A Search for Emptiness Interview with Jonathan Harvey

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A Search for Emptiness: An Interview with Jonathan Harvey Author(s): Matthew Jenkins and Jonathan Harvey Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 220-231Published by: Perspectives of New MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25164634Accessed: 14-06-2015 03:39 UTC

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A Search for Emptiness: An Interview with Jonathan Harvey

I *? *?* 1

Matthew Jenkins

Tffls

interview took place throughout the afternoon of July 24, 2005 at

Jonathan Harvey's house in Lewes, United Kingdom.

Matthew Jenkins (MJ): When did you first encounter Buddhism? Did it have a large initial impact?

Jonathan Harvey (JH): I came to Christian mysticism strongly in about 1960. Perhaps 1959. When I was studying that there were many ref erences to Buddhism and oriental philosophy. I began to read about Buddhism at that time. However, I became more interested in Indian meditation techniques, which were concrete and practical.

Although there were still interests in Buddhist literature, philoso phy, and art, there was something a littie too abstract, austere, or


A Search for Emptiness 221

too distant from God about Zen. It was only later that I began to

get close to Buddhism. That was about ten or twelve years ago. I can point to a work like Forms of Emptiness. It is a choral work from 1986 based on the Heart Sutra quoted in Sanskrit. It is entirely a Buddhist work. I used a lot of Christian texts before that.

It has been a steady growth, but I really started practicing about ten years ago. Then I didn't mind that there wasn't any emphasis on God anymore. I always felt before that I had to have a figure or fig ures that were supernatural in my pantheon. That helped me to

relate, because I am a kind of Bhakti person, someone who thrives on the idea of devotion. That involves a human metaphor?a meta

phor of human love. Without a figure to interact with I couldn't

grasp the characteristic of warmth in this metaphysical strand. I find in Tibetan Buddhism that all of the deities come back in a very baroque, colorful and strange way. However, they're in a sense all

empty just like every thing else is. The Tibetans have a different rela

tionship to these other beings.

MJ: How has your relationship with Buddhism changed your relation

ship with Christianity and mysticism?

JH: In one important respect it has made me look more deeply into

Christianity and its Indian roots. A fair amount is being written these days, but when I was young I don't think it was written about at all. For instance, the discovery of the Dead Sea scrolls and the

Nag Hamardi manuscripts has revealed all of these suppressed

gospels and writings: the gospel of Thomas and the secret letter of

John, for example. These texts show an obvious relationship with

quasi-Buddhist teachers. Many people now suggest that Jesus had contact in those forgotten years of his life with those kinds of teach ers. Whether he actually traveled south to India or they traveled to his area is uncertain, but it seems absolutely clear that there is an

entrance there.

I find myself going more towards the Jesus within you rather than the Jesus out there of St. John's gospel. It is different from the other three gospels. It was a thing of John's to make Jesus into a divinity. I realize that is a rather one-sided way of looking at Christianity and

what the church teaches now. There is another way to look at it. I don't know who's right, but I know which I prefer. I prefer the Gnostic version of Jesus. His relationship with Buddhism is rather

beautiful, close, and full of a kind of mystical light. That is what

appeals to me very much.


222 Perspectives of New Music

MJ: Do you practice meditation?

JH: Yes.

MJ: How long have you done so?

JH: About ten years. I practiced Hindu, or Vedic, meditation for about

twenty years. That is when I started daily practice. I just changed from Vedic to Buddhist, but at least I got into the habit of meditat

ing. I think it is important. It doesn't do to just read or think about it. Does it?

MJ: It is not the same.

JH: It is not a philosophy to be intellectualized about, but one to be lived.

MJ: Which schools of thought speak to you more closely? Why?

JH: Tibetan. The New Kadampa tradition1 is the one that I follow, but all Tibetan traditions speak to me closely. They're similar actually. It

just happens that the monk I have teachings from is from the New

Kadampa tradition. It is close to the Dalai Lama's, but not exactly the same. I have had a lot of contact with Zen Buddhists. I like the rather more colorful and ... I was going to say psychological schools, but Zen is also psychological. The Tibetans are skillful.

They know what human minds are like and how much they love

things to grasp onto. The Zen masters are a little bit severe. They make great demands, which I couldn't always feel comfortable with.

Maybe my mind is too weak!

MJ: Have you ever lived in a monastery?

JH: I have only lived in Christian monasteries. In some ways they are

quite close to Buddhist monasteries. I think the monks themselves would admit that and would even like me saying it. They often take

great interest in Buddhist thought and find many things in common. In February I went to some Buddhist monasteries in North India in the foothills of the Himalayas and lived just opposite a monastery in a guest house. I was there every day. I didn't really call it "living in a

monastery," but I talked to a lot of the lamas there. Some of them were marvelous people. They were very devoted and would go into solitude and retreats for three months and often longer. I just



received a letter from a friend who recently came out of a three month retreat. He is planning another for six or nine months. They speak to no one. They hardly survive, because they eat so little. Their research into consciousness and the spiritual is incredible. I admire that enormously. I love the people. They are so charming.

MJ: What area was the monastery in?

JH: Rajpur. It is north of New Delhi near the mountains close to the Tibetan border.

MJ: In Uttar Pradesh?

JH: Yes.

MJ: When did it occur to you that the notion of emptiness was an

appropriate lens to view music through? How so?

JH: I think it was after I started taking fairly regular lessons and classes with the Tibetan group about ten years ago. It began to dawn on me slowly that this is what music is all about. In fact, I would almost

say all art, but particularly music. As I explain in the essay,2 it is remarkable once you see that. To me it is as clear as daylight?what

we love in music is what we call emptiness. It is a kind of reality that is being shown us in as clear as possible way in this serious art of

music. Not in bad music, but in music that we call good. We call it

good, because it is empty. That is really my thesis. If it is banal or chaotic then it doesn't have emptiness. If it is somewhere in between there and it has something ambiguous, subtle, teasing, mysterious, or all the other magical things we want in music then it is because it is empty.

MJ: Is it subjective?

JH: It depends on each person's education and ability to receive the pat terns. One person could receive Schoenberg's patterns and to another person it is just chaos. There are emotional filters too. I think sometimes we can receive a Tchaikovsky piece and another time we can only receive a Stravinsky piece. It is different from per son to person. You could call it subjective. Every mind is different from every other.



MJ: Do you diink that it was music or Buddhism that fueled this realization?

JH: It was Buddhism. If I hadn't studied Buddhism, I would have never realized it. I would have never come to it clearly. Emptiness is quite difficult. I go to these classes and see the puzzled faces on people who have even been practicing for a year or two. Even quite intelli

gent people find it hard to grasp emptiness. It is not an obvious

thing. It goes against everything that we have been led to believe in our culture. I don't think it is the same in Eastern cultures. Empti ness is natural from the age of three onwards. It is in their way of

thinking, but for the West it is not in our way of thinking. It is coun

terintuitive, and it is possible that I would have never grasped empti ness without my Buddhist teachers.

MJ: Did you have any experiences before this realization that you viewed music through the lens of emptiness?

JH: Yes, in my love of ambiguity and disguise. For instance, I have been

doing electronic music since Princeton in 1969. Since those days the

shifting quality of sound has always fascinated me. Once you get a

computer on it you can change anything into anything. It is just like

emptiness. Nothing really exists except for the labels you stick on. That became important for me in listening to my [own] and other

people's music. Whether by Beethoven, Machaut, or Boulez, the music depends on that quality of flux. Things change into each other and set up seemingly strong ideas and dissolve them. It has

certainly been with me for a long time.

MJ: Is the notion of emptiness suitable for all music?

JH: I think so. I think all good music, or music that has been liked, is suitable. That is an important qualification. I am trying to think of

any music that I don't like that I would not call empty or not think to have an element of emptiness to it. Then we get into areas like chant or chanting on one note. They do not have emptiness. I don't know. Often chanting on one note depends on many other things like the 'sacred' acoustic, the words, the situation and the ritual. There could be borderline cases. A lot of other music doesn't have

anything to do with emptiness. It just doesn't make it clear. It is

nothing. It is just a mess. It is not music except in some technical sense. Just banal . . .



MJ: What parameters or characteristics are more suitable for the notion of emptiness? Or, is it just within one's self?

JH: The perception of ambiguity. The things I was talking about in

my essay.3

MJ: You suggested that Lachenmann and Sciarrino lend themselves to emptiness.

JH: Yes. There is an interesting trend that is everywhere evident in the

young composers that I see in the various classes I give around

Europe. I am not talking about in the States so much. I think the influence isn't nearly so great there. The trend of breaking up the

solidity of sound is one I see happening since about the beginning of the twentieth century. I don't think that Lachenmann and Sciarrino are Buddhists, but they are concerned with what I am talk

ing about in my essay. It is this unnamed thing, which we could call

emptiness. It is to do with the fascination of the changing, the estab

lishing and the changing, or the flux of reality. Nothing is what it seems. When you listen to Lachenmann it is clear that you have a violin that doesn't seem to be a violin from the sound it is making. At times you recognize a bit of 'violinness' about the sound it is

making. Half of the time it is something completely different from the violin for all intents and purposes. All of these disguises and destructions of fixed labels are important to their music and aes thetic. Lachenmann is passionate about destroying the conven

tional, traditional gestures.

MJ: Do you mean cultural constructs?

JH: Yes.

MJ: Is it a proper state of mind or the musical object that aids this type of listening experience? Or both?

JH: It is all in the mind. There is nothing beyond mind!

MJ: In light of Nishida's theory of pure experience, do you think an

egoless musical experience is possible such as the self and the mus ical object collapse into one for a more pure experience?



JH: Yes. That's quite a higher state when you experience unity with

objects?seemingly out-there objects. One gets glimpses of it. That is an important state towards which music aspires. People often say, "I was completely lost in the music

... I was lost. . . The ego was

lost." In a good listening experience, this is quite common, but

only briefly.

MJ: Like an entrancing type of experience?

JH: Yes. Ecstatic standing outside oneself. There is no separation between mind and object. No duality anymore. That is the idea of uncertainty.

MJ: How do you perceive the ego and what is its role in the musical

experience?

JH: The ego is illusory, but the illusory ego certainly plays a role in a lot of musical experiences. It kind of does a dance. It dances around in its illusory way. Of course we think it is real. I think we are in some

way involved as egos, but in ambiguous music you constandy get tripped over. The ego is put through its paces. It often gets a bit dis oriented. That is nice. Some people can occasionally get afraid if the music gets powerful, loud, or domineering. It knocks the ego out of its security. The Rite of Spring must have frightened a lot of people in its time. There are many successors to that. The role of the ego is cer

tainly present. Studying how the ego is battered and assaulted would be a fascinating study somebody should write about. The ego is kind of shown to be illusory if you are watching carefully.

MJ: Perhaps in extremely quiet and still music as well?

JH: Yes. That is really where I think the ego can be put to rest. It can

stop jumping around and the mind can become tranquil and expand into vast empty space.

MJ: Do you think the ego relates to the notion of beauty? What is beauty?

JH: That is a very interesting question, because beauty is partiy sexual.

Sexuality has a lot to do with the ego and so on. Beauty transcends

sexuality and becomes something different, but the borderlines are

fascinating. Aren't they? It's an extremely good and difficult ques tion and it is absolutely at the heart of the aesthetics and, above all,



ethics. I think it could be approached in a long book, perhaps by someone who is old.

MJ: (Laugh)

JH: (Laugh) But not before.

MJ: Perhaps yourself.? (Laugh)

JH: (Laugh) One day. I think there is a rather interesting intention in Tantric Buddhism in the use of beauty to quickly obtain spiritual ends. It involves using your imagination, but it is kept a secret because it can be abused. One is not supposed to talk about it unless it is to people who have had the instructions and teachings from a

master. It is a fairly sensible precaution. The typical sensationalists of

modern-day life could abuse it. It is an approach to beauty that can be extremely powerful and can lead quickly, so the monks say, to the attainment of an awakening. It is extraordinary and old. It has been

kept secret.

MJ: Is beauty emptiness?

JH: No. Beauty is the means to emptiness. It is a kind of technique if

you like. Those of us who are dealing with art and emptiness inevita

bly come across the question: "What is beauty?" Beauty has a lot to do with emptiness. I wouldn't go so far as to say, "It is emptiness." There are so many objects that are called 'virtuous objects' in Buddhism that are extremely beautiful. For instance, one could call

'goodness' beautiful. As Kant said, goodness and the beautiful are the same. To observe someone being kind or compassionate to

another person is beautiful. In that sense, beauty is close to the vir tuous objects. As I said, it is a complicated question. There are many types of beauty. One would have to unpack them all.

MJ: Do you see the composer as a shaman-like figure?

JH: I think so. It is not a bad description. Of course shamans can deal with a darkness that has to do with bad or unvirtuous things. That is the other half of shamanism. The composer as somebody who

mediates between higher, other, or invisible forces is absolutely a correct supposition, I think. Some composers, but not all compos ers fit that description.



MJ: Is the composer a complex set of cultural constructs and any distinct voice perceived is just an illusion of personality?

JH: I kind of believe that, but then people say to me, "You have a voice. I can pick out your music." And, I say, "Can you? Well, I am not aware of it." I just write what I want to write. If it sounds like some one else, I am just not too worried. My compositions are different from one to another, but I guess one can't avoid connections with others' worlds unless one is an enlightened person. Then it probably wouldn't happen. I don't know quite what the music of an enlight ened person is. When you think of the late quartets of Beethoven there is a great quality of Beethoven in them. In many ways they seem to transcend everything.

MJ: They're ambiguous in many ways.

JH: Fundamentally, the voice as a bundle of stuff that has been collected from our histories, environments, and karma is a good description.

MJ: Do you think that the composer's intent of encoding a score with extra-musical meaning aids in communicating the message behind a

programmatic work?

JH: Yes. The intention of the subject and the music can come as a com

plete package. It is no different from painting a picture of an object. It is both a mark making and a reference. Music can't escape its ref erences. It always relates to an agitated or calm heartbeat or breath; a running, dancing, or gesture movement; or speaking, exclaiming or chanting. It just can't escape. There is reference all over. What

ever people might say, there is no neutral level. If you write a title or

program, it is just extending what is already there. It certainly helps the listener to enter into what is in the composer's mind. On the other hand, if nothing is consciously in the composer's mind, what are you going to title it except perhaps "Symphony" or something?

MJ: Does music communicate meaning?

JH: Yes. Yes. The extra-musical meaning is strong, but ultimately empty. That is the strength of music. We know emotions of tragedy, com

edy, romance, and mysticism are strongly portrayed in music, but

ultimately music is just notes and vibrations in the air. It is not even that. It is just things in our brains and minds. We can see in the



music that they don't have any real existence. They are constructs in our minds, ways our minds think, and ways our minds can make sense of things. Yes and No. There is the conventional answer and the ultimate answer, the Buddhist one.

MJ: What are the differences between a religious Buddhist music, such as Tibetan chanting, and non-religious music that describes its self as

Buddhist, such as one of your Buddhist songs? Is there no difference?

JH: We obviously have the rite and the concert hall. There are times when a concert hall tries to become a rite. Oftentimes there are com

posers who want to achieve that. Perhaps some do. Whether the two remain in separate compartments is an interesting borderline issue too. As I was saying earlier about the chant on one note, the music

that is used in a rite doesn't contain such a high degree of inherent

emptiness in the musical sense. It is doing something else. The music is conveying techniques for meditation, purification, and for making people happy?assuaging the fears and torments of existence. It is about many things other than being about emptiness. That music is

functional, rather than simply being an empty music, existing as a

picture of this wonderful vision of illusion that we are calling com

plex, or sophisticated, music. There is a difference in function one could lay out like that, but the borderlines can be blurred.

MJ: Speaking of some of your pre-existing works, is there any connec tion between the works that attribute themselves to the notion of

emptiness, such as Forms of Emptiness and Wheel of Emptiness^.

JH: I don't think there is a fundamental difference. I think in the Buddhist works I am more conscious of emptiness. Sometimes I tried to make it clear for the listener, but, no, I don't think there is a fundamental difference.

MJ: Did you want to write works about emptiness or did the titles occur to you afterwards?

JH: In the case of Wheel of Emptiness and Forms of Emptiness, I wanted to write about emptiness. With Wheel of Emptiness I knew more about it than in '86 with Forms of Emptiness. In Wheel of Emptiness I did it using two ideas of flux: firstly chaotic and formless music and

secondly music of extreme form, as two contrasting objects of mat erial. In Wheel of Emptiness I was showing the way in which we take



objects and fetishize them. We give them labels and see them as individual things. You highlight the contradictions of the dialectic in the process of perceiving emptiness when you juxtapose a profusion of notes that are always changing against constructs which are fixed and don't change at all. In a meditation on emptiness, you also have to find, identify, examine and realize the object of negation as 'truly existent'. You then 'see through' the object, and fail to find its veri fiable existence apart from the mind that makes it appear. You then meditate on emptiness. It is essential that you start with something that seems not to be empty. Then you demolish it. That is what I

was doing [in Wheel of Emptiness]. This process is like the collage artists that put a scrap of newspaper or a bus ticket into their paint ing. They just stick it on. It sticks out as an object which doesn't

normally belong to the world of painting. It is fun. It doesn't

belong to the world of painting, but someone like Picasso could make it belong by sheer showing of that deceptive real existence. It is not really a bus ticket. It is part of the paint, part of the flux of form or formlessness?part of the Stardust from which we all come from and beyond. It is a false form. It is an interesting way to com

pose for me. Bird Concerto with Pianosong is another piece in which I do exacdy the same thing.

MJ: What about the work From Silence)

JH: It is a litde bit Buddhist. I wrote some of the texts myself. They are rather Buddhist. It uses monastic Christian texts from a somewhat Buddhist point of view. Would you say, "Is Mozart's such-and-such

symphony a Buddhist work?" How could I answer that? Yes. It is for me, but it doesn't say much. All of the music that I like is Buddhist.

MJ: Are your Buddhist Songs meant to be a religious or spiritual experience?

JH: They were written for Buddhist occasions. They are fairly simple and meant to be functional music. I set texts they use and know in Buddhist circles. The songs are 'church music' and they are Buddhist certainly in their structure, but simplified.

MJ: Those were all of my formal questions. Is there anything you would like to add?

JH: I am writing an opera on a Buddhist theme, which is a combination of things. It is about Wagner and his death at the time he was in


A Search for Emptiness 23 I

Venice lodging in the Palazzo de Vendramin. He was writing his

essay on the feminine in culture and had just started to write about the Buddha in this Buddhist legend. He suddenly died of a heart attack. Buddhists, as you may know, say that what you are thinking about at the moment of death is the supreme mind of your life. It is the most important state of mind of your life. At any rate, I take this

moment of Wagner's death and follow his mind. It is obviously a

fantasy of mine. The opera explores what happened to him at the

gate of death and what he thought about this wonderful theme in which the Buddha appears. That is the whole evening. We have

Wagner on the stage speaking, not singing, with his family; and an Indian cast, one of which is the Buddha. It is a beautiful story, an old Indian legend. It is a clash, or dialectic, between nineteenth

century romanticism and Buddhism. Wagner knew quite a lot about it for his time, but I think he misunderstood it. His vision of nirvana

was rather bleak and nihilistic in some ways. It lacks the laughter of true Buddhism. Playing his vision of Buddhism off of the Buddha's is at the back of the story.

Notes

1. The essence of the New Kadampa tradition, a Mahayana school founded by Master Atisha (A.D. 982-1054), is cherishing others and

proving oneself on the spiritual path to be able to benefit all living beings. It centers on meditation and how acts of daily life can lead towards enlightenment. Contemporary New Kadampa Buddhism, also known as Kamdampa, centers around Geshe Kelsang Gyatso's

teachings and temple, The Manjushi Center, in England.

2. Jonathan Harvey, "Music and Buddhism . . . ," in Max Paddison and Irene Deliege, editors, Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philo

sophical Perspectives (Aldershot: Ashgate, forthcoming).

3. Ibid.


Article Contentsp. [220]p. 221p. 222p. 223p. 224p. 225p. 226p. 227p. 228p. 229p. 230p. 231

Issue Table of ContentsPerspectives of New Music, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Summer, 2006) pp. 1-268Front Matter[Photograph]: Robert Yoder: Perry Hall (2001), Painted Wood; 44 by 96 by 1.5 Inches; Howard House Contemporary Art [pp. 5-5]"Where Have We Met before?" for a 90th Birthday Celebration of Milton Babbitt [pp. 6-12][Photograph]: Robert Yoder: Turner (2003), Painted Wood; 32 by 60 by 2 Inches; Howard House Contemporary Art [pp. 13-13]"What Is about, Is Also of, Also Is": Words, Musical Organization, and Boretz's "Language, as a Music", "Thesis" [pp. 14-64][Photograph]: Victoria Haven: Landscape Fragments (2004), Ink on Cut Paper; 11 by 9 by 1 Inches; Howard House Contemporary Art [pp. 65-65]A Living Oxymoron: Norman O. Brown's Criticism of John Cage [pp. 66-87]From a Categorical Point of View: K-Nets as Limit Denotators [pp. 88-113]General Equal-Tempered Harmony (Introduction and Part I) [pp. 114-158][Photograph]: Victoria Haven: Mirror Mountain (2004), Reflective Mylar; 19 by 33 by 1 Inches; Howard House Contemporary Art [pp. 159-159]Why We Refuse to Listen [pp. 160-218][Photograph]: Robert Sperry: Force #12 (1998), Digital IRIS Print; 19.5 by 23 Inches; Howard House Contemporary Art [pp. 219-219]A Search for Emptiness: An Interview with Jonathan Harvey [pp. 220-231]Composed Silence: Microsound and the Quiet Shock of Listening [pp. 232-248][Photograph]: Robert Sperry: Platter # 1055 (1993), 27 (dia) by 4 (d) Inches; Howard House Contemporary Art [pp. 249-249]Toshi Ichiyanagi, Japanese Composer and "Fluxus" [pp. 250-261]Editorial Notes [pp. 262-263]Back Matter

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A Search for Emptiness Interview with Jonathan Harvey