Another reason that is keeping me from posting is that I am working on what I hope is a fairly significant piece and there is an upcoming deadline. I am scheduled to supervise the recording of the piece and another one written a few years ago in Toronto in early December with highly professional players and engineers. While I am working on the piece I am strongly inclined not to talk about it! I think this is pretty common with creative work. You never want to talk about what you are doing while you are doing it. I'm not sure why this is, but creation seems to involve turning your attention in a certain direction or opening your perceptions in a certain way and talking about it tends to interfere in some way. In any case, after the project is completed, I am sure I will have lots to say.
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I have been reading a book recommended by a commentator, The Hall of Uselessness, a collection of essays by Simon Leys, the nom de plume of Pierre Ryckmans, a Belgian-Australian essayist and critic with a particular interest in China.
Not available on Kindle, unfortunately, you will have to order a print copy. But the book is well-worth reading, I think. I realized something about my own aesthetic makeup from the essay "Poetry and Painting: Aspects of Chinese Classical Aesthetics." When I was quite young, just out of high school and before I went to university, I made two aesthetic discoveries. The first was musical in the person of J. S. Bach (and other classical composers, but Bach was the main one) and the second was of Asian art in the form of ukiyo-e, Japanese woodcuts. From there I discovered the arts of Japan and China more generally which over the years included Chinese poetry and painting, haiku, Zen Buddhism, Japanese, Chinese and Javanese music and so on. Here is a passage from the essay that resonates:
Probably the best way to examine this theme of "communion with the universe" in Chinese art is still to study the central role played by the concept of qi in the aesthetic theories.
Qi is sometimes translated as "spirit," which could be misleading unless one remains aware that the Chinese have a materialistic notion of spirit and a spiritualistic notion of matter. Far from being antithetical, the two elements indissolubly permeate each other. A good example of this conception can be found, for instance, in the well-known "Hymn of the Righteous Qi," written in the thirteenth century by Wen Tianxiang... Whereas a Western mind would wish to distinguish between different realms, for the Chinese classical mentality, one single concept of qi can simultaneously cover physiological realities and abstract principles, material elements and spiritual forces...
The literal meaning of qi is "breath" or "energy"... In a broader and deeper sense, it describes the vital impulse, the inner dynamism of cosmic creation. For an artist, the most important task is to collect this energy within the macrocosmos that surrounds him, and to inject it into the microcosmos of his own work.Without realizing it, this is exactly what I have always tried to do in my compositions, directly or indirectly. Whereas in Western aesthetics, art is essentially an illusion that seeks to imitate Nature, in China:
...for a Chinese painter, the measure of success was not determined by his ability to fake reality but by his capacity to summon reality... The relation between the painted landscape and the natural landscape is not based on imitation or representation; painting is not a symbol of the world, but proof of its actual presence.Occasionally Western artists have had the same preception:
Picasso put it more concisely, but no less explicitly: "The question is not to imitate nature, but to work like it."How does this work, practically?
A painter should aim to turn his painting into a sort of energy field where forms constitute as many poles between which tensions are created; these tensions--invisible, yet active--ensure the unity and vital dynamism of the composition.Negative space is an important component:
Earlier, we pointed out that in Chinese philosophy the Absolute only manifests itself "in hollow": only its absence can be circumscribed... Not only can the message reach its destination without having to be fully spelled out, but it is precisely because it is not fully spelled out that it can reach its destination. In this sense, the "blanks" in painting, the silences in poetry and music are active elements that bring a work to life.
The poet Tao Yuanming (372 - 427) used to carry everywhere with him a zither without strings, on which he played mute music: "I only seek the meaning that lies at the heart of the zither. Why strain myself to produce sounds on the strings?"The case of John Cage's 4'33 will come immediately to mind. Cage was deeply influenced by Chinese and Japanese aesthetic concepts. I recommend reading all of Leys' essay. My quotes are from pages 342 through 349.
I spent my formative years largely on Vancouver Island where I first encountered the art and aesthetics of China and Japan. Apart from ukiyo-e, another important influence in those years was A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy by Wing-Tsit Chan. I lost the book years ago but recently replaced it. I was delighted that it was still in print.
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Like John Cage, I grew up on the Pacific coast of North America, where the influence of Asia is the strongest. An old friend of mine, composer Anthony Genge, is also from the Pacific coast, Vancouver, and is also very influenced by that aesthetic. His two composition teachers were Morton Feldman and Toru Takemitsu. Feldman is probably the most "eastern" aesthetically, after Cage, of that whole group of composers who worked in New York. The influence of Chinese and Japanese aesthetics is so deep that I am usually quite unaware of it, but a couple of years ago a violinist that I play with quite regularly pointed out that my music has an Asian feel. She is Chinese-American and lives in California. Someone else might not have noticed.
So there you have it, a long post about why I haven't been doing long posts recently. The perfect envoi to this is a piece by Anthony Genge that has been a significant influence on my music. The piece is Night Rain, for flute and guitar. The performers are myself, guitar, and Richard Volet, alto flute.
UPDATE: I meant to include an example of ukiyo-e in this post and forgot. Here is a woodcut by Hiroshige, a great 19th century master:
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5 comments:
Bryan, you are an artist I take seriously. But you are more than that to me. You are a teacher, a stimulating conversant, and an intellectual I find engaging because yours is not a formulaic or ideological approach, but rather combining contemplation with an unfinished and authentic quest for truth, and that in the human experiential rather than religious dogmatic sense. In my small world, I don't know anybody else who can ethically defend Western Civilization from the misguided Social Justice Warriors, appreciating (for example) the music of Marin Marais AND 2 of the brothers Couperains even while integrating Asian aesthetics into your art and thought. It makes me happy to interpret your writings and our conversations here as a form of friendship. Certainly your work enriches my life.
This article, and a few others of yours recently, remind me of books I read decades ago, now buried deep in my parents' attic. At age 18 I started with several Alan Watts books that quickly led me to several more by D.T. Suzuki and a few others on Buddhism and Eastern philosophy. One of them was Suzuki's "Zen and Japanese Culture" (if I remember correctly), which combines in my mind with an exhibition of Chinese paintings I saw a few years ago...into my understanding that Asian art often omits the (or minimizes) the background, portraying the subject in an economy of brushstrokes as a foreground on an otherwise blank parchment. And isn't that similar to what we hear in Anthony Genge's "Night Rain," so beautifully rendered here by you and Richard Volet? And in the appreciative aftermath of listening, do I remember correctly that the old paleolithic bone flutes were found in China?
Will, thanks so much for your fulsome comment! I haven't added any quotes for a while, would you mind terribly if I excerpted part of your comment?
Yes, I too read the Suzuki book on Zen and Japanese Culture (I just checked and that is indeed the title and it is still in print, though Amazon says it "usually ships in 1 to 3 months"). Months!?! I used to read a lot on Eastern art and philosophy. I need to get back to doing more. As I recall, forty years ago a lot of us were reading this sort of thing, but now it seems that hardly anyone is. Or am I mistaken? I have the feeling that people are much more oriented around purely practical and partisan activities now. If it doesn't put money in the bank, what use is it?
You got me on the paleolithic bone flutes! I recall reading something about them, but don't recall where they were discovered. France? Or China as you say?
Except for a Bible I saw in the car driven by one of our electricians, I've never seen any of my co-workers with a book, or even talk about one. That includes the office, not just my fellow rooftop installers and electricians. One lead installer does listen to books on tape, "inspirational" books about how to believe in yourself, make a successful career, etc. Funny thing is, he tries to be a serious Jew yet when I told him Friday that I will see the MetOpera production of Samson and Delilah, he had never heard of the story! BTW, I did see it yesterday, a GREAT show!
Nobody at work ever asks me what I'm reading, though I always have a book or Kindle to read in the truck, and at lunch if I didn't bring a fiddle to play. Most of my brothers and sisters (big family!) don't read. Sadly, I doubt my son (18 yo) has read 10 books in his life, and those were quite simple. Most of these people consume information by browsing through videos they attend for perhaps 10 or 20 seconds each, or reading Facebook that has portioned attention down to literally fractions of a second. By contrast, even a slender book requires several hours of focused thought.
I think I've said something like this here before: we seem to be entering a post-literate era, "aided" by technology, wherein the majority of people only read for immediate practical application, use dictation technology to even replace typing their thoughts (or google searches), yet know a lot about their immediate world through television, videos, movies and gossip. Popular music seems to be following a similar path, with less musical literacy due to computer-generated sounds and rhythms, singing reduced to spoken "rap" (often through a computer that modifies the timbre and pitch).
Before mourning these developments too hard, I reflect that most human history was pre-literate (and therefore technically pre-historic), that it was usually a small minority who were literate since the invention of writing, and therefore this whole democratic experiment assuming an informed and critically-minded citizenry was indeed quite radical and ahistoric. As a monarchist and cultural Catholic, none of this bothers me much.
Oh yes, almost forgot...you can always quote me on anything as you like, I don't much believe in copyrights. Like electricity, they are ruining music.
Thanks, Will, I will put up a quote.
When I lived in Montreal I would see people reading all the time: on the bus, on the subway, in parks and judging from my recent trip, it still seems to be the case. But in Mexico one never sees anyone reading in public. I think I have read about five books a week since I was ten years old and if you count reading blogs and the Wall Street Journal online, I think I am still reading that much. Less of my reading is serious, however, and I aim to correct that. Two books I want to get through in the near future are the collected Nietzsche and the anthology of Chinese philosophy.
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