A melancholy score on musicians

NOCTURNES: FIVE STORIES OF MUSIC AND NIGHTFALL

By Kazuo Ishiguro Available at select

National Book Store branches

MANILA, Philippines - Tibor, the hero of one of these lyrical, affectionate stories by Kazuo Ishiguro, is a young Hungarian cellist who lands in Venice one summer to participate in its Arts and Culture Festival.   Although this venture is a potential source of income, the swaths of listeners who request maudlin oldies and trite hits disgruntle him, mainly because their ignorance undermines his remarkable musicianship. After giving a recital at the San Lorenzo church, he dismisses his attendance as a crowd of “tourists with nothing better to do.”

Why is Tibor so frustrated? Well, his education was forged at London’s Royal Academy of Music and further pursued under the aegis of a revered conductor in Vienna. Evidently, he’s a gifted natural — the kind of artist you’d expect to grace concert halls one day with the Concertgebouw or the Berlin Philharmonic. “After a rocky start with the old maestro, he’s learnt to handle those legendary temper tantrums and had left Vienna full of confidence — and with a series of engagements in prestigious, if small, venues around Europe. But then concerts began to get cancelled due to low demand; he’d been forced to perform music he hated; accommodation had proved expensive or sordid.” The festival in Venice just happens to be a workaday resort for finances and sustenance.

After this dispiriting recital, he meets a woman called Eloise McCormack, an alleged virtuoso who coddles his talent due to her nursing an obsessive conviction about his “potential.” McCormack, a seemingly musical American who speaks in vague and abstract aphorisms, tells Tibor that she has “a sense of mission” to inspire “all cellists to play well. To play beautifully.” She invites Tibor to her hotel suite to play the cello, responding rapturously to the sweeping undulations he draws from his instrument.

Like a master class between maestro and student, Eloise entreats Tibor to render gems from the repertoire, proffering hints and interpretive advice to weave his music from melodious little black dots into a grand symphonic tapestry. She wills to have him “unwrapped,” although Tibor later discovers that his gnomic guru isn’t the virtuoso she made herself out to be. Their liaison does not falter though, and both, in an Ishiguro-esque stroke of cozy and rallentando intimacy, eventually reaffirm their place as broken and flawed artists in a world where “it’s difficult for people” like them. 

A very similar sentiment echoes through Ishiguro’s characters in these exquisite soiree pieces: dusk-colored stories about musicians precariously living through a careerist ennui tethered to talent, image, and luck; facing the daunting prospect of never employing the lifelong training they’ve painstakingly built in conservatories and music lessons; and wrestling tempestuously with the idea that the evanescent forces of the industry will prevent them from achieving the dreams they’ve fostered since youth.

In the story “Crooner,” an aging singer popularized with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin must decide between resuscitating a career collecting dust and a romance on the rocks. Another musician, a guitarist tired of strumming platitudinous warhorses, accompanies this veteran in a quest to whet his waning marriage.

The hero of “Come Rain or Come Shine” is a music connoisseur whose impeccable taste appears to fetch a higher price than his friendship. A friend who believes that he has been cuckolded asks him to intercede as an arbiter, prompting him to blitz his wife’s apartment while role-playing as a dog. As we travel to “Malvern Hills,” a saddlebag London songster consents to slogging in the kitchen of his sister’s countryside bed-and-breakfast while he awaits his big break. Two traveling musicians wander into the inn and later discover that their server is actually an undiscovered talent. And as these tunes arpeggio softly into “Nocturnes,” a brilliant saxophonist dawns on the understanding that professional recognition comes with the price of fixing a face that doesn’t “look right.”

Though many of these musicians stake their careers with different instruments in varying genres, they all resonate a recapitulating motif of longing — longing for recognition, for appreciation, a beckoning for the public to understand the genius they’ve worked so hard to polish, only to find themselves welcomed into a gloomy existence marked by privations and paltry concert-to-concert earnings. 

Mr. Ishiguro, himself a guitarist and a one-time chorister, most likely finds an affinity with these people, and strives to capture their bluesy language in this collection of short stories.

Most of the heroes in Ishiguro’s fiction visibly share a vision — they play because they “believe in the music.” Whether they are toying with Elgar and Vaughan Williams, Martin and Sinatra, Leos Janacek, Django, Reinhardt, Edith Piaf, or Astor Piazzolla, they all aspire to the greatness and the glamour of a life in music while dreading the hardships and the possibility that they will be forced into “playing ‘The Godfather’ nine times in one afternoon.’” 

All of them, too, subscribe to the high standards of “serious” art, while despising the “shallow and inauthentic” attitude espoused by a philistine industry. But they also ruminate on the despondent truth that survival, while drudgingly self-effacing, overtakes their idealism on grounds of priority.

Within the overarching scope of Nocturnes, Mr. Ishiguro has composed a rather melancholy score on the musician’s creed inserted with interludes of dry, yet refreshing Anglo humor. Think of some of these tableaus as possible adaptations for a Colin Firth and Emma Thompson romantic comedy — rife with awkward and strained relationships, yet injected with offhand doses of British humor to oil the plot. But these sappy moments can be otherwise jarring, and the various narrators who propel these stories can taxingly read like circumlocutory variations on a theme. Thankfully though, Ishiguro manages to retune the greater part of these tonal inconsistencies while bringing his stories to a delicate, if somewhat dissonant, diminuendo.

Nocturnes happens to be the debut short story collection in Mr. Ishiguro’s bibliography, one characterized by an impressive lineup of novels adorned with Booker Prize winners and finalists. While his writing is indeed best savored in notables like Remains of the Day and The Unconsoled, both which extensively reveal the author’s ability to embellish elegant and bittersweet studies on the human condition, Nocturnes, as a quintet of movements strung by a recurrent motif of that sometimes regretful, sometimes nostalgic, and usually understated play on situations so reminiscent of this author, nonetheless conveys a tragically beautiful portrait of these seemingly disparate, yet inherently congruent musicians as they carve their places among the tone-deaf and the indifferent.