Absolutely on Music Conversations with Seiji Ozawa

1Identity & Context

A book born of illness and enforced stillness — the talk a busy man never had time for.

• Full titleAbsolutely on Music: Conversations with Seiji Ozawa
• Original (JP)小澤征爾さんと、音楽について話をする — literally "Talking About Music with Mr. Seiji Ozawa." The English title is the translator's flourish; the Japanese is plainer and deferential (note the honorific -san).
• AuthorsHaruki Murakami (novelist, b. 1949) & Seiji Ozawa (conductor, 1935–2024)
• TranslatorJay Rubin — Murakami's long-time English translator
• PublishedShinchosha, Japan, 30 Nov 2011 · Alfred A. Knopf, English, 15 Nov 2016
• FormNon-fiction — six long recorded conversations, four short "interludes," a Murakami introduction and an Ozawa afterword
• AwardHideo Kobayashi Prize, 2012

The occasion. In late 2009 Ozawa — for half a century one of the most famous conductors in the world, music director of the Boston Symphony for 29 years and then of the Vienna State Opera — was diagnosed with esophageal cancer and forced to rest. Murakami, a friend through their families, discovered that the convalescing maestro, who had "never had time to talk," would now talk for hours. Between November 2010 and July 2011 they met in Tokyo, Honolulu, and finally at Ozawa's academy on Lake Geneva, listening to records and talking. The spark was a single story: Ozawa's first-hand account of the 1962 Carnegie Hall Brahms with Bernstein and Gould — after which Murakami knew these memories had to be preserved.

2The Authors

An amateur of genius and a professional of genius — the gap between them is the book's engine.

3Where It Sits in Their Work

For one man a fascinating sidebar; for the other, a testament.

For Murakami, this joins his music-and-life non-fiction — Portrait in Jazz, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Novelist as a Vocation. It is "minor" only in that it is not a novel; in truth it is the liner notes to his imagination, the fullest airing of the musical obsession that drives all the major fiction.

For Ozawa, it is effectively his memoir — the one place he reflects, at length and on the record, about his craft, his mentors, and specific performances. Read after his 2024 death, it is unmistakably his testament.

4Argument & Structure

No thesis in the academic sense — a wager: put a great conductor and a great novelist in a room with records, and the tacit craft can be talked into the open.

The book is built as listening sessions. They drop the needle, stop it, replay a passage, and Ozawa narrates what he hears — phrasing, breath, the placement of a horn, why one tempo lives and another dies. Six conversations, threaded with short interludes, rise from a methodical opening to an emotional close among young musicians.

• IntroSeiji Ozawa and I — how the friendship and the project began.
• Conv 1Mostly on the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto — the anchoring listening session; the same notes in utterly different worlds. Interlude · On Manic Record Collectors
• Conv 2Brahms at Carnegie Hall the anecdote — Gould's startlingly slow tempos and Bernstein's spoken disclaimer to the 1962 audience. Interlude · Writing and Music
• Conv 3What Happened to Gustav Mahler? — from neglect to ubiquity; Bernstein the evangelist. Interlude · From Chicago Blues to Shinichi Mori
• Conv 4The Joys of Opera — Ozawa's late immersion at the Vienna State Opera. Interlude · Eugene Ormandy's Baton
• Conv 5"There's No Single Way to Teach" — teaching, the Saito Kinen idea, what he absorbed from Hideo Saito.
• Conv 6In a Little Swiss Town climax — ten days at the Lake Geneva academy, watching young string players remade week by week.
• AfterAfterword (Ozawa) — his surprise at how much the talking revealed.

The Gould problem — what they actually argue about

The founding anecdote is also the clearest lesson in the book: tempo is meaning, not decoration. At Carnegie Hall on 6 April 1962, Glenn Gould wanted the Brahms D-minor Concerto taken extraordinarily slowly; Bernstein stepped out before the performance to tell the audience he disagreed but would honour the soloist's vision. Toggle the two readings to feel the gap a few clicks of the metronome open up.

Conventional tempo: phrases arc and resolve at a familiar gait — momentum carries the line forward to each cadence.

5Key Figures

Six people stand behind every page.

6Themes & Takeaways

What the talk is really about, beneath the records.

If you carry away five things

• Listen actively — stop, repeat, compare. The book teaches a way of hearing.
• "Individuality without ego" — great ensemble playing surrenders vanity to a shared pulse.
• Tempo is meaning. A few clicks of the metronome change everything.
• Writing and conducting share a hidden grammar: rhythm, voicing, the management of time.
• A teacher's real gift is attention — hearing what the student cannot yet hear.

7Style & Craft

Polished talk — and unmistakably Murakami even in transcription.

The prose is plain, warm, conversational: Q&A shaped into readable dialogue, with bracketed asides ([laughs]) and Murakami's own short framing essays. Even as transcribed talk the rhythm is his — the gentle curiosity, the deadpan precision, the willingness to chase a fanciful idea. The signature device is the replayed passage: they listen, Ozawa says "there — hear that?", and the reader is invited to hear it too.

Translation note

Jay Rubin faces a hard problem: talk about sound, in Japanese, full of technical asides, by a non-native English speaker (Ozawa) and a novelist whose voice English readers already know intimately. Rubin keeps Ozawa direct and slightly informal, lets Murakami sound like Murakami, and the footnotes identifying performers, works, and dates are a genuine service to the reader.

8Philosophical & Intellectual Analysis

A quiet aesthetics of the living, embodied moment.

Beneath the chat is an argument: meaning in music is carried by minute, embodied decisions that resist theory. Ozawa is, in effect, a phenomenologist of sound — what matters is the lived event, the breath before the note, not the score as abstract object or the recording as fixed relic. Against the collector's idolatry of the definitive take, he insists music is provisional and alive.

Murakami, the writer, keeps testing whether that maps onto prose — and the book's deepest claim is that all the time-arts share one discipline: the shaping of duration. The tension it never fully resolves is the old charge against Ozawa — that he felt more than he thought. The book is partly his rebuttal, showing a mind that has thought very precisely indeed, just not in academic vocabulary.

9Reception, Significance & Influence

Warmly received; invaluable as oral history.

Critics who love both men treasured it. Kirkus called it a work "general readers will enjoy and the musical cognoscenti will devour." Many reviewers prized it as the only extended record of Ozawa reflecting on his own career — a value only sharpened by his death in 2024. It won Japan's Hideo Kobayashi Prize in 2012. Its significance is documentary and humane rather than scholarly: it preserves first-hand history (the Bernstein and Karajan years, the Gould stories) and models a way of listening for non-specialists.

10Criticism & Counterpoints

The honest case against — and the reply.

• "You had to be there." Long passages describe sounds on records you may not have to hand; without the music the admiration can feel airless.
• Factual looseness. The New York Times (James R. Oestreich) praised the "good, solid musical discussion" but objected to "too many muddled volleys off the top of the head, lacking the needed factual follow-up and correction."
• Insider coziness. Two famous, comfortable men admiring great recordings can tip into the rarefied; there's little dissent or edge.
• Amateur enthusiasm. Murakami's "idiosyncratic, often fanciful" readings (the Guardian) sometimes outrun what a musicologist would accept.

11Who Should Read It & How

And the one piece of advice that triples the book's value.

• Ideal readerAnyone who loves classical music and wants to hear how it's made; Murakami fans curious about the music inside his fiction; amateurs who want to listen better.
• PrerequisitesNone — but a passing acquaintance with Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler helps enormously.
• How to read itWith the recordings playing. Queue the records named in each conversation and stop where they stop. It becomes a guided listening session.
• If you read nothing elseThe First Conversation (Beethoven Third) for the method; the Sixth (the Swiss academy) for the heart.
• PairingsMurakami's Portrait in Jazz & What I Talk About When I Talk About Running; Bernstein's The Joy of Music; Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise.

12Recommended Listening — the records from the book

The book is, in effect, a curated playlist with commentary. Filter by composer and listen along.

• 1959Beethoven — Piano Concerto No. 3 Beethoven — Glenn Gould / Bernstein / Columbia Symphony. The book's anchoring listening session.
• 1957Beethoven — Piano Concerto No. 3 Beethoven — Gould / Karajan / Berlin Phil (live). The same soloist, an opposite conductor — hear the difference.
• 1964Beethoven — Piano Concerto No. 3 Beethoven — Rudolf Serkin / Bernstein / New York Philharmonic. Weight and gravity against Gould's wit.
• 1994Beethoven — Piano Concerto No. 3 Beethoven — Mitsuko Uchida / Kurt Sanderling / Concertgebouw. A modern point of comparison they admire.
• periodBeethoven — Piano Concerto No. 3 Beethoven — a fortepiano / period-instrument account. What the original sonority changes.
• 1962Brahms — Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor the anecdote Brahms — Gould / Bernstein / NY Phil, Carnegie Hall, 6 April. Gould's startling tempos and Bernstein's spoken disclaimer.
• —Brahms — Symphony No. 1 in C minor Brahms — Ozawa / Saito Kinen Orchestra. Pretext for the talk on the horn writing and orchestral inner workings.
• 1960sBerlioz — Symphonie fantastique Berlioz — Ozawa / Toronto Symphony (and later Boston). The young conductor's early calling card.
• —Mahler — Symphony No. 1 "Titan" Mahler — Bernstein's Mahler, and Ozawa / Boston & Saito Kinen. From neglect to ubiquity.
• 2000sOpera — the Vienna years Opera — Ozawa at the Vienna State Opera, with recollections of Carlos Kleiber's example. Music's most collaborative art.

·References & Further Reading

Real, linkable resources — each with a note on why it's worth your time.

Reference

Reviews & essays

Discussion & the text