There is no difference between life and death

This photo shows John Cage and Daisetz Suzuki in 1962. Now playing is Cage's 36 Mesotics re and not so re Marcel Duchamp which is dedicated to the Japanese video artist Shigeko Kubota and includes this quote from the Zen teacher Daisetz Suzuki: 'There is no difference between life and death'. In the Harmonia Mundi recording the text is sung by Paul Hillier and spoken by Terry Riley. More on Daisetz Suzuki here and here.

Cage Talk, dialogues with and about John Cage is available from Boydell Press. Photo credit Yashuiro Yoshioka. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Cleaning the ears of the musically educated

It was, as I remember, through Jean [Erdman} - who is to dancing what Vivaldi was to music - that we met the other member of the party, composer John Cage, who had then become interested in the relationship of music to Zen and was beginning to explore the melodies of silence. My principal tie with John was that we had the same kind of humour, for he would simply bubble with laughter whenever describing his latest plans for musical outrage, such as a very formal piano recital in full evening dress, complete with an assistant to turn the pages, in which, however, the score consisted entirely of rests.

The joke wasn't merely that he was getting away with murder in the hopelessly deranged world of avant-garde music, so as to constitute the master charlatan of all, but that beyond all this and to make matters still funnier, he had also discovered and wanted to share the meditation process of listening to silence. This is simply to close your eyes and allow your ears to resonate with whatever sounds may be happening spontaneously, making no attempt to name or identify them, just as when one listens to formal music. After a while one hears the sounds emerging, without cause or origin, from the emptiness of silence, and so becomes witness to the beginning of the universe.

John slept that night on a divan in the living room, where we kept a hamster in a cage furnished with a vicous wheel, or bhavachakra, wherein the benighted creature could run forever without getting anywhere. This particular wheel squeaked abonimably as the hamster ran, so I told John to put the cage out in the passage if it bothered him. "Oh, not at all!" he said. "It's the most fascinating sound, and I shall use it as a lullaby."

What may not be generally understood about John is that he is an extremely accomplished musician who has, however, realized that we do not know how to listen. Conventional music, as well as conventional speech, have given us prejudiced ears, so that we treat all utterances which do not follow their rules as static, or insignificant noise. There was a time when painters, and people in general, saw landscape as visual static - mere background. John is calling our attention to sonic landscape, or soundscape, which simultaneously involves a project for cleaning the ears of the musically educated public.

As painters once framed "mere" landscape, John is using the ritual of the concert hall to frame silence and spontaneous sound, which we shall in due course find as beautiful as sky, hills, and forests. Imagine, then, the sonic equivalent of those places in national parks usually called Inspiration Point where tourists from Kansas exclaim at the view, "Oh, it's just like a picture!" Buddhahood is the state in which all sensory input is viewed in this way.

Priceless 'John Cage for dummies' from Alan Watts' autobiography, which has recently been republished by New World Library, Novato, California. Alan Watts, who is seen in my header photo, was born in England in 1915. He met the Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki at an early age, and moved to America where he became an Episcopal minister.

After leaving the church Alan Watts wrote more than twenty books on Zen Buddhism, and his teachings were one of the triggers for "beat Zen" in the late 1950s which saw expression in Jack Kerouac's novel Dharma Bums, Franz Kline's black and white abstractions and John Cage's compositions. In the 1960s Watts was considered by many to be a counterculture 'guru', and his circle included Timothy Leary, Aldous Huxley and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass). Watts was also an early environmentalist, and he died at his mountain retreat near Muir Woods, California in 1973.

Buddhism has been an important influence on many other modern composers including Philip Glass and Lou Harrison in the States, and Edmund Rubbra, John Palmer and Jonathan Harvey in England. In My Own Way is the compelling story of one man's pursuit of the Buddhist way, and the impact that his teachings had on many other important twentieth-century figures. Highly recommended, together with the Asian Journals of the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton.

* I am sure my readers' ears do not need cleaning, but this Sunday (Feb 10) you can hear John Cage's Concerto for Prepared Piano and Chamber Orchestra on my Future Radio programme at 5.00pm on Feb 10 and 12.50am Feb 11 framed by Canzoni by the 17th century Italian composer Girolamo Frescobaldi.


Now read about Zen and the art of new music.
Alan Watts website here. Listen on Future Radio at 5.00pm UK time this Sunday, Feb 10 and 1.00am Monday Feb 11 real time here (convert to local time zones here). Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. If you are in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Karlheinz Stockhausen - part of a dream

Karlheinz Stockhausen died on December 5, 2007. In tribute I will be playing his orchestral work Gruppen on my Future Radio programme on December 16, preceeded by Palestrina's Missa Brevis. My article below explains the connection between the two works, and also looks at Stockhausen's position within the bigger picture of mid-twentieth century culture.


This photo of Peter Orlovsky was taken in 1955, and he is the subject of the background portrait which was painted by Robert LaVigne. Orlovsky became beat poet Allen Ginsberg's lover and companion, and Ginsberg is listed as one of the thirty-six most influential people of the hippie era. Here is the complete list:

Bella Abzug, Muhammad Ali, Joan Baez, Helen Gurley Brown, Rachel Carson, Bob Dylan, Buckminster Fuller, Jerry Garcia, Stephen Gaskin, Allen Ginsberg, Berry Gordy Jr., Bill Graham, Germaine Greer, Dick Gregory, Tom Hayden, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, John Kennedy, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Timothy Leary, John Lennon, Malcolm X, Bob Marley, Thurgood Marshall, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, George Orwell, Les Paul, Gene Roddenberry, Jerry Rubin, Mario Savio, Ravi Shankar, Dr. Benjamin Spock, Augustus Owsley Stanley, Gloria Steinem.

This list comes from the quirky and wonderful Hippie Dictionary compiled by John Bassett McCleary. This is a compelling but fallible book, and I wonder how many readers will agree with all the thirty-six names in the list? Shouldn't contemporary classical music be represented by more than Ravi Shankar?

Look again at the header photo, there is a a Capitol Records LP of the Bach B Minor Mass (can anyone identify the actual recording?) visible bottom right. And in Barry Miles' biography of Ginsberg there is a description of Ginsberg tripping on LSD with Timothy Leary as Götterdämmerung blasted on the stereo.

The soundtrack of the hippie era crossed musical boundaries. In 1952 at the invitation of Lou Harrison a 'concerted action' was staged by John Cage and friends at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. This event is generally considered to be the forerunner of the multi-media happenings that defined the 60s. Later, in 1966, a Concert Happening at Aerospace Hall in Los Angeles included music by Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage. At the happening John Byrd performed a composition titled 'The Defense of the American Continent from the Vietcong Invasion'. This used chance techniques drawn from Cage's work, and concluded with a transition from improvisation to a chorale arrangement of 'America the Beautiful'.

There are links between Allen Ginsberg and John Cage. In the 1950s Cage (below) considered working with Ginsberg on a project based on the cycle of seasons, but it never came to fruition. Thirty years later, when the early IBM PCs became available, Cage used a computer programme to extract random pattern's (mesolists) from Ginsberg's epic poem Howl, which he then used to generate 'chance' music - these programmes are available for download.

Earlier, in 1970, Cage had lived in a flat in the West Village, New York, with Yoko Ono and John Lennon as neighbours. Lennon contributed a page of a Cage's collection of scores which was published as Notations, and which also included contributions by Igor Stravinsky, Milton Babbitt, Morton Feldman and Darius Milhaud.

The Beatles connection leads us to Karlheinz Stockhausen (below), who joined the soundtrack of the 60s when he was a visiting professor of composition at the University of California, Davis. Paul McCartney says he was influenced by Stockhausen's music, although you wouldn't guess it. And Stockhausen became part of the era's iconography when Peter Blake (who, himself, is a candidate for the list) included him on the sleeve of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band at McCartney's request. Stockhausen is fifth from left in the top row in my footer image. You can find out who the other icons are here.

Philip Glass, of course, has lots of links with Allen Ginsberg, although most of these post-date the hippie era. I wrote last year about Glass' 2002 Symphony No 6, which sets Ginsberg's Plutonian Ode. Glass' Wichita Vortex Sutra for solo piano was the result of a chance meeting between Glass and Ginsberg, in St. Mark's Bookshop, in the East Village, New York. "We decided on the spot to do something together and chose the poem,'" Glass recalls. He explains "I composed the music to match the rhythm of Allen's reading", a technique which has echoes of John Cage's mesolist writing.

Wichita Vortex Sutra was first performed in 1988 at a benefit for a group of Vietnam veterans, with Ginsberg reading his poem and Glass playing piano. No excuses for not knowing it - you can hear it on Jeroen van Keen's ulta-low priced Minimal Piano Collection which I reviewed here recently, and it is incorporated into Glass' 1990 chamber opera Hydrogen Jukebox.

The links between Philip Glass (below) and Allen Ginsberg continue ten years after the poet's death. At the October 2007 London performance of Glass' Book of Longing Patti Smith joined the composer on stage to invoke Ginsberg's spirit. In a wonderfully circular path Book of Longing is a setting of Leonard Cohen's poems, and Cohen is surely a candidate for the list of thirty-six hippie movers and shakers?

Leonard Bernstein is also missing. I am sure that Lennie would have felt his Black Panther connections meant he was a shoo-in for the list. But despite West Side Story and Mass I'm not sponsoring him, with, or without clothes. But one priceless Bernstein story is worth repeating. The infamous radical grouping the Weatherman hijacked the West Side Story lyrics for revolutionary purposes. 'The most beautiful sound I ever heard' was not 'Maria' in their extreme left utopia. Instead Stephen Sondheim's lyrics were morphed to 'I've just met a Marxist Leninist named Kim Il Sung, say it soft and there's rice fields flowing, say it loud and there's people's war growing'.

Difficult to follow that one. But it is not just in music that John Bassett McCleary's list can be challenged. The visual arts are not well represented. Where is Andy Warhol for instance? And if Star Trek creator Gene Rodenberry is on the list, why not Stanley Kubrick? He, of course, famously used György Ligeti's music in the ultimate 60s trip, the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Kubrick's 1971 film A Clockwork Orange became a leitmotif for the death of the hippie dream, and featured music by Wendy Carlos (credited as Walter Carlos) who might just make the list herself. And, of course, Wendy (left) plays the Moog synthesizer, which provided the cantus firmus of the Hippie era, which means Bob Moog just has to be among the thirty-six as well. And Bob Moog's path crossed with John Cage in 1965 when Moog created a movement triggered sound system for Merce Cunningham's performance of Cage's Variation V.

A Clockwork Orange was based on Anthony Burgess' novel (Burgess was also a prolific composer), and writers are not well represented either. George Orwell is a perverse inclusion as he died in 1950. Instead I would argue for some who were not enrolled in what the artist Robert Crumb called the 'army of the stoned'. How about Marshall McLuhan, Hermann Hesse, J.D. Salinger, but above all the monk, writer and thinker Thomas Merton?

Merton's 1948 book The Seven Storey Mountain was an unexpected best-seller through the 1950s and 1960s, and the story of his search for faith resonated with many of the hippie generation. Despite being a member of the strict Trappist Order Merton worked for peace with leading activists, politicians and theologians until his tragic death in 1968, the turbulent year that also took Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F Kennedy from us.

The last page of Stockhausen's score for his 1957 masterpiece Gruppen carries the words Deo gratias (Thanks be to God). This response occurs three times in the Latin Mass and frequently in the Breviary and in Catholic prayers. Like Stockhausen, Thomas Merton (below) was profoundly influenced by Catholicism. But also like John Cage (and Philip Glass, Allen Ginsberg and many others) Merton's late inspiration was Buddhism. In fact the paths of Merton and Cage crossed, they were both disciples of the great Zen teacher Daisetz T. Suzuki.

Merton, unlike Ginsberg, understood that the use of any kind of drugs was utterly contrary to the spirit of Zen. But, despite this divergence, Thomas Merton's writings were uniquely inclusive, as this extract from his posthumously published Asian Journals shows:

In speaking for monks I am really speaking for a very strange kind of person, a marginal person, because the monk in the modern world is no longer an established person with an established place in society, We realise very keenly in America today that the monk is essentially outside of all establishments. He does not belong to an establishment. He is a marginal person who withdraws deliberately to the margin of society with a view to deepening fundamental human experience. Consequently, as one of these strange people, I speak to you as a representative of all marginal persons who who have done this kind of thing deliberately. Thus I find myself representing perhaps hippies among you, poets, people of this kind who are seeking in all sorts of ways and have absolutely no established status whatever.

That link between Thomas Merton and Allen Ginsberg brings this meandering overgrown path full circle. So many strange, marginal, and anti-establishment people to celebrate, and this really could go on for ever. The Hippie Dictionary is a wonderfully entertaining and stimulating book, and debating who were the most influential people of the hippie era could just be the new Trivial Pursuits. But don't take it all too seriously - understand that this is a dream.


Now, continue the trip on the majic bus.
Hear Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen on my Future Radio programme on Sunday December 16 at 5.00pm UK time (convert to local time zones here) I will also be playing Lou Harrison's 1985 Piano Concerto. Listen by launching the Radeo internet player from the right side-bar, or via the audio stream. Convert time to your local time zone using this link. Windows Media Player doesn't like the audio stream very much and takes ages to buffer. WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. If you are in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk