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

Happy long tail to all my readers

Right at the end of 2007 the Observer ran a story that shames the whole classical music community, including this and other blogs. It was about the BBC's rejection of director Tony Palmer's Vaughan Williams film, a news story that was featured prominently by the Observer and several music blogs, including this one. It now appears that the rejection letter quoted in the coverage was a publicity-seeking hoax, although the identity of the hoaxer remains unclear - read the full account here.

This story neatly sums up a year in which relevance became the order of the day, and swapping the long tail of culture for the short head of the mass market became the number one priority. 2007 saw Norman Lebrecht's attempts to go mass market hit the buffers, while William Barrinton-Coupe's efforts on behalf of his late wife met a similar fate. It was also the year when the Royal Opera House went mass market with its advertising, BBC TV went mass market with its classical music programming, Deutsche Grammophon went mass market with its CD covers, John Foulds went mass market with his World Requiem, the BBC Proms went mass market with its crooners, and the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra went mass market with its concert attire and politics.

'Relevance' is in and the long tail is out. But it doesn't always work as Dominic Sandbrook recounts in his excellent book White Heat, a History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties? 'Many Protestant churchmen, alarmed at their inability to reverse the long decline in church-going, concluded that 'relevance was the order of the day'. According to Grace Davie, the churches, besotted like so many other institutions by the 'desire to be modern', consequently 'looked to the secular world for a lead and borrowed, in some cases rather uncritically, both its ideas and forms of expression'. It was in this period, for example, that liberal churchmen first began wielding guitars, introducing handclapping into the Anglican rite and generally conducting themselves like frustrated pop singers, a tactic that failed to attract many new parishioners and often alienated those still loyal to the Church of England'


In 2008 On An Overgrown Path will stay focussed on the long tail, and now playing is Satori (1999) for solo harpsichord by John Palmer. A long way from the Anglican rite, Satori describes the spiritual awakening during Zen meditation. This penetrating work, with its long silences is influenced both by the composer's friendship with John Cage and by his deep involvement with Japanese culture. Adventurous and thought-provoking new music from the enterprising Sargasso label, which revels in promoting the long tail. Check out good length MP3 samples here.

The CD has excellent sleeve notes by Peter Burt, including this one for the title work - A koan, for instance, is that type of apparently nonsensical question by means of which students in the Rinzai school of Zen are trained to transcend the limitations of verbal reasoning, the most famous example perhaps being Hakuin's 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' (My own mischievous answer has always been that it is the audience reaction at the average new music concert).

Peter Burt neatly disposes of the long tail versus mass market conflict with these words - All this picturesque 'Japaneseness' might make it sound as though the listener to this CD is in for a comfortable session of 'New-age' easy listening. But be warned: someone who submits himself to the ascetic severities of Zen monastery life could hardly be expected to opt for facile and superficial artistic solutions, and the musical language of John Palmer's work is uncompromisingly Western and modernist. It demands of its listener, no less than of its creator, an attitude of disciplined seriousness. Deeply rewarding listening.

Which eloquently sums up the long tail listening experience.


* Celebrate the new year with some more long tail - my David Munrow on the record programme is being repeated on Future Radio by popular demand at 7.00pm on New Year's Day, click here for the audio stream.

Sand mandala header photo from my 2007 post about the Free Tibet campaign. And no apologies to all those who think politics, music and sport don't mix. With the Olympics in Beijing in 2008 it is a subject I'll doubtless be returning to. Sand mandalas are a motif in Martin Scorsese's film Kundun which also deals with the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and I featured Philip Glass' score for the film on internet radio in November. My middle photo is from Going Buddhist which featured the music of Lou Harrison, the footer image is from Zen and the art of new music about Jonathan Harvey's music, and there is another contemporary music Koan here from James Tenney. Lots of long tail links for the new year.
All photos (c) On An Overgrown Path 2007. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk