Absolutely on Music: Conversations

About

Haruki Murakami and Seiji Ozawa — the novelist and the conductor — sit together and listen to music. They play recordings of Brahms, Beethoven, and Mahler. They argue about Glenn Gould's eccentricities and Leonard Bernstein's genius. They disagree about tempos. They fall silent in the same places. This is not music criticism. It's two artists trying to articulate what happens in the space between a note played and a note heard — the same space Murakami has spent his career trying to describe in fiction. Ozawa's technical knowledge meets Murakami's instinct for metaphor, and the result is a conversation that makes you hear familiar recordings differently. A book for anyone who has ever stopped what they were doing because a piece of music demanded their full attention.