I was browsing through an old journal of mine from many years ago and ran across this:
"Driving on the highway yesterday I was noticing the beauty of the trees alongside and it seemed to me that the beauty came from the purposeless of them. They grow as they do for no reason other than that it is their nature." [December 31, 1985]
Now, of course, what I meant to write was "purposelessness." This may have been around the time I was reading a lot of Chinese philosophy. I found a little YouTube clip of Alan Watts talking about purposelessness. It is a deeply Zen notion. He says: "When Chinese say nature is purposeless, this is a compliment." "All music is purposeless." In the wider sense, I suppose, though there is a great deal of music, especially in the 17th to 19th centuries that has a very organized harmonic direction. He also says, "When you dance, do you aim to arrive at a particular place on the floor?" Here is the clip:
I wonder a couple of things: is this way of looking at the world horribly out of step with the present times? But also, this seems to me to capture an interesting aesthetic virtue that is of our times, roughly. When I listen to John Cage, for example, it seems to me that he is practicing the aesthetic virtue of purposelessness--perhaps too thoroughly! The music of Morton Feldman seems to share this virtue as well. The aesthetic virtue of purposelessness offsets the potential aesthetic vice of busy emptiness. I witnessed an example of this in an Oscar Ghiglia master class once. A student was playing a piece by Bach and was industriously and busily working her way through it and Oscar commented: "You played that like you are going shopping!" I don't think she realized how devastating a critique this was. Playing music to get to the end of it, or to display your prowess or to find the good bits, like you are sorting through the bargain clothing in a department store--this is to miss the real point of the music, which is to be purposelessly beautiful or expressive. You really have to notice the music in itself and not just as an end to some further purpose like money or applause.
An interesting serendipity: here is a piece by Morton Feldman written the same year that I made that journal entry: 1985. The piece is Violin and String Quartet:
4 comments:
A funny way of looking at it. Traditionally, things done for an intrinsic good -- like making music, for a person, or growing, for a tree -- rather than for some instrumental reason, were considered the exemplars of purposefulness. They are the things for the sake of which all other things are done. Their "purpose" is a transcendental one: to manifest beauty, goodness, or truth.
Craig, you've got me dead to rights! I agree totally. But wait, this is September 9? Oh, that explains it: on even-numbered days of the week I am an Aristotelian, but on odd-numbered days I am a Taoist, a disciple of Chuang Tzu.
I do agree, by the way, I am an Aristotelian, basically. But when I am writing music I am in a different mode, one where, while I may survey the territory, mostly I need to roam freely. Did you listen to the Feldman?
The Taoists had a rather specialized interpretation of purposeless. One of their favorite sayings was: Earth and Sky do nothing but there is nothing that they can't do. So the idea was to seem purposeless to changing fashions and styles of human society and follow the way of the natural order. They were not art connoisseurs I'm afraid; more likely folk music advocates.
Maury, you are going to make me dig out my Chuang Tzu, aren't you? "Since the music of earth consists of sounds produced in the various hollows, and the music of man consists of sounds produced in a series of flutes, what is the music of heaven?"
The Taoists had many interpretations of everything! What I mean by my jocular answers is that I find the basic materials for a composition by not looking for them, but rather stumbling across them.
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