Perspectives of New Music

Volume 44, Number 2 (Summer 2006)

CONTENTS

6 “Where Have We Met Before?” For a 90th Bir thday

Celebration of Milton Babbitt BENJAMIN BORETZ
14 “What is about, is also of, also is”: Words, Musical
Organization, and Boretz’s Language ,as a music, “Thesis”
DORA A. HANNINEN
66 A Living Oxymoron: Norman O. Brown’s Criticism of
John Cage CHRISTOPHER SHULTIS
88 From a Categorical Point of View: K-nets as
Limit Denotators
GUERINO MAZZOLA AND MORENO ANDREATTA
114 General Equal-Tempered Harmony (Introduction and
Par t I) IAN QUINN
160 Why We Refuse to Listen MICHAEL KOWALSKI
220 A Search for Emptiness: An Inter view with
Jonathan Har vey MATTHEW JENKINS
232 Composed Silence: Microsound and the Quiet Shock
of Listening THOMAS PHILLIPS
250 Toshi Ichiyanagi, Japanese Composer and “Fluxus”
LUCIANA GALLIANO

262 Editorial Notes

264 Instructions for Contributors
265 Personae
267 Acknowledgments
 Graphics
5, 13 ROBERT YODER
65, 159 VICTORIA HAVEN
219, 249 ROBERT SPERRY
 © Perspectives of New Music

A Search for Emptiness:

An Interview with Jonathan Harvey

This interview took place throughout the afternoon of July 24, 2005 at Jonathan
Harvey’s house in Lewes, United Kingdom.

Matthew Jenkins: When did you first encounter Buddhism? Did it have a large
initial impact?

Jonathan Harvey: I came to Christian mysticism strongly in about 1960. Perhaps

1959. When I was studying that there were many references to Buddhism and
oriental philosophy. I began to read about Buddhism at that time. However, I
became more interested in Indian meditation techniques, which were concrete and
practical. Although there were still interests in Buddhist literature, philosophy, and
art, there was something a little too abstract, austere, or too distant from God about
Zen. It was only later that I began to get close to Buddhism. That was about 10 or
12 years ago. I can point to a work like Forms of Emptiness. It is a choral work
from 1986 based on the Heart Sutra quoted in Sanskrit. It is entirely a Buddhist
work. I used a lot of Christian texts before that.

It has been a steady growth, but I really started practicing about 10 years ago.
Then I didn’t mind that there wasn’t any emphasis on God anymore. I always felt
before that I had to have a figure or figures that were supernatural in my pantheon.
That helped me to relate, because I am a kind of Bhakti person, someone who
thrives on the idea of devotion. That involves a human metaphor – a metaphor of
human love. Without a figure to interact with I couldn’t grasp the characteristic of
warmth in this metaphysical strand. I find in Tibetan Buddhism that all of the
deities come back in a very baroque, colorful and strange way. However, they’re
in a sense all empty just like every thing else is. The Tibetans have a different
relationship to these other beings.

MJ: How has your relationship with Buddhism changed your relationship with
Christianity and mysticism?

JH: In one very important respect it has made me look more deeply into
Christianity and it’s Indian roots. A fair amount is being written these days, but
when I was young I don’t think it was written about at all. For instance, the
discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls and the Nag Hamardi manuscripts has revealed
all of these suppressed gospels and writings: the gospel of Thomas and the secret
letter of John, for example. These texts show a very obvious relationship with
quasi-Buddhist teachers. Many people now suggest that Jesus had contact in those
forgotten years of his life with those kinds of teachers. Whether he actually
traveled south to India or they traveled to his area is uncertain, but it seems
absolutely clear that there is an entrance there.

I find myself going more towards the Jesus within you rather than the Jesus out
there of St. John’s gospel. It is different from the other three gospels. It was a
thing of John’s to make Jesus into a divinity. I realize that is a rather one-sided
way of looking at Christianity and what the church teaches now. There is another
way to look at it. I don’t know who’s right, but I know which I prefer. I prefer the
Gnostic version of Jesus. His relationship with Buddhism is rather beautiful, close,
and full of a kind of mystical light. That is what appeals to me very much.

MJ: Do you practice meditation?

JH: Yes.

MJ: How long have you done so?

JH: About 10 years. I practiced Hindu, or Vedic, meditation for about 20 years.
That is when I started daily practice. I just changed from Vedic to Buddhist, but at
least I got into the habit of meditating. I think it is important. It doesn’t do to just
read or think about it. Does it?

MJ: It is not the same.

JH: It is not a philosophy to be intellectualized about, but one to be lived.

MJ: Which schools of thought speak to you more closely? Why?

JH: Tibetan. The New Kadampa traditioni is the one that I follow, but all Tibetan
traditions speak to me closely. They’re similar actually. It just happens that the
monk I have teachings from is from the New Kadampa tradition. It is close to the
Dalai Lama’s, but not exactly the same. I have had a lot of contact with Zen
Buddhists. I like the rather more colorful and…I was going to say psychological
schools, but Zen is also psychological. The Tibetans are skillful. They know what
human minds are like and how much they love things to grasp onto. The Zen
masters are a little bit severe. They make great demands, which I couldn’t always
feel comfortable with. Maybe my mind is too weak!

MJ: Have you ever lived in a monastery?

JH: I have only lived in Christian monasteries. In some ways they are quite close
to Buddhist monasteries. I think the monks themselves would admit that and
would even like me saying it. They often take great interest in Buddhist thought
and find many things in common. In February I went to some Buddhist
monasteries in North India in the foothills of the Himalayas and lived just opposite
a monastery in a guesthouse. I was there every day. I didn’t really call it ‘living in
a monastery,’ but I talked to a lot of the lamas there. Some of them were
marvelous people. They were very devoted and would go into solitude and retreats
for three months and often longer. I just received a letter from a friend who
recently came out of a three-month retreat. He is planning another for six or nine
months. They speak to no one. They hardly survive, because they eat so little.
Their research into consciousness and the spiritual is incredible. I admire that
enormously. I love the people. They are so charming.

MJ: What area was the monastery in?

JH: Rajpur. It is north of New Delhi near the mountains close to the Tibetan
border.

MJ: In Uttar Pradesh?

JH: Yes. That’s right.

MJ: When did it occur to you that the notion of emptiness was an appropriate lens
to view music through? How so?

JH: I think it was after I started taking fairly regular lessons and classes with the
Tibetan group about 10 years ago. It began to dawn on me slowly that this is what
music is all about. In fact, I would almost say all art, but particularly music. As I
explain in the essayii, it is remarkable once you see that. To me it is as clear as
daylight - what we love in music is what we call emptiness. It is a kind of reality
that is being shown us in as clear as possible way in this serious art of music. Not
in bad music, but in music that we call good. We call it good, because it is empty.
That is really my thesis. If it is banal or chaotic then it doesn’t have emptiness. If it
is somewhere in between there and it has something ambiguous, subtle, teasing,
mysterious, or all the other magical things we want in music then it is because it is
empty.

MJ: Is it subjective?

JH: It depends on each person’s education and ability to receive the patterns. One
person could receive Schoenberg’s patterns and to another person it is just chaos.
There are emotional are filters too. I think sometimes we can receive a
Tchaikovsky piece and another time we can only receive a Stravinsky piece. It is
different from person to person. You could call it subjective. Every mind is
different from every other.

MJ: Do you think that it was music or Buddhism that fueled this realization?

JH: It was Buddhism. If I hadn’t studied Buddhism, I would have never realized it.
I would have never come to it clearly. Emptiness is quite difficult. I go to these
classes and see the puzzled faces on people who have even been practicing for a
year or two. Even quite intelligent people find it hard to grasp emptiness. It is not
an obvious thing. It goes against everything that we have been led to believe in our
culture. I don’t think it is the same in Eastern cultures. Emptiness is natural from
the age of three onwards. It is in their way of thinking, but for the West it is not in
our way of thinking. It is counterintuitive and it is possible that I would have
never grasped emptiness without my Buddhist teachers.

MJ: Did you have any experiences before this realization that you viewed music
through the lens of emptiness?

JH: Yes, in my love of ambiguity and disguise. For instance, I have been doing
electronic music since Princeton in 1969. Since those days the shifting quality of
sound has always fascinated me. Once you get a computer on it you can change
anything into anything. It is just like emptiness. Nothing really exists, except for
the labels you stick on. That became important for me in listening to my and other
people’s music. Whether by Beethoven, Machaut, or Boulez, the music depends
on that quality of flux. Things change into each other and set up seemingly strong
ideas and dissolve them. It has certainly been with me for a long time.

MJ: Is the notion of emptiness suitable for all music?

JH: I think so. I think all good music, or music that has been liked, is suitable.
That is an important qualification. I am trying to think of any music that I don’t
like that I would not call empty or not think to have an element of emptiness to it.
Then we get into areas like chant or chanting on one note. They do not have
emptiness. I don’t know. Often chanting on one note depends on many other
things like the ‘sacred’ acoustic, the words, the situation and the ritual. There
could be borderline cases. I think a lot of other music doesn’t have anything to do
with emptiness. It just doesn’t make it clear. It is nothing. It is just a mess. It is not
music except in some technical sense. Just banal…

MJ: What parameters or characteristics are more suitable for the notion of
emptiness? Or, is it just within one’s self?

JH: The perception of ambiguity. The things I was talking about in my essayiii.
MJ: You suggested that Lachenmann and Sciarrino lend themselves to emptiness.

JH: Yes. There is an interesting trend that is everywhere evident in the young
composers that I see in the various classes I give around Europe. I am not talking
about in the States so much. I think the influence isn’t nearly so great there. The
trend of breaking up the solidity of sound is one I see happening since about the
beginning of the 20th century. I don’t think that Lachenmann and Sciarrino are
Buddhists, but they are concerned with what I am talking about in my essay. It is
this unnamed thing, which we could call emptiness. It is to do with the fascination
of the changing, the establishing and the changing, or the flux of reality. Nothing
is what it seems. When you listen to Lachenmann it is clear that you have a violin
that doesn’t seem to be a violin from the sound it is making. At times you
recognize a bit of ‘violinness’ about the sound it is making. Half of the time it is
something completely different from the violin to all intents and purposes. All of
these disguises and destructions of fixed labels are important to their music and
aesthetic. Lachenmann is passionate about destroying the conventional, traditional
gestures.

MJ: Do you mean cultural constructs?

JH: Constructs. Yes.

MJ: Is it a proper state of mind or the musical object that aids this type of listening
experience? Or both?

JH: It is all in the mind. There is nothing beyond mind!

MJ: In light of Nishida’s theory of pure experience, do you think an egoless

musical experience is possible such as the self and the musical object collapse into
one for a more pure experience?

JH: Yes. That’s quite a higher state when you experience unity with objects -
seemingly out there objects. One gets glimpses of it. That is an important state
towards which music aspires. People often say, “I was completely lost in the
music…I was lost…The ego was lost.” In a good listening experience, this is quite
common, but only fairly briefly.

MJ: Like an entrancing type of experience?

JH: Yes. Ecstatic standing outside oneself. There is no separation between mind
and object. No duality anymore. That is the idea of uncertainty.
MJ: How do you perceive the ego and what is its role in the musical experience?

JH: The ego is illusory, but the illusory ego certainly plays a role in a lot of
musical experiences. It kind of does a dance. It dances around in its illusory way.
Of course we think it is real. I think we are in someway involved as egos, but in
ambiguous music you constantly get tripped over. The ego is put through its paces.
It often gets a bit disorientated. That is nice. Some people can occasionally get
afraid if the music gets powerful, loud, or domineering. It knocks the ego out of its
security. The Rite of Spring must have frightened a lot of people in its time. There
are many successors to that. The role of the ego is certainly present. Studying how
the ego is battered and assaulted would be a fascinating study somebody should
write about. The ego is kind of shown to be illusory if you are watching carefully.

MJ: Perhaps in extremely quiet and still music as well?

JH: Yes. That is really where I think the ego can be put to rest. It can stop
jumping around and the mind can become tranquil and expand into vast empty
space.

MJ: Do you think the ego relates to the notion of beauty? What is beauty?

JH: That is a very interesting question, because beauty is partly sexual. Sexuality
has a lot to do with the ego and so on. Beauty transcends sexuality and becomes
something different, but the borderlines are fascinating. Aren’t they? It’s an
extremely good and difficult question and it is absolutely at the heart of the
aesthetics and, above all, ethics. I think it could be approached in a long book,
perhaps by someone who is old.

MJ: (Laugh)

JH: (Laugh) But, not before.

MJ: Perhaps yourself!? (Laugh)

JH: (Laugh) One day. I think there is a rather interesting intention in Tantric
Buddhism in the use of beauty to more quickly obtain spiritual ends. It involves
using your imagination, but it is kept a secret because it can be abused. One is not
supposed to talk about it unless it is to people who have had the instructions and
teachings from a master. It is a fairly sensible precaution. The typical
sensationalists of modern day life could abuse it. It is an approach to beauty that
can be extremely powerful and can lead quickly, so the monks say, to the
attainment of an awakening. It is extraordinary and old. It has been kept secret.
MJ: Is beauty emptiness?

JH: No. Beauty is the means to emptiness. It is a kind of technique if you like.
Those of us who are dealing with art and emptiness inevitably come across the
question: “What is beauty?” Beauty has a lot to do with emptiness. I wouldn’t go
so far as to say, “It is emptiness.” There are so many objects that are called
‘virtuous objects’ in Buddhism that are extremely beautiful. For instance, one
could call ‘goodness’ beautiful. As Kant said goodness and the beautiful are the
same. To observe someone being kind or compassionate to another person is
beautiful. In that sense, beauty is close to the virtuous objects. As I said, it is a
complicated question. There are many types of beauty. One would have to unpack
them all.

MJ: Do you see the composer as a shaman like figure?

JH: I think so. It is not a bad description. Of course shamans can deal with a
darkness that has to do with bad or unvirtuous things. That is the other half of
shamanism. The composer as somebody who mediates between higher, other, or
invisible forces is absolutely a correct supposition, I think. Some composers, but
not all composers fit that description.

MJ: Is the composer a complex set of cultural constructs and any distinct voice
perceived is just an illusion of personality?

JH: I kind of believe that, but then people say to me, “You have a voice. I can pick
out your music.” And, I say, “Can you? Well, I am not aware of it.” I just write
what I want to write. If it sounds like someone else, I am just not too worried. My
compositions are different from one to another, but I guess one can’t avoid
connections with others’ worlds unless one is an enlightened person. Then it
probably wouldn’t happen. I don’t know quite what the music of an enlightened
person is. When you think of the late quartets of Beethoven there is a great quality
of Beethoven in them. In many ways they seem to transcend everything.

MJ: They’re ambiguous in many ways.

JH: Fundamentally, the voice as a bundle of stuff that has been collected from our
histories, environments, and karma is a good description.

MJ: Do you think that the composer’s intent of encoding a score with extra-
musical meaning aids in communicating the message behind a programmatic
work?
JH: Yes. The intention of the subject and the music can come as a complete
package. It is no different from painting a picture of an object. It is both a mark
making and a reference. Music can’t escape its references. It always relates to an
agitated or calm heartbeat or breath; a running, dancing, or gesture movement; or
speaking, exclaiming or chanting. It just can’t escape. There is reference all over.
Whatever people might say, there is no neutral level. If you write a title or
program, it is just extending what is already there. It certainly helps the listener to
enter into what is in the composer’s mind. On the other hand, if nothing is
consciously in the composer’s mind, what are you going to title it except perhaps
“Symphony” or something?

MJ: Does music communicate meaning?

JH: Yes. Yes. The extra-musical meaning is strong, but ultimately empty. That is
the strength of music. We know emotions of tragedy, comedy, romance, and
mysticism are strongly portrayed in music, but ultimately music is just notes and
vibrations in the air. It is not even that. It is just things in our brains and minds.
We can see in the music that they don’t have any real existence. They are
constructs in our minds, ways our minds think, and ways our minds can make
sense of things. Yes and No. There is the conventional answer and the ultimate
answer, the Buddhist one.

MJ: What are the differences between a religious Buddhist music, such as Tibetan
chanting, and non-religious music that describes its self as Buddhist, such as one
of your Buddhist Songs? Is there no difference?

JH: We obviously have the rite and the concert hall. There are times when a
concert hall tries to become a rite. Oftentimes there are composers who want to
achieve that. Perhaps some do. Whether the two remain in separate compartments
is an interesting borderline issue too. As I was saying earlier about the chant on
one note, the music that is used in a rite doesn’t contain such a high degree of
inherent emptiness in the musical sense. It is doing something else. The music is
conveying techniques for meditation, purification, and for making people happy –
assuaging the fears and torments of existence. It is about many things other than
being about emptiness. That music is functional, rather than simply being an
empty music, existing as a picture of this wonderful vision of illusion that we are
calling complex, or sophisticated, music. There is a difference in function one
could lay out like that, but the borderlines can be blurred.

MJ: Speaking of some of your pre-existing works, is there any connection between
the works that attribute themselves to the notion of emptiness, such as Forms of
Emptiness and Wheel of Emptiness?
JH: I don’t think there is a fundamental difference. I think in the Buddhist works I
am more conscious of emptiness. Sometimes I tried to make it clear for the
listener, but, no, I don’t think there is a fundamental difference.

MJ: Did you want to write works about emptiness or did the titles occur to you
afterwards?

JH: In the case of Wheel of Emptiness and Forms of Emptiness, I wanted to write
about emptiness. With Wheel of Emptiness I knew more about it than in ’86 with
Forms of Emptiness. In Wheel of Emptiness I did it using two ideas of flux: firstly
chaotic and formless music and secondly music of extreme form, as two
contrasting objects of material. In Wheel of Emptiness I was showing the way in
which we take objects and fetishize them. We give them labels and see them as
individual things. You highlight the contradictions of the dialectic in the process
of perceiving emptiness when you juxtapose a profusion of notes that are always
changing against constructs which are fixed and don’t change at all. In a
meditation on emptiness, you also have to find, identify, examine and realize the
object of negation as ‘truly existent’. You then ‘see through’ the object, and fail to
find its verifiable existence apart from the mind that makes it appear. You then
meditate on emptiness. It is essential you start with something that seems not to be
empty. Then you demolish it. That is what I was doing [in Wheel of Emptiness].
This process is like the collage artists that put a scrap of newspaper or a bus ticket
into their painting. They just stick it on. It sticks out as an object, which doesn’t
normally belong to the world of painting. It is fun. It doesn’t belong to the world
of painting, but someone like Picasso could make it belong by sheer showing of
that deceptive real existence. It is not really a bus ticket. It is part of the paint, part
of the flux of form or formlessness – part of the stardust from which we all come
from and beyond. It is a false form. It is an interesting way to compose for me.
Bird Concerto with Pianosong is another piece in which I do exactly the same
thing.

MJ: What about the work From Silence?

JH: It is a little bit Buddhist. I wrote some of the texts myself. They are rather
Buddhist. It uses monastic Christian texts from a somewhat Buddhist point of
view. Would you say, “Is Mozart’s such-and-such a symphony a Buddhist work?”
How could I answer that? Yes. It is for me, but it doesn’t say much. All of the
music that I like is Buddhist.

MJ: Are your Buddhist Songs meant to be a religious or spiritual experience?

JH: They were written for Buddhist occasions. They are fairly simple and meant to
be functional music. I set texts they use and know in Buddhist circles. The songs
are ‘church music’ and they are Buddhist certainly in their structure, but
simplified.

MJ: Those were all of my formal questions. Is there anything you would like to
add?

JH: I am writing an opera on a Buddhist theme, which is a combination of things.

It is about Wagner and his death at the time he was in Venice lodging in the
Palazzo de Vendramin. He was writing his essay on the feminine in culture and
had just started to write about the Buddha in this Buddhist legend. He suddenly
died of a heart attack. Buddhists, as you may know, say that what you are thinking
about at the moment of death is the supreme mind of your life. It is the most
important state of mind of your life. At any rate, I take this moment of Wagner’s
death and follow his mind. It is obviously a fantasy of mine. The opera explores
what happened to him at the gate of death and what he thought about this
wonderful theme in which the Buddha appears. That is the whole evening. We
have Wagner on the stage speaking, not singing, with his family; and an Indian
cast, one of which is the Buddha. It is a beautiful story, an old Indian legend. It is a
clash, or dialectic, between 19th-century romanticism and Buddhism. Wagner
knew quite a lot about it for his time, but I think he misunderstood it. His vision of
nirvana was rather bleak and nihilistic in some ways. It lacks the laughter of true
Buddhism. Playing his vision of Buddhism off of the Buddha’s is at the back of
the story.

i
The essence of the New Kadampa tradition, a Mahayana school founded by Master
Atisha (AD 982-1054), is cherishing others and proving oneself on the spiritual path to be
able to benefit all living beings. It centers on meditation and how acts of daily life can
lead towards enlightenment. Contemporary New Kadampa Buddhism, also known as
Kamdampa, centers around Geshe Kelsang Gyatso’s teachings and temple, The Manjushi
Center, in England.
ii
Harvey, Jonathan. Music and Buddhism.... Paddison, Max and Deliège, Irène.
Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives. Aldershot: Ashgate,
forthcoming.
iii
Harvey, forthcoming.