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Music, Aesthetics and Legitimation: Keith Jarrett and the

"Fourth Way"

by

Christopher W. Chase

Conference Draft Copy Not for Quotation or Republication

Without Permission

2010 Midwest Popular Culture Association and Midwest American Culture Association Conference

Minneapolis, Oct. 1st, 2010

Panel 1211 - "Religious Crosscurrents in Culture" Panel Chair: David Schimpf, Marian University

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Good afternoon all. I would start by thanking David Schumpf for

his gracious help in putting together these sessions and also share

my joy in the recent news that these particular sessions this year

have the most participants they have ever had. In my experience this

would be consistent with a recent explosions of work combining

music and cultural criticism in general as well as pluralistic

relationships between music and religion in particular. In my view we

are living in a small renaissance of scholarship in this area. At the

same time, what my colleagues might not be aware of is the slowly

but definitely growing scholarly interest in esoteric and occult forms

of religion, not merely in terms of late antiquity or the Renaissance,

but even up into the 20th century. And this is precisely what I wish to

speak to. In terms of the 20th century Georges Ivanovich Gurdjieff, or

simply "Gurdjieff" as he is often referred to, must be counted as one

of the most influential and yet least understood esoteric figures. He

died in 1949.

At the same time Gurdjieff in both his person and esoteric

system has been a lightning rod for critics and skeptics who

denounce him as a devious charlatan. Yet one of the most distinctive

elements of Gurdjieff, his legacy of music, remains somewhat

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obscure to cultural critics. I seek here to analyze the role of Gurdjieff

in Keith Jarrett's music, and suggest that musical aesthetics has

become a general venue of open legitimation for Gurdjieff's ideas with

Jarrett as the primary cultural broker in this regard.

I do not wish to overstate my position. Jarrett has not been the

only high profile artist to have become involved in Gurdjieff’s

teachings or what students of Gurdjieff have generally called “The

Fourth Way.” Harlem Renaissance author Jean Toomer, most noted

for his modernist novel Cane, also became a disciple of Gurdjieff. As

a result of his personal study Toomer recorded several experiences of

enhanced consciousness and growth towards a sense of universal

kinship and shared essence between all beings.1 Luminaries as varied

from the architectural giant Frank Lloyd Wright to Timothy Leary and

novelist Katherine Mansfeld all found some connection to him.

Neither was Gurdjieff's output limited to music. Toward the end of his

life he wrote several works intended to present his ideas to a larger

public. He was also known as a choreographer and teacher of dance.

Gurdjieff's esoteric system as a whole is vast and varied, and I

can only present the briefest of overviews, but hopefully this will be

                                                                                                                         1 Frederik L. Rusch, ed. A Jean Toomer Reader (New York: Oxford University Press) 1993, 31-76.  

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enough for our purposes. According to Gurdjieff, human functioning

takes place on three different levels, cognition, emotion and

movement--all of which are almost hopelessly fragmented because of

modernity and its "discontents." These 3 different levels correspond

to the what he called the three ways people have traditionally

attempted to re-link themselves to the Cosmos: the yogi, the monk,

and the faqir (or dancer). Gurdjieff's system was, generally speaking,

an attempt to use all these modes and more in the service of a

[QUOTE] "Fourth Way" [ENDQUOTE] as an answer to the dis-

integrating forces of the modern world. The purpose of this Fourth

Way is to achieve an integral self-- conscious of its deep connection

to everyone and everything else.

Gurdjieff called this concept "self-remembering," as composer

and devotee Thomas de Hartmann noted.2 In this way re-membering is

understood not merely as informational recall, but esoterically as the

antidote to modernist "dis-membering" of the self--an antidote leading

back to the Absolute Creator: God. Gurdjieff claimed that this project

was an almost impossible task, and yet one that had to be undertaken

if humanity was to collectively survive modern challenges.

                                                                                                                         2 Thomas de Hartmann, Our Life With Mr. Gurdjieff (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1964) 10.  

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The key to both the difficulty of this project and the possibility of

its success lay in his cosmological structure and the role of music in

it. Gurdjieff taught that the relationship between the Creator and his

Creation is in the form of levels or "rays" separating the two. The

active principle of the absolute is to radiate in the form of

progressively denser material. You can see the debt to Neoplatonism

here---the principle of materiality is a coagulation of successively

heavier elements. As heavier elements, they have an inertial tendency

to drag beings at their level away from spiritual illumination--literally

the radiance of the Absolute Source.3

First fully developed in 19th century Theosophy, this "Ray of

Creation" --- this series of levels descending from a NeoPlatonic

absolute, is by no means random, but corresponds to "the law of

octaves." Therefore, proper functioning of cause and effect involves

active participation in a large cosmic harmony of deep metaphysical

structure, this harmony providing a path to negotiate a return to the

Absolute.

                                                                                                                         3 Here I draw upon some of Antoine Faivre's ideas on radiance and crystallization in Gurdjieff's work. See Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism (Albany, NY : State University of New York Press) 212-3.  

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For Gurdjieff, materiality and its associated suffering has its

appropriate function in providing obstacles for humans to refine and

focus their integrated being against, in a manner similar to what

theologian John Hick has famously called "soul-making."4 But the

situation of modernity has deteriorated to the point that humans are

merely and continuously torn apart and dissociated by their

encounter with material reality, foreclosing the possibility of an

authentically integrated ego for a series of associations with transient

goods and pleasures. This Gurdjieff called "being asleep." The task,

as Gurdjieff and his disciples saw it, was to rupture this sleep,

creating an opening for awakening and authentic growth to take root.

Creating the conditions for rupture and growth were different for each

student, simply because the specific nature and style of

fragmentation and false coalescence varied from pupil to pupil.

ENTER JARRETT

Enter Keith Jarrett. Jarrett is without a doubt continues to be

one of the most important and influential musicians in the post-bop

                                                                                                                         4 G.I. Gurdjieff, Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson: An Objectively Impartial Criticism of the Life of Man (New York: Penguin Books, 1950), 748.  

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era of jazz music. Like many others, he passed through the gates of

hardbopper Art Blakey, and also played electric with Miles Davis for a

time in the early seventies along with his current drummer, Jack

DeJohnette as well as Chick Corea. Well before he began the most

well-known musical phase of his life, doing long solo piano

improvisations on the ECM label, Jarrett as a late teenager had taken

to reading Gurdjieff, and in most account of Jarrett's life, some small

mention of this is made.5

Jarrett’s devotion to Gurdjieff forms an often-mentioned but little

analyzed area of significance. Critical studies such as Steve Lake’s

Horizons Uncovered: The Music of ECM, make periodic note of

Gurdjieff’s influence, especially because in 1980 Jarrett released a

solo piano album of music originally composed by Gurdjieff and his

associate Thomas de Hartmann under Gurdjieff’s personal direction.

Gurdjieff was known to collect bits of folk melodies and other tunes

throughout his early life. However, these were not developed more

fully until de Hartmann became a disciple of Gurdjieff's from 1917.

The Gurdjieff-de Hartmann catalogue is extensive, with estimates

                                                                                                                         5 The most extensive discussion of this subject can be found in Ian Carr, Keith Jarrett: The Man and His Music (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo, 1992). Reprint of a 1991 book on Grantia Press published in London. On Page 41 Jarrett recalls here his attraction to the "Law of Octaves," although he appears to be referring to P.D. Ouspensky's discussion of the idea. Ouspensky was a disciple of Gurdjieff. Also see Keith Jarrett: Art of Improvisation, Euroarts, DVD, 2005.  

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ranging anywhere from several hundred to over a thousand short

pieces of music.

As Jacob Needleman has noted, trying to assess the role and

influence of Gurdjieff in contemporary culture can be difficult,

because of his emphasis on method rather than doctrine per se.6 As

mentioned, it is quite common for material written about Keith Jarrett

to include oblique references to his involvement in the Gurdjieff work.

Jarrett's ECM albums, and indeed ECM albums in general tend to

include booklets showcasing and promoting other works of both

Jarrett's and other ECM artists, including Jarrett's album sampling the

Gurdjieff's/de Hartmann music: Sacred Hymns of G.I. Gurdjieff, in

1980. As Jarrett's 1975 Koln Concert remains the best selling jazz

piano album to date, promoting his material is easy and making

Jarrett's religious music accessible is a simple matter.

This recording is often described as out of place in the Jarrett

canon, and does not reflect much of Jarrett's own style. Until Jarrett's

1980 release few had heard the music outside of esoteric Gurdjieff

working groups. Its neither one of Jarrett's quartet or trio recordings.

Nor is it improvisational piano work (like the Koln Concert) or one of                                                                                                                          6 See Jacob Needleman, "G.I. Gurdjieff and his School" in Modern Esoteric Spirituality, edited by Antoine Faivre, Jacob Needleman, and Karen Voss. New York: Crossroads, 1992, 359-380.  

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his experimental instrument recordings. Its a simple, fairly bare

transcription. I would describe the pieces as short and stark. The All

Music Guide for Jazz describes the album as a group of [QUOTE]

"some solemn, now-dark, now-affirmative religious hymns by one G.I.

Gurdjieff, with none of the usual flourishes and heady flights...Jarrett

assumes the proper devotional position, playing with a steady tread

but always with attention to dynamic extremes, producing a

gorgeously rich piano tone with plenty of bass. The whole record has

a serene dignity, even at its loudest levels, that gets to you."7

[ENDQUOTE] Having undertaken this music and brought it into the

public consciousness for the first time, Jarrett was subsequently was

invited years later to help produce and release original recordings of

Thomas de Hartmann playing the hymns.

The pieces, with names such as "Holy Affirming--Holy

Denying--Holy Reconciling" are replete with single-spaced notes,

dramatic tempo/volume changes and unresolved harmonic tensions

that destabilize the listener in a fashion reminiscent of the writing

style and neologisms all throughout Gurdjieff's written work. In fact

the hymn I just mentioned describes a principle of quasi-Hegelian                                                                                                                          7 Richard S. Ginell, "Sacred Hymns" in All Music Guide to Jazz (San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1998), 596.  

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progression through the Ray of Creation and into the world according

again to a "law of octaves," or what Gurdjieff also called the

"Vivifyingness of Vibrations."8

It is perhaps John Kelman who provides the best

description of the Gurdjieff-de Hartmann piano music-- [QUOTE]

"Often revolving around simple progressions, with a naïveté

reminiscent of Satie, its majesty remains subtle and

understated...near-ambience."9[ENDQUOTE] The analogy to Erik

Satie, from his Gymnopédies to especially the Gnossienne works, is

apt not only for his use of spare melodic form and subtle use of

minimal techniques. Satie of course was active in 19th century French

occult circles of his own, including Joseph Peladan's Rosicrucian

salons. The namesake of the Gnossienne, the term "gnosis"--refers to

a esoteric insight or occult interpretation of religious truth. And it

forms the very basis of Gurdjieff's religious methodology--the

recovery of gnostic insight from age-old folk stories and musical

forms.

                                                                                                                         8 Gurdjieff, Beezelbub's Tales To His Grandson, 138-9.  9 John Kelman, "Present and Future Songs" in Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM, ed. Steve Lake and Paul Griffiths (London: Granta Books, 2007) 350.  

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This link between Jarrett's effort and Gurdjieff's was

prefigured just the year before Sacred Hymns was released. With the

release of Peter Brook's film adaptation of Gurdjieff's book Meetings

With Remarkable Men, the music of that film took center stage.

Besides winning the Best Music Award at the 1979 Oxford Film

Festival, the soundtrack album practically provided a dissertation for

its liner notes. Director Brook emphasized that from the very first

scene the spiritual search of the young Gurdjieff begins with a type of

pure vibration, a vibration known to be correct through its harmonic

resonance with the landscape of the first scene itself. The very end of

the soundtrack arrives with "The Great Prayer," a musical

accompaniment for a series of sacred gymnastics, Gurdjieffian

movements designed to attune the consciousness of the participants

to more rarified heights. Music, as other arts, was thought by

Gurdjieff to be a latent esoteric mode of gnostic transmission.10

And it is this search for musical gnosis that forms for

Jarrett and his audience a modern journey in search of spiritual

mastery. As Antoine Faivre has observed, Gurdjieff's quest for the

unknown master has been a hallmark of esoteric and occult religiosity                                                                                                                          10 Back Cover, Meetings with Remarkable Men: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. Varese Sarabande STV 81129, 1979. LP.  

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at least ever since Renaissance mystics like Jacob Boehme sought to

join with Christian Rosencreutz and the hidden band of Rosicrucian

reformers in 17th century Germany.11

In his 2005 release Radiance, a two-disc solo piano set recorded

in 2002, Jarrett included some thoughts in the liner notes as to the

process he was working under at that time. He had entered a phase

where he wanted to unlearn old ways of what he called “premature

resolutions” to the music. As he explained in a DVD film released the

same year, he had been trying to remove previous patterns of

thinking and preparation so that new creative possibilities would

open themselves. As Jarrett put it, his “left hand” began to tell him

things and teach him that it had more to say than his conscious mind

had previously allowed. Jarrett was trying to guard against the

habitual conditioning of material personality so warned about in

Gurdjieff’s teachings.

“Transformative moments are very rare, or they seem so due to our inattention. It takes so many processes to coincide just so for us to arrive at a transformative moment (if we’re watching). But maybe this is wrong, and they happen constantly, although we are absent. The listener has to bear with me here. The whole

                                                                                                                         11 Antoine Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism (Albany: SUNY Press) 2000, 184.  

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thing is risky, but I've taken you to places before and I'm not aiming to disappoint.”

Jarrett also expresses surprise at the emergence of an overall

structure to the music, suggesting his subconscious was receiving

the next piece of the puzzle. In Jarrett’s view, [QUOTE] “we are all

players and we are all being played.”[ENDQUOTE] Understood from

an esoteric perspective of vibrational theory, Jarrett's subconscious

might be understood as receiving echoes and harmonic overtones in

same way that Peter Brook descibed the first scene of his Gurdjieff

biopic. In this case, you might say that proper functioning of Jarrett's

cause and effect involved active participation in a large cosmic

harmony of deep metaphysical structure--one that communicated

with him in as much as he attuned himself to it.

Perhaps the most Gurdjieffian character of Jarrett's

musical paradigm is to be found not in the precise attention to score

found in his 1980 album, but ratter in both his earlier and subsequent

works like Radiance. Jarrett is committed to improvisation as a type

of reception or "channeling,"---an ability to access sacred power. But

this comes only at a risk. In discussing the Gurdjieff/de Hartmann

music, John Allen Watts notes that "the experience of performer and

audience alike sharing a common simultaneous experience through

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the music is akin to the experience of being touched by something

higher, more real, in a group meeting, with an emphasis on the

emotional component. Perhaps, one can say that the music acts

directly on the emotional center in order to effect the harmonious

reconciliation of the three centers?"12

That's a tall order, to be sure. And perhaps a dangerous

one, given that Gurdjieff and Jarrett both understand music as

directly operating on human consciousness in a fundamental way.

Jarrett's articulation of the perilousness and danger (even at the risk

of one's "self") of such explorations serves more than mere rhetorical

purposes. Rather, they are classic markers of ritual discourse. As

others have suggested, Jarrett's music, especially his solo piano

concerts, are highly ritualized, even "sacred-sensual music" events.

Jarrett has even been known to stop his concerts and lecture the

audience on their commitment to share his risks in improvisational

performance.13 All of these bespeak a radical departure from classical

and jazz aesthetics that focus on formal analysis or so-called

                                                                                                                         12 John Allen Watts, "Introduction to the Gurdjieff-de Hartmann Piano Music" in G. I. Gurdjieff: Armenian Roots, Global Branches, ed. Michael Pittman (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing) 2008, 41.  13 Peter Elsdon, "Listening in the Gaze: The Body in Keith Jarrett's Solo Piano Improvisations" in Music and Gesture, ed. Anthony Griffin and Elaine King (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006) 194-5.  

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absolute music. As Peter Elsdon has noted, there is an entire set of

somatic language gestures that Jarrett typically goes through in

concert. His own contortions contrast with the uncomfortable

positions Gurdjieffian dancers are to put themselves in via those

"movements." I would suggest that Jarrett's solo performances are

his parallel of the Gurdjieffian dances or movements designed to shift

consciousness--not only for Jarrett, but for the entire audience as

well--hence the risk.14 So I suggest that these performances as a

whole are far better understood as a form of occult liturgy rather than

secular jazz improvisation.15

The results of these "collective" improvisational rituals can

be understood as a type of phenomenological opening, a vanishing

mediator augmented by the quasi-shamanic bodily cues undergone

by Jarrett and validated by audience reaction.16 His piano

improvisations form narrative sets of stories, often undergirded by

                                                                                                                         14 See Mel Gordon, "Gurdjieff's Movement Demonstrations: The Theater of the Miraculous," The Drama Review: TDR, 22(2), 1978, 38.  15 Jarrett is on record as having "stopped" reading Gurdjieff, although he dismisses the idea that he has refuted it. He appears to have developed his own relationship and interpretation of the involvement in Gurdjieff's ideas, unsurprisingly. See Carr, Keith Jarrett, 130.  16 On the comparison to Frederic Jamison's notion of the "vanishing mediator," see Jarrett's and Sandner's analysis in "Jazz, The Piano and Jarrett's Galaxy" in Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM, ed. Steve Lake and Paul Griffiths (London: Granta Books, 2007), 246.  

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familiar pedal points, vamps and gospel set-offs. As with Jarrett's

own music, others have understood this style in both the life of

Gurdjieff and the Gurdjieff-de Hartmann music. Anja Lechner, a

German cellist, describes herself as drawn to composers and musics

grounded in the folk traditions of their homelands, storysongs. It is in

this context that she discusses her pursuit of Gurdjieff's music--a

musical search very much patterned off of Gurdjieff's own

autobiographical work Meetings With Remarkable Men.17 Lechner,

admits she was initially inspired by Jarrett's album. But rather than

suggesting she was following in Jarrett's direct footsteps, Lechner

seems to be indebted more to a common ideological ancestor or

Jarrett's: the project of spiritual seeking itself. Certainly this is

admitted by her collaborator Vassalis Tsabrapoulos, who claims that

music should have both a spiritual dimension and integrative

dimension in terms of everyday life.18 Yet Steve Lake reminds us of

Lechner's and Tsabrapoulos's historical debt to Jarrett in the liner

notes to Lechner and Tsabrapoulos's 2004 work Chants, Hymns and

                                                                                                                         17 Quoted in David Fanning, "Late-Soviet and Post-Soviet Music: The World Within" in Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM, ed. Steve Lake and Paul Griffiths (London: Granta Books, 2007), 212-3.  18 Quoted in Wolfgang Sandner, "Jazz, The Piano and Jarrett's Galaxy" in Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM, ed. Steve Lake and Paul Griffiths (London: Granta Books, 2007), 260.  

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Dances. This dimension of spiritual seeking embodied in a folk search

for authentic religious power is a subject I and others written on

elsewhere. And as for here I will suggest it forms a powerful anti-

modern romantic countercurrent within modernity itself, and perhaps

forms a more general component of the record label ECM's own

appeal in the world of recorded music.19

ECM's own website suggests the Lechner/Tsabropoulos

work be understood as blurring the lines [QUOTE] "between East and

West, composition, arrangement and improvisation, and between

contemporary and traditional music."[ENDQUOTE] On Chants, Hymns

and Dances, the only works not attributed to Gurdjieff (those by

Tsabrapoulos) are sandwiched between Gurdjieff's works. They

function as bookends for Tsabrapoulos's own spare folk-based

melodies. Their treatment of the Gurdjieff-de Hartmann hymns are not

so much a restatement of the Jarrett interpretation as they are

expansions and improvisations based on portions of the Gurdjieff-de

Hartmann piano music released with the assistance of Jarrett in the

mid to late 1980's.

                                                                                                                         19 See Karl Lippegaus's discussion of folkism as uncovering music's "abstract and enigmatic" power in "Colours, Densities, Forms: How ECM Changed Folk Music" in Horizons Touched: The Music of ECM, ed. Steve Lake and Paul Griffiths (London: Granta Books, 2007), 265.  

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When ECM released Chants, Hymns and Dances in 2004,

Lechner and Tsabrapoulos's interpretation of the Gurdjieff/de

Hartmann music--- performed on piano and cello, author Steve Lake

remarked in the notes that Jarrett's 1980 album radically challenged

the obscurity of the music that had existed since Thomas de

Hartmann's death.20 As I just noted, Lake revealed that Jarrett was

specifically encouraged to bring this music to a wider public by a

member of the London Gurdjieff society and subsequently undertook

the task, along with ECM's Manfred Eicher, of restoring the old

Hartmann recordings, leading to a 4 LP set released on Triangle

Records in 1985. Releases and interpretations of Gurdjieff's music

have since flourished, due in large part, I think, to Jarrett's role as

cultural broker.

Jazz music is rightly understood to have deep roots in the

Blues and Gospel tradition. But slowly scholars are coming to

understand the role of Hinduism in the music of John Coltrane and

Charles Mingus, the role of Islam among musicians such as Art

Blakey and McCoy Tyner, Dizzy Gillespie's own Baha'i faith tradition,

and even the place of Scientology in the work of artists like Chick                                                                                                                          20 Anja Lechner and Vassilis Tsabropoulos, Chants, Hymns and Dances. ECM New Series 1888, 2004. Steve Lake authored the essay in the liner notes.  

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Corea and Anthony Braxton. It is my hope that alongside these efforts

we can find a place to discuss Western Esotericism as it manifests in

the music of John Zorn, Sonny Rollins, Charles Lloyd and Keith

Jarrett. Thank you.