By Andrew Maxfield
I bought a copy of the ancient Taoist philosophical text, the Tao Te Ching, often translated in English as Book (Ching) of the Way (Tao, pronounced “dow”), at a used bookstore in Cambridge, the first of three times my wife Liz and I lived in Boston.
It looks like I scrawled “Dec. 2007” on the title page, and I remember reading the book and scribbling in the margins during my daily commute, shivering, waiting for the Red Line to take me to the Orange Line to take me to the bus to take me home. Had I had a smart phone back then, I suppose I would have had ample time to stare at it, but, as it was, I had time to read.
By that point, I had read a smattering of “transcendental” or “Eastern”-leaning books like the Analects of Confucius and Thoreau’s Walden in addition to the texts common to my Western upbringing. It helped that, as an undergraduate, I seemed to have missed some key advising meetings and, as a result, bumbled around campus, flirting with Comparative Literature, Chinese, Economics, and other majors—reading and reading, but never quite committing.
Being a descendant of plucky yankees, pioneers, farmers, and entrepreneurs, a certain kind of “Western” thinking has always come naturally to me. After Liz and I rebuilt our house from the ground up, a process that required breaking a complex project into (so many) subsystems and steps, I admit that it can be an advantage to think mechanistically, reductively, linearly, strategically, aggressively, purposefully. We’ve inherited quite the list of adverbs, and they’ve accounted for much of what we consider to be “progress” in our Western culture and life.
When my longtime friend Tyler, an oncologist at Stanford, cures a patient’s cancer, it’s because the empirical, incremental practices of science led both to our understanding of cellular biology and to incredible therapeutic interventions, grounded in chemistry and physics, which help achieve desirable outcomes of health and healing. Everyone who rings the cancer survivor bell is thankful for the kind of thinking that not just “conquered” that cancer but also “conquered” a host of limitations and inconveniences that bedeviled generations past. If Liz ever accuses me of “golden age thinking,” or looking at the past wistfully, let me be clear that I’m grateful to live in the age of germ theory, democracy, and deodorant; many things are very, very good.
In medicine, “side effects” are no surprise, and we’re accustomed to weighing the probable value of a treatment in balance with the risk of possible unintended consequences. Yet, as another friend of mine likes to say, “there are only effects;” when we think we’re encountering “side effects,” we are, in fact, only acknowledging that we’ve delineated our system too narrowly.
I remember seeing diagrams in an elementary school science textbook (in the mid-1980s), which explained with vivid arrows that certain gases—including gases with long, official-sounding names like chlorofluorocarbons—liked to rise into the atmosphere, where they depleted the earth’s ozone layer, which could eventually make things very hot. That was tough news for a third-grader, but tougher still is the news that our love of progress, such as we define it, has taken us ever closer to that peril (and many others) rather than away from it. That stings.
We acknowledge that progress comes at a price, but we’ve accepted that progress at any price is still progress, that a Pyrrhic Victory is still a real win. If there is a failure in progress-oriented Western mindset, it is, as Wendell Berry writes in Life Is a Miracle, that “nobody seems able to subtract the negative results of … ‘advances’ from the positive.”
As I first encountered the Tao Te Ching (in an English translation by Gia Fu Feng and Jane English), and subsequently read other English translations, I encountered ways of thinking grounded in adverbs that Confucius and Thoreau would have found familiar. Lao Tzu, the semi-legendary, purported author of the 81 chapters of the Tao Te Ching, which hover somewhere between puzzling proverbs, practical poems, and philosophical provocations, invites readers to think holistically, systemically, usually gently, and to strive—or to not strive, rather—towards balance and wholeness as we choose to yield to Tao, or the Way, an external, universal imperative or order, a flow that transcends our best attempts to describe it and stands in a sort of cheerful, cosmic ambivalence to our feelings regarding it. It is, as C.S. Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man, “the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, [regarding] the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.”
This yielding to an outside standard is inconvenient in any century, but especially this one. First, it requires that we easily sidetracked moderns admit the possibility that there might be an objective reality outside of our feelings or preferences. Second, yielding sounds like a form of weakness to people steeped in notions of personhood based on individualisms and novelty.
All the same, we’re quite accustomed to yielding our trust and decision-making to the influence of other people, ranging from prophets to politicians to marketeers. It turns out that every leap—whether it’s declaring one’s (a)theism or buying organic bananas—is a leap of some kind of faith.
Reading the Tao Te Ching for the past fifteen years has been useful to me as it has helped me examine which of my Western ideas might benefit from some updating or tempering, and which might be just bananas. Now, when my Western brain whispers “inevitable collateral damage,” my Eastern brain replies, “perhaps we imagine a better way.”
As a composer, I react through my craft to what I love and to what fascinates me, and I often think of my compositions as “appreciations.” I imagine holding what I love (like poetry) up in a new light so others can enjoy it. As I studied, I never saw musical possibilities directly in the translated texts, but I became enchanted by the idea of making a musical work based on the Tao Te Ching: not a setting of the text itself, but a meditation on encountering it as an appreciative lay reader.
In about 2017, I began writing short, sometimes cryptic “lyrical riffs” in response to the aphoristic chapters of the Tao Te Ching. (I’ve written lyrics and poetry in other contexts, but not often for my own choral projects.)
After accumulating dozens of these possible lyrics, I happened to attend a performance by Brian Blade and the Fellowship Band at the Village Vanguard (just after Kameron Kavanaugh, Sound of Ages, and I performed at Carnegie Hall). My musical voice is already a byproduct of my simultaneous obsessions with Renaissance polyphony and jazz harmony, but hearing Brian Blade (my favorite drummer) that night cemented the idea that this piece would combine my contrapuntal vocal writing with jazz elements to a degree that I had never attempted before.
A piece of this scale—a concert-length work for double choir and jazz-influenced chamber orchestra, hovering somewhere between cantata, concept album, and musical Objectivist Manifesto (whatever that means)—makes absolutely no sense to write (though I think Lao Tzu would approve, and I know Jane English does), and, despite my fascination with the Tao Te Ching, I don’t think I ever could have written this piece were it not for an exceptional collaborator in Kameron Kavanaugh. And there would be no concert at all without exceptionally skilled and willing singers and instrumentalists. Ironically, it takes a lot of work to “be still and offer the Tao” (Tao Te Ching, 62).