CD booklet 'koan, still, satori'

The last time I bumped into John Palmer was at the 2001 World Music Days in Yokohama, where his Koan for shakuhachi and chamber ensemble had just been performed. Many Western residents of Japan become enchanted by its traditional culture, and some of them even start 'going native' to a greater or lesser extent; but I have never met anyone who had fallen in love with Japan so completely, and in so short a time, as John had. Already resembling some priestly acolyte in his flowing black kimono, he told me excitedly how he had just spent a week at a Zen monastery in Kyoto. The severity of training at such institutions is notorious, and most lay followers of Zen prefer to immerse themselves more gradually in its demanding discipline. John, however, had jumped in feet first - and to judge by his present reactions, the water was lovely. It seemed very much in keeping with what little I knew of the composer's personality, this by-passing of all comfortable superficialities to plunge directly right into the depths of a culture.

The three works presented on this CD all reflect this profound engagement with Japanese spiritual and aesthetic tradition. This is obvious from the titles of two of them - Koan and Satori - and implicit in the programme notes for Still, which make reference both to the poetic form known as haiku and the traditional aesthetic concept of ma. Moreover most of these terms refer to concepts which nowadays enjoy a certain currency in the West, even if they are not always described by these technical names. A koan, for instance, is that type of apparently nonsensical question by means of which students in the Rinzai school of Zen are trained to transcend the limitations of verbal reasoning, the most famous example being perhaps Hakuin's 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?' (My own mischievous answer has always been that it is the audience reaction at the average new music concert.) Satori describes that spiritual awakening during Zen meditation sometimes misleadingly translated as 'enlightenment', though in its transcendence of dualistic discrimination it is in fact the very opposite of the wordy rationalism of European humanism. The compact seventeen-syllable scheme of the haiku has long been familiar in the West, and many readers will no doubt have written examples at school, but outside specialist circles the aesthetic term ma is less well-known. Written using the Chinese character for 'interval' or 'space', ma refers to 'empty' areas in an artistic composition in both a spatial and temporal sense - blank parts of a painting for example, or thoughtfully displaced 'silences' in music. Except, of course, that the empty spaces in music are not 'silences' at all, but alive with unintentional sounds which it is part of the function of music to bring to our consciousness - as Palmer's friend and mentor, the American composer John Cage, well knew.

All this picturesque 'Japaneseness' might make it sound as though the listener to this CD is in for a comfortable session of 'new-age' easy listening. But be warned: someone who submits himself to the ascetic severities of Zen monastery life could hardly be expected to opt for facile and superficial artistic solutions, and the musical language of John Palmer's work is uncompromisingly Western and modernist. It demands of its listener, no less than of its creator, an attitude of disciplined seriousness. True, you don't have to practise Zen to understand it, and by the same token it probably won't grant you the gift of satori; but if you devote to it a little of that concentrated attention which the acolyte brings to meditation, it may reward you with glimpses of what Palmer calls 'those magical and transcendent qualities which reside in the remote corners of our inner-self'. And if you find yourself agreeing that the composer's use of the first person plural here is an appropriate one, your investment of time and patience will not have been wasted.

Peter Burt - Vienna, February 2003