November 9, 2007

'Musicians From a Different Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music'

By NINA C. AYOUB

As a child in Tokyo, Mari Yoshihara shared her bedroom with a Yamaha upright. She began piano lessons at age 3. It was a typical middle-class Japanese girlhood, she says, recalling that she was serious about music through adolescence but ultimately chose not to attend a conservatory. Instead she pursued American studies in Japan and in graduate work in the United States. Now, shaped by the "productive tension," she writes, between her musical past and scholarly present, comes Musicians From a