“Music is frozen architecture and architecture is frozen music.”
Goethe
Some experimental music, such as that produced by American jazz clarinetist Tony Scott for instance, an innovative meditator whose breathing beyond jazz created a groundbreaking 1964 record album called Music for Zen Meditation (considered by many to be the very first new age recording) take a powerfully intercultural approach to finding a sonic balance between east and west. His album featured his own alluring improvisations on clarinet in conversation with master koto and shakuhachi musicians from Japan. The results were just as liberating as they were imaginative, and they still feel surprisingly fresh today, since they do indeed eliminate multiple limits, inside and out. Because there is no east or west in dreams.
Museum of Dreams. That was the title that a friend and fellow broadcaster, the late Kevin Courrier and I, gave to an episode of a pilot for a radio program we were working on together a few years back. The program was called Musical Chairs, with each weekly episode being devoted to a particular theme and featuring drastically diverse musical examples evoking a given subject. That particular installment was about “The City”, and it offered a wide range of international music, including songs, instrumentals, pop, folk, jazz, classical and avant-garde, all of which personified life in an urban setting: what it meant to be city dwellers, all of us strangers living together in close proximity. My notion was that every city was a kind of museum collecting all the dreams, and even perhaps the nightmares for that matter, of all the inhabitants it had hosted throughout its history. Maybe even the dreams of future inhabitants would be stored in this urban museum, people who hadn’t even arrived there yet.
We had songs by Bruce Cockburn from Inner City Front, a concerto by Aaron Copeland called Quiet City, the Lovin’ Spoonful’s Summer in the City, Ornette Coleman’s Skies Over America jazz suite, Scott Walker’s enigmatic Farmer in the City, Stevie Wonder’s Living For the City, and the mysterious chamber work by American composer Charles Ives, Central Park in the Dark, among others. The idea being to freak out as many listeners as possible by exploring one single, simple subject and theme, the city and its sounds, through as many divergent threads of musical styles as possible. In between tracks, Kevin and I would chat about how and why we each had chosen our alternating selections to play for the other (and the audience) these shimmering compositions. They were veritable doorways to meditation via music.
Every so often, usually by either serendipity or synchronicity, one comes upon an artist who gives a fresh new and startling meaning to the word interdisciplinary, and Scott was just such a one. In fact, some of the other episodes of Musical Chairs were slated to include wildly varied themes such as love, politics, science, conflict, fashion, and the importance of understanding the role of place and space in our lives, and in retrospect, Kevin and I could easily have programmed three or more of Scott’s jazz albums and just sat back and let them unspool their restless but tranquil energy across the airwaves. Now, the inimitable Elvis Costello once uncoyly remarked, with typical sarcastic bravado, that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. But remember, I take the poet Goethe literally when he identified music and frozen architecture and architecture as frozen music: so let’s dance.
Far be it from me to contradict one of our greatest singer-songwriters, however, some exception must be taken to the talented Mr. Costello’s observation. First of all, let’s readily admit that he is utterly correct, insofar as music and the songs they convey are best appreciated in the temporal immediacy of the listening experience. But by reflecting on the music’s origins, their narrative blueprints so to speak, one can often clarify how such songs occupy the landscape of both our culture and our own personal lives. Thus, we attempt to imagine the biography of sounds and visions and their ancestry in our lives. True, writing about music just might be like dancing about architecture, but it is also equally true that some architecture deserves to be danced to, especially when it seems so crystal clear that each song is also a kind of aural building, a building imagined to contain the message of the song itself, designed and constructed by the writer, and delivered in his or her own distinctive sonic signature.
The best music, whether songs or instrumentals, are little houses that take our breath away. Songs which, as a friend of mine once told me, you can live inside of for a while. It often fees like I am returning to a place I was familiar with, even though I have never visited there before. This sensation of synchronicity recurs again and again in Scott’s many compelling compositions, which often explore the notion of dwelling (in the widest possible sense of the word) and also what the Vedantists refer to as indwelling. In almost all of his works there is a high degree of statistical density (a term I’ve borrowed from the American composer Frank Zappa) and highly developed informational systems that manifest complex patterns independent of melody. Each is also a kind of aural weather front, a texture, and an exploration of what I’d refer to as acoustic ecology: they have the added charm of brevity and restraint, something rare in music these days.
Indeed, the best artistic agenda is to always create fresh maps of a territory located in the geography of imagination. This is also of course a domain which has been fruitfully visited by musicians who share Scott’s affection for atmospherics: Brian Eno, Fred Frith, Cluster, Harold Budd, Jon Hassell, among others, however I am quite comfortable positioning him in their company in a most positive manner. There are distinct and shared family resemblances overlapping with all meditational musics, in a good way. That evocative description is indicative of what I’ve called the acoustic ecology in meditational music works, which often tells us an oblique story, from album to album, in a loosely organic and narrative way, but without being programmatic, such as even the best Debussy can be on occasion. With Scott’s excursions into evoking the artistic sensibility of great 19th and 20th Century visionary artists, whose media experimentations were not only extremely innovative but also influential in a way that continues to resonate into the 21rst Century, he has also continued this album as fictional novel approach to sharing his music. Personally I have no hesitation in describing meditational music such as Tony Scott’s as “four dimensional geometry”, especially since it unfolds in the domain of time, with duration itself often being a kind of aural painting medium.
And one of the best, or at least most instructive, examples of this trans-media method of approaching composition, one that incorporates elements of writing, visuals, sound, or cinematic techniques into the very sonic fabric of music itself, would be almost all of Brian Eno’s brilliant so-called ambient compositions. Objects suspended in his aural spaces seem to mirror the musical notes hanging in silence, in a zen-like dance of images intersecting with both idea and rhythmic presence. One wonders, is the image a kind of spiritual diagram of the song, or is the song a mathematical reflection of the image? The answer is, yes.
One of my favourite French culture critics, Roland Barthes, once described a kind of literature that starts from the basic structures and signs of language itself, which he referred to as Writing Degree Zero, and spirals outwards, perhaps infinitely, until it somehow turns into a Balzac or a Proust. And in offering these observations on the music of Scott and Eno, I would posit an elastic realm of multi-sensory experience that might be termed Music Degree Zero. Starting from silence and returning to silence, as is the urge of all great music, and yet also traveling lightly along with silence as a hitch-hiking passenger on the far flung voyage. Indeed, it was also in another superb Barthes book, his majestic Image-Music-Text, that he explored a similarly pertinent relationship that applies so vividly to Eno’s overall aesthetic agenda: the intersecting links between words, images and sounds.
Another French writer, Roger Caillois, also came to mind as I was exploring both Scott and Eno’s compositions, artists who truly treasure the exotic allures of frozen architectures and melting music. And this examination of seductive meditative music, I would emphasize, has not been conducted in the form of a review in the traditional sense of the word, but more in the shape of an appreciation for something both poetic and inexplicable. Theirs is a four dimensional breathing building, growing into a constellation-like city of sounds, with each piece being an emotional site we can live inside of, for a brief period of time, until time itself sends us, like immobile flaneurs, back out into the waiting streets of silence. In a very real sense, they have produced a movie for our ears, having mastered the art of sonic collage and musical montage.
As we experience his poetic ear movies, I am reminded again of how Caillois put it so succinctly: “We listen with delight” Caillois said, “to a very pure song which tells us all about ourselves and our lives: we expect nothing else, I imagine, from poetry.” We also expect nothing else from the diverse ethereal musics which encourage or manifest a meditative state, something akin to a dream state while we are wide awake. Thus: the ambience of mind, where music and meditation beckon to us to abandon linear thought. What kind of reverie music, if any at all, serves the environmental purpose of establishing the equilibrium sought after by all meditators? Some teachers would suggest that music is in itself a distraction, and perhaps it is, but it’s one which I’ve always felt formed a core place in my own longtime practice. Mine is a kind of beat hybrid of Zen and Dzogchen, and I’ve long used sound as an ideal accompaniment to concentration on the breath, which is in itself a kind of reverberating music created by our own lungs. Putting on a piece of music in order to facilitate meditation also provides me with a set formality and a ritual pattern, within which one can briefly forget all limits.
Rather than calling it meditation music however, composed or performed to aid in meditation or prayer in a literal religious or spiritual sense, I prefer calling it meditative music, almost as if it’s the music itself which is doing the meditating, through us. The approach of certain modern composers using meditational techniques in their creative practice, with or without application to or focus upon specific religious content, has long been recognized. Many notable examples have also combined concepts, meditation and music in their artistic work. Among the best known of such practitioners might be John Cage, also a Zen adept, as well as Stuart Dempster, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, R. Murray Schafer and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Cage in fact has even described his works themselves as meditations that measure the passing of time, and Stockhausen has employed the attractive term intuitive music to characterize his orchestral direction that performers only play notes when they are not thinking about their playing.
But it was the initial solo post-Roxy excursions of British composer Brian Eno in his release of Discreet Music that opened the door to a unique realm officially known as ambient music, a designation that for me best captures the essence of what meditative music might actually be and mean. Ironically, this territory was also explored even earlier by the French iconoclast Erik Satie during the last years of the 19th Century, with his majestically simple pieces that he termed furniture music, a stylistic device which suggests music that is simply part of the room in which it is being played, just like a chair or a table. A very Cage-like notion that.
Oddly enough, Eno’s concept of discreet sounds came about as a result of an accident, when he was recuperating in a hospital from an injury and a friend brought in a turntable to play music in his room but then left the musician in bed without realizing that the volume was turned way down remarkably low. Eno had something of a transformative experience when he continued listening to Pachelbel’s Canon at a barely audible level, which also permitted him to absorb all of the other ambient sounds in his room and on the street outside, in what I’m daring to call a moment of sonic satori.
Three years later he more consciously and intentionally explored the same ethereal realm he had stumbled into with his groundbreaking meditative composition entitled Ambient 1: Music For Airports, a gentle bath of soft and drifting sounds which appears to loop and overlap back and forth into and out of itself in a most mesmerizing manner. I can certainly personally testify that meditating (not to it, or with it but in it) provides access to a breathtaking (pun intended) zone of cognitive freedom which one can only characterize as dreaming with our eyes wide open: a here and nowness, the wow of a very long now, from the cadence and cascade the music invites us to experience. Indeed, it is a meditative musical now, one that measures, as Cage put it, the passing of time.
More recently, the encouraging intersections between the pop music, electronic, synth and world music categories have produced a new wave of meditative music which further eliminates boundaries between discernible and limiting genres. Among this fresh crop of experimenters with the edges of awareness, those who literally embody a kind of stylistic transcendence, have been artists as diverse as Robert Fripp and Harold Budd (both early collaborators with Brian Eno) with Budd’s shimmering sounds found on After the Night Falls, 2007 with Robin Guthrie; as well as Fripp’s excursions with fellow ambient master Theo Travis on their perfectly titled The Silence Beneath, 2008. For me, one of the most gifted sonic meditators over the years has been the post-pop incarnations of David Sylvian, ex-Japan alumnus, and his magical partnerships with Holger Czukay and others, such as the excellent environments he created with Franz Wright and Christian Fennesz on their exquisite album There’s a Light That Enters Houses With No Other Houses in Sight. Equally rewarding was the remarkably ethereal duo-band Dead Can Dance, who reformed to release Anastasis, 2012, and Dionysus, 2018.
Thus the historic experimentation with hybrid styles and inspiring ethos which commenced so long ago with Tony Scott continues unabated today and it promises to provide ample opportunities for meditators to turn off their mind, relax and float downstream in the future. It’s music that detaches us from over-thinking, yet also reconnects us to our own life itself, which can be so similar to an actual musical instrument when handled properly. As that great accidental Buddhist Albert Einstein put it: “Life is like a piano, what you get out of it depends on how you play it.”
Thanks Donald, an interesting dream of a dream which is music. My love for sure. Most of these composers are also favorites of mine. Harold Budd and I were on a program together titled, “ The New Sensuality.” My piece was based on a Rilke poem titled “To Say for Going to Sleep”. Also the Tony Scott Meditation music is wonderful. I have a piece called ABE which sounds similar to his. It’s on my SoundCloud posts. It’s written for unspecified number and type of instruments. This recording is alto saxophone overdubbed three times. Other combinations have been with bassoons annd oboes. It used heterophony. The separate lines mix and interconnect in various surprising ways. Anyhow, too much about me. I enjoyed your writing which brought these thoughts to the surface. Thanks.