Speaking about the sense of mourning in his music, the composer Morton Feldman once famously observed: “…I do in a sense mourn something that has to do with, say, Schubert leaving me.”

Feldman went on to suggest, as the philosopher George Steiner postulated: “Perhaps after Hitler there should no longer be art.”

Yet even as he asserted that he did not “identify with Western civilization music”, Feldman said that in his own music he aspired to distil “a very few essential things that I need … to at least keep it going for a little while more…”

 

I’ve always loved Schubert. In my first year of college, I sang in a performance of his Mass in G. I was 17, just a year younger than Schubert was when he composed it. Ever since then, I’ve steeped myself in the miracles of Schubert from time to time – the Great C Major Symphony, the songs, the late piano sonatas, Death and the Maiden. More than Beethoven or Mozart, Schubert’s music seems to me to breathe, to flow, to twist and turn as naturally and inexorably as a mountain stream running to the sea.

Yet while I share Feldman’s love for Schubert, I cannot mourn him in the same way. I’ve never felt that Schubert inhabited the same world as me, and I’m not at all certain that in today’s world even Schubert could be Schubert.

 

I was born 27 years after Feldman and came of age in the years between World War II and the end of the Vietnam War. This was the peak period of “American” dominance of what Theodor Adorno called “the culture industry”.

My adolescent heroes were Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King Jr and John Lennon. A friend recently pointed out to me that two of these three men were assassinated. Thoreau’s essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” inspired Dr King. Had he been born a century later, who knows what might’ve befallen the prophet of Walden Pond?

Lennon was both an icon and a victim of mass culture. For me, his murder was a landmark event in the decline of the culture that, in the 45 years since, has only continued to devolve. We have moved from mass commodities produced by humans towards a culture industry controlled by machines. Late capitalism has become suicidal capitalism. Where Feldman felt he was witness to the end of European civilisation, I feel that my generation is at once the witness to and agent of the end of “American” cultural dominance.

Like Feldman, I do not identify with “Western civilization music”. Although I still compose music for symphony orchestra, for string quartet, and other media of the European “classical” tradition, I don’t see my work as part of that tradition.

I’m haunted by an observation of the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer: “Art within the constraints of a system is political action in favour of that system – regardless of content.”

 

Feldman died in 1987. Two years before that I spent three memorable days in his company, producing a radio program about him. Our formal interview was long and wide-ranging, as the master dispensed his wit and wisdom to the young acolyte. All these years later, however, one moment in particular stands out.

Feldman began musing about the trend of art towards entertainment: “Everybody’s in show business these days. I mean, The whirling dervishes are on tour the way tootsies are on tour! … Everybody’s in some aspect of show business…”

I took a breath, then asked him: “What’s your business…?”

Feldman took a longer breath. Then he responded with a single, startling word: “Religion!”

I’ve never believed in God. It’s not from lack of trying. I’ve read the texts of various religions. I’ve meditated. I’ve tried to pray. I’ve listened to sacred music with open ears. I’ve done my best to listen to the words of true believers with an open heart. Yet my deepest intuition always tells me that the answers to our unanswered questions do not lie in some promised land beyond the improbable miracle of life on Earth. Like Morton Feldman, I’ve come to regard the practice of my art as the practice of my faith.

Reflecting on the countless atrocities committed in the name of God, it’s hard for me to believe that on balance religion has been a force for good in human history. Even so, I still believe that along with art and science, the clearest, most compassionate elements of religious thought embody the best of what it means to be human.

Art, science and true religion are all dedicated to asking essential questions, to seeking truth, however elusive and provisional. Politics and economics, the brute struggle for wealth and power, only perpetuate our seemingly endless human dramas.

 

Now in my 70s, what keeps me working at my art is my love for and faith in the next generations who will imagine and bring new human cultures into being. I will not be here to witness them. Yet perhaps in my own way, like Feldman, I’m simply trying “to at least keep it going for a little while more…”

So, then, what am I mourning in my music? Not Schubert. Not Lennon. Not the culture that either of them inhabited. It occurs to me that maybe what I’m mourning is the loss of the romanticism that drove both men.

In his poem “The American Sublime”, Wallace Stevens concludes:

And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space.

For most of my life I’ve pursued that vision, from the Arctic to the deserts of North and South America, to the Antarctic. At last, I’ve come to recognise its dark side.

The image of North America as a vast uninhabited space animated the myth of Manifest Destiny, justified the genocidal wars against Native Americans, fuelled expansionist wars all over the world and the voracious drive for material wealth that continues into the present day.

There is no vacant space, in North America or anyplace else. As Barry Lopez observes, “Each place on Earth goes deep. Some vestige of the old, seemingly eclipsed place is always there to be had.”

Each place on Earth is and has been inhabited, by people and other animals, by the spirits of the place, by elemental forces that have come and gone and come again over the past four billion years. The sooner we surrender, with truly empty spirit, the ideal of the sublime vacant space, the more likely we are to find our way home through the darkness of our own making.