assemblagesandchaosmosis

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If we only practice poses that reinforce our zones of comfort, we end up with a yoga practice that moves prana only in habitual ways. And if we are used to overexertion or hyperactivity, then the pranic patterns in the body will be reinforced in this way also. So finding the balance between steadiness and ease in yoga postures also requires playing with the limits of our physical sensibilities, because all our sense organs are conditioned in habitual ways.

Michael Stone -The Inner Tradition of Yoga

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All psychological symptoms, whether anxiety, depression, or even emotional pain, are the psyche's attempt to balance the sheaths of the mind-body process.

Michael Stone -The Inner Tradition of Yoga

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There is a joke in yoga that asks, "If you had to hide something that was the most valuable thing you had, where would you hide it?" The answer is: "in the present moment."

Michael Stone -The Inner Tradition of Yoga

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Music could be a model for society. It teaches us the importance of the interconnection between transparency, power and force.

Daniel Barenboim

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The ideal musician should think with the heart and feel with the intellect.

Daniel Barenboim via Nadia Boulanger (musician)

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In the future's favour During our meeting, Issey Miyake speaks of his friend and master Isamu Noguchi. He maintains that the Akari collection by Noguchi cannot be compared to In-Ei, because the two are utterly different, both in their form and material and in their content. On the one hand, archaic forms are inspired by those of nature seen with the naked eye; on the other, forms are derived from the use of algorithmic design, hence from a reasoning about nature's innermost geometric but cellular code. These are two types of "organic", but different design. To continue this comparison, we have on one side Noguchi with traditional paper in need of a structure, and on the other Miyake with an ultra-innovative, self-supporting material. Certainly, both are imbued with the same avantgarde spirit. But In-Ei is ahead, an offspring of our time. Miyake and Artemide together have scored a point in favour of the future.

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Alan Watts: The Life of Zen (1960)

Jazzy introduction music...

Write a Sanskrit word in alphabet, using... a calligraphy brush.

Logic on Non-A, Non-B to define what C is... --> interconnection, relations between innumerable points (Indra's Net) (07:21)

"Each jewel contains the reflection of the other jewels."

Negation of a separate center from which all the other actions originates.

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John Cage: An Autobiographical Statement

Just recently I received a request for a text on the relation between Zen Buddhism and my work. Rather than rewriting it now I am inserting it here in this story. I call it From Where'm'Now. It repeats some of what is above and some of what is below.

When I was young and still writing an unstructured music, albeit methodical and not improvised, one of my teachers, Adolph Weiss, used to complain that no sooner had I started a piece than I brought it to an end. I introduced silence. I was a ground, so to speak, in which emptiness could grow.

At college I had given up high school thoughts about devoting my life to religion. But after dropping out and traveling to Europe I became interested in modern music and painting, listening-looking and making, finally devoting myself to writing music, which, twenty years later, becoming graphic, returned me now and then for visits to painting (prints, drawings, watercolors, the costumes and decors for Europeras 1 & 2).

In the late thirties I heard a lecture by Nancy Wilson Ross on Dada and Zen. I mention this in my forward to Silence then adding that I did not want my work blamed on Zen, though I felt that Zen changes in different times and places and what it has become here and now, I am not certain. Whatever it is it gives me delight and most recently by means of Stephen Addiss' book The Art of Zen. I had the good fortune to attend Daisetz Suzuki's classes in the philosophy of Zen Buddhism at Columbia University in the late forties. And I visited him twice in Japan. I have never practiced sitting cross-legged nor do I meditate. My work is what I do and always involves writing materials, chairs, and tables. Before I get to it, I do some exercises for my back and I water the plants, of which I have around two hundred.

In the late forties I found out by experiment (I went into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University) that silence is not acoustic. It is a change of mind, a turning around. I devoted my music to it. My work became an exploration of non-intention. To carry it out faithfully I have developed a complicated composing means using I Ching chance operations, making my responsibility that of asking questions instead of making choices.

The Buddhist texts to which I often return are the Huang-Po Doctrine of Universal Mind (in Chu Ch'an's first translation, published by the London Buddhist Society in 1947), Neti Neti by L. C. Beckett of which (as I say in the introduction to my Norton Lectures at Harvard) my life could be described as an illustration, and the Ten Oxherding Pictures (in the version that ends with the return to the village bearing gifts of a smiling and somewhat heavy monk, one who had experienced Nothingness). Apart from Buddhism and earlier I had read the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna. Ramakrishna it was who said all religions are the same, like a lake to which people who are thirsty come from different directions, calling its water by different names. Furthermore this water has many different tastes. The taste of Zen for me comes from the admixture of humor, intransigence, and detachment. It makes me think of Marcel Duchamp, though for him we would have to add the erotic.

As part of the source material for my Norton lectures at Harvard I thought of Buddhist texts. I remembered hearing of an Indian philosopher who was very uncompromising. I asked Dick Higgins, "Who is the Malevich of Buddhist philosophy?" He laughed. Reading Emptiness -- a Study in Religious Meaning by Frederick J. Streng, I found out. He is Nagarjuna.

But since I finished writing the lectures before I found out, I included, instead of Nagarjuna, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the corpus, subjected to chance operations. And there is another good book, Wittgenstein and Buddhism, by Chris Gudmunsen, which I shall be reading off and on into the future.

My music now makes use of time-brackets, sometimes flexible, sometimes not. There are no scores, no fixed relation of parts. Sometimes the parts are fully written out, sometimes not. The title of my Norton lectures is a reference to a brought-up-to-date version of Compositions in Retrospect:

MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotationIndeterminacy InterpenetrationImitationDevotionCircumstancesVariableStructure NonunderstandingContingencyInconsistencyPerformance(I-VI).

When it is published, for commercial convenience, it will just be called IVI.

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My favorite music is the music I haven't yet heard. I don't hear the music I write. I write in order to hear the music I haven't yet heard.

John Cage

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The visual art of John Cage – a review article by Steve Marshall

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n the spring of 1981, during a residency at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage sat down to discuss their work and artistic process. As frequent collaborators, Cage and Cunningham pioneered a new framework of performance. Their novel approach allowed for mediums to exist independently, or rather cohabitate, within a performance, thus abandoning the co-dependent model of dance and music. Cage and Cunningham go on to discuss the methodology and motivations behind chance operations, a term used to describe artistic decisions based on unpredictability. Wanting to free himself of his likes and dislikes, Cage describes how Zen Buddhism influenced his work, leading him to use tools of chance. These new methods, adopted by both Cunningham and Cage, overturned a whole foundation of thought around music, movement, and the process of creating art.

"With ears, you can hear things behind you (;while you can't see things behind you)."

Attention on at least two different things (independence of music and dance to each other) (can we do three? four, five...)

18:50 Zen talk

Magic square < I Ching (early 50s)

Chance operations

Fresh air or clear water (music) 21:45 (with his clear eyes).

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This is extract from the documentary 'Knots and Fields' by Andrew Chesher and David Ryan (2010). The full documentary is 75 mins in length and looks at the history and the contemporary relevance of the famous Summer Courses in New Music which have been held in Darmstadt, Germany since 1946. It was here that composers such as Boulez and Cage among many other key figures in modern music met in the 50s and 60s.

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Messiaen, Couleurs de la Cité Celeste

Scored for piano, wind orchestra and percussion. Conducted by Pierre Boulez. Couleurs de la Cité Celeste was composed in 1963, and first performed on October 17, 1964 at a concert at the Donaueschingen Festival under the direction of Pierre Boulez. These "inner colours" spring from five quotations from the Apocalypse: Revelations IV, 3; Revelations VIII,6; Revelations IX,1; Revelations XXI,11; and Revelations XXI,19-20. The form of the piece depends entirely on colours. The themes, melodic or rhythmic and the complexes of sounds and timbres evolve like colours. In their perpetually renewed variations, there can be found (by analogy) colours that influence their neighbors, shading down to white, or toned down to black. These transformations can be compared to the superimposition of plays enacted on several stages, the simultaneous unfolding of several different stories that assume and call out for it. Plainsong Alleluias, Greek and Hindu rhythms, permutations of note-values, the bird-song of different countries were all collected and used in this work. All these accumulated materials are placed at the service of colour and of the combinations of sounds that assume and call out for it. The sound-colours, in their turn, are a symbol of the Celestial City and of Him who dwells there. Above all time, above all place, in a light without light, in a night without night... That which the Apocalypse, still more terrifying in its humility than in its visions of glory, describes only in a blaze of colours... To the song of two New Zealand birds is opposed "the abyss", with its pedal-notes for the trombones and the resonance of tam-tams. To the cries of the Brazilian Araponga is opposed "the coloured ecstasy" of pedal points. The work ending no differently from the way it began, but turning on itself like a rose-window of flamboyant and invisible colours.

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Memo: for the backup of the first part of my presentation.

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Group Ongaku -Metaplasm (1961)