Episode link
Leah Roseman:
Stephen Nachmanovitch is the author of both "Free Play" and more recently, "The Art of Is". Yo-Yo Ma wrote , quote: "Steven Nachmanovitch's "The Art of Is", is a philosophical meditation on living, living fully, living in the present. To the author, an improvisation is a co-creation that arises out of listening and mutual attentiveness, out of a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity. It is a product of the nervous system, bigger than the brain and bigger than the body; it is a once -in- a- lifetime encounter, unprecedented and unrepeatable. Drawing from the wisdom of the ages, "The Art of Is" not only gives the reader an inside view of the states of mind that give rise to improvisation, it is also a celebration of the power of the human spirit, which - when exercised with love, immense patience and discipline - is an antidote to hate," unquote. This was an amazingly inspiring conversation, extremely wide-ranging, including some musical improvisation. I've included timestamps to help listeners navigate the many topics we touched on, including many important artists.
Leah Roseman:
Good morning, Stephen Nachmanovitch. Thank you so much for joining me.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Good morning. It's my pleasure to be here.
Leah Roseman:
Many people will know you as an author, particularly of "Free Play", which is an amazing book about improvisation in many forms but mostly music. And more recently you published "The Art of Is", which I think is more about the importance of creativity in life, in many different forms. We'll definitely dig into your writing and your ideas and you're a performer. We're going to play some music and I was surprised to learn you were a computer software engineer and I was looking at your World Music Menu, I found that really interesting.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yes. Thank you very much. Unfortunately, the World Music Menu hasn't been updated in a long time and the synthesizers that it worked with no longer exist so it can't be updated but I'd been fascinated by what you'd call the fundamentals of music, meaning going back to Pythagoras, whoever he or she was and the idea that the perfect whole number ratios of string length or vibrating column or whatever are the basis of all the tones in all of the cultures. And there's so many scales and so forth and so the World Music Menu enabled you to just flick a button and go to Bali or Japan or India or ancient Greece and play on a mini keyboard the scales of those cultures.
Leah Roseman:
And you've written about the importance of studying different music series as a Western classically trained violinist. We just did the one type but right, you yourself, you studied Indian music for a while.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
I did, I studied Indian music for quite a while and I have always adored it and that was actually perhaps more important than Western music in terms of how I introduced myself to the process of improvising. My knowledge of Western music theory is actually relatively pathetic. I certainly know something about it but not as much as the average freshman in any music school. And there's so many music theories throughout the world and so many formats of musical culture and so many ways that sound can be put together.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And really when somebody asks me what kind of music I do, I was stumped for decades but now I say that I play materialistic music. We think of in our culture, we think of materialism as love of money but what I'm interested in is the fact that you pick up a musical instrument and it's made of wood, it's made of metal, it's made of strings and gut and all the other things and you're playing with the material. If I'm just tapping on the table in front of me, I'm playing with the material of my fingers and the material of the wood of the table and I'm really interested in the sounds that materials make. And that's really it.
Leah Roseman:
You're holding an electric, it's a six string violin, like a viola.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
A six string violin. It's called a Violectra. It's made by David Bruce Johnson in Birmingham, England.
Leah Roseman:
I'm going to be interviewing Tracy Silverman in a couple weeks actually.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh, cool.
Leah Roseman:
We'll talk about that.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Great.
Leah Roseman:
But maybe you can just talk about that instrument because you were one of the real pioneers in using electric violins, I believe.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
When I started doing improvisation in the 1970s, I was living in Berkeley, California, which was of course a hotbed of rock and roll. And my musical background was classical but I became fascinated very early with what could be done with an electric violin. And I went out and got one and I went out to the music stores on Telegraph Avenue and started buying pedals because it was fascinating to be able to modify the timbre of your sound electronically rather than changing instruments and changing instruments, even though that's fun too. And I'm just really fascinated by the immense variety of violin family instruments that you can play like this. I've got lots of them here but anyway, electric violin became a real staple for me and being able to play with loops and feedback and phasers and do things like play through a phase shifter and echoes and all the things that you can do was so fascinating to me.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
I've been doing that since the seventies. And since then, I've gone through a lot of electric instruments. This is really the best one that I've found so far. It's really wonderful. This particular one Dave made for me, I got one of his other instruments, which I really, really liked. I still have it but it was kind of on the heavy side so I wrote to him about making one that was as light as an acoustic violin so that it could be played comfortably. And I had a gig in Birmingham, England so I went and visited him and we sat together and worked on the design a little bit. And it was really great fun seeing the instrument appear a few months later.
Leah Roseman:
I'd be really curious because I had an electric violin for a while but it was so heavy, so uncomfortable. I just didn't like it.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
The weight is everything because a regular violin is a pound and a viola is a pound and a half and that's about as much as, if you play an instrument here, that's about as much as you want to do. This is pretty close. It's slightly heavier than a regular violin but not very much. And so that made a lot of difference but there's also, there's a huge variety of electric instruments and a huge variety, I switched from pedals. Of course, with pedals, you have to maintain cables and batteries and I was once playing in a large theater in Granada, in Spain on a Sunday night where of course no stores were open and the battery had run out in one of my pedals. And so anyway, I started doing multi effects boxes and in recent years, of course, in the last 10, 15 years or so, there's so many effects built into computer software. I basically just play through the laptop.
Leah Roseman:
The episode that actually came out today, I talked to Brendan Power recently. Do you know him? He's a harmonica player.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh no, I don't.
Leah Roseman:
He's a harmonica player, an inventor and he also likes to experiment with effects. He was saying, even for most people on the iPad, you can get all these free effects With any acoustic instrument. And he's saying you should check them out. I haven't done that yet. You were mentioning Stephen, all the variety of string instruments. I've been really exploring that in the series. We had a kamancheh player recently and I'll be interviewing a gadulka, a Bulgarian player soon but I noticed most of them erhu, and all these, it's mostly the other way. I think it's more comfortable than the way we play.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
You mean cello way.
Leah Roseman:
The cello way.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
I also started in the, I still have it though, it's in a bad state of repair now, but in the seventies I got a sarangi. Have you ever seen one of those?
Leah Roseman:
Maybe, but I can't bring it to mind.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
It's like a mosque, it's an Indian instrument you play it like a baby cello in your lap. It has three main strings that you play on and 38 sympathetic strings.
Leah Roseman:
I have seen it, pictures.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And it's absolutely extraordinary. And the whole business of sympathetic strings, in the West, we have the viola d'amore. This is a fairly unusual one. It's got four main strings that you play exactly like a viola and five sympathetic strings underneath. And this was the result of the English and Dutch sailors traveling to India in the 14th, 15th, 16th, centuries. I'm sorry, 15th, 16th centuries and bringing back sitars and sarangis and Western makers became fascinated with sympathetic strings. And so we got the viola d'amore and the baryton and all those sorts of things. And what sympathetic strings really are, is a way of creating electronic music before there were electronics.
Leah Roseman:
The baryton, you mentioned, it's such an obscure instrument. I remember a professor telling me that Hayden had written something like 80 baritone trios. He just loved this instrument that no one's heard of today. Could you play a little bit on the viola d'amore for us?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Sure. It's great that there's so much kind of second rate baroque music written for viola d'amore but it's really best heard, viola d'amore means viola of love, but it also means Viola of the moors, which was the European's generic name for all the brown skinned people who lived to the south and east of them. But it's also the love part of it also means that it's an instrument that's meant to be played close up to your lover because you can only hear the sympathetic strings really clearly when you're right next to them. It's great to have the microphone right here.
Leah Roseman:
Cool. I can really hear those resonating. My very first episode exactly a year ago was with Kirsty Money, who's a nyckelharpa player. Do you know?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh, cool.
Leah Roseman:
It's all about the resonant strings. We started talking about your life as a computer software programmer. I know you paid the bills for a while doing that.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh, yes.
Leah Roseman:
Was it hard to balance all your creative work with having that job? Or could you make the hours work for you?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Well, I did make the hours work. I was fortunate enough to have acquired computer skills back in the days of punch cards and COBAL and FORTRAN. In some ways it was like being a waiter or waitress to support my work but I could make much more per hour so I didn't have to spend all my time working for money. And that was really great. So called work life balance or whatever it is, I call it sacred and secular, sacred work and secular work. And in fact, I have sacred desks and secular desks and have had for the last, I guess, 40 years. That's difficult but no matter what your life situation, the plumbing breaks and you have to get that fixed and people get sick and you have to deal with that and you pay your taxes and you have to pay your rent and so forth. Every human being who's interested in something, whether it's music or poetry or science or engineering or whatever you do, has to spend time taking care of business.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And business also can have its sacred dimension and you can learn things from fixing the plumbing that feed back into your art, which again is why when I talked at the beginning about playing materialistic music, part of the material isn't just the wood, the wood that the instrument is made out of, it is also the material of your life and how you arrange your house and how you arrange your time and what you do, what you don't do, what limits you set. That's material too.
Leah Roseman:
It's wonderful to use words in a completely different way. I'd read about in your book about this way of talking about materialism with it but even when you said it this morning, I sort of recoiled. Before we leave the whole software thing I was thinking about, because you wrote another program that relates to synesthesia where music is depicted visually and do you yourself have synesthesia?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
I do. I don't have strong synesthesia. Certainly when I was young half a century ago, I had plenty of psychedelic experiences which contained a lot of synesthesia. And just in life, listening to sound, feeling sensations with your eyes closed. I see things, I feel things, I hear things and we all really do. And so I became very interested in visual music. I also, I did my PhD dissertation on William Blake who was poet painter philosopher, very much what we would today call an intermedia artist. And the whole idea that visual art is separate from music, is separate from poetry, is separate from prose, is separate from theater or movies, it's just quite unnecessary.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And so for many years I started doing visual music pieces back in the 1970s, at that time with slide tape pieces where I'd have two slide projectors and a dissolve unit and they were clanking and clagging at the back of the theater and making a lot of noise and we would do music with it. And of course in recent years you can do a lot things on the computer that are much more subtle and interesting. And I also wrote a piece of software called Visual Music Tone Painter, which allowed you to play on a mini keyboard and get all kinds of graphic sort of Pythagorean color things on the screen. We had a show at the Smithsonian in 2000.
Leah Roseman:
And let's talk about the intersection of theater and music and improvisation because you're really known for that. And I believe you got to know Keith Johnstone.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yes I did. He was quite wonderful. He came by, it was around 1981 or two to the San Francisco Zen Center where I spent a lot of time then and offered a workshop. And then he gave some more workshops in San Francisco and I got to know him and he was really, really fascinating person, a very funny, very incisive intelligence. And I've worked since then with a lot of theater improvisers. And once again, the lines between what I'm interested in is the creative process without categorizing it. The lines between theater and music and dance are not that significant. And I've done a lot of workshops with mixed groups of musicians, actors and dancers.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And very often when musicians and dancers work, the dancers are on stage doing their thing and the musicians are in the corner making sound. But I like to work with musician, dancer, musician, dancer, musician, dancer and musicians can move and dancers can make noise. And of course they can both speak and do theater. I'm really interested in these syncretic art forms that come out of. And then of course those people whose creativity has flowered in one particular skill can really shine in that skill but it doesn't have to be so specialized.
Leah Roseman:
And I was thinking that relates to your suggestion for musicians who are highly trained to take an instrument that's new for them. I actually took your suggestion, I went and bought a hand pan for that purpose actually, just to.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh, nice. Those are great. Those are great.
Leah Roseman:
But I was thinking if people, if musicians, if we did some theater improv, it would probably help us a lot.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh yeah. And one of the things, people who do theater improv, very much so in the United States, sometimes the word improv only means theater or comedy to people or to some people improv only means jazz and so forth. And of course it's a vast universe but it's really valuable for theater improvisers to discover that improvisation doesn't have to be funny and it's valuable for especially classically trained musicians to learn that music doesn't always have to be serious.
Leah Roseman:
In another interview, I heard you talking with an actor. I can't remember his name, another podcast and he was saying how a lot of actors, they want to go for funny when they're improvising because they get an immediate reaction but it's harder when it's serious. I thought that was very insightful.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh yeah, you get that sense. Of course when people laugh, you hear it immediately. And of course, once again, if you're a classically trained musician and people start laughing, this is supposed to be a bad thing but actually it doesn't have to be. But if you're in the theater and people laugh, you hear that immediately and you respond to that in a feedback loop. But when people's hair stands up on the back of their necks and they experience awe or quiet joy, you don't necessarily get that instant feedback. It's really important to cultivate a kind of bigger awareness of how people are reacting to what you do.
Leah Roseman:
I was just wondering, you mentioned the San Francisco Zen Center because I just read Deborah Madison's biography as a chef. Do you know her? Because she was.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
I knew her very slightly.
Leah Roseman:
Not a musician. I was just making that connection in my mind because she talked so much about that time in her life.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And cooking is another, now that you mentioned the chef, of course cooking and food in general is another area like music where creativity exists on a continuum between composing and improvising and there are people who love to read and write recipes and then there's people who improvise. Go ahead.
Leah Roseman:
I was just thinking, I think cooking is the most, apart from conversation, it's the most accessible mode of improvisation for most people.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And of course my mother taught me to, well, the way you learn to cook is you just taste it every once in a while and then you adjust and that's actually what happens in music too.
Leah Roseman:
And where was I going with this? When you wrote Free Play, I believe Yehudi Menuhin really encouraged you with this.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
He did.
Leah Roseman:
What was your relationship with him?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Well, I was living in San Francisco Bay area then and he was, I loved not only his music but his writings about music were really great. And his writings about you see, when I started improvising, I had quit the violin for a couple of years and then picked it up after having studied Indian music and after having recovered from an injury. And so I started unlearning what I'd learned as a kid and relearning to play out of my body and learning about weight and balance and gesture and lightness and all of that stuff.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And then I started finding stuff that he had written and it was, I realized that I was really just reconstructing a lot of the things that he had discovered. And so he was playing the Brahm's violin concerto with the San Francisco Symphony and I went backstage and introduced myself and told him what I did. He said, "Well, that sounds interesting. Why don't you come to my hotel room tomorrow and play for me?" I practiced a lot that day and I went to his hotel and we had about a five hour conversation. It was really extraordinary and became friends and I saw him from time to time over the years after that. He invited me to come teach workshops at his school in England and he was really, I wish I could have had him as a teacher.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
... really. I wish I could have had him as a teacher, but he was certainly a great encourager and he really encouraged... It was really his suggestion at which I started writing Free Play. And he was very, very supportive and encouraging to the work that I was doing and a wonderful person.
Leah Roseman:
I only met him once. He was quite elderly. He was conducting at McGill where I was going to school and the presence, like his sense of... just his presence was amazing. And I'd read all his books when I was a kid as well. What did you play for him that day when you met him?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh, I improvised.
Leah Roseman:
I was wondering. Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And I had read, you talked about you had this injury and you had to relearn. So in terms of your early training, was it just really old school?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Old school, straight violin lessons. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Were there things from those early lessons that you have kept with you or did you really have to reject so much of it?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
I had to mostly reject. Though interestingly enough, my teacher, after I had grown up and transformed my life and became the kind of artist that I am, I had moved back to Los Angeles for some time and spent a lot of time with my childhood violin teacher who at that point was elderly and didn't play very well. But he became a photographer and still taught violin. And he really had an incredible sense of what art is. And so I think I may even though the strictly, "How do you play the violin," part of the lessons was something I had to outgrow, this sense of being an artist was there with him. And I really appreciated that.
Leah Roseman:
So did you go to India to study music or was it in States?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
No, I've never been to India. I'd been interested in Indian music before, but after I finished grad school I spent a year living in Switzerland, in the French part of Switzerland in a small town called Yverdon and it was outside of Lausanne. And I happened to bump into an Indian tabla teacher named Shashi Nayak who taught tablas in Geneva. So I ended up taking lessons from him for that year and really started to learn something about the structure of Indian music. And then when I came back and was living in Berkeley, there was a sort of vibrant Indian music community in the Bay Area. And Ali Akbar Khan had a school in San Rafael and I took lessons from him. And he was quite remarkable, also.
Leah Roseman:
Were you playing Indian-ized violin or were you playing tabla, were you singing?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
I was playing violin.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And for the rhythms, were you vocalizing when you first learned?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah. Yeah. (singing)
Leah Roseman:
That's so great. Yeah. That's something.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
It is so great.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So I was thinking, you wrote "The Art of Is" actually right before the pandemic.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
But I bought it early in the pandemic and took a long time reading it and making notes and it was so helpful. And it was really a perfect book for the time we've been living in. One thing, I think it was in that book where you talked about no solo is solo.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
That's right.
Leah Roseman:
Because we have everyone who's influenced us and loved us and hated us, and even when you're alone with your microphone, you're not alone. I found that very comforting.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Really in a sense "Free Play" and "The Art of Is", "Free Play" is about the creative process from the inside out. And "The Art of Is" is about the creative process from the outside in. And from the sense of community and ecology and our connection to the wider world and to the people that we share the world with.
Leah Roseman:
So you've been a practicing student of Buddhism and a Buddhist for over 40 years, I believe.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
How did you get into that world?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Well, like a lot of things that I've learned, I learned about it intellectually first and then in the body. So I'd read, again being a child of the sixties, I'd read a lot of Buddhist and Taoist philosophy. And that was very interesting to me, but it was separate in a way. And then I spent many years working with my lifetime teacher, Gregory Bateson, the anthropologist and philosopher and biologist and many other things. And he was English and very much an inheritor of the 19th century British biology tradition, but applied to pretty much everything in the world. But he had a very strong affinity for Buddhist philosophy and had a strong affinity for Buddhists. And one day I was at Gregory's house in Big Sur, and there was a young American Zen priest there giving a little talk and he used the word practice.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Now I'd heard the word practice a million times in reference to Buddhist practice, to meditation and walking and everything else that we do. But somehow when he said it that day, it hit me between the eyes be because I realized, "Well, I'm a musician and I practice a lot," and it made the practice of this join with the practice of sitting still on a cushion. And what was really important was the idea that in the West we have the idea that you practice an instrument to get better at the instrument. So it's still you, but now you have more skills on this. And the Eastern idea of practice is to affect the person, the total person.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And it's really, and to the extent that you're playing an instrument or whatever you do, whatever your craft or skill is in life, it's not you plus this. It's you and this are a system together. And practice means becoming comfortable being in the world that you're in and breathing. And so that was very interesting to me. That was just that day when he said the word practice it connected a lot of patterns for me. And so I started really going to Zen Center and sitting a lot. And so that really was the basis, that's what I was sitting on when I was beginning Free Play.
Leah Roseman:
Okay. And I do a little bit of meditation, but I've never done a group meditation. It must be so different.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
It is. It's actually so much easier. And I'm saying this from my house in the country in Virginia, where I very, very seldom get a chance to... I sit with my wife quite often, but there's something about sitting in a large group where it's actually much easier to maintain your stability for a long period of time, just because there are other people there doing it also. And in the San Francisco Zen Center had three places, three facilities. One was in this beautiful place in Green Gulch, out in Marin County. And there was another, Tassajara, down in the Monterey Mountains. But the one in San Francisco was right next to the freeway. And it was right next to where there were two or three freeways that were intersecting and heading at rush hour towards the Bay Bridge.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And so very often if I was living up in Marin County and I would drive down to San Francisco to do whatever I was doing that day, and then I'd rather than drive back in rush hour, go into Zen Center and just meditate with the folks there at rush hour, with all this noise going on. But since there were 40 of us sitting and meditating, we were completely impervious to the traffic noise. Where if it was just me sitting by myself, I would've gone nuts listening to that traffic noise. And when I started writing "Free Play", I was at an artist colony in the Southern California Mountains called Dorland Mountain Colony. I was living in a tiny little cabin. There were four cabins spread out over the land about half a mile, apart from each other. And there was no electricity and no phone. And of course it was long before the internet. And so we had Clivus Multrum toilets and kerosene lamps and so forth.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
But there was a turn of the century Steinway baby grand that had been bought from Rachmaninoff by the woman who started the colony. And there was something wonderful about sitting and writing in your studio all by yourself, knowing that over there someone else was sitting and writing in her studio on the other side of the hill. And over here somebody else was painting on this side of the hill. And that sense of communal practice, even though we were all doing our own individual projects and just saw each other every once in a while, there was something very powerful about that. So I found it very similar to meditating in a group.
Leah Roseman:
In both your books you quote William Blake quite a bit, and you had written your dissertation on him. Have you returned to his work over the years and is it-
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh yes. All the time.
Leah Roseman:
It resonates differently?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
All the time. And sometimes when I return to him, I find him tremendously boring and, "Okay, well, I've seen this already. I don't need any more of that," and then a couple years later I return to it and it just grabs me by the throat and yanks me into another place that I need to go to. And of course it's true with pieces of music too. There's some things that you've heard a million times and you've really had enough of them for one lifetime, and then you hear it 1,000,001 times and suddenly it changes your life. So yeah, Blake continues to be with me.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And I did, I just recently put up on the internet for a friend, there was a piece I composed in 2001 based on Blake's illustrations of the book of Job. And that's been seen at various museums, but I just put it online for the first time. And it still feels fresh to me. And Blake, still. And Blake living in a time of so much turmoil and war. And he was one of many British peaceniks, you might say, who were not regarded well by the British government because they didn't have the internet but they had their ways of spying on what people were doing.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
But he had this extraordinary... And he was so unknown and unrecognized in his lifetime and for many, many years after that. And perhaps if he had been born in Tibet in the same century, he would've been a high lama and would've had thousands of people paying attention to his art and his words and... In the wrong place at the wrong time. But in many ways we're catching up to him now.
Leah Roseman:
We talked about when you wrote "Free Play", Yehudi Menuhin had encouraged you. So when I picked up "The Art of Is", I couldn't help but notice you have a wonderful testimonial by Yo-Yo Ma on the back. So is he someone that you had sent the manuscript to before it was published?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yes. Yeah. I don't know him, but I asked if I could send the manuscript and he did write an absolutely gorgeous, gorgeous blurb that really... He really hit it on the head. He really got it.
Leah Roseman:
He clearly loved it. And it's wonderful, he's a really interesting musician in how he's explored different elements of creativity and not just stuck to what he could have done.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yes, exactly.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Exactly.
Leah Roseman:
And some of The Art of Is, I believe, were transcribed speeches that you've given. Because when you give talks, you generally you're improvising, you're not working-
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
That's right. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
.... from a script.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
That's right.
Leah Roseman:
And your son, who's a poet, helped you edit the book?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yes. Yes. And my son, who's a poet, the first talk that I gave that ended up in "The Art of Is"... And of course the chapters, everything got edited together in a global format, so the talks weren't... Well, a couple of the talks, like the chapter "All About Frogs" was almost exactly a talk as given. And there were a couple of others that were like that. Actually, now that I think about it, "Finger-Kissing" was, several were.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
But the first talk that I gave, my wife was pregnant with Jack. So this talk was 1993 and the book was published in 2019. And my wife was pregnant with Jack and I had the tape of the talk in my bag as I was driving home from Monterey to Los Angeles. And I said, "Well, that was not bad. I should really turn that into a book." And I realized that I'm going to become a father in four months. My life is about to change totally and I'd better get on the stick and write now. And of course I had to wait until the baby grew up to be a man and a poet and a incredibly skillful editor to really give the book its final shape.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And the title. He thought of the title.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So you talk about acting like an ancestor. And certainly with your books you've really done that. I was really so moved by the story of Herbert Zipper, and I did watch that documentary.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh great. Yeah, it's really extraordinary.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Let's see. "Never Give Up" is the name of it.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
"Never Give Up".
Leah Roseman:
So for people who are interested, you can rent it on Vimeo. It's wonderful now, these relatively obscure documentaries are quite available. So maybe you can speak to that story.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah. Herbert Zipper. I was introduced to Herbert, I was living in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles then, and it was just a few blocks away from Herbert. It was a very interesting neighborhood. Among the people who had lived in that neighborhood in the past included both Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht and Henry Miller, a whole bunch of very interesting people that lived there mostly in the forties. So a very dear friend of mine, Larry Livingston, conductor, called me up one day and said, "You've got to meet my friend Herbert, who lives near you." And we went over there. And Herbert was in his nineties then, he was fairly close to death. He had been a conductor and composer born in Vienna in 1904. And if history had turned out differently, he might have been like Bruno Walter, one of those big mid century conductors. But instead Hitler took power and the Anschluss came and they marched into Vienna and they threw him into Dachau.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And on his third day of slave labor there, he for some reason started reciting some lines of Goethe. And he noticed that other prisoners who were not well read or cultured people heard this and stood up a little straighter and got a gleam in their eyes and reacted to this poetry. And he got the idea of starting a clandestine orchestra. He found a bunch of musicians who were prisoners in the camp and he started writing pieces. They were not extraordinary pieces. They were just songs. And they performed them in the latrines and they'd have sentries posted to see if the SS sentries were coming so they could scatter. And he wrote some songs that jumped from camp to camp, and he did what needed to be done in that place. And this was actually before the war started. It was just before the war started and his father had escaped to London and had some money and managed to bribe him out of there.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
So he gets out of there. He was in Dachau then Buchenwald and then makes it to London. And then he gets a job offer to become conductor of the Manila Philharmonic. So he goes "Oh goody, the Philippines. That's as far away from Nazi Germany as you can possibly get." So he went to the Philippines and then almost immediately the Japanese invaded. And once again, he was in the same boat, he was a prisoner of war. He got the musicians to bury their instruments in farmland in the countryside and so forth and made it through the war alive. And when Manila was liberated in really terrible gruesome battles, he got MacArthur to organize the musicians to come back together, the third of them who were left alive, and performed the New World Symphony and the Eroica Symphony.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And then he came to the United States and he was one of the people who started the Artists in the Schools programs that we have now. And he actually in his old age he was leading youth orchestras all over the place, preferably in places that didn't have them and that didn't have access to so-called high culture. And he was in Tienanmen Square when that happened in 1991. And everybody in the hotel left China immediately and he wanted to stay so he could see what was going on. And he was 89 years old then. So he was quite a remarkable person. And he was somebody who stood up for his entire life for the power of the arts to liberate people, the power of the arts. The arts are not going to free Ukraine. They aren't going to free Tibet, but they are going to make people sit up and be more human and persevere and realize what it is that they're trying to do here on Earth.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And in this little documentary, "Never Give Up", this kid asks him, "How do you read music?" And I think his answer was something like, "Even if it's difficult, anything you want to learn, you can learn. If you really want to do it."
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And it was amazing you got to get to know him.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I wanted to talk about parameters in improvisation.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Nice.
Leah Roseman:
So we can't have too many, but it's helpful to have some.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Right. Well, there's all kinds of views. There's as many views on parameters as there are improvisers. And for that matter, let's just talk about parameters in music. Because on the one hand you have the completely composed score where everything is set and the performer has the skill of transcribing that score into sound, but still we enjoy the performance when the performer puts herself into it and makes it an individual act. So there's some improvisation there. And at the other end of what you might call extreme improvisation, that is people having no parameters and just getting up and making noise. They still, even if they don't intend to, are still listening to each other and still affected by their environment. So to some degree that totally free... I'm thinking of what's called free jazz. So free jazz is still structured, and totally scored classical music is still free.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And right in the middle, you have certain traditional forms like jazz, like Indian classical music, which are you might say, half and half. They have certain patterns and structures that have been passed down from person to person for years, decades, or centuries. And within those patterns or around those patterns, people are improvising and putting their own voice into it and discovering new things. And we enjoy those performances probably an equal degree by how much they're playing the tune that we recognize and how much they're creating something brand new.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
They're creating something brand new. And then there's the people, I guess I'm sort of in this camp, of people who are not playing with external parameters at all, but are playing with some internal parameters and discovering patterns. You begin to make a sound and you have no intention before you make the sound. But now that you've made that sound, that sound sculpts the environment that you're in. And so now the second sound is played within that first environment. And now the relationship between the two sounds is placed within that environment.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And meanwhile, you have the room and the feel of the place and your breath and the breath of the people and how the floor feels on your feet. And gradually you discover that there's an enormous amount of structure and you're uncovering that structure as you play.
Leah Roseman:
Something I ask a lot of improvising musicians is if they're hearing what they're about to play before they play it. And I find it's not everybody. People have different ways of working. How about yourself?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Sometimes I do. Sometimes I don't. I usually don't, but I do sometimes.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Sometimes people get together and say, well, let's play. We need some structure, so let's play in D minor and in 4/4 time or something like that. So I'm not one of those people I'm not interested in those types of structures at all.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
But what I am interested in is the structure that's formed when people are paying attention to each other.
Leah Roseman:
Well, on that note, do you want to take a music break? Do you want to play some music?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Why not? What's to stop us?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I might just have to adjust my mic.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Okay. Well, I'll play on this thing. It's coming out of the speakers, but I think the level will be okay for.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I'll play and you'll let me know-
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
If it's too hot.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So I have a regular acoustic violin. Is that too loud? I can turn it to. Well, before we start improvising, I just want to make sure the sound's not going to be-
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Is that too loud?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Making sure that the sound is good.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
It sounds great to me, but making sure the sound is good means you're already improvising.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I'm a podcaster, so I have to make sure it's not distorted. I'm just going to turn this down a bit.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
My phone is ringing over there, so I have to play with that too.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Wonderful.
Leah Roseman:
That was fun.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
Love the water phone. I played one with Jesse Stewart a few episodes.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh, cool.
Leah Roseman:
Do you know him?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
No, I don't. I mean, I know who he is, but I don't know him.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. You should meet him. It was interesting. Because with him, we were talking about how when he went to university, he was studying both visual art and music at the same time and his art professors were very supportive, but his music professors not so much.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So I was just thinking, I know there's always more things I wanted to ask about. One thing we didn't discuss that I'd love to discuss with you a little bit is somatic awareness. I believe you've studied Alexander technique and maybe Feldenkrais.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
I didn't really study them.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
But I know something about them. I mean, I have friends who are real practitioners, but I think, I mean, any kind of somatic awareness is so important. Because otherwise if you play an instrument here, you'll just be like crumpled up like a piece of cardboard in about five minutes, unless you're really aware of how you're breathing and how you're moving and balance and weight. And the interesting thing about a violin bow is that the average violin bow weighs 60 grams. So you need 60.00001 grams of forest to keep it from falling to the ground, and that's not very much.
Leah Roseman:
So I'm just curious. It's on the string though. I mean the weight of the bow is being held.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
No, I'm saying I'm just holding the bow in the air.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Okay. Holding the bow in the air just like this-
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Requires 60.001. Now when the bow is on the string, of course you don't need anything or you might need a gram or two. And so you're talking about very tiny amounts of force and very tiny movements or sometimes very big movements, but they are to learn to become conscious of how you're moving and what you're moving to learn to become conscious of pain as a message about how you're moving and where you're moving and to allow yourself to adjust is really very precious. When I was learning to become an improviser, I was also around a lot of dancers and I learned an awful lot from them.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I was going to ask you actually, I mean, it was it partly your meditation practice that's helped you with that awareness.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Partly meditation practice, but also I was around a lot of dancers.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And the first concerts that I gave as an improviser, I rented dance studios and often did duos or trios with dancers and learned to move myself. And so all these things, the bow, the violin, whatever instrument you're playing, whatever weight you're carrying, you can learn to carry it very lightly with very, very little effort. And when you experience effort or when you experience pain, that's great because those are messages about what you can let go of.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And you can often do so much with less. And that applies to sound also. When people are improvising together and they want feedback from me, 90% of what I have to say is play less because there's so much information there. There's so much information in your neck. There's so much information in your hips. There's so much information in the sound that your partner is sending to you. And you can process that information at your leisure. You can act as though you have all the time and all the space in the world.
Leah Roseman:
And developing a sense of ease, I think, applies to people in daily life, whether they're musicians or.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
And I think it was in "The Art of Is" that you talked, you had a beautiful image of just dialing up or down in terms of your receptivity.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
I love that.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yes. Yes.
Leah Roseman:
Certainly as a performer, when we get very nervous, our focus can get too narrow and it's so, so important to have that broader awareness. I'm always reminding myself of that.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah. And when you're in a performance context, you're often concerned about impressing people and that adds a whole factor of tension into your body.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And so you just learn to spot that and dial it down. And I mean, everybody is, you want to give the people, if you're performing, you want to give the people their money's worth. If you're a kid in school, you want to do well, whatever do well means. If you're a teacher, you want to give the kids something that gives them something. But to be able to be silent sometimes and to sit back and do nothing can be so powerful.
Leah Roseman:
I believe-
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And you might find in the space of a five minute piece, that there's a hundred places where you can do nothing and there's still plenty of information in that piece. And if you're giving a talk to people, there are so many places where you can just say nothing and yet there's still a tremendous amount of information that's going on.
Leah Roseman:
I just wanted to interject. I think it was maybe in your first book "Free Play" that you talk about the Buddhist, the judge, the different ways-
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
The judging specter.
Leah Roseman:
Yes. That's it.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yes. Yeah. I mean, we have that so much. I mean more so now than when I wrote "Free Play" in the 1980s because our society has become completely insane over assessment and students are assessed and students are expected to assess their teachers and the schools are assessed and performers are assessed and people are assessed in their jobs. And there's so many surveys and people can be driven completely insane by trying to live up to other people's judgments, let alone living up to your own judgements. And so it does become a kind of boogeyman in your head.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And to get rid of that boogeyman, it's like walking through. I just thought of that image in the Lord of the Rings where Frodo and Sam are walking through Shelob's Lair. And there's like all these spiderwebs, giant spiderwebs and you're having to like. I mean, we walk through society, you spend 15 minutes on the internet and how many popups come up asking you to assess something and how many things pop up asking for your attention when all you want to read is an article. So we've become obsessed with assessment and we have to just ignore it.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And sometimes if we're in a job situation, we have to render into Caesar that, which is Caesars, but then get off of it as soon as you can.
Leah Roseman:
I was reading a neurologist. She was writing about the fact that 50% of our brain is taken up with our visual cortex. And I was wondering since you're not playing from music sheet music anymore.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
It must really change things because I'm an orchestral musician. It's so visual. The conductor and everything, it can really get in the way.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Right. It's true. It is very visual. And yeah, I think that's, for me, it's really great to not, and I'm certainly influenced or inspired. I mean, I remember when I was speaking to Menuhin one time talking about visual art and he said, oh, so it inspires you, meaning this is the score and the rectangle of the computer that I have in front of me as we talk is a score of a kind and the trees outdoor, the oaks and the poplars are a score. So there's lots of scores besides the notation, but it is really wonderful.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And for me personally, and I have extraordinary admiration for my friends who are musicians who play scores and do it far more beautifully than I ever could. But I'm thinking, you were talking about if I could swivel to the side here when we were talking about the body. I don't know if I can even do it, but there's like pianists neck, where you see pianists where the music is here, they're relating to that, to the keyboard underneath. But the head has to be up to see the score and you see this absolutely wonderfully wiggling body at the shoulders.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
But meanwhile, the head is like tilted up and it just seems very painful to me. And yet people do it year after year and they do beautifully. So maybe it's fine, but I would find it very uncomfortable.
Leah Roseman:
I was thinking what you said about the trees outside are part of the score. You've done a couple of recordings recently where you use beautiful field recordings that are integrated.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh yes. Thank you. Yeah. I mean, I've actually been in isolation for three years now because pretty much the minute "The Art of Is" came out and I was about to start doing trips and gigs, I discovered that I had a bunch of heart problems. I had an aneurysm and valve, all kinds of bad stuff. And I ended up having open heart surgery, which fortunately turned out completely fine, but I wanted to give myself six more months after that to really get my energy back and be able to travel and do gigs again. So, that would've put me at March of 2020.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
So I've been here and fortunately I have a home. It's a nice home in the country. I'm very much aware of people who don't have those things and have had to deal with the pandemic, whereas it's been fairly easy for me. So what I'd been doing for getting out into the world was just getting out on the trails in the forest here and recording birds. I became really intensely aware of bird song. And it's sort of like what I said before about practice, when the Buddhist priest said the word practice. It's like, I was aware of bird song obviously through my whole life before and I was always interested in biology, but somehow it hit me between the eyes and I really, really got into bird song.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And I discovered that I could record the thrushes out there and bring it into the studio. In the computer, you can slow it down and drop it three or four octaves and it sounds a great deal like whale song. And there's all kinds of interesting things going on there. And so I did an album of music, violin, viola, electric violin, plus birds, plus eight or 10 species of birds that live right outdoors here and that was called "Hermitage of Thrushes". And then I teamed up with a good friend of mine, David Rothenberg, who's a clarinetist and multi-instrumentalist and improviser, but who's also spent years improvising with birds, with whales, with insects, with all kinds of creatures.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
So we did a remote album together over the internet, much as you and I are hanging out today. And then I started doing things with other people. So, the whole pandemic period has actually been really fruitful for me. I've been very fortunate. I've had three albums of new music come out and a fourth one is about to come out with another friend, a flutist, Ellen Burr, whom I'd played with for many years, and then another flutist-
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And then another flutist album came out at the end of last year, Anders Hagberg from Sweden. So we were able to record remotely between Charlottesville, Virginia and Gothenburg, Sweden, and that turned out really well.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
So the connection with nature and the connection with other people, even through this weird electronic medium that we find ourselves in, is very interesting. And now that I'm about to start traveling again and doing things in the so-called real world, I'm so aware of how much my practice has changed through this connection with birds and the connection with remote people, and the kinds of dialogues that I've been able to have that I would simply never have had if it weren't for the pandemic and if it weren't for us getting comfortable hanging out with each other over long distances electronically.
Leah Roseman:
So these recordings you made, were they done in this way, so out of sync, or were they done... you make a recording then the person reacts to that?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
No, no. We played together on Zoom. And of course, the sound of Zoom is crappy, but we would each have on each of our sides, we would be simultaneously recording with good equipment. And then we'd bring the recordings back into the studio here.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
So we'd have your side and my side and the Zoom video. And you use the Zoom video to synchronize the other two and then throw away the sound from the Zoom.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And now you have a nice, quality studio recording. And in some ways, it's almost better than recording live because if you and I are playing together and I make a blooper, whatever that means in the context of improv, we just have to cut that part of the music out; whereas, in this context, it's almost like the way music is recorded in the pop music world, in studios with separate tracks.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
So that if I make a blooper, I can just dip my sound down while yours keeps going. So the flow of the music continues all the way through. And then you can do little editing things like taking parts of one of us and doubling it and putting it in another place in the track and starting to build up more multi-layered voices. And so, of course, when you start editing in the studio in that way, that starts blurring the line between composition and improvisation.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. We were talking about the internet and, of course, this is one of the beautiful things about the internet.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
But we got away. Actually, I did want to circle back to this Buddhist idea of the judgment specter because I didn't really get you to speak to that.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
The big boogeyman in the head who hovers over you and tells you that it's not good enough, that you're not good enough, that you'll never be as good as so-and-so; that no matter how many years you practice, you'll never be as good as so-and-so; that oops, you made a mistake. Isn't that terrible that you made a mistake?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
So I have this chapter in "The Art of Is" called "Finger Kissing", which is the antidote to the boogeyman. And that comes from... There was this guy named Johann van Beethoven, whose little boy, Ludwig van Beethoven, was a talented little pianist. And the father was mindful of the example of Mozart running around to the crown heads of the world and entertaining them as a little kid.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And he figured that little Ludwig van Beethoven would be the goose that laid the golden egg for his family. And so the father would stand over the son and whack him on the fingers with a big stick every time he made a mistake.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
So one day I was teaching a workshop at Juilliard, where these students were far better musicians than I will ever be. And many of them had never improvised before. And they did absolutely gorgeous pieces.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And then there was one that was out of sync and weren't really listening to each other. And they were looking dejected and glum. And I could tell that Johann van Beethoven was in the room, whacking them on the fingers. Oh my God, you made a mistake. You weren't perfect. So I told them to go around, walk around the room and start kissing their fingers.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
So finger-kissing is great. It's an antidote to the judging specter because believe me, we all have that specter roaming around inside. And of course, in our world of assessment and judgment that is present in schools and in the arts, and in business, and just about everywhere in life, the specters are inside and outside.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
There's nothing wrong with trying to do something... seeing something you did and trying to do it a little better or adjusting it, adjusting your angle, or adjusting the weight or something. I didn't like the way that sounded, so I can try it this way now. And now I could try it this way, and now I could try it this way.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
That kind of judgment is okay. But the kind of judgment that is about you're no damn good and you'll never make it, and there's only one right way to do it, and look at the masters who have come before you...
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
I mean, there was poor Brahms who waited 20 years to write his first symphony because Beethoven was sitting on his shoulders. How could I ever equal that guy?
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. I sometimes wondered if Brahms wasn't so neurotic, how much more music we would've had from him.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yes, indeed. Indeed, yes. Actually, it was thanks to a really boring... I was originally thinking of putting it in the book, but it's going to have to go somewhere else. My encounter with Jesus Christ, thanks to Brahms.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
So I was involved in a music festival where the concerts took place in a Catholic church. So we, the audience... At one point, I was watching a concert and there were six really top-of-the-line, wonderful musicians playing a Brahms sextet. And they were so competent and so terrific, and it was so boring because they were just phoning it in.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
But I was crowded into these pews, these hard pews, with a bunch of other people. And I certainly couldn't move or, God forbid, leave. So I just went into this trance and I looked behind the musicians; there was a huge life-size crucifix. And it was one of these Spanish-style crucifixes with the crown of thorns and the wound in his side and the blood dripping everywhere, and this gruesome, long, pained face that was tilted down like this.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And I was looking at him. And suddenly, he lifted his head up and he looked right at me and he said, "Don't be an asshole." And then he put his head down again.
Leah Roseman:
Stephen, I wanted to ask you about John Cage.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Okay.
Leah Roseman:
You knew him. Because I'm playing a lot of new music, and often it sounds random, but it's so carefully notated.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
It's such a relief for me when the composer writes, especially in orchestral music, "Approximate pitches. Play out of phase with your neighbors." And I'm like, whew, we can just improvise for a few minutes and not worry about this incredibly.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
That's right. That's right. Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
But you said that John cage didn't like improvisation.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
He did not like it, right. It's so weird. He was a person of so many contradictions because his ideas inspired so many musicians and other kinds of artists who were into improvisation and all different kinds of creative expression. And so many of us owe him a huge debt of gratitude.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
But at the same time, he liked to control the situation. I remember he had some interview about... You can find it online. There's a wonderful series of five close-to-an-hour radio broadcasts that Cage and Morton Feldman did together in the '60s. Absolutely wonderful. And it was in one of those broadcasts where Cage was complaining about the New York Philharmonic. Leonard Bernstein had invited Cage to do something with the New York Philharmonic.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And they were given one of these sets of scores or instructions that had to do with approximate pitch and range and were given a lot of freedom within the parameters that were set. And he said something to Feldman about how they just didn't want to do what they were obliged to do, which was a strange word because it's like you are obliged to be free.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
It's like at the beginning of Free Play, I talk about the ultimate double bind, which is somebody pointing at you and saying, "Be spontaneous." Right? So they were obliged to be free. So they had to be free, but in the way that he was prescribing.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
But he was in a position to really inspire people to really be free. And he was contemptuous of Beethoven. He was particularly contemptuous of Beethoven because, of course, there was the kind of cult of Beethoven in the classical music world. But the whole notion that people were kind of in a jail of what they were obliged to perform and obliged to like. And yet he was also aspiring to be a composer in that vein.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
There was a lot of contradictions there. And I said to him... So he said to me something about, well, he's very suspicious about improvisation and he doesn't really like it. And I said, well... He was also a very avid and accomplished mycologist.
Leah Roseman:
I was going to bring that up.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And I asked him, "Well, John, when you go in the woods hunting for mushrooms and you decide which ones to eat and which ones not to eat, do you throw the "I Ching" or toss coins, or do you use your feeling and knowledge of mushrooms?"
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
So he just gave me this big, seraphic smile, and that was his answer. He didn't like improvisation because improvisation is based on feeling and impulse.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And I wonder, to some extent... I mean, he was a person who was such a breakthrough artist. He was gay at a time when this was illegal possibly. His mentor, one of his mentors, Henry Cowell, who was an extraordinary, prolific composer and teacher of composers in the 20th century.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Henry Cowell was put in jail for several years for being gay and never really recovered from that. I'm just speculating now. I just don't know. And I never knew John well enough to ask him. And I wouldn't have had this thought back in the '80s when I was talking to him. But I just wonder if the whole notion of expressing emotion openly and in public was something he wanted to avoid because it was dangerous.
Leah Roseman:
That makes a lot of sense. So sad.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
The mushroom thing was actually a much lighter thing because you tell that story in your book about why he got into mycology, which I thought...
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Oh, yes. So he got into mycology because... I mean, he was on the level of many university biologists and had an extraordinary collection of mushrooms. And he got into my mycology because as an undergraduate student at Pomona College, a professor said, "Hey, John, you're so focused on music. You should broaden your interests."
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And so already being John Cage, he got out a dictionary and looked up the word "music," and looked right above it and saw the word "mushroom." And he said, "Okay, I'll learn about that." And he really devoted the rest of his life to really, really learning about mushrooms.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
He was just a fascinating, fascinating person. So many contradictions. Perhaps the amount of his contradictions was, in fact, one of the things that inspired so many people, through his work, to do their own work, to inspire people to do work that doesn't look anything like his work at all. But somehow, they feel they have the license to do it because he did his work.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. It's interesting in terms of creativity and curiosity, that story about mycology, because it was a random thing. Like his music, he was into randomness, his parameters. But yes, you just pick something and you go into it deeply enough, it becomes fascinating.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
That's right.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
That's right. Yeah. He had a statement that he repeated many times that if you find something boring for two minutes, try it for four minutes. And if it's boring for four minutes, try it for eight minutes, and then 16. And eventually, you'll find that it's quite interesting.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And the other thing that was inspiring about him was he took... I think he just audited a class with Schoenberg when he was young in LA. And Schoenberg told him, "Look, you're never going to be a composer because you just don't have a grasp of harmony and music theory and all that stuff."
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And so John just said, "Well, screw you. I'm really going to..." He didn't say it to Schoenberg, but it's like, "Okay, if Schoenberg says that to me, then I'm going to be a composer." And he was. And he busted so many boundaries.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
I can certainly identify with that because my identification with Western harmony is so minimal. But to be told that you can't do something because you don't fit the mold is a very, very powerful thing.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
My wife is a physician. And when she was applying to schools, that was still in the day when there were very few women in medical schools, she was told in an interview, "Well, are you sure you want to do this and give up having a family?" So her response was basically, "Well, screw you. I'm really going to be a doctor now."
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. She works in palliative care, am I right?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
That's right.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. She's Buddhist as well?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
She's Buddhist as well. Boy, you've really been doing your research. This is an amazing interview.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Thank you. Yeah, she works in palliative care and she's a professor here at the University of Virginia in the medical school. And we met through Buddhist practice. The Dalai Lama did a series of teachings called the Kalachakra initiation in LA in 1989, and that's where we met.
Leah Roseman:
Oh, wow. I was thinking because you had this very scary episode with your open-heart surgery recently.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah.
Leah Roseman:
But she must have a different perspective than most wives in terms of working with people at the end of life and having that Buddhist grounding.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, she also had her swords out in the hospital, making sure that things happened right.
Leah Roseman:
All the angles.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yes. From all the angles. It was really extraordinary to go through that experience with her. And there she was, sleeping on the window ledge, night after night, when I was in the hospital room. She's just an extraordinary human being.
Leah Roseman:
Does she play music at all?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
No, however, she has extraordinary expertise in rock and roll and punk as well as comic books. She has extraordinary expertise in rock and roll, science fiction, comic books, Buddhist philosophy, and she's a fifth-degree black belt in Taekwondo.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. One of my other guests was conductor Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser, and I was asking him about advice for conductors. And he said, "Go down your rabbit holes. Follow your interests. And you never know where they're going to take you."
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yeah. Yeah. That's great.
Leah Roseman:
And I love to end these conversations with similar questions. I'm wondering, would you have any advice for the younger Stephen Nachmanovitch or do you have advice for people finding their way, trying to bust out of boundaries that they feel are being imposed on them?
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Yes. I'd say, well, I agree, go down your rabbit holes, but also find the other people who are going down their rabbit holes that might be a little bit different from yours. But you can help each other and you can find each other and support each other. And that's really important because there's so much in our world that is working to split people apart.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
And it's great when we can find each other and assist each other in those rabbit holes and keep culture alive, keep the things alive that are being decimated, and new things will flower. It's going to be a very, very difficult century coming up, and we need all the creativity we can get.
Leah Roseman:
We do. Thank you so much for your wise words and your generosity today. It's just an honor to meet you.
Stephen Nachmanovitch:
Thank you so much. My pleasure.
Leah Roseman:
My life is so enriched by getting to know these incredibly inspiring creative guests and their perspectives on their lives in music. Please follow this podcast and sign up for my podcast newsletter to get sneak peeks for upcoming guests and find out about newly published transcripts.
