Beginner's Mind for Piano
by Walter Zimmerman
A performance of Beginner's Mind (1975) by Kazue Nakamura on SoundCloud
From Walter in 2023:
Thank you so much, Zen Mind Beginner‘s Mind accompanied me through my whole life. I called my Loft where I made concerts Beginner Studio from 1977-1984.
Yours Walter
Here is the introduction. Please add it to your blog.
Beginner's Mind is the result of my study of the contemporary European new music scene. It is influenced on the one hand by Erik Satie, who wrote in the simplest way in the midst of a highly complex musical landscape, and on the other hand by John Cage, especially by his music of the "naive period" around 1950. "Waiting" is one of these pieces.
In the face of a music business that has become independent, detached from the public, and overly managed, I found it bitterly necessary to write a piece that has as its task working its way through the complication that has become towards the simple and direct. So I designed a sequence of forty chapters that show techniques of a way from the old to the new by working through a transcribed piano improvisation. The piece represents the process from the complex to the simple. This is achieved by transforming and dissolving transcribed piano improvisations. The techniques of this process are derived from Shunryu Suzuki's book Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (New York & Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1970).
The process takes place in three chapters: 1) Leave the Old. (Leave the Old), 2) Clean the Mind (Clean the Old), 3) Change your Consciousness (Change your Consciousness). The piece ends with the Beginner's Mind song that articulates the new consciousness.
Beginner's Mind takes its starting point in imagining the materials that I spontaneously played on my piano at home at some point. These 5 moments represent the old, which in the three following books gives way to the new, simple.
The first book takes fragments of what is presented and transforms it, depending on what the chapters demand, e.g.: collect everything, lose yourself, destroy what's around, discover the now. So the first book presents possible variations that still allow the old to shine through.
The second book breaks down the materials into chapters like: let images come and go, find perfectness through imperfectness, limit your activity, dissolve obstacles through constancy, burn yourself completely, create from emptiness.
The third book uses consciousness-altering techniques, using the scales obtained in the dissolving process as material for the reconstruction of the Beginner's Mind song. The material of this song is found in chapters such as: adapt yourself to stimuli, shake through your automatic responses, dissolve your time-feeling, find stimuli with which you are one, grasp the arising ideas, let them free yourself. The pianist, whose attitude - in parallel - leads from the objective interpretation of a heterogeneous text to the subjective going along with the emerging simple structures, intones the Beginner's Mind song at the end of the 60-minute piece the New.
From the Old to the New The fragments selected in the first book, Leave the Old, form the Beginner's Mind song at the end of the piece. Thus, in the chapter "Become the spur of the moment" the fragment is transformed into the accompanying formula of the first bars of the Beginner's Mind melody. Find perfectness through imperfectness" shows again the transformations of the fragment piled up.
"Change mental weed into mental nourishment" now shows the crucial process of dissolving the fragment condensed by the transformations into a scale that is formed into one of the melodies of the Beginner's Mind song. With the acceptance of the past, the core structures of the new are already forming, which form the Beginner's Mind song at the end of the piece. Thus, in the chapter "Become the spur of the moment" the fragment is transformed into the accompanying formula of the first bars of the Beginner's Mind melody. This melody is now the result of the path away from the old to the new and appears at the end after the third book, which is yet to be presented, in the following text context: "If you think you have body or mind, then you also have feelings of loneliness. But when you realize that everything is just a flashing into the vast universe, you become very strong" (If you think you have body or mind, you have lonely feelings, but when you realize that everything is just a flashing into the vast universe, you become very strong). The way to the new is now possible, where the old is dissolved. All fragments are now resolved into melodies.
The second half of the second book now brings the process of internalizing these melodies. In this process, one melody is selected and played through as a representative of the others. The pianist absorbs the melody, first by singing along, then by transforming the melody itself into simple breathing. The second book ends where the fragments are resolved and the melodies derived from them are internalized by the pianist, thus ready for singing in the Beginner's Mind song at the end.
The third book, Change your Consciousness, uses catharsis techniques to manifest the reconstruction of the Beginner's Mind song. First, the harmonic framework of the song is built, which in the following expands and becomes more and more virtuosically charged, until the virtuosity takes on such a life of its own that the core sentence of the song, intoned by the pianist, becomes almost compelling and makes tabula rasa for the song that follows: "We must have Beginner's Mind free from possessing everything".
Beginner's Mind Song. Words by Shunryu Suzuki from ZEN MIND BEGINNER'S MIND
A flower even falls though we love it
And a weed grows even though we do not love it.
What we call I is just a swinging door which moves when we inhale
and when we exhale
lt just moves that is all.
Not two and not one
our body and mind are not two and not one
our body and mind are both two and one.
It just moves that is all.
You think you have body or mind you have lonely feelings
but when you realize that everything is just a flashing into the vast universe
you become very strong.
It just moves that is all.
In the midst of noise your mind will be quiet and stable.
We must have Beginner’s Mind free from possessing everything.
When you are you, you see things as they are
And you become one with your surroundings.
lt just moves that is all.
For the moon there is the cloud for the flower there is the wind.
lt just moves that is all.
The future is the future, the past is the past
Now we should work on something new.
What we call I is just a swinging, door which moves
when we inhale and when we exhale.
It just moves that is all.
Always be a Beginner.“
beginner-press.de and details in German
An earlier note from Walter Zimmerman to DC at cuke.com
I just come back from Japan where my long piano piece Beginner's
Mind was played for the first time in a long time. i wrote it in the seventies
when i was a Zen scholar in Köln with Dagmar von Biel following
Shunryu Suzuki and his book accompanied me all my life, naming a
concert series Beginner Studio etc. I contacted the publisher 40
years ago to get permission to use Shunryu's words for my
Beginner's Mind Song at the end of the long journey the piece is
going through. The piece never reached the circle around Shunryu
Suzuki. This is the first time one close person is answering.
Enclosed you find the score. If I receive the concert recording
from Tokyo I will send you one. After 40 years I came back to
this wonderful book.
Yours Walter
Beginner's Mind - piano piece score
On Beginner's Mind by C.Fox with words to Beginner's Mind Song—the final part attributed to Shunryu Suzuki but he didn't say them in that order—lines taken from the book. - DC