Music more than any other art form, to my mind, models the physical nature of the world. Like nature, the surface complexity of music is a creation of the infinite variety that results from combinations of simpler elements.
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Despite the fact that the history of mankind is steeped in war, I feel obliged to dream that we can find a way, somehow, to abandon war as a means to deal with conflict and exist together in peace. I know this is a nothing but a dream – there is too much history behind us and too many people who profit by and are excited by war to give it up – but it is a dream from which I cannot shake myself awake. There was a time, in the midst of huge crowds protesting the war in Vietnam, that I imagined there was enough people who were passionate about achieving peace that it could actually happen – that a generation of young people existed who wanted to be different from all previous generations and create a new world in which war did not exist, who dreamed that we could be different. Although that dream turned out to be just a temporary flower of our youthful unrealistic idealism – it is still too important to abandon. I look on the present young generation in despair – they seem to want to be just like their parents and are too easily satisfied with toys and games to be serious about such fantastic ideas like working to put an end to war. I feel a still greater despair when I see the end of my own life approaching in the not so distant future and see the world perched upon the precipice of violence not seen since my parent’s unfortunate generation. I desperately desire to see mankin do better than this – to see again enormous crowds gathered together, in this country and in every country, to protest against those who preach violence as a means to whatever end they are after. Enough with that kind of man – they are a minority and the rest of us must stop empowering them.
It is my hope that each and every one of us who shares this dream will contribute, in their own way, one thought and one action at a time, towards changing the way people think about this – if the goal of peace seems possible, then it will be possible. In my own way, I offer up the spirit of beautiful, glorious music to create an opening in the hearts of those who listen to the possibility of peace. I have begun to write music that is intended to conjure up images of peace in the minds of those who hear it, with the hope that with each hearing, some new sand grains of feeling will be added, which little by little will become mountains which stand, forever, for peace for everyone.
Reason #1. A vivid memory, as a small child, lying on the living room floor staring up at the dark ceiling, alone in the night, with the sound of Bach’s b minor mass pouring out of the speakers and over me, lifting me. Writing music today, is a way of saying, thank you, returning the favor, passing this wonderful invention on to others.
Reason #2. In any age, but particularly so in our present age of commercialism and the quick sound bite, music has the ability to cut past the surface level of our psyches and dive deep into our inmost unconscious and, twang, bring it to the surface – sometimes with tears, sometimes with joy.
Half asleep and half dreaming, I was considering the compositional problem of starting and ending music. The problem is better explained, perhaps, by an analogy with painting. While I love paintings, I’ve always had trouble with the way they seem to sit so incongruously in their frames on walls, as if the image one saw in the painting was like one out of a window, entirely unrelated to the setting in which it rests. Rather than merging into its surroundings, with walls gradually transforming themselves into painted image which gradually turns back into wall, the painting is a hole punched into the continuity of the room. A music composition is similar, except in that it takes place in time rather than within a space. The music starts out of whatever precedes it – silence, the sounds of people sitting together, noises from outside – and ends with what follows – again, silence, or applause, or whatever. Somehow I dream of writing music that effortlessly merges out from and back into the rest of the sounds of the universe…
That strain of American poetry which sought to bring poetry down to the level of street language (or to bring street language up to the level of poetry) never was my cup of tea. No sublimation there – which, after all, is the heart of classic art. Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, et. al. may have spoken on and on at great length, but never to me.
The art of poetry, to me, is the masterful use of language such that a very great deal is expressed in a minimum of words. Hence my preference for Yeats, the short poems in Blake’s notebooks. Street language is simply inadequate for this purpose. This is not to say that poetic language has to be esoteric. William Carlos Williams, for instance, uses ordinary language, describing ordinary things, with an extraordinary mastery of implication and compression of meaning that is the equal of the best of haiku.