I recently bumped into some interviews given by the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

His mention of D.T. Suzuki’s point about the composer’s synthesizer music being “natural” because it comes from his “inner conviction” inspired me to learn about this D.T. Suzuki and I ended up acquiring a copy of his classic An Introduction to Zen Buddhism. Originally published in 1914, these essays served as a first introduction to the subject to many Westerners.

Half-way through the book, I will quote from pages 68-70:

Any answer is satisfactory if it flows out of one’s inmost being, for such is always an absolute affirmation.

“When you meet a wise man on your way, if you do not speak to him or remain silent, how would you interview him?” The point is to make one realize what I call an absolute affirmation. Not merely to escape the antithesis of “yes” and “no”, but to find a positive way in which the opposites are perfectly harmonized—this is what is aimed at in this question.

“Suppose a man climbing up a tree takes hold of a branch by his teeth, and his whole body is thus suspended. His hands are not holding anything and his feet are off the ground. Now another man comes along and asks the man in the tree as to the fundamental principle of Buddhism. If the man in the tree does not answer, he is neglecting the questioner; but if he tries to answer he will lose his life; how can he get out of his predicament?” … If you open your mouth trying to affirm or to negate, you are lost. Zen is no more there. But merely remaining silent will not do, either. A stone lying silent there is silent, a flower in bloom under the window is silent, but neither of them understands Zen. There must be a certain way in which silence and eloquence become identical, that is where negation and assertion are unified in a higher form of statement. When we attain to this we know Zen.

Stockhausen and Suzuki’s conversation is a reverberation of the the first of these quotes.

The second reminds me directly of not only Mahler, but also of my own experience of the extremes. In particular I remember a moment in Griffith Park, in which misery and happiness were conjoined at dusk. Why Mahler? The most direct example: the final acceptance in Symphony No. 9 is both outside of tragedy and triumph, and yet it encapsulates them. As Stockhausen had said, “I think that identifying with a sound is meditation. A musical meditation is when you completely become the sound.” These all are windows into the same phenomenon, which is described above, and is the essence of Zen.

That reminds me, another such window, through which I recently loved to have looked through: Windows by Chick Corea.