Top 10 Most Wabi-Sabi Pieces you've heard

[Karl Henning]

The nature of incompletion: a topic we have not exhausted.

[some guy]

The nature of incompletion: a topic we have not exhausted.

You can easily picture me laughing out loud.

(My cat, nap disrupted, was not amused.)

[Madiel]

Chopin's preludes are the first things to spring to mind. I know people who can't get into them precisely because many of them are gone before they've had a chance to register.

[Karl Henning]

Chopin's preludes are the first things to spring to mind. I know people who can't get into them precisely because many of them are gone before they've had a chance to register.

Nice.

I suppose we might append the Prokofiev Op.22.

[North Star]

Surely Webern too, if we include Prokofiev and Chopin.

[Karl Henning]

Well, except that, while Webern wrote miniatures, they are perfectly self-contained structures.

[North Star]

Well, except that, while Webern wrote miniatures, they are perfectly self-contained structures.

True enough.

[James]

The nature of incompletion: a topic we have not exhausted.

Reminds me of Boulez. This topic/thread gets my vote for one of the most ridiculous of all time at GMG.

[Karl Henning]

True enough.

Though I suppose we may still pursue the fractal angle 

[Luke]

Reminds me of Boulez. This topic/thread gets my vote for one of the most ridiculous of all time at GMG.

I've been letting that sit unanswered for a few days, wondering if it was just me that found that post so bizarre. No one else has replied, so perhaps it was, then!

Though I often disagree with him in his assessment of certain composers, I 'get' why James dislikes them as virulently as he does. There are perfectly valid reasons for his tastes differing from mine WRT certain music. So that's fine, and I don't think I've ever really argued about any of those issues here. But this? It confuses me. I honestly do not understand why a thread which is utterly inoffensive, which is not concerned with any particular composer or even any particular style of music, and one which raises what I personally think are interesting and thought-provoking issues concerning musical aesthetics, should cause James to react in such an OTT way. 'One of the most ridiculous threads/topics of all time.' Really?

I don't post anywhere near as often at GMG as I once did. There are plenty of personal reasons for that of course - my life is so full and (right now) so stressful that I don't have the time or the peace of mind to spend carefully composing posts as I once did - but there is another reason, which is that I find I have less to say here these days. I've been on boards like this since 1998, and I've said everything so often. The old days of writing long, involved posts and getting mixed up in intense discussions on e.g. AC or the niceties of various methods of notating string harmonics are long gone. Life's travails have put those things into perspective, too, I have to say.

But sometimes a thread does enough to pique my interest. This is one of them. I find it fascinating. What interests me is what asking a question about a Japanese artistic theory reveals about the aesthetics of classical music. Maybe James is just uneasy with the idea of different aesthetic worlds, hence his dismissal of the thread, but I find it totally absorbing. It puts us out of our comfort zone, makes us reassess fundamentals. Wabi sabi is a complete philosophy of art, sufficient and perfect in itself. It is not really congruent with the aesthetic of classical music, but that doesn't lessen either. The difference between them is in their attitude to materials. Classical music is predicated on taking raw materials and using as much intervention as is necessary to make them into something flawless, perfect and imperishable - just as a raw block of marble can be carved into the Venus de Milo, for example. Wabi sabi art, OTOH, is predicated on the idea of only using as much intervention as is necessary to bring out the intrinsic qualities of the material, and letting flaws and imperfections speak for themselves - maybe more like the way Rodin would leave figures only roughly finished, seeming to emerge from raw stone, letting the natural lines in the stone find their own expression instead of bending them to 'The Will.' (That's not a great example, and I don't think Rodin is wabi sabi at all, really.) Extend this line to its furthest extreme and you reach art which makes no intervention on the materials whatsoever - a Cagean art which accepts materials as they are. I know James hates that idea, and though I don't feel as strongly as he does about it I recognise that as it's an extreme position it is possible to have an extreme view on it. But wabi sabi isn't that or anything like it, it is simply art which encourages us to work with nature and its imperfections, and not to try to tame them too severely. I don't really understand why that is so offensive.

For me this whole thread raises interesting questions which have a personal resonance. I have hardly composed any music for years, and the musical part of the reason behind this inactivity is that these days I feel the competing pull of these two aesthetics so strongly in me. I was born, brought up and trained in classical music; I know it, love it, breathe it, speak it, dream in it. It cannot be taken out of me, nor would I want it to. But (especially since things started going badly in my life about seven years ago) the quietness and humility of wabi sabi speaks to me so strongly that I cannot divorce it from my music either. And the two simply cannot co-exist. As I said in an earlier post, I managed, for a while to write some very intimate and 'natural' pieces, mostly for piano, which I think went in the right direction. But when I want to codify that method, or to expand it for larger forces, or to write longer pieces, it withers before my eyes - because those things are just not what wabi sabi does. This is the problem I have, and it goes to the heart of this thread, for me. The difficulty in finding ways to have these two equally wonderful aesthetics co-exist might not be something that has much interest for most people on this board, but nevertheless it exists, and that is why I find James' response so peculiar and also - as it dismissively disposes of something I have found of passionate and painful importance for a long time now - so personally resonant.

[Karl Henning]

Limited intervention, yes.  I guess that is part of what I am puttering with, in these recent essercizi in electronica.  Intervening, certainly, but only as much as (I am trying to discover) serves the goal of beauty.

[Brian]

Luke with the Post of the Month, there - and with another reason why I'm thankful for anything you do write here, when you have the time/wherewithal to do so.

[kishnevi]

Luke with the Post of the Month, there - and with another reason why I'm thankful for anything you do write here, when you have the time/wherewithal to do so.

And say us all, Amen.

[James]

Wabi sabi art, OTOH, is predicated on the idea of only using as much intervention as is necessary to bring out the intrinsic qualities of the material, and letting flaws and imperfections speak for themselves.

Hey Luke .. read your post here. Sometimes I feel that our tendency (almost game) to use & graft words gets carried away. Things get murky, gray, redundant. It takes us away from the music. Without any of the fancy verbiage, what you describe in the quote above sounds like what happens in a lot of popular music(s) .. pop, rock, jazz etc.

In fact, there is plenty of music/performance that is imperfect at all levels of engagement. Advanced, or naive. I never heard of this 'wabi sabi' wording before and I don't think I needed to.

("wabi sabi") As say, a strict practice or approach to music making, I don't see it as a serious one. It's rather underdeveloped, almost stillborn. Too easy and lazy as well. Musicians should strive for better.

[jochanaan]

You see, I don't get that. Not a slight on Bruckner at all, nor anyone else, but I don't see the connection between Bruckner and wabi-sabi.. It's as I said earlier - wabi-sabi is concerned in part with a humility and a willingness to be subservient to materials which doesn't match up to the aesthetics of classical music....

...but does match up to Bruckner's working methods.  And perhaps one sees more wabi-sabi elements in his choral compositions.

In Beethoven's famous Fifth Symphony's first movement, there is in the beautifully-constructed coda an odd bar of dead silence that disrupts the "expected" phrase length and rhythm.  Very wabi-sabi moment.

[Luke]

Hey Luke .. read your post here. Sometimes I feel that our tendency (almost game) to use & graft words gets carried away. Things get murky, gray, redundant. It takes us away from the music. Without any of the fancy verbiage, what you describe in the quote above sounds like what happens in a lot of popular music(s) .. pop, rock, jazz etc.

In fact, there is plenty of music/performance that is imperfect at all levels of engagement. Advanced, or naive. I never heard of this 'wabi sabi' wording before and I don't think I needed to.

("wabi sabi") As say, a strict practice or approach to music making, I don't see it as a serious one. It's rather underdeveloped, almost stillborn. Too easy and lazy as well. Musicians should strive for better.

I don't agree with all of this, James, but I see your points. Specifically I don't really agree that this is just throwing around words, 'fancy verbiage.' As I say, I have personally found that the competing claims of these two styles which mean so much to me have stymied my own composing to a large extent. So it is clear to me, at any rate, that something is going on here, and something which to me is worth exploring. Call these different aesthetics by different name if you want, but they certainly exist. And as wabi sabi has a venerable and well-documented history stretching back many centuries and closely allied to Zen Buddhism, it seems to me to be a term which sums up this particular aesthetic very well.

I see what you are saying re jazz, pop music etc. Certainly they place a far greater emphasis than classical music does on the acceptance of imperfections. Indeed they often welcome them as an integral part of the music. This is obviously particularly true of jazz. 'The grain' of an individual's voice or instrument, say, or even a failing in technique, lend this music expressive force which the smoothing out of these features would nullify. But even so, wrt most pop music, most jazz... I wouldn't see it falling into the same area as wabi sabi, simply because some of the other fundamental precepts of wabi sabi are at odds with those of jazz and pop. For instance, Wabi sabi eschews urgency and forcefully heightened impact; it does not use precise measures, rulers, set squares. Plastics and man-made materials are not used. Fluctuations in regularity are of the essence. Music which has a precisely regular beat, especially one reinforced by drums, and music which is synthesized/electified/amplified in order to impose itself, are not really in tune with the wabi sabi aesthetic, I would say. Of course there are countless examples of pop and jazz which do fit closer to the wabi sabi ideal, of course - I'm thinking of obvious things like Blue in Green from Kind of Blue, probably because of Bill Evans' liner note which draws the parallel with a type of Japanese calligraphy which is very wabi sabi in essence. The 'unplugged' movement in pop music is/was a movement in the wabi sabi direction, too. But these are the exception to the general rule, IMO.

As for wabi sabi being 'stillborn' or 'under-developed,' I find that rather dismissive of a way of thinking and working which, as I say, has been around for hundreds of years and to which countless artists have dedicated their lives. Nor is it 'easy' - I can attest to that myself. But, hey, it's all only opinion.

...but does match up to Bruckner's working methods.  And perhaps one sees more wabi-sabi elements in his choral compositions.

In Beethoven's famous Fifth Symphony's first movement, there is in the beautifully-constructed coda an odd bar of dead silence that disrupts the "expected" phrase length and rhythm.  Very wabi-sabi moment.

Jo, I still don't see the Bruckner connection to wabi sabi. When you first made it, and knowing your posting history, I did guess that you might be thinking of the choral music at least as much as you were the symphonies, and reading your latest post early this morning I listened to the E minor Mass on the way to work this morning (loving every moment of it, of course). But I still can't see the connection.... or rather, I can see it, in the special purity and essential simplicity of Bruckner's language, and the man's essential humility, of course, but I still think this is outweighed by the other features. The repetition, the regularity, the carefully-graded teleological movement towards climax... And with Bruckner more than most composers, in fact, there is an obsessively strict regularity - I am talking about the literal bar-counting, which is another way of saying that Bruckner is here really wresting control of his materials, really concerned not to lose himself in them.

And if I had to choose one piece which was the opposite of wabi-sabi, it might well be Beethoven 5's first movement, simply because the piece is almost the poster boy for all the things wabi sabi isn't. It is a tremendous effort of Will and power - a piece almost entirely constructed around a single idea, relentlessly worked and repeated for all it is worth, in the service of a iron grip, towards a tumultuous, overwhelming climax. To me the pin-point placement of that silence you mention is an example of Beethoven playing with the listener's responses, holding their emotions in his control, pummelling, withholding... Incredible stuff, but not, to me, wabi sabi. 

[mszczuj]

Der Leiermann.

[North Star]

Der Leiermann.

Wabi-sabi is not tragedy.

[mszczuj]

Wabi-sabi is not tragedy.

Neither Der Leiermann is.

[mszczuj]

Beethoven - Presto of op.130.