaki:
I keep forgetting my pencil. And then she said, "Okay, you have to turn the pages." So, I started turning the pages. It's like, "No, that's too early. That's too late," and so on. Just learn these etiquettes, as you go. So, I had great experience when I was already 12 or 13. Just looking from the back too, what's happening in front of you, it's a fantastic perspective. You see the concertmaster, the concertmaster that I played under for all those years in Aspen was David Perry. He's out in Wisconsin, I think. Fantastic violinist, and leader as well. He was a student of Dorothy DeLay. Right behind him, sat Robert Chen. He's a concertmaster of Chicago, right now. He was also studying with Dorothy DeLay, and it was just seeing the two of them there. Then, I think, there was also Nick , who was a long time concertmaster of the Metropolitan Orchestra. So, I was able to just observe and pick up the antics, or whatever it is, the gestures of these three violinists, for six or seven years. I just watched them, from various places in the orchestra.
Leah Roseman:
One thing I find interesting in orchestra, people may not realize, the conductor has to beat quite a bit ahead of where the music sounds. So, they have this orchestra in their head that's ahead of what they're hearing. Then the concertmaster, which you do so well, you have to show it just early enough before you play, you can't be late to your own. You know what I mean? So, there's all this anticipation happening for everyone to play together. Do you ever think about that or it just come naturally?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
I've been thinking about it more recently because we haven't been playing. Certain tendencies that every orchestra has, it seems to get exaggerated as the pandemic goes on, to me anyway. We're all living in our own world, even when we're practicing, our own time, our own intonation, it's all just circling around you. I think we just get used to it more and more as we do it. So, when we're not getting together and playing all the time, it's hard to come together again with that sort of timing that you're talking about. Conductors always have to beat ahead. For me, recently, maybe it's the closer you sit, the easier it is to react, of course. That's true. I just find that us trying to anticipate what the conductor is doing is also part of the job. Not waiting for the beat. So, my thoughts on that are, I don't know, hard to talk about without having done it in so long.
Leah Roseman:
I was actually on the selection committee when you were hired. It was a long process. I think it was five years, 13 for concertmaster. I really remember the first time I heard you play and I was just really blown away by the color in your playing. Just incredibly beautiful contrast of tonal color and really inventive musical expression. So, I've always really admired that about you. When I see your fingering choices, sometimes you'll just be way up in the D-ring on some solo that no one else would maybe choose that, it's really risky, but you really go for color. Is it conscious with you, that you keep pushing the boundaries that way, or just always been part of your playing?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah. It is something that I think about all the time. I prefer playing slower music. I like slow movements of everything.
Leah Roseman:
You mentioned, you're coaching university students, and I know you coach young professionals entering the profession, you hear a lot of auditions, a lot of mock auditions. Do you have advice you'd give people preparing auditions?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
What's often lacking, do you find? Why aren't people getting the job?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
That's a hard question because it's not as general as it seems. Every playing is so different. We all hear what's lacking, I guess. So, my advice is try to be honest with yourself, I suppose, try to really be aware of your strengths and weaknesses. My teacher, Dorothy DeLay, was so great at paying compliments. She always started off the lesson, no matter how bad I played or how bad anyone played, with a compliment. She would always say, "Honey, you have the most beautiful sound," and then she'll go off and just start dissect everything that was wrong with the playing. But I think that's super important, to really know what it is that you do well. If you can put that forward, if you can bring that to the foreground despite the weaknesses that you may have, then I think, we, as panel members, we can hear some of that confidence as well, in people's playings.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
And then, of course, from excerpt to excerpt, we've been doing a lot of audition training in the orchestra as well for participants and students, bringing out the differences of every excerpt and really showing the panel your versatility is a great weight, I think, advance in auditions, but every orchestra is different. I remember auditioning for Chicago once. The only comment I got was I missed one note. There was another comment. My vibrato was too wide.
Leah Roseman:
So you came from Japan, so you're bicultural, would you say?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
I was born in the States, actually. My parents are Japanese.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. But you've worked quite a bit in Japan. You're fluent in Japanese, would you say?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Leah Roseman:
Would you say there's a slightly different culture in orchestras there compared to North America?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yes. Very. Culturally, it's a different place. There's a real sense of hierarchy there based on experience, based on age, especially, and good things and bad things about that, but their whole modeling of an orchestra and the etiquette, the politics, that sort of thing, it's modeled after European orchestras, more, especially German orchestras. When I first started playing in orchestras there, it was different. In the end, we're all working towards the same goal, of bringing together a program. But the process, it's much more organized. Because of that sense of hierarchy, everyone is ... It's not a criticism of how we do things here, at all. It's just different.
Leah Roseman:
You play a lot of chamber music. Sometimes I think about the fact that when, of course, we need to focus in our own playing with any group, but you need to have this incredibly wide focus so that you're listening across, and all that. An orchestra's really amplified. So, you don't have time to study every score before every rehearsal for every piece. So, are there go-tos, things you know to listen for, to keep track of where to fit in?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah. I usually just try to keep an ear out on the baseline. So, not just the double bases, but cellos, and timpani. It's really just the furthest people from me that I just try to keep always an antenna up for. Then I hope that everything in the middle converge together.
Leah Roseman:
I know things are just getting going again. You're running a couple of chamber music festivals as artistic director, I believe?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Just one in Japan, it's called this Affinis Summer Music Festival, and it has a 30 year history, but it moves around a lot. For the next four years, I think, we're going to be in a city called Nagaoka, it's very close to the Japan Sea. It's a chamber of music festival designed for just orchestra musicians. It's great. The participants are all members of different professional Japanese orchestras, and we invite, I guess, principle players from orchestras from abroad. So, there's a concertmaster from Gewandhaus Orchestra that comes there. Last year we had Storgards there, as well.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
That was great. Every year, slightly different members. It started off as more of a coaching situation because it was designed in the beginning, I guess, with the idea of how do we improve rural orchestras in Japan, professional orchestras, but it's come such a long way that most players of any orchestra in Japan, but also across the world, the level's so much higher, and I just mean facility wise, playing wise. These days, it's really just a collegial feeling, making chamber music, and in a cultural exchange through music, I guess you could call it.
Leah Roseman:
That's really great to hear.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah. It's fun.
Leah Roseman:
Do you think you'll have any online component going forward, or just live?
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah, we're doing one this summer. Unfortunately, the invited musician from abroad, we can't go to Japan. So, the groups that are being assembled in Japan are also not from different orchestras. They're from the same orchestras and they're being paired with invited musicians from abroad. Ultimately, when we have situations where one person is listening to a group play, it becomes sort of a coaching. You can't avoid that dynamic. So, I try to make it more collegial by inviting two musicians to listen to the same group from the same orchestra. So, this summer, Rachel Mercer and I, from our orchestra, we're going to be working together with a group from Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra. I thought, just to have just even two different perspectives of the same performance, or same playing that's going on, will spark that kind of group discussions more.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
We're going to tackle it that way. It will culminate to a live performance in Nagaoka, just played by the Japanese ensembles, and we are doing a children's concert as well, as we do every summer. That's also interesting this year, because we're using this new technology by a Japanese company called Fujitsu. It's a little device that looks like ... It's called Ontenna it's for the hearing impaired, and it vibrates and lights up different colors and things like this. You can clip onto your hair or to your ear, or hat, or whatever, shirt too, I suppose. So, we're trying to come up with a programming around that.
Leah Roseman:
That's really great.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Yeah. That's fun.
Leah Roseman:
Well, thanks so much for talking to me this morning. It's been really interesting.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
It went by really quickly. I'm surprised my daughter hasn't come up yet.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. So, goodbye.
Yosuke Kawasaki:
Bye.
