To Know or Not to Know? Music Composition and the Tao
In the past year, I have been training up my skills in musical composition, doing harmonic exercises, composition exercises, and understanding the elements of music: harmony, melody, rhythm, timbre, at levels I haven’t gotten to before.
Yet there is a part of me that fears knowing too much. Or perhaps this is inaccurate. Perhaps I mean losing sight of the purity from which my very early compositions came, when I didn’t really know what I was doing. Despite a lack of knowledge, these compositions held such beauty because I was guided by something I could not really comprehend. An instinct. A feeling. I like the idea that Rick Rubin talks about in his book The Creative Act. This idea posits that we, as composers, are conduits for the will of the universe. All musical ideas are out there in the spiritual realm already, and our job as composers is to act as dreamcatchers, allowing the ideas of the universe to flow through our bodies, minds, and souls into our instruments and onto paper, a computer, or whatever else.
I have recently been reading The Tao of Pooh and The Te of Piglet, a gorgeous explanation of some of the guiding principles of Taoism through the stories of Winnie the Pooh (cute, right?), and a specific quote spoke to me here:
An Empty sort of mind is valuable for finding pearls and tails and things because it can see what’s in front of it. An Overstuffed mind is unable to. While the Clear mind listens to a bird singing, the Stuffed-Full-of-Knowledge-and-Cleverness mind wonders what kind of bird is singing. The more Stuffed Up it is, the less it can hear through its own ears and see through its own eyes. Knowledge and Cleverness tend to concern themselves with the wrong sorts of things, and a mind confused by Knowledge, Cleverness, and Abstract Ideas tends to go chasing off after things that don’t matter, or that don’t even exist, instead of seeing, appreciating, and making use of what is right in front of it.
Let’s consider Emptiness in general for a moment.
What is it about a Taoist landscape painting that seems so refreshing to so many different kinds of people?
The Emptiness, the space that’s not filled in. What is it about fresh snow, clean air, pure water? Or good music? As Claude Debussy expressed it, "Music is the space between the notes."
Of course, I want to continue building on my foundations, hopefully going to a music school, learning more about orchestration and the interaction between instruments, writing in counterpoint, expanding my knowledge of music history as far as I can. However, I think one must not lose sight of why I feel composition speaks to me like no other activity. That is, it connects me to this infinite well of emotion and spirit through which all creativity swells, and it is life-affirming. Let us take the analogy of a hike. Knowledge can certainly help in allowing yourself to choose an adequate route, to not get lost, to know when the last train is so you do not get stranded in the middle of some English countryside. But what of your connection to the earth with each footstep? What of the sensation of soft wind blowing against your skin? What of the visual sensations, of luscious greens and rustic greys, which surround you? And what of the sensations in your ears? The trickling stream? The baa of a distant sheep? Does knowledge help you in this regard, to connect to your surroundings with your whole body and breath? To me, this latter series of questions is what hiking is truly about. And I think I feel the same way about music. This is why Daniel Johnston is an infinitely better musician, in my opinion, than Jacob Collier. The emotion of Johnston’s shaky, out-of-tune voice and an equally shaky, out-of-tune guitar, singing his heart out in his beautiful song True Love Will Find You in the End, is so much more important than someone who can do harmony exceptionally well but whose songs carry the emotional weight of a grain of sand (not to mention the fetishisation of a singular way of understanding music). Johnston is what music is about. He is what life is about.
Similarly, I had an interesting discussion with my tutor over the idea of arbitrariness in composition. He told an anecdote from his time at Guildhall, where the professor had presented some abstract graphic scores and much of the interpretation of the scores was apparently up to the performers and how they responded to the graphic markings. My tutor explained he felt the whole thing was "a bit arbitrary", and as I nodded along, I was thinking… "How do I get in contact with this professor, how do I get into Guildhall and take their class?? Because that sounds like the most fascinating thing ever…". I love this sort of thing. I was doing an exercise at the time which involved changing the time signature of my piece after a certain number of bars, and this number of bars or time signature was decided by the Fibonacci sequence. Maybe it is because I have some trauma from double maths in school, but to me this felt a lot more arbitrary than what the professor was doing, because I do not hold a connection to the Fibonacci sequence. But an artist’s interpretation of graphic notation comes from something other, something deeper.
One of my favourite composers who inspires me in this regard is Toru Takemitsu (1930–1996). He was (mostly) self-taught and saw composition not as control but as cultivation, like tending a garden in which sounds could breathe on their own. In the 1950s he explored tape and early electronics in pieces like Water Music (1960), which involved using sounds produced by droplets of water and manipulating such sounds to resemble traditional Japanese instruments such as the tsuzumi. In the 1960s Takemitsu became more inspired by John Cage and his openness to silence, a liberation from structure and a renewed sense of freedom for performers. For example, Corona (1962) for piano uses a graphic score of circular diagrams rather than linear notation, where each ring suggests clusters of sounds and textures to be interpreted in the order the performer chooses. What moves me most deeply about Takemitsu is how he balances this openness to silence and sound together. His notion of ma (間), or the space between sounds, is central to this. Silence is not absence, but a field that gives shape and intensity to sound. In later works, he often structured music so it emerges from silence and recedes into it again, allowing listeners to feel the weight of what is unspoken or unheard.
Ultimately, I compose not to produce perfection, but to cultivate presence. I want to keep learning, sharpening my tools, but never at the cost of losing that fragile instinct which drew me to the practice in the first place. To be able to connect to the world, to others, to something greater. Like Takemitsu tending his garden of sound, I want to let music breathe through me, imperfect and alive, like the breeze. That is what makes music real.
