|
Delivered August 15, 2004 The rather unusual opening music you heard this morning is my liberal interpretation of a piece that is actually in the hymnal! Today's talk is all about chance, serendipity, and order out of chaos. So it seemed right that while looking through the hymnal for another reason entirely, I came upon this piece and was surprised to discover that it had an element of improvisation written into the accompaniment. Some of you know that in one of my previous lives I studied musical composition. One of my favorite teachers was named Steven Mosko, but most people knew him as "Lucky", a name given to him by his parents who, the story goes, were both inveterate gamblers. Again, suitably enough, Lucky taught a class in a style of music called "aleatory" or "chance" music. Aleatory literally means "throw of the dice". Pieces of music are created by leaving some of the elements to be determined by a random process. For example, a series of notes could be chosen deliberately, but the length of each note would be determined by tossing coins. Or a melody could be written out, but the choice of which instrument it would be played on left to the performers. The idea behind this style relates to non -Western philosophy and is partly an attempt to remove the will of the creator from the work, letting chance occur as it will and making each performance different, sometimes radically different. Obviously, which choices are left up to chance will have a large influence in the character of the final piece. This whole concept runs against the grain of what we consider art to be about, which is the conscious expression of the artist's vision. What is the point of music which can be said not to be written by anyone? The original idea for this "chance music" came about though experimentation by American composer Henry Cowell, who placed objects inside a piano to create a wide range of sounds. According to one version of the story that I've heard, Cowell became frustrated because he couldn't predict what sounds he would get. His student at the time, John Cage, saw this as an inspiration rather than a problem. Due to another bit of random chance, Cage had recently come across an ancient Chinese text called the Book of Changes, which was then little known in the United States. It's a venerated philosophical text which originated in China thousands of years ago. Both Taoism and Confucianism originate from its teachings. Over the course of centuries it has evolved to contain elements of mythology, poetry and religious symbolism. Also called the I Ching, the book is used for divination and spiritual guidance. Questions are asked by tossing coins or sticks to form a pattern of six solid and broken lines, called hexagrams. Each one of these patterns has a specific meaning. The interpretation of each hexagram is far more than an exercise in fortune telling and creates, in the words of Richard Wilhelm, who translated the original Chinese text into German, an "intimate interplay between image and concept". Cage began to use the methods he learned in studying the I Ching to generate musical sounds by chance procedure. He was interested in the idea of using chance to arrive at something not possible to achieve by conscious choice. The Book of Changes uses its patterns to ask questions of the universe about the convergence of influences at a single instant in time. These concepts defy all our logical understanding of the nature of art and reality. The idea may seem pointless, a trick or a fanciful game. To me, it illustrates a basic and profound difference between Eastern and Western ways of seeing the world. As I learned more about the hexagrams and their interpretation, I became intrigued by their symbolism and by the way the patterns seemed to be a metaphor for understanding something beyond the literal nature of reality. I tried asking my own questions and was almost always surprised by the specific and accurate nature of the reply. It's hard to convey the powerful feeling of magical connection that happens when the book seems to speak directly to you! The process of asking the question focused my mind in a contemplative way that allowed me to suspend assumptions and expectations. I still may not be able to completely explain why it works for me, but I know that it does. I find formulating the question and considering it from multiple angles helps me to think in a different way, to compose the music of my own existence less rigidly. I believe there are certain things that are more true than literal truth, that exist on many levels and that cannot be perceived directly. They can best be grasped by metaphor, by embracing the paradox of what we cannot really comprehend. This is the true function of all forms of art, to provide a mirror that gives us an indirect glimpse around the corner to a different level of reality. Poetry is like that, at least the best poetry. It lifts the veil of how things are to reveal the connections between disparate things, and to embrace the confusion and wealth of complexity that is human existence. Here are two fragments from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets" which illuminate the illusory and paradoxical nature of time. What might have been and what has been Time past and time future I once heard someone ask John Cage whether or not he believed in symbolism. He smiled his beatific Zen-monk smile and said "Which kind?" Then he said, "I believe in the kind of symbolism where everything stands for everything else." This to me was a wonderful answer, not typical of Western thought but simply and beautifully expressing the concept of the interdependent web of existence. In the symbolism of the Book of Changes, the 64 hexagrams are constructed by combining two trigrams, groups of three solid or broken lines. You can see these "building blocks" in your inserts. In the tradition of Chinese philosophy, these interacting patterns have symbolic significance on many levels. They represent the three realms of earth, man and heaven, the principles of light and dark, of motion and stasis. It is important to understand that these are not opposites but complementary parts to a cyclical form in which change is the only constant. The first hexagram consists of six solid lines, and is called "The Creative". The commentary about it which is ascribed to Confucious describes the beginnings of life and the creative force of nature. "The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony." Hexagram number two is complementary to the first and consists of six broken lines; it is called "The Receptive". Wilhelm says, "While the creative is the generating principle to which all beings owe their beginning... the receptive is that which takes the seed of the heavenly into itself and gives to beings their bodily form." The creative principle is seen as male, and the receptive principle as female. The combination of the two forces creates all things and generates the unending cycle of time. The creative force is an abstract, a potential without form. The receptive force acts upon matter to bring material things to completion. From the original text we have this explanation: The Creative and the Receptive are indeed the gateway to the Changes. The Creative is the representative of light things and the Receptive of dark things. In that the natures of the dark and the light are joined, the firm and the yielding receive form. Thus do the relationships of heaven and earth take shape, and we enter into relation with the nature of the light of the gods. The interplay of matter and energy, the Creative and the Receptive, generate all the permutations of lines that form the remaining hexagrams. In reading through the names listed in a modern translation I found many that describe the cycles of growth and change; Difficult Beginnings, Calculated Waiting, Holding Together, Decay, Contemplation, Splitting Apart, Returning, Potential Energy, Critical Mass, Attraction, Change, Increase, Decrease, Zenith, Dissolution. Several of these terms remind me of terminology from the world of particle physics and quantum mechanics. The parallels between these two schools of thought has been mentioned before, perhaps most notably by Fritjof Capra in a wonderful book called The Tao of Physics. First published in 1976, it attempts to bring together the worlds of science and mysticism, and draws upon the I Ching as one of its sources. Capra says: "...both modern physics and ancient Chinese thought consider change and transformation as the primary aspect of nature...The eight trigrams are symbols standing for transitional states... In modern physics we have come to see the "things" of the subatomic world in very much the same way... regarding the particles as transient stages in an ongoing cosmic process." Thinking about the paradox of tossing coins to determine choices also reminds me of the combination of logic and absurdity inherent in modern physics. The concepts first advanced by Albert Einstein have led us to a point where sometimes the common- sense laws of nature no longer seem relevant. Observing an action can change its outcome. Matter and energy are different sides of the same tossed coin. Electrons can behave like waves or particles but are actually neither, or maybe they are both. Most of what we think of as solid matter is in fact nothing but space. And at the opposite end of the spectrum, when we look at things on a cosmic scale, reality is equally bizarre. Our sun is one of an unimaginable number of stars in an endless series of galaxies. How amazing that we are here at all, and what a ridiculous set of odds argue against the chance of sentient life, much less human civilization, or spoken language, music, or art. Looking at the world in this way can make us feel that life is a random chance, that there is no grand design or purpose. Or it can remind us of the interconnection between all matter, all existence, all of us. The final pairing of hexagrams are made of alternating solid and broken lines. Number 63 is called "After the End", and would seem to bring the cycle to conclusion. The translation reads, "At the beginning good fortune, at the end disorder." The hexagram exists in a state of equilibrium that already contains the start of its own collapse. In the words of the poet Yeats, "The center cannot hold." The pattern of the final hexagram is the inverse of the one before. It is called "Before the End", and the commentary says, "Success, for the yielding attains the middle." The lines are seen as harmonious despite the appearance of chaos. The interpretation of each hexagram is a complex process which looks at different groupings of lines within the overall pattern. These groups form visual images much as the Chinese system of writing is based on pictographs rather than vowels and consonants. In the hexagram "After Completion" the top three lines form the symbol for water, the bottom three for fire. In the complementary "Before Completion" the images are reversed so that fire is above water. When water is over fire, the two elements interact according to their natures to create balance. Fire tends upward, water downward. When fire is over water the fire flares upward, the water flows downward, and the two do not intersect. The text says "One must separate things in order to unite them." Thus the symbol that appears chaotic represents rebirth, the gestation of a new cycle which moves in turn back to the beginning. The creation of patterns, the establishing of systems and relationships between different elements of a whole, is not only a description of what the I Ching is about. It also exactly describes the process of musical composition. I imagine that is one reason Cage was drawn to the I Ching and why it makes such intuitive sense to me. Music unfolds on a canvas of time. Especially in chance works, the sounds exist as a collection of forces in that unique moment. The process of casting the sticks or coins to generate a hexagram can be seen as freezing a moment in time and examining all the influences or forces acting at that moment. As in quantum physics, everything is interrelated, not in a cause and effect line, but in terms of "meaningful coincidence", a concept developed by Carl Jung which he termed synchronicity. Ira Progoff explains in the book Jung, Synchronicity and Human Destiny that "these coincidences...belong to a pattern that is not continuous in time, but somehow goes across time. For this reason they involve a principle that...must at least be noncausal." Jung wrote an acclaimed introduction to Wilhelm's translation of the I Ching in which he contrasts the idea of synchronicity with the traditional Western scientific world view. This is from the introduction. In order to understand what such a book is all about, it is imperative to cast off certain prejudices of the Western mind...Our science...is based on the principle of causality, and causality is considered to be an axiomatic truth. But a great change in our standpoint is setting in...we know now that...every process is...interfered with by chance, so much so that under natural circumstances a course of events absolutely conforming to specific laws is almost an exception. Jung goes on to say: The manner in which the I Ching tends to look upon reality seems to disfavor causalistic procedures...The matter of interest seems to be the configuration formed by chance events in the moment of observation, and not at all the hypothetical reasons that seemingly account for the coincidence...The hexagram [is] understood to be an indicator of the essential situation prevailing in the moment of its origin. The ancient Chinese mind contemplates the cosmos in a way comparable to that of the modern physicist... The scientific method assumes that results are not significant unless they can be replicated, and that the scientist must be an objective observer. The synchronous process of the I Ching takes a very different view. Each time the coins are cast only one answer is possible because each moment in time is unique. And, as physicists have also come to believe, the observer is an integral part of the process and influences its outcome. The Book of Changes has been used for centuries as a way to formulate theories about the workings of the universe. Its scholars believe that the system of order that controls the motion of the heavens also gives rise to earthly patterns. One of the commentators on the text, Ta Chuan, states that if we know the laws of time and transformation, we can gain understanding of the correct course of action. "If we know the laws of time"...Time is not seen here as a uniform and linear progression of moments but as a more fluid entity. In a very old part of the text discussing the building blocks of the symbology and their many levels of meaning, the groups of three lines, or trigrams, are arranged in a sequence that mirrors the seasons and the four directions. Describing the interweaving of these groups the text says that "a double movement is observable: first, the usual clockwise movement, cumulative and expanding as time goes on, and determining the events that are passing; second, an opposite, backward movement, folding up and contracting as time goes on, through which the seeds of the future take form... In figurative terms, if we understand how a tree is contracted into a seed, we understand the future unfolding of the seed into a tree... As in the course of the year, so in human life we find ascending and backward moving lines of force from which the present and future can be deduced." Wilhelm speaks of a harmonious relationship to time when he says: This may appear to be verbal sleight of hand, but this fluid concept of time is common to many mystical traditions, and seems to me to express the real idea of what magic is. The I Ching allows us access to a magical world that exists outside the bounds of ordinary time. There is a phrase in Eliot's Four Quartets that I will leave you with, which echoes the idea of perceiving time from the center, from "the still point of the turning world".
Sources: The I Ching, or Book of Changes
The I Ching Workbook
Fritjof Capra
T.S. Eliot
Jeremy Hayward
Ira Progoff |
||||||
|
| ||||||
|
|