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Coincidences Happen

Heavens, I’ve gotten so involved here that I’ve forgotten to publicize a second performance I have today.Â Pianist Aron Kallay is playing three of my microtonal keyboard worksÂ this afternoon, Fugitive Objects and the world premieres of Triskaidekaphonia andÂ New Aunts. The concert is at 3 PM atÂ Ramo Recital Hall at the University of Southern California,Â 820 West 34th Street,Â Los Angeles. My apologies for the late notification. Aron is doing very interesting-sounding graduate work on microtonal keyboard performance. I won’t be there because I’m a few hundred miles north giving a pre-concert talk for the Seattle Chamber Players’ performance of my Kierkegaard, Walking at Sacramento State. Having conflicting performances on the same day almost makes it sound like I’m one of those composers whose works get performed frequently, but I think we can chalk it up to coincidence.

Composing Generously

Sacramento – Harold Meltzer’s new sextet Brion, played by the Cygnus Ensemble here at Sacramento State last night, opened with a quiet piccolo solo playing the same motive over and over. It was a high note followed by several staccato repetitions of a low note. Pianissimo string chords played underneath. At first the relation between them was tonal, but it branched out into bitonality and mild dissonance. Lasting maybe a virtual minute in experienced musical time, it was lovely. But what was better was that, almost halfway through the piece, the whole section came back. By writing that passage, Harold created beauty; by repeating it, he gave it to the audience. We could now take it home. It was a generous gesture, generous toward the audience.

Charles Wuorinen’s Sonata for Guitar and Piano was on the same program. Lots of musical beauty flew by, but it was not Wuorinen’s intention to give us any of it. Nothing ever audibly came back, no discrete musical entity was ever defined, nothing was burned into the memory. He wanted us to admire his formidable technique, all the beauty he could create, but to keep us from getting any of it and taking it home, he showed it to us in only the most ephemeral glimpses. In a way, his piece was all about him, telling us what a clever composer he is.

I have been wondering for awhile now (and in a way this is really a continuation of my previous post) how it came to pass that we have trained composers to be ungenerous toward the audience. Composers are people who provide musical beauty for the world. How did it become a sin to actually give it to them?

In my theater piece Custer and Sitting Bull, I have a passage in which Sitting Bull repeats a question over and over (and this really happened) to a panel of American military inquisitors, “Do you know who I am?” Then, later in the piece, I bring this section back verbatim. People have run up to me after concerts gleefully repeating, “Do you know who I am, do you know who I am?” They clearly love this passage – perhaps they could have loved any other passage just as much, but this is the one that I burned into their memory, this is the one I gave them. It’s clearly the hook of the piece. People respond so extravagantly to any little generosity that it’s touching. And yet, I know of a well-known composer who expressed stern disapproval to someone when this passage returned in the piece. I was pandering to the audience.

How did the audience become the people from whom we composers are supposed to withhold our riches, rationing beauty out to them in only tiny drops?

I find lately that almost all of my critiques of student compositions have to do with the music moving on too quickly to something else. A composer will start with a gorgeous opening gesture – and 20 seconds later, the mood of the piece has already changed. I’m constantly telling students: “At the 20-second mark in a performance, the audience member has realized that a new piece has begun, quit talking to his neighbor, glanced at his program, and is beginning to listen – and already your best idea has gone by, never to return.” I have no one to pin the blame on, but somehow our students are internalizing the mandate that musical ideas, no matter how beautiful, should never be repeated nor dwelt upon. I see fabulously professional pieces with one stunning little timbral idea after another, none of them sustained long enough, or repeated often enough, to register in the listener’s conciousness. Why do we create beauty only to immediately take it away again? Relatedly, I get students expressing doubts that something lovely they’ve written in a piece is too “banal,” or too “cheesy,” by which they mean too obvious, too recognizable and enjoyable by the listener. You can see these young composers burst forth with an impulse to give the listener something fun to listen to – and then squelch it, for fear that they’ll look too naive and not professional. It’s the strangest thing in the world.

I’m going to make a political analogy, so if criticism of poor, dear George W. Bush hurts your feelings, just skip to the next paragraph. Wuorinen’s compositional attitude is like Bush’s: “I’m the Decider.” I don’t have to give you anything, you should just admire me because I’m so great. In response to a reporter’s opinion, Bush snapped, “Who cares what you think?” When the prospect of invading Iraq brought about the largest world protests in human history, Bush said, “I’m not going to be influenced by a focus group.” Bush has never expressed generosity, which I guess to Republicans would be a sign of weakness. By contrast, what has Obama done for us? Almost nothing, so far: just given some speeches about how we’re important to him and he wants to do something for us. And so instantly responsive is the human mind to even a suggestion of generosity that the entire world is cheering.

And that’s why Philip Glass is the most successful composer around. If you want to tell me his musical materials are cheap, I’ll agree with you, depending on the piece. But he is invariably generous. When he gives the audience a piece, good or bad, they take it home with them. You want to convince me that there’s more beauty in Wuorinen’s sonata than in, say, Glass’s Akhnaten? Fine, I’ll go along. But people are more grateful for a hot dog you give them than for lobster Ã©touffÃ©e that you let them smell briefly before whisking it away.

Want an example of a composer whose materials are exquisite, and who is superbly generous with them? Morton Feldman. The older he got, the more generous his music became.

I love that statement from Schoenberg’s “Brahms the Progressive” essay that I’ve quoted so often:

Evenness, regularity, symmetry, subdivision, repetition, unity, relationship in rhythm and harmony and even logic – none of these elements produces or even contributes to beauty. But all of them contribute to an organization which makes the presentation of the musical idea intelligible.

But I think it’s a little too open to self-serving academic misinterpretation, and I’d rephrase it this way:

Musical beauty is not difficult to create, and almost any materials will do. But to transmit that beauty to the listener, to give it to him or her, so that the listener feels like he owns it and can take it away from the performance with him, requires some combination of repetition, evenness, regularity, symmetry, subdivision, unity, relationship in rhythm and harmony, or logic.

The Trouble with Serialism

Though I’ve done it in other cases, I see little point in posting the keynote address I delivered yesterday for Sacramento State’s 31st (!) annual new-music festival. The bulk of my spiel, about why the so-called American maverick composers aren’t really loners but a pretty tightly-knit group, was sewn together from bits of material already available on this blog. But toward the end I changed subject and addressed another issue that’s been on my mind lately, and I’ve been meaning to bring it up anyway. So I’ve adapted and expanded it for the virtual print medium, and I’ll add some afterthoughts at the end:Â

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Many composers come into music through the world of 19th-century music, and most music schools put a pretty strong focus on Romanticism, and there’s one aspect of Romanticism that survived through all the vicissitudes of 20th century style change pretty much intact: many, many composers aim in their music for a kind of organic emotional curve whereby the music spends most of its time either crescendoing or decrescendoing in intensity, with some sense of climax and often resolution, often symbolized by increasing dissonance or complexity. Of course there’s nothing wrong with this, and it describes a lot of great music. But if there is a privileged paradigm that subconsciously represents normalcy to many musicians, this is how I would characterize it. The deliberate avoidance of this paradigm, the rejection of its premises, is one of the sins committed by the so-called “American Maverick” composers (Cage, Harrison, Young, Tenney) and continued by many of us, their faux maverick acolytes.Â Â

One realizes that many classical musicians cannot understand music outside this paradigm by the criticisms they make of maverick music. Cage’s quiet, diatonic music of the late 1940s, like In a Landscape and Dream, gets dismissed in classical music quarters as mere “doodling.” Lou Harrison’s music is called aimless; it is said that it lacks a sense of urgency. Morton Feldman’s music is often considered boring, as is early minimalist music. I am proud to have joined this tradition when one of my CDs was reviewed as being “a little bit Zen for [the reviewer’s] taste.”Â Â

I’ve been reading the autobioghraphy of Daisetz Suzuki, and I just ran across a traditional story of two monks, Baso and his student Hyakujo. Baso sees a flock of wild geese flying through the sky, and asks “What are they?”Â

“They are wild geese, Master,” answers Hyakujo.Â

Baso asked again, “Whither are they flying?”Â

“They are all gone now,” answers Hyakujo.Â Â

Baso turns to Hyakujo and painfully twists his nose, and then asks, “Are they really gone?” And Hyakujo suddenly achieves satori.Â

Suzuki explains:Â

The Hyakujo now crying, now laughing, does not lose sight of the Absolute Present. Before his satori his crying or laughing was not a pure act. It was always mixed with something else. His unconscious conciousness of time urged him to look forward, if not thinking of the past. As the result, he was vexed with a feeling of tension, which is unnecessarily exhausting. (A Zen Life: D.T. Suzuki Remembered, p. 41)

Suzuki goes on to criticize serialism – and I love this, because of course Suzuki isn’t talking about 12-tone music, but rather uses the word serialism to describe the state of mind that lies outside the Absolute Present – that is immersed in the orderedÂ series of events that constitute linear time. It’s the state of mind in which “We regret the past and worry about the future… The future and past overlay the present and suffocate it.”

“A feeling of tension, which is unnecessarily exhausting,” is precisely what I try to escape in my best music. The most accurate way to describe it, based on the way it feels to me while composing, is the avoidance of musical karma. Of course sometimes my music increases in intensity and heads for a climax, and when it does so I have to time the climax well and lead to it smoothly, and make sure the effect isn’t mitigated by extraneous elements. It’s a matter of skill. It also imposes a certain feeling of obligation on the composing process. And I find as the years go by that I enjoy composing more when I can feel that what I’m writing in measure 185 doesn’t commit me to writing anything particular in measure 202. I might suddenly want to take a left turn. I might be writing in B-flat, and suddenly think, “I think now I’ll switch to A-flat.” I love the description Feldman gave of his First (?) String Quartet, in which at one point he just suddenly decided to quote a Webern tone row in the violin – he wanted “a moment of symmetry.” Later in the piece he threw in the retrograde.Â

To many composers, the determination to avoid creating a feeling of tension may seem absolutely crazy. But Cage’s chance music, the sensuous early minimalism of Harold Budd, Peter Garland’s never-repeating melodies that all lie within a few never-changing triads, Brian Eno’s ambient music, are all attempts to capture an Absolute Present, in which the sounds of the moment are not suffocated by the future or the past. This is a very different music from the more traditional classical attempt to draw a metaphor for an emotional experience. When composing a metaphor for human emotions, the skill of the music is judged by whether the climax is reached effectively and at the right moment, whether the emotional curve is smooth, motivated, and convincing. For many traditional composers, all these signs of competence are paramount, and the composer who does not exhibit skill in them is “not serious,” of no importance.

The assumption is that, conversely, to capture an Absolute Present requires no skill. This is untrue, though perhaps in context skill is not the right word for what’s needed. I find that keeping my music centered in every measure, free from the implications of what has come before and not accumulating any musical karma toward what will come after, is an enormously absorbing balancing act – and withal a tremendous pleasure. Boredom and pointlessness can legitimately ensue, and keeping the thread without a long-term throughline requires concentration. And so, for instance, my piece Kierkegaard, Walking (played at the festival here last night and this Sunday) moves from one thing to the next without any causality. The texture might continue and the key quietly change, or a ripple of triplet 16ths might suddenly enliven the momentum for a moment. The piece does contain passages that crescendo to high points – but the high points aren’t real climaxes, because afterward the music goes on to something else unrelated, so the climaxes are reallyÂ representations of climaxes, not metaphors for an emotional process. One could say that the little moments of heightened emotion are ironic, or, more accurately, that the music remains detached from them. They may be analogues for the pain Hyakujo felt when his nose was twisted, but they are divorced from any sense of before and after.Â

[In fact, entre nous, it’s seeming more and more to me that the perfect compositional model is the psychotherapy session. In therapy, you just start talking about what’s on your mind, and wander anywhere you want through free association. But anyone who’s been in therapy will tell you – I gather this is universal – that every therapy session ends up having a theme, often one that is unintentionally announced in the opening sentences. You think you’re just chatting at random, but as you go it becomes clear that the entire session is really about just one topic, explored on many levels and through deceptively unrelated-seeming metaphors. Sort of like blogging, except that in blogging the mind retains too much conscious control.]

What I’m saying is that this flatness, this charge of boredom leveled at many of the maverick composers and their quasi-maverick acolytes, is a common feature of that musical world from which the mavericks emerge. I don’t compose music that way because I’m from Texas and a tough hombre who can’t be bothered to write mainstream music and I’m one of those outlaws who touch ladies deep down in their souls. I write it because I picked up that musical paradigm early in life from Erik Satie and John Cage and Morton Feldman and Harold Budd and John Luther Adams and I dearly treasure it. It doesn’t make me a maverick, neither does it make me, in itself, incompetent. It makes me rather typical of a different musical world which is now evident in the new pluralism that contains both it and what we used to call the classical European mainstream. There is plenty of room in that pluralism for music that acts as emotional metaphor, and also music that seeks an Absolute Present.

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[He-he – gave you a pretty good sucker punch with that headline, didn’t I?]

Now, obviously I am not presenting alarmingly new thoughts here. When I was in college, and Cage’s influence was still fairly novel, we young composers discussed exactly this issue of the Eternal Musical Present among ourselves and in academic forums. People wrote about it over the years, and the climax of attention came with Jonathan Kramer’s fantastic book The Time of Music, which has never received enough attention. I admit, though, that I haven’t heard it discussed in many years, and that may well be because I teach at a kind of Uptown bastion where the agenda gets set by Grawemeyer Award winners. The Time of Music has been out of print for many years. Perhaps this issue of divergent experiences of musical time is more taken for granted than I realize, but it is my experience, and that of many colleagues, that it never hurts to re-present what seems like old news to yourself to the new generation that may well have never gotten wind of it from anywhere else.

The thing is, Cage’s music and writings advocated for a different experience of musical time. A lot of people didn’t buy it. Then minimalism came along and made some of those Absolute Present ideas a little more seductive. My generation got into Drumming, and early Glass, and those slowly evolving Phill Niblock drones, and a whole new repertoire emerged – but mostly underground. Publicly, the New Romanticism came along, the classical musicians sighed with relief when John Adams and Louis Andriessen diverted the minimalist impulse back into more acceptably entertaining channels, and orchestral life returned to normal. So I think it might not be simple insularity on my part, or my chronic paranoia, to assume that the idea of music existing in a kind of timelessness is a less familiar idea now than it was in the oh-so-liberal-and-never-to-cease-being-regretted Golden Days of my youth.

In the meantime, the repertoire of unconventionally nonlinear music has vastly expanded. It’s easier to recognize now what could have been more obvious then, that pieces like Satie’s Socrate represented a vivid precedent for what Cage brought to the surface. I had a student sing Socrate a couple of years ago, and was amazed when a couple of my colleagues admitted that they found it pointlessly boring. And in Morton Feldman, Phill Niblock, John Luther Adams, Meredith Monk, Arvo PÃ¤rt, and quite a few others, the music of the Absolute Present – and I’m not going to take the responsibility for coming up with a term for it this time – has its major figures, its unignorable repertoire. It has thousands and thousands of fans who would be bored stiff listening to Brahms or Bartok or John Corigliano. It has its defenders in the public world. It needs, perhaps, more advocates within academia, so that young musicians drawn to it are not discouraged and confused by the uncomprehending faculty – whose effect overall, I think, is to keep the academic music world pointlessly alienated from a seminal musical tradition whose importance will only increase.

Fear vs. Hope: Fear Lost

I’m from Texas, but the family story is that during the Civil War my ancestors were Northern sympathizers. One great grand-uncle was hung by the Confederacy for giving shoes to a Union soldier. I’m also a Civil War buff, and have read dozens of histories of it and visited more than 30 battlefields. And it feels like the Civil War finally ended tonight, with me here to see it happen. Not only because an eloquent Black man became president, but because Nixon’s “Southern strategy” finally crashed to ignominious failure. I couldn’t be happier. God bless us all, and bless President Obama most of all. After eight years of a malevolent, moronic president, America can now rejoin the rest of the world.Â

Back with the Swallows

I’ll be in California the second half of this week. I’ve been invited toÂ Sacramento State’s annual Festival of American Music. I’m involved in the following three events:

Nov. 6: Thursday at noon, I start the event by giving the keynote addressÂ in the Music Recital Hall.Â

Nov. 7: Friday at 10 AM, I give a Composer’s Forum on my music in Capistrano Hall, room 205.

Nov. 9: Sunday at 7 PM I give a pre-concert talk (Capistrano Hall 151)Â prior to a concert in the Music Recital Hall by the Seattle Chamber Players. My old Seattle friends will be playing my quartet Kierkegaard, Walking, along with some of the works by younger composers they premiered at theÂ festival of their I was involved with last January.Â

See the whole schedule here. I can only stay for the first week, but it’s a huge event, with composers Lukas Ligeti, Harvey Sollberger, Richard Festinger, Betsey Biggs, Steven Ricks, and Aaron Kernis; percussionist Steven Schick; bassists Robert Black and Mark Dresser; the Cygnus Ensemble; the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and a lot of other new-music big-name performers. See you there.

Theory Wonk Post

October is the cruelest month. Or rather, late October/early November: my first-year students know diatonic chords and a few non-chord tones, but it’s awfully difficult to find pieces of music (even hymns!) devoid of accidentals for people still stymied by secondary dominants. One piece that I’ve found wonderful for teaching around Halloween is Barber’s Adagio for Strings – I’m not a fan of Barber or the piece, but they all know it by heart, and the film industry has done very well by it. And a lot of it stays in B-flat minor and teaches the 4-3 suspension ad nauseum:

Also, that last chord in the fourth measure is good for driving home the point that inversions matter. Barber uses it all over the place, and as a major 7th chord with the third in the bass and seventh in the melody, the root gets a little buried, for a bittersweet effect that feels both D-flat major and F minor. No wonder it’s laid over so many muted scenes of handsome young men dying in battle. The chord in that position comes back over and over, including at the climax (third, fifth, and seventh chords here):

Plus, the climactic chord progression here, though it strays outside the key, pretty much runs through half the circle of fifths in the flat direction: Gb, Cb7, Fb = E, A7, D, B (instead of the expected G), C, F – and you’re back at the dominant. So I get to demonstrate how comforting it is to keep moving toward the flat side of the key. That opening 4-3 suspension, with its repetitious iv7-V chord movement, comes back eight times in one form or another (six of them literal) in seven slowly creeping minutes, which is partly why I don’t much respect the piece – Barber stumbled across a nice opening gesture and milked it for more than it was worth. But the kids learn, I think, that knowing how to use common harmonies effectively can become a well-remunerated skill in the film industry. Perhaps other theory profs might benefit from the suggestion.

Thank You, Sarah Palin

We in American music owe a great debt to John McCain and Sarah Palin. Those two have so cheapened and tainted the word “maverick” that it will be at least a generation, maybe two, before anyone will be able to use the word non-ironically again. And that means, surely, that there will be no more talk about the “American maverick composers.”Â

As I’veÂ written here before, the musicological purpose of the word “maverick” is to legitimize certain handpicked composers despite the unconventionality (as compared with alleged European norms) of their composing methods, and to do soÂ withoutÂ de-marginalizing all the other composers who share those methods. What we need is for the methods themselves to be legitimized, so that a true pluralism of aesthetics can be accepted into discourse. The “maverick” image of Cage, Nancarrow, Lou Harrison, La Monte Young as lone dissenters – composers who, after all, had teachers, friends, students, protÃ©gÃ©s with whom they shared ideas and developed their creativity collectively – was always a palpable fiction. And no one who watched Palin vacuously self-identify as a maverick at the end of the vice-presidential debate will ever be able to use the word seriously again, thank god.

My Unpopularity in Perspective

I had a lovely lunch yesterday with my former editor from the Voice, Doug Simmons, who hired me and edited me for seven heady years. Each of us had some anecdotes from those years we’d never told the other before. The guy who’d recommended me for the job (who might want to remain nameless in this instance) once called Doug up, furious about some new infraction I’d committed in the paper. “You’re the guy who recommended him to me,” Doug expostulated, “I’d never heard of him before.” “I think I’ve created a monster!,” the guy exclaimed, and hung up.

As big a thorn in the side I am to the classical composing world, there was a time when the Downtown scene hated me even more. Why Bill O’Reilly and I still have public careers, I have no idea.

Beauty through Self-Limitation

From Peter Garland: I Have Had to Learn the Simplest Things Last.

The Op. 111 Club

I refuse to do those “playlist” things that tell you what I’m listening to lately, because 1. I go for long periods without listening to anything, and I’m entitled because I’ve already spent way too much of my life involved with other people’s music; 2. half of what I do listen to is for teaching reasons; 3. I often listen to pieces because I’m planning to steal ideas from them, so admitting it would sometimes be too revealing. But lately I’m listening over and over to a mammoth work that’s long fascinated me, Grand Hotel (1989)Â by Cornelis de Bondt. I found a score of it last year in Amsterdam at Donemus, and in fact, I envy the Dutch that they have such a helpful, friendly, professional institution as Donemus as a one-stop-shopping center for Dutch music. I hiked over to their spacious office (way off in an inconvenient corner of eastern Amsterdam) several times, and was welcome to listen to recordings and peruse scores for hours before buying anything. Imagine if the U.S. had a central place you could go to and look through scores by John Luther Adams, David Lang, Elodie Lauten, and almost any other American composer you could name – that’s what the Netherlands has. Although some of the younger Dutch composers have refrained from selling their scores through Donemus because, they told me, the place has gotten a reputation for representing the stodgier side of Dutch music. Given that they handle music by people as hip as Jacob ter Veldhuis, I couldn’t quite see the criticism myself, but I report what I was told. One easily imagines that if there were such a place in the U.S. it would get swamped by the officially approved orchestral New Romantic crowd of whom our elites are so dubiously proud, but Donemus struck me as admirably democratic in its absence of stylistic bias.

It’s a huge, sprawling, 37-minute essay, one of those complex pianistic virtuoso marathons mostly notated on three if not four staves, played in a frantic fury by Gerard Bouwhuis, and based on Beethoven’s Op. 111 Sonata. The opening diminished-seventh chords of that piece burst forth frequently, and many of the streams of falling 32nd-notes come from the concluding scale passages of Beethoven’s first movement. The longer (naturally) second movement is dotted with less obvious references to Beethoven’s tranquil Arioso theme, often simply sudden secondary dominant chords that hang quietly in the air. Key signatures – three flats, six sharps, five flats – run through the piece, although it more often sounds atonal than diatonic. The title, according to the liner notes, is a reference to the crumbling edifice of tonality, which certainly stands nobly, but in ruins, here. I’m told by one of his students that Cornelis de Bondt (b. 1953) teaches theory at the Hague Conservatory. I’ll upload an mp3Â hereÂ for you, as is my wont, but only temporarily, for it’s a big file and I can’t spare the space forever.

Grand Hotel is a interesting contrast to Clarence Barlow’s Variazioni e un pianoforte meccanico, which is a theme and variations for live pianist and Disklavier based on the theme of Op. 111’s second movement. Barlow’s achievement is a stunning logical and technological feat, the computer grabbing data from Beethoven’s theme and composing its own cheery, sometimes almost humorous variations. Grand Hotel is far darker and more introspective, a kind of existential, manic-depressive drama featuring Op. 111’s elements in dozens of flashbacks, playing with sudden recognitions and buried shards of memory.Â

As documented here, though 95% of my musical influences are American, I’ve got my own long history of associations with Op. 111, a piece which haunts me almost as much as the Hammerklavier haunted Brahms. (Other European pieces deep in my compositional bloodstream include Mahler’s Sixth – which turned up in Custer and Sitting Bull – the adagio of Bruckner’s Eighth, Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, Boulez’s Rituel, and everything Erik Satie wrote.) I’ve never directly quoted Op. 111 except in my Disklavier piece Petty Larceny, which consists entirely of quotations from the Beethoven sonatas, but my I’itoi Variations of 1985 was a kind of spiritual homage to it, and my two-movement piano concerto Sunken City mimicked Op. 111’s proportions and movement contrasts. In grad school, for Peter Gena’s class on the late Beethoven sonatas, I wrote a paper titled “Zen and Op. 111,” in which I analyzed the piece as a contrast between samsara and satori, between the earthly veil of illusions and the tranquility of Zen consciousness. My idea was that the first movement’s angry diminished sevenths chords represented a relentless drive to the final, sad resolution, while the arioso variations gradually defuse the polarity between tonic and dominant, creating an image of timelessness in which resolution becomes unnecessary:

(Years later, in a review of Pauline Oliveros, I described this same C-D-F-G sonority as a musical equivalent of the Yin-Yang symbol, a union of tonic and dominant with no thirds to specify major or minor.)

Obsessively quoting every historical thinker from Basho to Nietzsche and beyond, “Zen and Op. 111” was too embarrassingly immature to make public now, but at the time I was moved to write it by a book that I recently had the tremendous pleasure of rereading: R.H. Blyth’s Zen in English Literature. This is one of the books Cage read in the ’40s, and one I had discovered through his writings. Blyth was a British Japanese scholar who sat out World War II in Japan, and whose books on haiku elevated that genre to heightened visibility in the West. Zen in English Literature is an absolutely charming tome, a virtuoso display of astonishing erudition (which I tried ineffectively to imitate) in which he traces examples of Zen consciousness through Wordsworth, Dickens, Shakespeare, Keats, Blake, Pope, Donne, Milton, Chaucer, Cervantes (not English, but included anyway), and many others. Hamlet’s “There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” is the book’s continually recurring mantra, and he finds Zen in every perfectly self-forgetful artwork: “Art is frozen Zen.” No isolated example will do the book’s flavor justice, but for instance Blyth compares George Herbert’s

I made a posie, while the day ran by:
Here I will smell my remnant out, and tie
Â Â Â My life within this band,
But time did beckon to the flowers, and they
By noon most cunningly did steal away
Â Â Â And wither’d in my hand.

with Basho:

Leaves of the willow tree fall:
Â Â Â The master and I stand listening
Â Â Â Â Â Â To the sound of the bell.

as a type of self-identification with nature. Zen is Blyth’s poetic criterion, in fact, and for want of it he damns Coleridge as merely a sentimental pantheist.

Zen in English Literature is the liveliest and most enlightening introduction to Zen for a Westerner I’ve ever found; it’s long out of print, but I located a used copy from Amazon, and enjoyed it all over again. By Blyth’s way of thinking, Zen could be found in much (or any) great music, but there’s something special about the second movement of Op. 111 and its gradual dissolution of 19th-century goal-directed syntax. In fact, one could impose the two movements of Op. 111 as a metaphor on modernism versus minimalism, or perhaps postclassical music, in general: anxiety, portentousness, climax-orientation, and ambition versus calm, intuition, flatness, and paradoxical nonsequitur. The karma-riddled first movement is entirely classical, but the Arioso lays out a postclassical harmonic agenda many decades before the fact. Perhaps that’s why the piece has never relaxed its hold on me, and every musical work that makes reference to it demands my attention.