running in circles and loving every step

So, having finally figured out how to get music on this blog, I thought I'd post something. This recording of Enso is still a working file; it's pretty rough in places, is missing a cello part, and occasionally clips a syllable off voices. Nevertheless, it's the first song I've written specifically for this project, so I thought I'd put it up so you could see what I've been up to. A more complete file should be up soon.

My mom has this theory that everybody eventually loops back to who they were when they were 10 years old. This summer, I found myself reconnecting to various former selves as college became less of a year-by-year culmination of what came before it, and more a coherent four-year section of a larger continuum, a discrete period included in and contextualized by a continuing story. This led me to suspect that not only did mom know best, but that our lives may in fact be marked by all sorts of interior circles and loops of various sorts and sizes, and that the horizontal through-line of living is punctuated by other stranger geometries as new events inform old ones, old friends reappear, and new appearances echo memory.

All this circling seemed kind of grand, and also very reminiscent of a topic covered in the incomparable Thomas Hare's course on Zen in Performance. Enso is a Zen performance art like archery, shakuhachi, or tea ceremony, except that it's a form of calligraphy. It involves drawing circles - in fact, that's pretty much all it is. Drawing circles as a form of self-knowledge, self-effacement, religious exercise, spiritual diary, and who knows what else. Point is, for practitioners of Enso, all the various heavens and hells of Buddhist cosmology could be expressed within a single, cyclical stroke of a brush.

Thinking of life circles and the art of Enso led me to consider all the various similar shapes that help me fall asleep at night. There were of course all those darker orbs with which I was already well acquainted; the downward spiral of urban poverty, the escalating vortex of the security dilemma. In the face of these, however, were other deeper circles like breathing, aging, and Enso. They were refreshingly new to me, and also, surprise surprise, largely once-familiar wisdom from younger days. They would make, I thought, good music.

Thus, Enso, the song. It's written for cello quartet, guitar, and voices. The voices are of the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh (who talks a lot about breathing), Beatrice Wyatt (who mostly tells us to move along), myself (who talks some repeating blather about Rzewski's Attica), my father (who discusses ring composition in the Iliad and the Odyssey), and my mother (who talks about the things she has forgotten and remembers). The piece is constructed in two opposing circles of fifths; we start in A, then go down the circle of fifths till we arrive back at A, and then we go back up again. Each key area gets a set amount of measures, and every three key areas, the time signature gains an eighth note. We start in 4/8, then go to 5/8, 6/8, 7/8, until finally, at the same time the key arrives in A, the time arrives in 4/4 (8/8): double or, with a little theoretical scoojing, roughly the same as where we started. Once this 4/4 A Major section has played itself out, Beatrice Wyatt tells us to come along, and the process rolls back, the eighth notes steadily vanishing at the same rate they appeared.

Various textural details also suggest circles; the pizzicato cello's cyclic arpeggios are in concentric opposition to one of the arco cello's slurred figures (not yet recorded), which together literally make graphic circles upon the score. Similarly, the guitar ostinato goes down chromatically and returns up throughout the piece. The only bump in this regularity is at the very middle of everything, when we arrive back at A in 4/4. Here, although all the structural restrictions are maintained, the allotted measures are spent in a brief, quiet, groovy little song that is wholly unique to this single, interior segment. At the heart of all these circles, Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, we may find peace, and pleasure.



Enso was first performed at the Crimson Frog Coffeehouse in Camp Hill on Aug. 7.