Emptiness

Merely sitting in emptiness, the mind settles into itself. Environmental sounds appear as empty forms, neither rejected nor affirmed; neither focused in on nor ignored. I play a sound on my kacapi that arises as soundful emptiness and dissolves into the boundlessness of emptiness. This is not the same as saying that it arises from silence and dissolves back into silence. Emptiness is not silent. It is audible as the fullness of form and does not exist separate from form.

For anyone who is not just here—for anyone whose mind is divided into past and future, object and subject—the same sound just played can function as an intimation of emptiness. What for the kacapi strings was emptiness actualized, becomes for them the beginningless beginning of emptiness. 

Sounds are the audible movements of emptiness. A good performer knows how to express emptiness and how to intimate emptiness. How we intimate emptiness is a tacit process that cannot be simplified as the employment of certain playing techniques or stylistic strategies; it is mistaken to assume that emptiness will be intimated by resounding gentle and quiet sounds surrounded by long silences and a clear sky. Emptiness is always sounding but not always heard. Simply recognizing this is what intimating means. 

Tre platser i Augusti

Text orginally posted together with an embedded recording of the piece 'Tre platser i Augusti' in Tara Trinley Wangmo & Erik Pema Kunsang's online Buddhist zine Levekunst.

In the summer of 2016, I wrote a piece for two violins and flute. A warm day in August, some friends and I went out in a garden in Darmstadt, Germany and performed the piece. It was not a concert; there was no stage and no introductory announcement was given. After having played the piece three times at three different locations in the park, we packed our things together and went for lunch. The piece consists of short musical events separated by long gaps of inactivity (silence).

I wanted the music to mingle unobtrusively with the sounds of the garden. By not creating a continuous web of sound with the instruments, as one normally would expect from music, and by always letting the music disappear into silence at unexpected places, my listening experience became that of a calm awareness of the entire field of sound around me. The sounds from the everyday become part of the music; an old man drove by on his bicycle and by the fountain were people playing games. In one of the silences, a church bell sounds in the same key as the music (it is F major). When a musical fragment arose from this field of ordinary summer noises, an acute sense of its ephemeral and dreamlike quality emerged with it, and I was reminded of Gyalse Togme’s instruction: “When encountering a beautiful object, One should consider it to be like a rainbow in summertime”.