Peter Lieberson's Articles on Lions Roar

Peter Lieberson, composer of "King Gesar," describes his creative journey from the high intellectualism of twelve-tone theory to a trust in the play between spontaneity and technique. Just before Prince Siddhartha sat down to his final meditation session, after which he would be known as the Buddha, or Awakened One, he had an interesting realization. Ascetic practices of mortifying the body and attempting to control the mind did not work. As the prince was contemplating this insight a young girl tending her cow passed and offered him some milk. Then a farmer gave him a seat of kusha grass. The prince accepted these gifts, and, after months of denying himself the basic necessities of life in his search for enlightenment, he ate the food and sat down on the mat of grass, comfortably arranged himself, and simply opened his mind. In that moment the Buddha solved a spiritual conundrum: he realized enlightenment only when he finally stopped struggling to become enlightened. He discovered that the essential nature of his mind was primordially free and that the obscurations of neurosis and habitual patterns of all kinds were temporary. The Buddha let go of his struggle because he saw through all the techniques he had been faithfully practicing for years. He understood that the intrinsic wakefulness of his basic being was beyond any concept of enlightenment. At the same time, he discovered that freedom paradoxically came about through those very disciplines that were artificial, gradual in application, and, ultimately, constricting. So for those inspired to follow the Buddha's example, a path developed based on the skillful methods of the Buddha himself and of realized teachers in the lineages that followed. From the very beginning of the Buddhist path simple techniques are presented to the student that encourage a state of wakefulness; in a sense one is deliberately playing a trick on oneself. Still, because one is trying to let go, there are nine yanks, or vehicles, in the Buddhist path that present ever more subtle and powerful techniques, each wearing out the previous ones. From this perspective, it might be said that enlightenment is a kind of transcendental exhaustion. In the early 1970's, Buddhism's initial appeal to me was that it was not a religion in the conventional Western sense. Buddhism did not posit the existence of any external deity or savior or, for that matter, an individual personal ego. Although there were religious trappings in the form of rituals and observances, the great Buddhist masters seemed to be very eccentric and unpredictable. Their basic message was: be brave enough to experience existence without dogma or beliefs of any kind. At that particular stage of my life, after much self-analysis, I was, finally, bored. I felt I was carrying an enormous conceptual superstructure in my head to get through situations. Fundamentally everything, especially myself, remained an enigma. Buddhism seemed to address this dilemma by removing the ground on which I thought I had been standing. Among the books I first read was the popular Be Here Now (1971) by Ram Dass (Richard Alpert). He was entertaining and ridiculous. Vicariously enjoying his experiences, I felt I was slumming from my intellectual heritage. I loved the story of his Hindu teacher taking a fistful of LSD and remaining blandly serene while an agitated Ram Dass anticipated a crack-up. I began practicing meditation on my own, relying on The Secrets of Chinese Meditation (1972) by Charles Luk. It was a far more substantial book than the supermarket title suggests. I followed instructions for self-cultivation according to the Tian Tai school. I discovered that Buddhism placed a tremendous importance on the role of the teacher, an accomplished fellow human being able to guide students on their path. I read stories of Chinese Ch'an and Japanese Zen masters. They were fiercer, more humorous, and more pointed than the Hindu masters; I preferred them. Trying to find such a teacher, however, was another story. I attended a lecture given by a semi-certified American roshi at the New School. His brand of enlightenment was a huge guffaw and a few anecdotes about the ego as a swinging door. The analogy seemed fine, but he didn't. I wandered from bookstore to bookstore. One day a friend introduced me to a book by Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche called Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism (1973). This book tossed me through my world into an uncertain space. I was instantly aware that someone was speaking to me from the other side, so to speak. From that moment on, I never had any doubt that Chögyam Trungpa was an enlightened person, and whatever the many things that could have meant at the time, it certainly meant that he saw reality in a way I had never seen it. I was inspired and terrified. Chögyam Trungpa was former supreme abbot of the Surmang monasteries in eastern Tibet. He was recognized at the age of thirteen months as the eleventh incarnation of the Trungpa line. He was known by numerous titles, but in the early days of his residence in the United States he was known simply as "Rinpoche," an honorific given to teachers that literally means "Precious One." But Rinpoche's students used the term more as an endearment than as an expression of guru worship. Worshipping the teacher as a way of elevating oneself was a form of insincerity that Chögyam Trungpa regarded with lethal cynicism. Finally I met him. The occasion was a seminar. The place was a seedy loft in downtown Manhattan. The students consisted of hippies, intellectuals and a few people with full-time jobs. A number of women in the audience moaned, "Oh, Rinpoche," in theatrical distress when Chögyam Trungpa lit up a cigarette. I was thrilled. He was brilliant. He drank sake and smoked cigarettes, great pluses as far as I was concerned. He dressed quite elegantly, too. He seemed to be one of us and yet not one of us. I could not quite make the whole thing out. To this day I remember one of his sentences: "Fear of losing ground causes a screen: aggression and tightness operate." Here was my own language being used in a way I had never heard it used before, skirting on psychological jargon but free of it, penetrating and accurate, right to the heart of everyone's squirming, nonexistent ego. My friend introduced me to Chögyam Trungpa at the end of the talk. As we exchanged hellos, I had the distinct impression of encountering an energy that spun me like a top down the street and into the night. "As for myself, I experience a sort of terror when, at the moment of setting to work and finding myself before the infinitude of possibilities that present themselves, I have the feeling that everything is permissible to me." —Igor Stravinsky: Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, 1970 During this period I had nearly completed a master's degree in musical composition from Columbia University. My principal teachers were Milton Babbitt and Charles Wuorinen, both brilliant men and composers. I learned many secrets of musical composition from them. These I practiced diligently, living a Spartan life and seeing hardly anyone. The musical world I inhabited was hermetic—sealed and self-secret. This was the era of twelve-tone music and, especially, twelve-tone theory. Theory to me meant the mysteries of a new musical universe locked up in the relationship between numbers, their inversions and retrogrades, their multiplicative transformations. These investigations were carried on in the famous journal Perspectives of New Music. Therein, the terrain Arnold Schoenberg had discovered by intuitive leaps of genius was methodically mapped out for the next generation. Not all composers were suited to this kind of thinking, but those who were not were made to feel irrelevant. For the rest of us, this was clearly the path of the future. What was daunting, however, was the complexity of method. I would erect theoretical edifices capable of housing multiples of the twelve-minute piece I was working on. The possibilities were endless: the relationships within one set of notes could be extended to aggregates of sets and further expanded to multiple arrays of sets. Then one had to realize all this stuff as music, for performers who needed time to breathe or draw a bow across a string. Curiously, after each piece was finished I would forget what I had done. Beginning a new piece involved the formulation of yet another set of theoretical concepts. I found these experiences to be true for other composers as well. Individually we all understood what we were doing, but each piece required its own particular explanation. There seemed to be no common ground other than an underlying theoretical method. Justifying a piece by means of the theory behind it was solipsistic, the first symptom of disease. I became immensely dissatisfied with the musical results and not too sure about the ideas behind them either. I needed to rest and rethink what I was doing. This discontent combined with the politics of musical life—the intense competition for very few rewards—to provoke a sense of revulsion. I was fed up. As time went on I was drawn out of my city hermitage into the world of the sangha, the community of Buddhist practitioners. I met Chögyam Trungpa again, this time in Boulder, Colorado, and asked to be accepted as his student. He said, "Sure," further throwing me off: didn't such a portentous move on my part require a like response? Little did I know. When asked by a famous sitar player how he should meditate, the Buddha said that he should work with his mind the same way he would string his instrument: not too tight, not too loose. In 1976, I moved to Boulder. I had enjoyed considerable success for a young composer. My music had been played by Pierre Boulez and the New York Philharmonic; I had a publisher and a number of grants, awards and commissions. But to the despair of my loved ones, I seemed to be throwing all this away. I...

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