歇尔西梦游乐境

Music cannot exist without sound, but sound can exist without music. Thus it seems that sound is more important. Let us begin with this.
Have I told you the story of the louse yet? Once, there was someone who wanted to learn archery. Archery is a Zen discipline. So he goes to a Zen master and says to his master: “Master, I want to learn archery.” “Yes, that can be done. But first you must learn to see the heart of a louse.” “How’s that?” “It’s very easy. You take two sticks; place them on the ground at a distance of one to one and a half meters from each other.” “Yes, I can do that.” “Then lie down underneath the string. Observe the louse as it relentlessly crawls.” “For how long, Master?” “Well, for a long, long time, until you are able to see the heart of the louse beat.”
Alright, the man tells himself that he’ll try it, He lies down under the string. He observes the louse crawling up and down the string without pause. Now, you all know that when you look at an object for a long time, the object grows. You start to see many details. The man stays there, for a long, long time. （Chinese stories take many years!）Then, one day, he sees the louse grow, becoming bigger, but it continues to march back and forth.. Then, on another day, he sees something beating, just like that, in the louse. By watching the louse for such a long time, the louse has become bigger and he sees something beat: the heart of the louse.
That is now you hear a sound. I have experienced this myself, without having read the story. It happened when I was sick, when I was staying at a clinic. There are always small pianos hidden somewhere in those clinics. Almost no one touches them. So I played a little on the piano. C…C…D…D…While I was doing this, someone said: “This one is even madder than we are!”
If you play a sound for a very long time, it grows. It becomes so big that you start to hear many more harmonies, and it becomes bigger inside. The sound envelops you. The sound fills the room you are in, it surrounds you, you swim in it. But the sound is both creator and destroyer. It is therapeutical. It can heal, but it can also destroy. When you enter a sound, it surrounds you. You become part of this sound. Gradually, you are devoured by this sound and you need no other sound. It’s all in this sound, the entire universe is in this one sound that fills the room. All possible sounds are contained in this sound from the start.
You have no idea what is inside one single sound! There are even counter points, if you like, displacements of various tone colours. There are even ouvertones that produce completely different effects inside and do not just come out of the tone but penetrate to its very centre. One single tone has movements traveling towards the inside and outside. When this sound has become very big, it becomes part of the universe.
As minute as the sound may appear, it contains all.

Besides, sound is spherical, although it seems only two dimensional when you listen to it. Pitch and duration = its third dimension, depth, always escapes us in some way, although we know it exists. The overtones and undertones = we hear less of the latter = sometimes give us the impression that the sound is more complex and comprehensive than can be described by pitch and length. We find it difficult, however, to appreciate this complexity. Besides, we would not even know how to score it. In painting, perspective was invented to create an impression of depth, but in music, in spite of all the experiments with stereophony and various other experiments, no one has successfully overcome the tow dimensions of length and pitch yet to create the impression of a truly sphere = shaped sound.
A sound is spherical, it is round. All that is spherical, has a cnetre.
This can be proven scientifically. Only he who penetrates to the core of a sound is a musician.
He who does not succeed, is a craftsman. A musical craftsman merits respect.
But he is no true musician and no true artist.

Artistic creativity. What is it? It is the ability to stop movement, to crystallize a moment of time, to extract it = and to translate this moment into a verbal, tonal, or plastic material with all one’s soul.

Art is very easy or it is not.

I am not a composer. Composing: Combining different things, componere, that’s not what I do.
My music is not this or that. It is not dodecaphonous. It is not pointillistic.
It is not minimalist. Well: What is it then? One does not know. Sounds are only clothes, garments. But what’s inside a piece of clothing is much more interesting, don’t you agree?

Whether my music is played or not, I do not care. It is difficult to make people understand this, because normally a composer wants his music to be played. I don’t want to force it to happen. If my music is played, so much the better. That’s music. For me It’s enough, if it is played once. I don’t want it to be repeated, to be performed again. That’s the way it is, that’s the way it is. You may not have a very clear idea of my own thoughts yet.
Maybe they are completely personal; perhaps they are true, perhaps wrong;
But in any case they are mine.

The scores will remain, unfortunately. They will be performed, and badly in most cases.
I should not have written any of this. It should have stayed there, concealed, what the heck.
Yes, I could also destroy it. But it would be difficult to bum down the Salabert publishing house.
Everyman his truth…

Our life is also music with its harmonies, with its disharmonies, it various accents, strong and soft, with Andante and Allegro, meditative, rhythmic, and vivacious tempi, with planned, intuitive, and improvised forms… that’s also music, no?

When I was three=and=half or four years old I began to improvise on the piano.
That went on for a while （at the time, taped recordings were not yet possible）: I pounced on every piano I could find and banged on the keys, even with my fists and feet. But no one ever said to me: “what are you doing, you’re breaking the piano. Stop it!” And the people came, too perplexed to tear me away from the piano. The only person who ever did that was a governess and I hit her on the head, on the skull with a big stick. She had to stay in the hospital rather long. Because she had pulled me away from the piano. I suffered a horrible shock. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was in a trance, in a fit. She didn’t know that.
Later I was forced to study music. I was told: “After all, you’ll have to publish, you’ve got talent” and so on. I even came to Vienna to study twelve tone music with Walter Klein, a Schönberg’s student. I even did that and then I fell ill. Naturally, that was to be expected. When someone sits at the piano hours on end without knowing what he is doing and still manages to achieve something, then it means that this person is inspired by some exceptional power that flows through him. But when this is blocked because he must think of a counter point or of how to resolve a seventh or some other nonsense, it’s useless, you won’t achieve a thing.
That made me sick, for four years. I was thinking too much. I haven’t done any thinking ever since. All my music and my poetry have come about almost without any thinking.

I spent a little more than three months in India, in the winter. At the time, my main interest lay in transcendence, the ways to the transcendeatl.

I feel more affinity for the oriental philosophies that speak against violence, against manifestations of earthly life on a practical level. I prefer to think and live on other levels, as much as possible.

Music also leads there, a way of insight, provided you have a certain understanding of music.
There are many ways. There is Christian mysticism, Hindu mysticism, Chinese mysticism. Every form of mysticism is a way to transcendence. You have gnosis and you have Zen. There are many ways to enlightenment = art is one of them, provided you see art from this perspective and not as profession or way of becoming famous or as a means of earning money or something else. Art is a very important way. Among all these ways, music, perhaps, is the most easily accessible. You can also paint without seeing what you are painting. In music you can also sing without knowing what you are singing or even without knowing what you are playing. A state of inspiration, to use this old word, that needs nothing else.

You can consider sound to be a cosmic power that is foundation of all.
There is a beautiful definition: A sound is the very first movement of the unmovable, and this is the beginning of creation.