Life is a meditation.

The output of all great artists is a meditation on a theme. Mahler. Beethoven. Bill Evans. Certainly McCoy Tyner. These are the ones I am familiar with: if you listen to their music enough, you always hear the same themes come back, again and again, from this direction or that, in this context or another. Deeper, vaster, expanding. Rilke’s growing orbits.

McCoy Tyner’s Song of the New World. Powerful music, coming from the African rhythms, gleaning from the Western tonality. Orchestral arrangements. Tyner’s ever-erupting stream-of-consciousness lines.

And but Spring! A glorious spring day. The flowers had come out earlier this week. A path behind Smith College, along the Mill River.

The congruence of Tyner’s music with the natural surroundings. As always I am reminded of Mahler. I reached to listen to Mahler 1… but decided to keep listening to Tyner. The album had something to say and I wanted to hear it.

But finally I did listen to Mahler 1, again (orbits). And now the finale rushes to the conclusion as I write this. The beginning of this work – the congruence, as always, with nature – I could only laugh out loud.

Why was Schoenberg compelled to ostensibely leave the path of his hallowed mentor – why do McCoy Tyner and Bill Evans seem in some ways closer to Mahler than does Schoenberg?

Mahler did not write books, but Schoenberg did.

Onward.

Addendum

I also listened to Bernstein conduct Mahler 2. Glorious is the word.