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While Absolutely on Music contains a few interesting anecdotes about legendary figures such as Bernstein and Glenn Gould, its conversations primarily revolve around selected pieces of music – Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto, Mahler’s First Symphony, and so on – and how each conductor brings their own vision to the performance of these works.

Which leads to the first substantial challenge of the book: you are reading dialogue between two individuals as they listen to different versions of the same music, but you are not hearing the music itself. Perhaps Murakami thought that his outsider perspective – although extraordinarily familiar with the genre, he is not a musician – would ensure that Ozawa did not overly rely on technical descriptions, and thus the book would find a common language for music that all readers could understand (such as “heavy” or “light”).

Unfortunately, this does little to allay the feeling that a critical sensory component is absent from the experience, like a movie with the sound off. Without hearing (for example) Ozawa’s conducting of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique across the decades, it is difficult to savour the development of the maestro’s style and particular nuances. History has gifted us a number of pithy quotes about the inadequacy of language to describe music, and they are apt for a reason.

A reader can perhaps intuit what it means that Gould’s performance has “tension” whereas Mitsuko Uchida’s playing is “so graceful, so transparent,” but the finer details, the richness that only music can provide, is sorely missing. Psychologists refer to this as the qualia of a phenomenon: someone can read everything there is to know about the colour red, its relationship to blood and love and sunsets and so on, but if you have never seen the colour itself, it is impossible to appreciate what redness truly is.