ARTS & MORE: Filmmaker explores the joy of music

In his documentary, "Music From the Inside Out," filmmaker Daniel Anker attempts to answer the unanswerable: "What is music?" He puts the question to members of the Philadelphia Orchestra. Understandably, they have a difficult time of it, but as the title points out, what Anker really wants is a sense of what music means to the people who make it, and most of the musicians approach the question from the standpoints of people for whom music is not only a calling but also a living.

This idea is explored at greater length and with considerable candor by the concert master, David Kim, who talks about trying to fulfill his late mother's dream that he become a concert soloist, only to realize well into his 30s that he would never be a great one. This "epiphany," as he calls it, opened him up to the possibility of playing in an orchestra, and as a result, he found his vocation.

Anker's question forces the musicians to consider why they took up their instruments in the first place.

A violist confesses that an elementary school music instructor chose his instrument for him. A Japanese violinist reveals that her mother actually disapproved of her musical ambitions, and so those ambitions came to be as much about defiance as they were about love of music.

Love of music is something you grow into, and the movie proposes that a propensity for making music springs from a more general tendency toward everyday expressiveness. Many of the musicians have non-musical interests every bit as intense as their careers. One is a world-class marathon runner while another is an accomplished painter.

Anker never really answers his initial question. All he can do is probe the emotional core that gives birth to great music, and in that regard the comments don't make as much of an impression as the music itself.

The film was shot over a period of several years during which Anker accompanied the orchestra on tour.

He includes stirring performances that illustrate points being made, and not all are of classical works. A trombonist moonlights in a salsa band and a pair of violinist brothers reel off a heart-stopping version of the bluegrass chestnut "Orange Blossom Special" in a Philadelphia bar.

But the most revealing performance is by an outsider, a Berlin busker who plays a flawless rendition of Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" on the accordion as 30 members of the orchestra watch in rapt awe. There is nothing quite as moving as hearing someone play beautiful music and knowing he's playing for no other reason than that he wants to.

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"Music From the Inside Out" runs May 17--June 13 at Eurospace in Shibuya. At 10 a.m. and 9 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; 9 p.m. only May 19-June 6; 10 a.m. only June 7-13.(IHT/Asahi: May 16,2008)