Playing Cage in Missouri

I’m flying back from Missouri State University, where Laurel and I played Two² and (with Barry and Peter) Four⁶. Laurel and I have played this piece almost every year since 1993, and something very unusual happened to me while playing this time around. My usual performance attitude is one of extreme concentration and emotional engagement with the music I’m performing. This time, I would not say I was concentrating as much as I usually do, but neither was I apathetic, going through the motions. And I felt emotions too. The feeling I had, perhaps, comes closest to the feeling I have when I’m practicing or playing for myself—no one around, no one to play to, no reason to be nervous or tense. And I got to thinking about the Zen mindset of nonattachment, of allowing feelings to arise and then depart as quickly; since we’ve played this piece so often, and since we hope to play it at least once a year for the foreseeable future, have these performances become everyday life? It’s very difficult to express exactly what this experience felt like for me, and I’m trying to distance it from some sort of otherworldly experience just as I’m trying to differentiate it from something banal and uninteresting.

And then after the talk I gave today before leaving for the airport, I was talking to Peter and a couple of his MSU colleagues and I told them it occurred to me that when I say something like, “I know something about Zen” or “I know a lot about Zen,” what can that possibly mean?