The Artistry of Oh Su-Fan

“quick o quick, a word of truth”:

The Artistry of Oh Su-Fan

 “Quick o quick, a word of truth. One arm holding the cat, the other the knife.

Quick or I slit the cat’s throat.”

(John Cage, April 1988)

Listening to water flowing in Ridley Creek as I write.      

Reminded of the sound of a stream in Seorak Mountain.

The sound is the same; the experience so different.

No repetition. All is variation (Schoenberg).

Remembering:

the first time I saw the art of Oh Su-Fan

after which, suddenly,

everything changed.

I.

necessity of speed                              

the amount of time it takes

to be empty

and quick

the truth

is not a word

the lines themselves

not symbols

to see

without looking

to draw

without intention

no-minded hand

making

line as activation

of space

love

in the spaces

pleasure

in the emptiness

fullness

of void

the eye

completes

the circle.

II.

act: to act upon

a prepared surface

readiness: to be prepared

a life's discipline

the walk: in woods, in mountains

a long walk: to be empty

stopped mind, opens

to what?

marks made on that prepared surface

the time it takes to quiet the mind so the hand can act

paintings and drawings everywhere: a seemingly endless succession

of mindless acts on both prepared and unprepared surfaces

A room full of paintings, a variety of single colored surfaces

A room full of color, no ascetic blankness

instead

the pleasure of the senses, prepared ahead of time

to hold, to carry

to open up--

what prepares the way to enlightenment?

those colored surfaces?

contemplation yes

but in the natural world

a world of physical pleasures

enjoyed. And then,

only then,

after walks in mountains,

after talk, food and drinks

after living,

while living an ordinary life,

loving that life and its pleasures,

experiencing all in its fullness,

to become empty in that

only then,

the blessings come

becoming empty in that fullness

suddenly--

the lines are drawn,

the space opens up,

again and again,

no repetition (Schoenberg)

endless variation

quick, a word of truth?

no word,  (not this)

no truth, (not that)

III.

keep walking:

movement

what lives,

moves

in English: " read between the lines"

but here, nothing to read

no words, no meaning

just look:

look between

those lines

and see.

Quick!

No "fat man bearing gifts"; no this

is the other version

the void in all things

the fullness of that

the motion of lines

how the living move and make

but what of the space between?

that "nothing between"?

the no-mind of those lines

creating the space

where the void can

whisper ...

listen in those spaces, to what can be heard

not by the ear but the eye

what does the eye hear in the fullness of the void

the space created by the hand of Oh Su-Fan?

IV.

"Stille"--German for silence.

Not silent but stillness:

in the quiet of that is born

the activity of those lines

you can feel their energy as the eye completes the image

the lines and spaces created

but the whole cannot be made

it is a process

the painting a song

but the song must be sung

the eye is singing and if the ear is open

the painting can be heard

the listening eye

if the eye completes the circle

and the circle is infinite

what becomes of time?

in those infinite spaces opened up through lines

drawn by moving hands, the hands of an artist

emptied of mind yet full of life

all of eternity in that quickened gesture:

"to see with our own eyes,

is second sight

to see with our own eyes

is second sight."

Christopher Shultis

Ridley Creek, PA

2012 

Oh Su-Fan (b. 1946)

Images (in order of appearance):

Work on Paper (2009) gouache on paper

Variation 2010 #1 (2010) oil on canvas

Variation (2004) gouache on paper

Variation 2011 #1 (2011) oil on canvas

Oh Su-Fan in his studio (photo by Hee Sook Kim, 2010)

In Praise of Steve Chavez

We don’t agree politically--in fact when we were in Guatemala together once I thought that we could have been arrested/abducted by either side depending on who was listening to who. But Steve Chavez is one of the greatest musicians I’ve ever met and probably the most influential. From the time I interviewed at the University of New Mexico  (where I coached Steve, the former student, on a vibraphone transcription of Bach) to the most important period where I studied first hand by example (Steve’s), regarding both traditional Mexican music as well as the means by which one improvises in a Salsa band (Steve on vibes, Tomás White on percussion, Ken Battat on drums, José Ojeda on guitar, Pedro Hernández on bass). When I revisited Mexico City last week, overwhelmed (as always) by the native musics of such a great country, I thought of Steve. Because it was him who created the interest I had for learning more about Mexican music.

The story of how Steve became so interested in Mexican marimba music is his and I’ll let him tell it. Except for the part of how he practically locked himself in his house practicing hour after hour and day after day until he perfected the roll that is an important part of what makes Mexican marimba music sound so distinctive. I don’t know anyone else in North America who can do it as well as he can. And I suspect it is because no one else ever took the time necessary to master that roll.

In the 1980s, soon after my arrival to New Mexico I had the chance to play with Steve and his band STTP. We played Chick Corea--La Fiesta and (my favorite) Spain as well as using a fake book to do covers. We also played originals, especially by Pedro Hernández who wrote music for the band. The way it started was simply this: I went over to see Steve for some reason and his band was practicing in one of the rooms of Steve’s house. Steve asked me to sit in and play marimba with them, which I did. Then at Steve’s direction I was asked to improvise a solo. I had never improvised on the marimba in my life! And because of that it went badly and I dropped out. But what happened next I’ll never forget. Steve said, actually yelled (it was pretty loud in there), “Keep going!” And so I did. Again and again and again. Until finally the improvisation started to work its way into something good. And that’s how I learned to improvise. Not through changes or studying music theory. Instead I learned by just doing it until my ear and hands found their way to where they needed to go. It was an amazing experience. We used to play in a lot of places: Summer Jazz at Madrid (where José couldn’t get his guitar tuned right—don’t ask why); the Cooperage (where our solos went so long that we stopped getting asked back—even though the audience loved it); and at the State Fair (until one time they didn’t invite us—I heard it was because of my being in the band but that’s another story). I can’t really remember why we stopped. My brother Eric visited once when we did a radio show at KUNM (I still have a treasured cassette of that) and he can attest to the power of the band. And also (he spent time with them privately) of the collective and individual power of their personalities. Playing with them was one of the great musical experiences of my life. And I think some of my best playing as a percussionist was with them. Thanks to Steve.

I came to UNM from the University of Illinois where I played in a steel drum band under the direction of Tom Siwe. In addition to playing standards, the members of the band made their own arrangements. One of my favorites was an arrangement of Sonny Rollins’s St. Thomas by Mike Friedman. That was a blast to play--especially as I was on the bass pans! I made a proposal to the University to purchase steel drums and start a band at UNM. Their response (turning down the proposal) was not only sensible, “we don’t see how this has anything to do with the musical culture in New Mexico,” but also influenced what to do next: I proposed the creation of a marimba band at UNM. Surprisingly, back then a full steel band was going to cost only $6000.00 whereas a marimba band (xylophone, four marimbas, one bass marimba) would cost $20,000.00. I got the money and we started a band.

I’m a little less dogmatic now (not much) but at the time I hated transcriptions. In 1981, when the percussion convention was in Indianapolis, I heard George Gaber’s marimba ensemble (Indiana University) play a transcription of Barber’s Adagio for Strings. That made me want to actually hurt somebody. But I’m a pacifist so I behaved. At this year’s percussion convention (again in Indianapolis) a mass marimba orchestra played Wagner. This time I was smarter and walked out so I wouldn’t have to hear it. Fortunately at UNM, I succeeded a great percussionist Robyn Schulkowski who was a strong proponent of advanced contemporary music and left UNM to go to Germany where she still lives and works.  Thus, there was no expectation that I would have to play anything other than music written for my instrument. I remember UNM’s violin professor at the time (the great Leonard Felberg) saying to me: “I don’t like all the music you play but the repertoire is all contemporary so of course you have to play it.” He later performed (brilliantly) Lou Harrison’s Violin Concerto at the percussion convention in Los Angeles in 1985 and then again when Lou Harrison was the “headlining” composer at the UNM Composers’ Symposium in 1986.  Sorry I digress …

Anyway I didn’t like transcriptions. So that meant I had two categories of music to play with the newly founded marimba band: xylophone rags which, at that time, were available in published versions of what had been recorded by Nexus; and traditional Mexican and Guatemalan marimba music. At first I used the arrangements Bill Cahn made of Un Misterio and La Negra. I also used a transcription Tom Siwe did of a Guatemalan piece whose name escapes me.  At first we played both kinds of music as written. But then Steve Chavez entered the picture and that moment where I improvised in the small rehearsal room in his house returned and the marimba band was, as a result, transformed. We began to improvise.

That meant everyone learning a rag had to improvise one of the verses. And it also meant we opened up the Mexican pieces and members of the ensemble (often two, sometimes even three) would improvise too. The entire character of the experience changed after that. Thanks again to Steve.

There was another thing Steve influenced and probably even more important than the creative element improvisation added. That was the lead sheets he gave me to use for the Mexican music he wanted us to play once when he was going to perform with us as a soloist. On the surface, it was simple enough: like most lead sheets it was just the melody and chord symbols. But what wasn’t there is what really mattered. You had to essentially memorize what was on the sheet, depending on what part you were assigned, either melody or chords (after we got started the rule was you had to memorize both melody and chords by the first rehearsal in order to join the group), but that was just the beginning. After that you had to rehearse with the group and learn how to play with the group. What began as a band learning to play rags and Mexican marimba music had become the UNM Marimba band with its own traditions. Not copying the tradition of either rags or traditional Mexican music but instead creating our own tradition. We didn’t sound like Nexus and we didn’t sound like a band in Chiapas. We instead started to sound like ourselves. It became such a popular part of the musical scene (at UNM and in the musical community of New Mexico at large) that we travelled widely and, now it can be told, we made money (through contributions) that made it possible to fund the entirety of what the percussion area did without the need of any support from department or university. Which, to be honest, wasn’t forthcoming anyway. Toward the end of my time teaching percussion at UNM, the instruments had been used so much they wore out and needed replacement. Donna Peck, wife of then-president Richard Peck, spearheaded the fund raising at a cost of more than double the original instruments. It was a great period of my musical life and a place where I was able to play with my students as equals, sharing in the pleasure with them of being a part of such a wonderful group and playing such beautiful music.

When I returned to Mexico City in June of 2012, for the first time in twenty years, I remembered how much I owe to Steve Chavez. Not just because the last time I was in Mexico was with him (we went there, and to Guatemala as well, on a UNM research grant) but because the time I spent in the eighties studying Mexican marimba music and visiting Mexico, usually at the invitation of my dear friend (and great composer) Julio Estrada, was the most important early influence in my career as a creative person, the one who composes music now instead of playing percussion instruments.

Sitting in the darkened theater of the Bellas Artes in Mexico City, listening to the great music of Mexico as I watched the dances of the Ballet Folklórico, I didn’t once think of myself as what I so obviously was: just another tourist doing what all tourists do when visiting Mexico City. My heart started pounding, my feet involuntarily started tapping, at first one beat per measure, then two, and finally when that extraordinary triple meter started doing those great hemiolas you so often hear I was tapping right and left feet, rapidly on every single beat, sounding a bit like Alex Van Halen’s double bass during “Hot for Teacher.” I was beside myself with joy, tears came to my eyes, and I felt again, deep down in my musical soul, the power this music has on me. There’s nothing I’ve written as a composer that hasn’t been influenced by it. Something I can’t articulate fully here except to say it is something I felt conscious of for the first time in twenty years. And for that, again, I thank Steve Chavez.

Looking back, looking forward (2011-12)

A little after midnight on the east coast I posted this on Facebook:

"At 12:01, January 1, 2012, Distinguished Professor and Regents’ Professor of Music Christopher Shultis, after more than 31 years of service, officially retired from the University of New Mexico. Happy new year everybody!"

Christopher and I had just watched Lady Gaga (his favorite artist, one of mine too) push the "crystal button" allowing the famed ball in Times Square to drop and officially bring 2011 to an end. Waking up to an outpouring of kind words from so many of my Facebook friends was an ideal beginning to 2012!

And 2012, being the John Cage centennial (born in 1912), will be a busy year for me, Cage-wise, having spent much of my last twenty years learning from him and his work. I'm going to write a post about that sometime soon. For now, let me just say (in relation to "looking back and looking forward") that I always admired Cage for his continued search for "newness." Even when he looked back, as he did toward the end of his life, it was as a means of transformation, of taking the material of the past (his own as well as that of others) in order to make something new. 

Looking back on thirty years of teaching at the University of New Mexico, thinking about the past, of why I couldn't teach what I didn't still do (like when I quit teaching percussion in the mid-1990s), of how important it has always been to me for my life to be about the present and looking forward, always looking forward to the "next thing." Of why, in the end, I decided I really could not continue to teach at all, especially in an environment like what currently exists at UNM, and other schools I'm sure, where teaching is becoming increasingly important as a skill, where being a "good teacher" is related to how well your students are learning, and how that has become your responsibility as teacher rather than theirs as a student. 

There are many reasons, both personal and professional, for why I left UNM. But one of the reasons has to do with that environment, about teaching and how important it is at universities now, and about how the retention of students as bodies has taken precedence over the retention of learning within those students as people and how what they learn, sometimes not fully grasped until years later, is much more important than what they are taught. I always used to tell my students that I was a "terrible teacher." But the truth is that I just don't believe in teaching. And this, of course, is something quite different. I had teachers in high school who really were terrible and they did incredible damage to talented students like myself who were a challenge to them, something they were intellectually incapable of handling. So their "job" as teachers was to "teach" instead of promoting an atmosphere of learning. This latter was always my goal as a teacher. I learned so much from the people I studied with: in percussion, Mark Johnson (at MSU), Thomas Siwe (Illinois), one great lesson on tambourine and triangle from Michael Udow when we played together at the Santa Fe Opera; timpani with Detroit Symphony timpanist Salvatore Rabbio; conducting with Harry Begian (Illinois); musicology with Alexander Ringer (Illinois); and great independent studies with Lee Bartlett and Gary Scharnhorst (literature); Fred Sturm (philosophy) and Ed Bryant (visual art)--all at UNM. These latter influential teachers told me what to read and I read it. And then how to write about what I learned from those readings. That was all I needed. In composition I'm intentionally self-taught but I did get encouragement from David Liptak when I was an undergraduate and I learned a lot from the many composers I had the good fortune to work with as a percussionist and conductor in the 1980s and 1990s. So I believe in learning and when I was teaching I liked to share what I learned. That's what I did for thirty years at UNM.

I started this blog to be a means of expression for me in my new life as a composer and writer in a new place here, just outside of Philadelphia, and will definitely devote the majority of my writing time to the documenting of that new life. But before I do I wanted to spend a little time looking back, as a way of clearing out a path before moving forward, but also as a way of acknowledging the importance of memories, of honoring our pasts, of taking stock of the enormous role that the time I've spent in New Mexico as a place, and the University of New Mexico as an institution has played in my life.  Because the truth is, for most of the time I spent at UNM, I was able to call my own shots, do what I wanted and believed in, and tried to include as many students in those activities as possible.  As my artistic and scholarly goals moved increasingly away from such collaboration it made less and less sense for me to continue at UNM.

Since my purpose is not biographical I'll leave the rest of that history, with its many treasured memories, for other more artistically motivated occasions.  And in closing, as I wrote at the end of that Facebook message: "To all my students here on Facebook, my sincerest thanks to you for a great thirty years. I learned a lot and appreciate your choosing to study along with me: in percussion, composition, or the history of music and the arts, becoming, as John Cage once wrote, 'students in the school from which we’ll never graduate.'” 

Finally, it begins ...

This first post of a blog I've been thinking about for years, and actually created in April of 2011, wants to start with an explanation. Why the "Great (un) Learning"?

I'm referring to the Great Learning of course, that essential text of Confucius. But also of the Cornelius Cardew piece of the same title, using a translation of the Confucian text by Ezra Pound, one of the great (and troubling) poets of the last century.  And when  I recently typed into Google, "the great unlearning" to see what already existed, I found,  in addition to some interesting connections with alternative spiritualities and philosophies,  references to Alzheimer's disease. Alzheimer's apparently is often called "the great unlearning." And since one of the closest people in my life, my father, is suffering from this illness I realized that the parenthetical (un) is a necessity in order to address what I'm after here. Not a negation of intellect, or the gradual destruction of it, but instead a way to seeing learning as something that can go both ways. To learn not only as a way of accumulating information and material but also as a process of purging, equally essential (to my mind at least) as a way to open up creativity in an increasingly circumscribed world that wants us to simply consume. I learn in order to find the limits of learning, of knowledge, and am ceaselessly engaged in the process of the attempt. And at any given point, when I feel as if I've reach that limit--that edge of the circle Emerson writes about--I instead find myself inside a new circle.

But ...

At the beginning of that newness it is sometimes possible to find a creatively nothing-like place where my unfamiliarity of everything I experience makes for an opening. And in that place I sometimes find it possible to create something: be that music, poetry, whatever.

I plan to use this blog as a way of documenting that journey. All those experiences. Probably just for myself in all likelihood. But in this world of too much of everything, I will try to document in such a way that, rather like a diary, gives a sense of what I did and maybe even points to why. The latter I'll leave others to decide. But in this initial post, that wants to establish the purposes and conditions of the former, I thought it somehow important to say so at the outset. And now,

Let the journey begin: