Interview with Yehudi Menuhin

小提琴家梅纽因专访

By Michael Quigley

In addition to his being a celebrated violinist, Yehudi Menuhin's international reputation has been enhanced in many ways. He has been instrumental in the organization of three European music festivals, and has also founded a school for young musicians in England. Musically, he has devoted much time to conducting, and in the last twenty years has maintained a deep interest in the music of the East. (He has collaborated on two well-known albums with Ravi Shankar, for example).

梅纽因除了是一位著名的小提琴家，他也享有很高的国际声誉。他在三个欧洲音乐节的组织中发挥了重要作用，并在英国成立了一所青年音乐家学校。在音乐方面，他还投入了大量时间来指挥，在过去的二十年里，他一直对东方音乐保持着浓厚的兴趣。（例如，他曾与拉维香卡合作过两张知名专辑）。

While talking to Menuhin, one rarely senses that he is in his mid-fifties. Despite his knowledge of music and understanding of people which only comes with time, Menuhin's outlook on life remains as fresh as that of a young child. Perhaps this is, as he has suggested, a result of the fact that as a boy he was comparatively isolated. (A child prodigy, he made his debut playing Beethoven's Violin Concerto at age 11.) In any case, he manifests a great understanding of and interest in both people and his art.

和梅纽因谈话时，很难感觉到他已经五十五岁了。尽管梅纽因的音乐知识和对人的理解是随着时间的推移而逐日增长的，但他的人生观仍然像小孩子一样充满朝气。也许正如他所说的，这是由于他自幼比较孤独的缘故。（他是个神童，11岁时就举办首场音乐会演奏贝多芬的小提琴协奏曲）在任何情况下，他都表现出了对人和艺术充分理解和兴趣。

YM: When I speak of contemporary music, it's not the same as when my son speaks of contemporary music. There's always the generation gap. I realise that I cannot now pretend that when I'm playing Bartok, I'm playing contemporary music, or even Schoenberg. I can't pretend that I'm riding the last crest. I don't in fact know what the last crest is. It's in the airplane that I do most of my contemporary reading, and there's this young English pianist who's the last word in rock, pop, or jazz, whatever you call it. You must know his name ... he jumps on the piano.

梅纽因：提及当代音乐时，我和我儿子对此的理解大相径庭是不一样的。代沟总是存在。我意识到当我演奏当代音乐时，如今我不能假装演奏巴托克甚至是勋伯格。我不能假装我是在攀登最后一座高峰。而且事实上也我不知道最后一座高峰是什么。在飞机上我大部分时间都在阅读，我了解到有一位年轻的英国钢琴家，他是摇滚、流行乐或爵士乐的代表人物，无论你怎么称呼他。你一定知道他的名字。他总是喜欢跳上钢琴。

Elton John?

埃尔顿·约翰?

YM: That's right. He seems rather wonderful and exciting. I can't wait to hear him. He studied at the Royal Academy, and then decided that music for him was to be something more spontaneous. I think that's all very healthy. Once you have your basis, the dis- cipline of your studies in music or any other subject, and then to escape them and be free and improvise and create your own world, I think it's a wonderful thing. Nor do you have to have the basic disciplines necessarily.

梅纽因：就是他，他看上去相当棒，令人为之兴奋。我等不及要听他的音乐了。他在英国皇家学院学习。对他来言，音乐是一种发乎自然的事物。我认为这是一种非常健康的看法。一旦你有了自己的积淀以后，再进行音乐或任何其他学科的学习，最后摆脱条条框框的束缚，去自由地即兴创作，创造属于你的天地，我认为这是一件美妙的事情。你也不需要循规蹈矩。

Children improvise at games. I'd like to see them do much more spontaneous music in the schools at an early age -- even making their own instruments and creating their own melodies and dances. But things still have to be formalized somewhere along the line, before, after, or during -- I think that's what we're seeing taking place now with people like Elton John.

孩子们在游戏中即兴发挥。我希望看到他们在很小的时候就在学校里创作许多即兴音乐，甚至自己制作乐器，创作自己的旋律和舞蹈。但是事情还需要在某个时候正式化，在这之前，之后，或者在此期间——我想这就是发生在像埃尔顿·约翰这样的人身上的事情。

Are there any contemporary composers you're particularly interested in?

有没有当代作曲家是你特别感兴趣的?

YM: Penderecki and Lutoslawski. I did Postlude by Lutoslawski last year in New York. Then there's Blackwood, the American composer, sort of modified twelve-tone, and Ben-Haim, the Israeli. I'm still primitive enough to want my music not to be absolutely abstract. I like it still to move me, to move an audience.

梅纽因：潘德列茨基和卢托斯瓦夫斯基 。我去年在纽约完成了卢托斯瓦夫斯基的终曲。我还喜欢美国作曲家布莱克伍德的《十二音列》和以色列作曲家本哈伊姆。我仍然保持原始和纯粹，我希望我的音乐不是绝对抽象的。我仍然喜欢自我感动，并且感动观众。

Do you listen to rock music at all?

你听摇滚乐吗?

YM: No, but I read about Elton John and I was very intrigued.We're overwhelmed today with background music. There's too much of it. It's kind of a background noise which absorbs too much of our consciousness. Just as a painting has to be appreciated on a canvas which has no other painting, so music has to grow out of silence. And there's not enough silence, not enough clarity, clean spaces of no noise, and privacy. Even now we have this air conditioning noise ...

梅纽因：不听，但是我读了关于埃尔顿·约翰的书，对摇滚乐开始感兴趣。今天我们被背景音乐淹没了。它们过于泛滥，以至于成为一种背景噪音，夺走我们太多的注意力。正如一幅画必须在没有其他画的画布上欣赏一样，音乐也必须在沉默中生长。没有足够的沉默，就没有足够的清晰感，我们就会失去一个没有噪音的纯净空间，也就无所谓那些在音乐中隐私的心灵体验。你看就现在我们身边还有空调噪音。

That's the tape recorder noise ...

那是录音机的声音……（此刻采访者正举着录音机）

Oh, the tape recorder noise. If it weren't for that, there'd be some other noise. The number of machines that are going on all the time is appalling. The lack of subtlety in our civilization is a very disturbing factor.YM: If you give an audience a really live performance which they don't often get (it depends a great deal on the quality of performance, if you hear a Beethoven symphony and feel it as you might for the first time and not simply repeating yourself) ...

梅纽因：哦，好吧就算没有录音机的声音，肯定也会有其他噪音。一直在运转的机器的数量是惊人的。我们文明中缺乏微妙之处，这相当令人感到不安。如果你为听众表演一场他们不常看到的现场演出。这在很大程度上取决于演奏的质量，如果你听贝多芬的交响乐，你要试着像第一次演奏那样感受它，而不是简单地重复你的惯性演奏。

you see, what an audience wants is an experience, a living experience, and that's why the living concert will always exist, because the moment of creation, the moment the artist gets on stage and actually makes that performance is an entirely different impression than turning the record on and knowing that it's there. One might even say that the interest in live performance will come more and more.

观众想要的是一种体验，一种活生生的体验，这就是为什么现场音乐会将永远存在，因为创作的那一刻，艺术家上台的那一刻，在现场聆听音乐感受它的存在和打开录音机播放是两种截然不同的体验。甚至可以断言，人们会对现场表演越来越感兴趣。

We are treated more and more as numbers, whether it's by the Office of Tax Collectors or the Police Department, we are not treated any longer as individuals, but as categories. More and more we are herded and we get our bills through computers and so forth. Therefore, the need for live contact, to be reassured that life is something that pulsates, that communicates between human beings is more than ever necessary.

我们越来越被为数字化，无论是税务局还是警察局，我们都不再被视为个人，而是被视为类别。我们越来越分门别类，通过电脑等电子设备获得账单。因此，我们比以往任何时候都更需要真实鲜活的接触，更需要确信生命是一种脉动的东西，需要人与人之间的交流。

People are really starved for it. That's why the young people go off and live in communes, why they are establishing their own set of values, which are in many cases not only legitimate, but very, very important and valid.Nothing in my life has basically changed. The extraordinary thing is that I can look back on, and find in my early years the seed of everything that interests me today.

人们真诚地渴望得到这些。这就是为什么年轻人要去社区生活，为什么他们要建立自己的价值观，在很多情况下，这些价值观不仅是合法的，而且是非常、非常重要和有效的。我的生活没有什么根本改变。不平凡的是，我可以回顾过去，在我的早年发现了今天我所感兴趣的一切事物的种子。

I mean, I love nature, as probably everybody does, but I remember what it meant to me from time to time when our family in San Francisco would go out to visit some people in the country who had a chicken farm. In the morning, one of my moments of really ecstatic joy was to hear the rooster crow. I thought it was one of the most wonderful sounds in the world. You can still hear in Buenos Aires today, where they have roosters and hens on rooftops in the center of town.

我的意思是，我热爱大自然，就像每个人一样，但是我记得在旧金山的家人去拜访那些拥有养鸡场的人的时候，这对我来说意味着什么。早晨，我最欣喜若狂的时刻之一就是听到了公鸡的啼叫。我认为这是世界上最美妙的声音之一。今天在布宜诺斯艾利斯你仍然可以听到，在市中心的屋顶上有公鸡和母鸡。

I wish more chickens and human beings would live in the centre of New York instead of abandoning these office buildings at night and having these vast empty spaces, and then forcing the people out to face traffic and waste their time in suburban driving. It would be much better to cut down on the number of cars and enable people to live in the centre of town and have some quiet and the advantages of the centre of town. Centres of towns are dying now because people aren't living next to their theatres, their libraries, but are driven out and the town is taken over by anonymous office buildings which remain empty and rather terrifying at night.

我希望更多的鸡和人类能够生活在纽约市中心，而不是在晚上空无一人的这些办公大楼里，在这些空旷的空间里，强迫人们出门去面对交通，在郊区开车上浪费时间。最好是减少汽车的数量，使人们能够住在市中心，有一些安静的环境和市中心的优势。城镇中心现在正在死亡，因为人们不再住在他们的剧院和图书馆附近，而是被赶出来，城镇被一些不知名的办公楼占据，这些建筑在晚上仍然空荡荡的，相当可怕。

Are you dissatisfied with the methods being used to teach music today?

你不满意今天教授音乐的方法吗？

YM: It's not the methods I'm not satisfied with. It's the teachers. People talk a lot about methods as they talk about "isms". What really makes a difference is what their values are, what kind of people they are, whether they respect life. And the same thing with methods. Obviously certain methods are better than others, in certain ways. I mustn't give you the impression that there's no difference in methods. There are differences, but, they're even more important -- the teachers -- even more important than the method. The most important thing to remember in teaching a child, or anybody, is that one isn't trying to impose something on the student.

梅纽因：我不满意的不是方法。而是老师。当人们谈论“主义”时，他们谈论很多方法。真正不同的是他们的价值观是什么，他们是什么样的人，他们是否尊重生命。方法也是如此。在某些方面，某些方法显然比其他方法更好。我并非说方法上没有区别。它们是有区别的，但是，老师本身甚至比方法更重要。在教育孩子或任何人的过程中，最重要的是不要试图把某种东西强加给学生。

I think one should let the student find out what he wants to find out, what he's dying to find out himself, and find the easiest way for that to happen. Too often the teacher has posed as the authority and relied on his authority and the book. I think that a real teacher should refer very little to a book. He should keep the contact with the student direct, especially when it's with very young children.

我认为一个应该让学生发现他想发现的，他渴望发现自己的东西，并找到最容易的方法来实现它。教师常常把自己装扮成权威，依赖与自己的权威和学究。我认为一个真正的老师应该很少参考一本书。他应该和学生保持直接的联系，特别是在和小孩子接触的时候。

If a mother had to consult a book each time she responded to her baby, it would be very, very poor. The same thing happens with a teacher. The relationship, between a teacher and the student, must be direct, mustn't be devious or through the book. Whatever method a teacher has should be so adaptable to the particular child or particular situation that he should be ready at any second to give up the method for the child.

如果一位母亲每次回复她孩子时都要去翻阅一本书，那将是非常非常可怜的。同样的事情也发生在老师身上。教师和学生之间的关系必须是直接的，不能拐弯抹角，也不能藏着掖着。不管老师采用什么方法，都要因材施教，以至于他应该随时准备好为孩子放弃固有的教学法。

YM: I hate most instant things, but instant art has some value to it because it's an effort to make an artistic work out of living. Every moment of life can be a work of art worth doing in terms of communication and inherent intrinsic value.

我最讨厌转瞬即逝的事物，但瞬间艺术的确有一定价值，因为它是一种从生活中努力创造艺术作品。无论是人们沟通方式还是事物本身内在的价值，生活中的每一个瞬间都可以成为一件值得尝试的艺术品。