Aria

I’m working one-on-one with a gifted young undergraduate singer on the John Cage piece “Aria” (the photo above shows an excerpt from the score). I got a small grant from my university music department’s diversity committee to design and teach this course; they have the earnest but perhaps misguided goal of trying to attract more minority students into academic music studies. A colleague of mine expressed some curiosity about how it would play out, seeing as John Cage is a composer, as he put it, “seriously lacking in what the French call negritude.” The more I work with my student on “Aria,” the more I see what he means, and the more I become frustrated with Cage’s real limitations. Obviously he’s a very important composer and thinker, crucial to our understanding of the post-World War II breakdown of previously-received systems and standards across the arts. He also represents the advance guard of what writer Rick Fields called “the swans coming to the lake”: the dissemination of eastern spiritual thought in American culture, which can be seen also in the works of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, J.D. Salinger, and many others. As such, he provides a kind of link back to the nineteenth-century Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau by way of Japanese Buddhism. But his music is beginning to seem maddenly boring, not to mention totally divorced from what music is meant to convey, i.e. meaning. What's more, I'm coming to the conclusion that Cage's musical ideology is just plain wrong. This is, after all, the man who said that duration in music is more important than harmony, and that Satie is a more important composer than Beethoven -- in fact, that Beethoven corrupted music. While Cage and Satie have their charms, I’m beginning to feel like I chose the wrong piece for my tutorial.

The Average Boddhisattva

My first husband, M., was a cradle Buddhist, who liked to say that he had lost his faith because of an episode that took place at a childhood sleepover, when he was terrified by the sound of grandfather clock. and his supplications to the Buddha brought him no consolation. As an adult, however, he began exploring his childhood faith again, as I was to do later, and his second marriage was performed in a Buddhist ceremony. Around the time that he started attending Buddhist services again in the late 1990’s, while we were still married, a prominent Buddhist priest and scholar came to his temple to speak. At that talk, a fellow member of the sangha mentioned the freedom that came to her when she realized that she was just average; not a “special” person, as we all want to believe and are encouraged to believe we are, but just an average one with average abilities and average hopes and dreams. The prominent Buddhist speaker replied that he was filled with admiration for her, bowed to her, and called her an “average Boddhisattva.”

Nothing could have rubbed me more wrong than when M. told me this story. I think it bothered me so much because I found it so terrifying. I was “special,” after all, and had been brought up with a clear recognition of my special gifts and what I assumed were the privileges that came with them – privileges such as the right to fulfill my appetites and curiosities without regard for average rules and morals – and I was convinced that I must never descend to the everyday world of the average person. It took me a long time to recognize that I am more average than I care to admit. I think that I am one of the millions who do not live up to their early promise, and I don’t know whether that’s a tragedy of epidemic proportions based on massive failures of parenting and society, or simply part of the human experience in a fallen world. It’s taken me a string of failures and catastrophes in the realms of health, relationships, and career to recognize my averageness, and in a way I wish for more of it, because perhaps if I could embrace my averageness, I could have some peace, and then offer others kindness instead of bitterness, and perhaps even become an average Boddhisattva.