A spiritual (?) journey (Part 3)

Earlier I noted how Keith Jarrett's music moves me, how at times it fills me with a sense of wonder. This is something I rarely experience listening to other music. Other music may provoke an emotional response in me (it may make me feel sad or happy, for example) or leave me feeling contented, but these are responses on a different level.

Also, I find it difficult to relax while listening to Jarrett's music, not because it's discordant (on the contrary, most of it is extremely harmonious), but because it commands my attention. In other words, I often feel I have to stop what I'm doing and listen intently.

Keen to find out why Jarrett's music has this effect on me, I tracked down a copy of Inner Views, a book not widely available outside of Japan based on a lengthy interview with the pianist conducted in November 1988 by Japanese music journalist Kunihiko Yamashita.

In the interview, Jarrett describes how he realized quite early on in his career that he approached music differently from most of the other musicians around him. To him music was not just a form of entertainment; it was something far more serious.

Towards the end of the interview he says of his piano playing, "There are no emotions involved. So many people think it's an emotional thing in the way that emotions have colors like…happiness and anger and joy, but really as soon as an emotion is involved in a concert, I also lose the music."

He also recounts the following episode:

"One time someone came backstage and said, 'It was a nice concert, but the chairs were uncomfortable.' They were very uncomfortable, just little chairs. And I said, 'Oh, gee, I'm sorry. Should I do it again in a comfortable room for you?' But then I said, 'Did you ever learn anything when you were comfortable?' Who learns anything when they're comfortable?"

Throughout the book Jarrett speaks about his own music with a fervor that suggests he's on a mission. But if the point of the music is not to entertain or provoke an emotional response, and if he's not concerned with the comfort of his audience, then what is this mission?

The answer is hinted at in the following statement at the very beginning of the interview:

"I don't think of myself as a musician. When I hear myself play I realize it is not about music. It is about staying awake and continuing to perceive. Perception, awakeness and awareness."

Jarrett's ideas on the importance of what he describes as "perception, awakeness and awareness" owe much to the teachings of George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, a Greek-Armenian mystic who influenced many artists and writers in the early- to mid-20th century. Gurdjieff had some unusual ideas about music, and reading them reassured Jarrett that he was not alone in regarding music as something utterly serious.

"I knew my calling was music. But as to why that calling - why such a serious calling was in a world where the other people doing this didn’t feel serious…there was some discrepancy there. But this seriousness that surrounds music is what Gurdjieff explained. Not serious like the opposite of happy, but a profound, reasonable quality that emanated from music. Something that moved, truly could be a moving force."

I was convinced that if I wanted to know more about the effect Jarrett's music had on me, I needed to learn something about this Gurdjieff fellow. I went to the library and found a tatty old hardback entitled The Harmonious Circle: The Lives and Work of G. I. Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, and Their Followers, by James Webb. It turned out to be one of the most interesting books I've ever read.

(To be continued...)