Music of the Unquiet Mind

In 1944 the avant-garde composer John Cage wrote “Four Walls,” a 70-minute work using only the white keys of the piano. It was the music for a “dance play” in two acts by the dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, who would later become Cage’s lifelong partner. I rediscovered “Four Walls,” virtually forgotten for four decades, in the 1980s. It has since become one of the most personal works in my repertoire. Its repetitive, insistent nature struck a deep chord within me. It was as if someone had entered the innermost rooms of my mind and translated their contents into sound.

I asked Cage, whom I first met in 1981, about this compelling musical essay in inquietude. He told me that “Four Walls” was about the disturbed mind, a subject of fascination for Cunningham and himself during the mid-1940s. Two years after the completion of “Four Walls,” Cage seriously considered giving up composing to undergo psychoanalysis; he turned instead to Asian philosophy and Zen Buddhism.

The music in “Four Walls” is of a non-narrative nature. Its many silences and static repetitions do, however, contribute to an atmosphere of growing entrapment, inviting the listener to probe the deep recesses of his psyche. Each person brings to the experience what he wishes or, rather, what he is. (...)

I have lived with obsessive compulsive disorder for as long as I can remember. When I was a child it manifested itself in a spectrum of behavioral quirks ranging from an adamant insistence that the bow in my hair be perfectly straight to a perpetual need for reassurance to allay my many fears, largely imagined but painfully real to me. A few years ago I came across the perfect depiction of O.C.D.: an image of a child trapped in a merry-go-round cage while his parents looked on helplessly.

My own parents did not know what to make of it all and did their best to cope with my idiosyncrasies. Fortunately for them I insisted on having piano lessons when I was 6, and this became a creative channel for my obsessive energies. One of the classic manifestations of O.C.D. is compulsive counting. Till this day I count the number of steps when climbing a flight of stairs or the number of times I rinse after brushing my teeth. These counting rituals permeating my daily life serve no particular purpose other than to satisfy the need to perform them. That is the nature of O.C.D. Enter music and rhythm: you can imagine how delighted I was to be actually required to count the beats in a piece of music. I could now count to my heart’s content in a totally creative fashion! (...)

Through Cage and his take on Zen philosophy, I have made a truce with my O.C.D. I recognize that it is integral to who I am and have come to accept myself, warts and all. Obsessive-compulsives are, not surprisingly, perfectionists. Yet, I have learned to relinquish the grand illusion of the goal and relish, instead, the unfolding of the process. Cage’s highly forgiving definition of error, as “simply a failure to adjust immediately from a preconception to an actuality,” has helped temper my self-judgmental parameters of right and wrong, all or nothing. 

by Margaret Leng Tan, NY Times |  Read more:

Illustration: Karen Barbour