Words Without Music: A Memoir (28 page)

It would not be until the 1980s that I would meet another yogi, Swami Bua, who in retrospect was the finest yoga teacher I have known. I’m not sure what his lineage was, though I did see a photo of him in his studio, a portrait of him and Sivananda taken in 1924, when Swami Bua was about thirty. It was my son Zack, when he was barely more than thirteen, who took me to Swami Bua’s yoga class in his small apartment near Columbus Circle in New York City. As we walked into his living room studio, Swami was sitting cross-legged on the far side of the room.

“Ah, sir, you have brought your son to me,” he said. “Don’t worry, I will take good care of him.”

“No, Swami,” I said. “My son is bringing me to you, and I would like you to take good care of
me
!”

Swami was in his nineties when I met him, still giving two classes a day. By then I was in my late forties and I had no problem jumping into his program. However, it was highly developed and personal with many details that were new to me. He was always lively, though sometimes as he was nearing the one-hundred-year mark, he would doze off during a class. Ultimately, his program became the base of the yoga practice I continue to follow on a daily basis.

Swami Bua was himself a strict vegetarian. Sometimes during a class he would begin a fierce tirade on meat eating. Since he was shorter than any of us, perhaps five foot one or two, he would raise his hand with a finger in your face and very heatedly say “You’re turning your body into a cemetery!”

On one occasion I was receiving the brunt of the lecture with exactly that line about the cemetery.

“But, Swami,” I protested, “I’ve been a vegetarian for thirty years.”

His face and voice softened immediately. He reached up and tapped me on the head.

“Ah, God has blessed you!”

The clearest direct link between my work with these Eastern traditions and the music work that I was doing at the same time is in the pieces that have been based on those traditions. One major work based on Indian sources is, of course,
Satyagraha
. Another is
The Passion of Ramakrishna
—an oratorio for chorus, soloists, and orchestra composed in 2006. Though sung in English, the work is based on the biography of Ramakrishna written in the late nineteenth century by one of his disciples. Besides these two, there were several other selections from Indian religious texts that appear in my Symphony no. 5 (1999). From my involvement with Tibetan Buddhism has come the music for
Kundun
, the Martin Scorsese film about the life of the Dalai Lama, and “Songs of Milarepa” (1997), a piece for soloists and orchestra based on the poems of Milarepa, the Tibetan yogi and poet who lived almost one thousand years ago.

These works never could have been imagined, let alone written, without the kind of in-depth study and practice that came from my direct experiences with India’s and Tibet’s traditions. I haven’t been back to India in some time, but my search and quest for the esoteric or transcendent in ordinary life has continued, and in several other directions.

I TOOK UP QIGONG, THE THIRD TRADITION
I mentioned, with the Taoist teacher Sat Hon. Born in China, Sat Hon came to the United States with his family to live in New York’s Chinatown, and then, after graduating from Princeton University, returned to China to complete his study of Chinese medicine.

In 1996, I began a qigong program, which is quite different from hatha yoga. It is the parent study to tai chi, which is probably more widely known. When I entered into lessons with him, Sat told me I would be learning “longevity practice.” I continued with the qigong for a good fifteen years before he began to teach me tai chi. He seemed to think I would have time to practice: the matter was urgent, but no rush was necessary. He has told me that though I came to him at fifty-nine years old, my forty years of yoga and thirty years of Mahayana Buddhist studies had made it possible to begin studying with him without any major mental or physical deficit.

It was at least ten years before Sat even mentioned the word “Taoist” to me, at first with a few books, then with his translations from ancient Chinese poems. Recently he has added sword and staff training and now tai chi. I know very little about classical Taoism, but the training continued and expanded in its detail and precision, and I have gone into it conscientiously and as deeply as I could. It’s hard to say what I have learned from all this, but I have noticed a certain ease I have begun to experience in my daily life. This extends not only to living but to the subject of dying as well. More than that I am unable to say.

There have been several music collaborations with Sat as choreographer. The first was
Chaotic Harmony
, a work for flute and dancer, and a second, recently completed work,
Taiji on 23rd Street
, is a film featuring Sat Hon as performer.

MY MOST RECENT ENCOUNTER
with an esoteric tradition was completely unexpected and moreover the most surprising. And it has the special quality of being wholly born in North and Central America.

Browsing through the Eastern philosophy section of the St. Mark’s Bookshop sometime in 1996, I came across
The Toltecs of the New Millennium
by Victor Sanchez. It was a story of a young man who had gone on a pilgrimage with a group of Wixárika Indians from the mountains of central Mexico. The book was a revelation. At the bottom of the last page the author had printed his e-mail address.

This was close to my sixtieth birthday, and Orly Beigel, my friend and Mexican concert producer, had arranged a big party and some concerts for me at the main concert hall in Mexico City, Palacio de Bellas Artes for the year coming up, 1997. I wrote to Victor Sanchez, telling him I enjoyed his book and suggesting, if he lived in Mexico City, that we have lunch together. He wrote back that yes, he did live in Mexico City and would be happy to meet me, and by the way was I the composer by the same name? I was totally surprised that he had heard of me at all. But there it was, all arranged. Soon after, we had lunch together in Mexico City every day I had a concert, which made it five days in a row.

Victor had been a student of anthropology, but he describes himself as an anti-anthropologist. He believed that the only way to learn about an indigenous culture was to be immersed in the culture itself. Of course this was anathema to an academic, scientific point of view. The normal way of working for an anthropologist at that time was for the scientist to keep a distance between himself and the subject. But Victor instinctively rejected the idea and therefore had to leave the university, freeing him to find the tools and knowledge he was drawn to on his own. He spent quite a lot of time after that with the Wixárika people, and the book I read was a report on his work.

There was no other way to learn about this tradition than through personal involvement. It is a culture with an oral tradition but not a written one. Knowledge for the Wixárika people will not be found and read in a book. The desert and mountains are their encyclopedia. The
Poderíos
—the Powers: the sun, moon, fire, earth, wind, ocean, the Blue Deer and the “little” Blue Deer—are the teachers. The Wixárika people are the students. They have learned to listen to Grandfather Fire, and they have found the voice with which they can speak to him. There is no practice like yoga
asanas
or Buddhist texts or Taoist poetry. There is the desert, the mountains, and the
Poderíos
. However there is a little more than that, too. There is a path of discovery, a kind of technology and procedure—in this sense, meaning literally “how things are done”—that, if not exactly practiced, still has to be experienced. Along with that comes, on the one hand, a development of attention, and on the other hand, an almost Buddhist “not-doing” that is known and cultivated.

I’ve been with Victor now on fifteen or sixteen separate visits, each ten days to two weeks long. A lot of time was in the mountains of the Sierra de Catorce, but there were also visits to the river country of San Luis Potosí and expeditions to the monuments and pyramids of ancient Mexico in the south of Mexico and Mexico City itself, as well as the jungles of Guatemala and Honduras. This can be hard travel, usually without hotels and restaurants.

During these journeys, there is some talking in the evening but almost none during the days of climbing and trekking, usually with just four or five of us traveling together. There is no question that there are things to be seen that are otherwise not viewable. And there are other times when the ordinary world can be terrifying. These are not tourist getaways. They are deeply exhilarating experiences.

In 2011, Victor asked me to prepare a concert in honor of the new Mayan calendar that was to begin at the 2012 winter solstice. I replied that I would like to do it with Wixárika musicians—Roberto Carillo Cocío, who plays a homemade guitar, and whom I had met previously, and Daniel Medina de la Rosa, who plays a homemade violin and sings. In July 2012 we had two days of rehearsal in the town of Real de Catorce, where we began preparing music we could play together at the the Casa de Cultura, which, surprisingly, has a Yamaha baby grand piano. The final rehearsals took place several days before the concert, and on the evening of December 20, 2012, we played in front of a packed house of maybe sixty people. Over the subsequent two days we recorded the music as
The Concert of the Sixth Sun
.

IN A CLEAR WAY, WE ARE BOUND TO OUR CULTURE
. We understand the world because of the way we were taught to see. That’s why we become Americans, we become Indians, we become Eskimos. We see that world because that’s what was installed, almost banged, into our heads when we were very, very young. But it’s also possible to step out of that world.

For many years I always thought of the music as being separate from these other activities. It was only recently that I began to see it as connected to everything else. I remember talking once to Tomo Geshe Rimpoche, who invited me to spend some time at his place in the Catskill Mountains north of New York City. “Why don’t you come and just do a retreat here?” he asked.

“Can I bring my music with me?”

“You’re
supposed
to bring your music with you.”

When I got there, he began to place me on different days in every cabin, house, and other building on the property. I wrote music everywhere—that’s what he wanted me to do.

At first, it wasn’t easy for me to accept the idea that my pursuits of these various paths had anything to do with music. But my friends who are professionals in this business all said, “No, no, no, it’s the same thing.”

I finally arrived at that conclusion, but with some difficulty. Still, even today it’s an idea that does not come to me easily. However, the mental concentration and physical stamina that result from these disciplines is virtually identical to that needed in music making and performing. To this point, I can’t even say which comes first. My personal experience is that they nourish and support each other. The question is not how could I have had the time and energy to pursue both personal and musical development, but how could I have done it any other way?

RETURN TO NEW YORK

N
EW YORK LOOKED MUCH THE SAME AS WHEN I HAD LEFT IT IN
1964, but my generation, now in its late twenties and early thirties, felt an energy that seemed to pervade the entire city. In only a few years, the Beats had become the hippies, while the dreamers had reawakened as activists. Woodstock was just two years away, and a new electric popular music set the beat for everyone. The scene at Berkeley was very much a part of our energy system, a second pole of active creativity, as it were. Looming over everything and everyone, however, was the long shadow cast by the Vietnam War. It still had years to go, and no one, either for or against it, could withstand its pull. The drug culture had not yet taken root in our lives, which, for some, meant there would be dark, dark days ahead. Some would not survive. AIDS had not surfaced, still over a decade away, and sexuality was still a playground of sorts. You could say that these were still our days of innocence.

I was thirty years old in 1967, and I was coming back from Europe with not only the instruction I had gotten from Nadia Boulanger but also the training I had received from Ravi Shankar. With these skills, I was very well equipped musically. I also had the beginnings of a new musical language that was developed to the point where I could work with it professionally. I had composed music for Samuel Beckett’s
Play
; I had applied the procedures I used in composing the Beckett music to write chamber music that had no theatrical or literary connection: String Quartet no. 1; and I had made a piece, “Music for Ensemble and Two Actresses,” for JoAnne and Ruth Maleczech, in which they recited a recipe from a cookbook with my new music.