Bullet Trains Are Best

I haven't travelled a great deal, at least not the kind of exploring travel.

I suppose I have been lucky to have been able to travel in my work, which has the added advantage that I have been paid to travel. And I have not had to provide the purpose for my travel, which is perhaps the hardest thing to discover.

Perhaps my most interesting traveling has been the furthest from home, in every sense.

12 hours on a plane to Japan is long in distance, and long in cultural difference.

Ostensibly, it was an orchestral tour for one of the National Orchestras of Scotland, and if you travel with a National Orchestra, you tend to stay in decent hotels. I wasn't a player in the orchestra, and so perhaps my schedule was more free than most.

The tour had come about because of links between Edinburgh and Kyoto, which explains why there were only two performances on the tour. Hardly an intensive or grueling itinerary. And in some respects, it meant that the education aspects of the tour, for which I was responsible, became more important as justifications for the trip.

Kyoto is the second city of Japan, and was once the capital. It may seem obvious once pointed out, but the same syllables make up the two names, the old capital and the new. Simply transversed.

And so we flew into Kyoto, to spend a couple of days overcoming jetlag, and during which I would undertake my education work, for which I had enlisted an English composer that was living and working in Japan.

Through his contacts, I was able to organize most of the project. Which given the language differences was fortunate.

After a brief discussion, our plan was simple. A quartet of musicians from the orchestra would be matched with an equivalent Eastern-trained quartet, and they would learn from each other and create something performable in a short time.

The composer was introduced to me by a friend in England, and since he lived in Japan on very little money, he was eager to take part in the project.

He was a master of the front blown Japanese flute, which has a haunting sound that most of us would associate with Japan.

Thus, I provided a flute quartet, flute, violin, viola, and cello. The equivalent Oriental musical grouping consisted of his flute playing, a Chinese violin that has two strings, a horizontal harp, and something that resembled the deeper resonant tones of the cello.

On top of this, we had the participation of a Japanese contemporary dance specialist, who had been trained in all of the skills for No theatre, but for whom his particular dance form had taken prominence.

He would typically dance naked apart from a loin cloth, with his body painted white. This form of contemporary dance had apparently grown out of a sense of guilt over what had transpired during the Second World War, but its impact was primal and deeply emotional.

As a venue, my slight contact had arranged that we would use for two days one of the temples in the Kyoto Temple complex, which were a cluster of 15th century temple buildings and somehow he had arranged that we could use one of them on a fairly intensive basis.

It was as if for 24 hours we would put our musicians and the dancer into a room, lock it, and after some intensive sharing between them, we would see what the result was.

And so, on the second day, my contact had invited an audience of about 60 or 70 people to attend to see what the results had been.

The instructions were simple, that each quartet might play something that came from their tradition and training, but that they would also create a number of pieces of music that involved all of them, sharing something of their particular skills in the process.

The event was extraordinary, I do not remember much of the detail, but what I do remember is traveling back to our hotel in the centre of Kyoto, after a day in which I felt as if I had been practicing sleep deprivation torture techniques on my quartet, so that my job on the return had been to make sure that I woke them up so that we wouldn't miss our stop from the bullet train.

Anyone that has worked with western trained classical musicians will appreciate that this in itself represented an extraordinary achievement, to have had them work so hard that they would fall asleep on the journey home.

And without any murmurs of complaint at all. Because they all loved what they were doing so much.

From Kyoto we moved to the venue for our second concert, which took place somewhere in the North in a very rural district, and yet which nevertheless possessed a 700 seater auditorium of the highest quality.

When we arrived at the resort hotel in which we were to stay, I remember that businessmen in suits arrived with their wives, only to disappear and then emerge dressed in traditional costume that remained their attire for the duration of their stay.

We gave our concert and then returned to catch our plane home, but my quartet were able to visit a primary school, somewhere on the outskirts of Kyoto, and make a brief visit in order to exchange musical gifts.

I still remember the extraordinary spectacle of 40 recorder players in unison playing something familiar from The Sound Of Music, something that is pretended for the purposes of the film to be like a national expression of Austrian culture. Edelweiss.

After an exchange of gifts with the headmaster, we too travelled to the airport, and began the long journey home.

Less than a year later, I was able to bring that same composer and the dancer over to the UK, where with that same quartet of western trained musicians, we undertook an extraordinary project in a poor community in Edinburgh. In which during the interval I arranged for sushi to be served for an audience that had never even heard the term.

We brought back with us a wooden flute that the flautist had purchased, and a horizontal harp I had purchased for the use of the education department, and that the cellist involved in the project set about learning to play.

Thus, my visit to Japan. Practicing sleep deprivation on superb musicians, and enjoying the kind of travel that I most appreciate, seeing something of a culture unfold before me.