Elan Sicroffinterviewed by Reijo Oksanen
I had the pleasure of listening to Elan Sicroff’s concert in Freiburg, Germany and the following day a chance to speak with him about his work on music and on his inner work generally. Here is a little sample of Elan playing Gurdjieff - de Hartmann from 2007: Reijo: My first question is about what made you interested in the Gurdjieff work as I suspect it was the main reason why you came to Bennett. How did that happen? Elan: There was a project that we took on in Sherborne at one point. It was to find out the means by which people found out about it. There are many interesting stories. The quick response to your question is that I had no idea what Sherborne was when I went there, and I had no intention at all of staying there. I had come across Asia from New Zealand in 1972 where I had been studying for one year. I saw all kinds of things on this trip. The Bangladesh war was still going on. A million people were starving to death in the streets of Calcutta. I went to Nepal where I saw a huge Mandala in the Golden Temple, and I saw that it meant something deep. By the time I got back to the States five months later I could not stay there. I could not finish university. I had seen too much to go back to ordinary life. So I took off with a friend with the intention of going to Afghanistan and riding through the center of the country on horseback. Reijo: A very nice romantic dream. Elan: Yes. I left the States with a bicycle, an airline ticket and $125. That was it. We were going to hitchhike to Istanbul and then go by train, but we only got as far as Athens before the dream got completely squashed. My friend went to India to study sitar. Then everything started to happen very quickly. I hitchhiked back to Cologne, where I came upon a hippie commune of German social misfits. They were into all sorts of spiritual paths, from Yogananda to Khrishnamurti, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, etc. This was 1972. They let me stay until I got on my feet and got a job in Germany. While I was there I met a woman and fell in love with her. She was going to Sherborne but I had no idea what kind of place it was. She left in October, and I was going to visit her at Christmas. Shortly before I left to see her she sent me two letters which arrived on the same day. The first explained that it was all too complicated, her family would be there, she could not deal with them and a relationship at the same time, that I should not come. The next letter had a story which she related to me. She was in a Movements class and the pianist was having difficulty. The teacher finally asked in desparation: “Doesn’t anyone know of a pianist?” Irmgaard answered that she did, but that he lived in Germany. Anna Durco replied, “What use is that?!” But then she began to pester Irmgaard to have me come to Sherborne. So in this second letter, Irmgaard wrote: “Now I know you must come here and meet Mr. Bennett.” So I did. I came to Sherborne. I still remember my first meeting with Mr. Bennett, a very big man leaning over me and looking at me with penetrating eyes. We exchanged one or two words. Then later in the week, Irmgaard advised me to go to speak to Mr. Bennett. She nearly had to push me to the door of his flat. He asked me what I did. I said “Well, I play the piano.” He asked: “But do you have any talent?” And I said: “I don’t answer that kind of question.” He said: “If you have a talent it is a gift. A gift does not belong only to you, you have an obligation to share it with other people”. I had never thought about it like that. Then, after listening to me play, he said: “You can come on the course if you want to.” I had no idea what was taught on this course, none at all. After that he went away on holiday for a few days. I could not make up my mind about the course. I decided that since I could not say “Yes” that I would leave. On December 30th I went to dinner, about to leave Sherborne. There was Mr. Bennett. I saw him and started running out of the room! He came running after me. We then had a long conversation during which I made the choice to come to Sherborne House. That is how I arrived. Even at that point I had little idea of what it was all about. Reijo: Thank you for telling me. My next question is did you then consider other branches of the Gurdjieff work when you got to know, or was it that you got so much from the connection with music and Bennett and the others at Sherborne that you weren’t really looking for anything else? Elan: Actuallly, it wasn’t other Gurdjieff connections that interested me. It was other paths. I was very taken by Yogananda. I must have read his book, An Autobiography of a Yogi, about 5 times—that was really fascinating for me. I was also attracted to Buddhism, having kept the Diamond Sutra close to me for months. And there were other people trying to get me into other paths, Guru Maharaji for example. But I didn’t even know that there was a Gurdjieff Foundation, an Ouspensky Society (The Study Society). I just didn’t know anything. Reijo: That is how we are when we come to the Work, a clean sheet in a way, we don’t know anything, and we only hear rumours and we don’t verify them; we don’t know anything. Elan: We still don’t know anything [laughs]. Reijo: You’ve had a long time in the work. What is your question today? That’s a big question I know, you can have many questions, questions on different levels. But you understand the gist of what I’m trying to ask you? Without a question we’re not getting anywhere, so what’s the basic sort of, what you need, what you want, what is the purpose of…your work? Elan: We touched on this last night. You’re asking personally? I would say that there are two things. The first is that for my own personal inner work, that it’s taken a surprisingly long amount of time to clear the decks so there can be some kind of inner stability. When I look back , I can see that there were obstacles to progress, habits which caused a leakage of energy. Those obstacles were there on Day One. When those energy leaks have begun to be closed then you begin to look for other things… how does Gurdjieff say it? The consequences of the properties of the Organ Kundabuffer. We look at reality upside down. We imagine ourselves to be the center of the Universe. How to get free from our own egoism? This is something that I am beginning to look at now. Reijo: Where does the energy leak into? What comes to my mind is the problem as I experience it at least, that I don’t have enough energy to, so to say, practice the work. All the time, I’m away somewhere. What’s missing? That’s my big question. You’re saying it’s where the energy leaks, have we then found out something about where it leaks? Elan: We need to come into balance. We need to balance the functions, physical, emotional, thinking. We need to moderate talking, eating, sleeping, sexual activity, etc. This gives us the energy we need to observe ourselves, then to “remember” ourselves, and finally to be able to act, to allow a change in ourselves to take place. We begin from a point of being out of balance. The consequences of the organ Kundabuffer make us to see reality upside down. We want to live for pleasure, we don’t want to suffer. Reijo: Or we want to sleep. Elan: Which is another word for it. At Sherborne conditions were set up to wake us up. It was always cold in the house, and we were almost always hungry. There is a story about Muhammed A king was impressed by Muhammed’s teaching, and as a gift he sent a physician to look after his disciples.. After a year he found that almost no one had gotten sick and the king asked Mohammed how this could be. Muhammed replied “It’s very simple. My disciples always leave the table three-quarters full.” This discipline creates health in the physical body, and it also improves our psychic state. It engages us in a struggle of Yes and No, which gives strength for inner work. Of course, there are other practices which help us to wake up. By working with attention we are able to bring our centers into balance. For example, if I sense my body while I engage in outer tasks, I am able to work with more than one center at a time. Man is a three brained being. Almost always we start with one or another of these functions out of balance Reijo: A big question, what is a three-brained being? Elan: Do you have an answer? Reijo: No. There’s a very good article on the website. An interview with Adam Nott, which talks about this and he says it very clearly, actually. But I’m no expert on that having been in the work such a short time, just 40 years. So I haven’t really learned that yet, but of course, one can have an idea from the Movements. The easiest approach for me, anyway, is that in the Movements, I can experience the three centers working as a unit and be in it and be happy about it, that they work. That’s all. Just to see it. It’s an incredible feeling. I’m sure that you mentioned it yesterday in your own words. Elan: Yes, it is interesting. How does this process actually work? Because what you’re saying, and I’d have to agree, is that we work with these techniques (and they are multifarious), but we still find that we are asleep. Or we don’t find that we’re awake—let’s put it that way. Reijo: But isn’t it a lack of energy? Exactly where you started, it still is that. And I’m so amazed every time that I find out. I know exactly what I should do but I haven’t got the energy for it. Elan: I’d have to have an example that we could talk about. Reijo: Well let’s say that I’m trying to read something like Beelzebub, which is difficult in itself. And, all of a sudden, I find out that I’m not actually reading, I’m completing the sentences from somewhere else. Elan: It’s on automatic. Reijo: That, for me is a lack of energy also, because I’d like to read but it’s not working. A very simple thing in the end. Not complicated. Elan: To me, what you’re talking about is not something you can approach directly. There are some tools one can use, but if I put myself into your position, when I’m reading Beelzebub, which has happened many times, and it goes on automatic: I might try reading it aloud to myself. Sometimes this helps, but not always.. Reijo: It’s almost like when you wake up with a jerk. Finding yourself out in completing a sentence, which doesn’t exist in the book, which is truly amazing. Elan: Here is another example about needing energy. Yesterday. I had to plya a concert , and I was in a pretty similar situation to what you’re describing. This music is extremely simple, there’s nothing flashy about the notes in the Gurdjieff music, so it’s all a question of one’s state. It’s all a question of whether one can get oneself into the proper orientation in order to play this kind of music. Reijo: Can I put another question here? What role does the unconscious play in playing it right? That it happens to you, you know, that it’s not your conscious itself that is playing. Is that a question, is that an approach at all? Elan: I’m trying to translate what you’re saying because I think our language is a little bit different here.. First of all, to prepare for a concert, I will eat very little on that day. Fasting, or even partial fasting opens the channel for higher emotions to pass through. Reijo: Not only cooking, but also not eating. Elan: Not only not eating, but also working with breath. In other words, when you limit the intake of the first being food, then it’s possible to extract substances from the second being food, in a different kind of a way. There are various exercises for this.. Reijo: What about the third kind? What is it? Elan: I would say that, in terms of this third kind, I also try to limit this contact with automatic impressions. I try to stay in my own atmosphere. I can see that the day is coming closer when I won’t need to do that anymore, but I am not there yet.. Where I’ll be able to keep myself from being sucked away by all the inputs that are coming from outside. But then there’s this other thing: I’m trying to get to this other thing where you talk about the unconscious. Because the language I would use for this is somewhat similar, but it has a different slant to it. There’s a triad here: the audience, the performer and the music. If my ordinary self is stuck, thinking about the audience, or even “thinking” about the music, there are very limited possibilities. There is a prayer which comes from the Sevenfold Work by JGBennett, which I use in this situation: “May I be empty.” Inasmuch as I can be empty of my ordinary Self, it’s possible for something from another source to come through. Sometimes it happens very easily. When I was recording this last CD, we had a little live performance at the end of two days of work. I was in a terrible state beforehand I was in physical pain. I had been playing for ten hours, and nothing was coming through. Before the audience arrived I had less than 10 minutes to collect myself. And then the audience appeared and it went—BANG—like that. I was completely rejuvenated, and some of the best cuts of the session came from the next 90 minutes of playing. Reijo: You may have been extremely tired. Elan: I was extremely tired and ready to give up. All the essential ingredients that you can’t manufacture [LAUGHS] and then something started to come through. But to me, when you’re talking about the unconscious, I don’t know if that’s the unconscious, or what? It’s not coming from…it’s getting myself, my ordinary, automatic thing, out of the way. That’s the thing. When I’m not able to get out of the way, sometimes I make that prayer. I get up and perform and it if I have connected with the meaning of the prayer, I do often allow something else to come through. Sometimes it’s only partially out of the way, and then it’s agony. I have a friend, Robert Fripp a well known guitarist. Robert speaks about this problem that musicians have, that we, you know, we get this taste, this energy, this higher energy, really coming through the music sometimes, but then, it’s not something that we have a control over. When it’s not coming through, we rely on our craft. Craft is something we have control of, it includes everything connected with technique, musicianship etc. Craft enables us to depend upon a good performance. It’s not great, but it’s good. It is within the realm of acceptability. Reijo: This thing about the unconscious is very simply, what I mean by that is that the work, the Gurdjieff work, is often said to be about developing our consciousness. Or something like that. That it is consciousness that needs to be developed. But our conscious mind, according to people like C. G. Jung, is only about 1 or 5%, or whatever percentage of our lives. And the rest of our life is unconscious. It happens in dreams, or it happens automatically, or what is automatic. I tend to think today, that my efforts towards consciousness are more automatic than anything that happens in the unconscious. In the end. That it’s a mess anyway. That I do not know what is what. That’s how I think about it. As you said, when you were starting with your concert yesterday, that the Gurdjieff work is very much about conscience, which is in our unconsciousness. Elan: That’s right, yes. That’s interesting. George Bennett recently gave a talk on conscience at the Beelzebub Conference in Toronto. The question came up, “What does it mean to live by conscience?” In his book In Search of the Miraculous, Ouspensky decribes it as a very big and possibly rare event, when one sees all the contradictions inside oneself at once. Reijo: That sounds very hazy to me. Elan: Well, it’s a big experience. And I’ve had experiences where I’ve been exposed, and all of a sudden, I’ve SEEN. But is that what he means to live by conscience? That’s impossible. I mean, it’s impossible the way we are. because we don’t have those experiences very often. So what would it mean to live by conscience in daily life? Reijo: If I may give my little answer to that, it would be that there are flashes of conscience coming through, and if I can eat those, then that’s impressions as well, that is third being food. I call them actually flashes, I’ve written some articles about that too, because to me, they’ve been very important. Because when you wake up in the morning and you suddenly have an idea, you don’t really know what it is and how to express it. Try to catch it then you lose it completely, and you can’t come back to it. But you’ve seen something. But it’s never become really conscious in you. I think that’s, sort of, conscience knocking to get through, in a way. Elan: Let me give you an example. Let’s say I go out to have a meal with somebody, and we pay for the meal. Something in me sees: ‘I could take this opportunity to give the tip ’ I can say ‘yes’, or I can say ‘no’ to this. If I say ‘no’, this voice doesn’t fight, it just gets buried again.. If I say ‘yes’ To me, that’s a little taste of what living by conscience is about. In Beelzebub’s Tales, Gurdjieff rarely speaks plainly. He generally „buries the dog deeper“. But in the Ashieta Shiemash chapters which deal with conscience, Gurdjieff is very direct. It is likely that he wanted us to make no mistake on the subject of conscience. It might seem that this all sounds trivial. How could such a small action have the power to change our lives? It seems to me however, that it is precisely the small every day events that occur to us that have the potential to effect our transformation. At this point this teaching about the 3 lines of work becomes important. This Work is not only for me, it is also about serving others, and also about serving a greater Purpose. Conscience is the inner guide, our own teacher located within ourselves. Reijo: Have you studied it from the point of Christianity? Elan: Studied what? Reijo: Conscience is one part of Christian teaching. I’m not saying that Gurdjieff uses it in the same sense, all that it needs to be verified. Conscience is very much a Christian concept in origin, in my knowledge. I’m not sure if I’m right, of course. Elan: Where do you find it? Reijo: It’s a general tone in the whole of Christianity. Elan: Well, it must be there in any real teaching, because it’s one of the components, isn’t it? It’s got to be. Reijo: It’s much more about conscience, in the end, than consciousness, what the work is all about. In the sense that I’ve understood those words before. ES: I don’t know if you’ve read ‘Energies’ by J. G. Bennett. His descriptions make it very clear, at least to me. Words like “conscious” may mean very different things to different people. One of the most interesting aspects of Gurdjieff’s teaching—if not THE most interesting—is that it is practical. There are tools which enable us to work. It is likely that much has been lost in terms of practice in the great world religions, and that Gurdjieff uncovered or rediscovered a large body of useful tools. Of course, there are practices which are still of great practical value, the Call to Prayer in Islam and the transmission through the Eucharist in the Christian liturgy come to mind.. Reijo: Yes it’s incredible the whole symbolism of that, and Bennett discovered that. Elan: Yes,at the end of his life he became a Catholic. This was probably influenced by his contact with a Benedictine monastery in France, and experiences he had during Communion. Now to get back to this question of consciousness. According to the 12 energies outlined in his book by the same name, the conscious energy is a cosmic energy. It is bigger than we are. When we experience it there is a feeling of expansion, that there is no longer any inside or outside. We are connected to everything around us. We can participate in conscious energy but we cannot own it the way we can own our sensitivity (the next lower energy). I can say “I will sense my right foot” and with a little practice I will be able to have that experience. But I cannot make myself become conscious. Conscious energy is not under our control. It enters us unbidden many times a day. When we notice something a small amount of conscious energy has entered into us, making us aware of ourselves. At other times it’s more oblique,we set up conditions, and conscious energy may enter.. There was recently a Work seminar at Stackpole, in Wales. After a week of work there was a taste of conscious energy in that group. On the last day we sat together silently before leaving and there was…it’s impossible to really describe in words what had happened, but we were in a medium in which we were all connected, that we all shared.. Reijo: There are exercises these days I have taken part in where you get together in a small group, we have a little group in Switzerland called Sisters and Brothers, people from different ways, Sufis and atheists and Buddhists, and last time we got together we were just trying to do that, you know, create an energy field, so to say. It can be done if we can be silent. It can arise in the group. It’s been practiced today like this also. I’m not really keen on doing anything like that, but anyway, I took part in it. Yes, I can understand what you mean by that. What about the work with Olga de Hartmann? How would you define it in a short way? Elan: Did you meet Madame de Hartmann? Reijo: No. Elan: Following on what we just said I think that I can say two things briefly about the Madame de Hartmann. Madame de Hartman was 91 when I met her. She lived till 95 and she had been working on herself for a long, long time by the time I met her. I would say there was a transmission through her as a result of her inner work which was probably the most important part of our interaction. She had presence, and through it one got a taste of a differenent level of being. I have a photograph of her which I wish you would be able to see. You can get a sense of her presence from it. Reijo: We have a friend who has been in the work for a long time; she is now 94 and weighs 34 kilos. She is in a hospital with cancer and looks incredible today. It can be seen when a person is… Elan: She was like a pillar. She had this force. Madame de Hartmann was determined to get her husband's work known. He was everything for her - he and Mr. Gurdjieff. When Thomas died in 1956, she went into mourning for a few years. Then she became aware of the task she had to accomplish. She took it upon herself to find people who would get her husband’s music known. I came out to work with her in Montreal in 1975, where she had a performance of the Gurdjieff/de Hartmann music as well as Hartmann’s personal compositions.. That was when I first met Laurence Rosenthal, and came into contact with the Gurdjieff Foundation for the first time. Madame de Hartmann was very close to the Gurdjieff Foundation. She also had a long standing contact with JGBennett. According to her own words, Mr. Bennett always asked her opinion of the many teachers he came in contact with after Gurdjieff’s death. She did not always approve! But she said she respected Mr. Bennett for the care that he gave his second wife when she was dying. And she was also willing to work with me on Mr. Bennett’s recommendation. The second thing I wanted to say is that her greatest interest in the interpretation and performance of her husband’s music was that feeling should be transmitted through it. She was unimpressed by fingers running up and down the keyboard, and she would sometimes say things that would irritate me. She would say that none of the pianists on the world stage really played with feeling. This was very hard for me to accept, and it took many years for it to really become clear to me, just what she was talking about. Reijo: But wouldn’t that exactly say also why the transmission of the teaching is from man to man or woman to man, man to woman, or woman to woman the way she taught you by her presence? Elan: That’s right. You know, it is funny you should say that because I was trying to think to myself what actually did Madame teach me. And I just couldn’t come up with it. Every once in a while, she would say, slow down to here or more louder over here. But any music teacher teaches that kind of thing. She wanted this higher emotional energy to come through because she had had a taste of that when her husband played, and when Gurdjieff played the harmonium she knew that there was some magic that music possessed. Reijo: Also, Elan, at the same time, misleading, isn’t it, to call it emotional energy because we associate it with something that is happening in us all the time. But she was talking about something higher. Elan: That's right. Yes. Higher emotional energy. Again that's a word to describe something.which cannot be described in our ordinary language. Reijo: What is it, then if you want to define it now? Elan: Si 12, Hydrogen 12. Is that really going to help?! But however you could say it, I'm pretty sure that everybody has a taste of this energy at some point in one’s life. But anyway, I mean, that's what she was looking for. She was looking for something out of the ordinary. She knew that Thomas' music could be a vehicle for that. Reijo: How then is the relationship between Gurdjieff music and the objective art? Elan: Now we are coming to an interesting subject. Reijo: Well, we're only starting now. Elan: Well, we could have met at 7 AM. Reijo: I was ready. Elan: Were you? Reijo: Yeah. Elan: Well, you should have told me. Reijo: My phone didn’t work and I didn’t have the number. All kinds of reasons, stupid reasons. Elan: This is interesting. You read about Objective Music in Gurdjieff’s writings. In the Bokharian Dervish chapter of Beelzebub’s Tales, he sets a very high standard: making flowers grow quickly, raising a boil on the dervish’s leg… He sets an even higher standard when he talks about Choon-Kil-Tez and Choon-Tro-Pel, the two Chinese brothers, and how they discovered the law of the sevenfoldness, how they made this instrument, Alla-attapan, and all this stuff. Now, how are we going to make sense of all this? Is there something practical that we can all make use of? Earlier this year I was about to give a talk on this at the Beelzebub Conference in Toronto. But there was no time because someone else gave a performance. Reijo: Oh, yeah. You were interested in doing that. Elan: I was going to do that and I was looking at it. The thing that is interesting in the chapter about the Bokharian dervish, is how he actually did raise up a boil on somebody's leg and how he did make flowers grow He struck one note, and then he struck another note, and he struck one note and he struck another note, the same two notes over and over. This points to something simples: the intrinsic nature of intervals. Between the intervals, there is a vibration. And so, all this fancy stuff you can push to the side for now, and get to work where it is possible to start, with the study of intervals. Now, if you study the Law of Sevenfoldness you can understand theoretically what the characteristics of these intervals are. I have found huge benefit readings JGB’s Enneagram Studies, particularly the chapter on The Kitchen at Work. The process of preparing a meal has a lot to say about the objective qualities of the different degrees of the scale. For example, we know that the Si-Do interval is the interval of completion in any process. We have a taste of what that interval feels like. Last night when I played a concert, that’s Si-Do. I have done all this practicing, all this preparation, but there is always risk in that interval. Success is never guraranteed. It’s an unstable place, it is headed for completion. Compared to many other parts of the process, it happens very quickly. Then, you take that interval, Do to Si, and you play that on a piano or you have two people singing it, and you get a taste of what that feels like, in sound. Some very unstable sound intervals. Unless you have two professionals singing, it is almost impossible to hold this interval: it moves to the octave. So, this is one place to start, we have this tool that Gurdjieff gave us about the law of sevenfoldness. And there is enough information that people have uncovered that we can expand on this. For example, the Harnel-Aoot, the fifth stopinder, which is disharmonized, what does that sound like? And you look at Harnel-Aoot in music, you know, Do to sol flat, that’s the Devils interval. It was illegal to use the tritone in the early church days. It sounds like you are on the horns of a dilemna, it is an uncomfortable place, very dissonant. that you can’t figure out. This is one way one way you can approach the subject ofobjective music without wiseacring. That is what the title of my talk was going to be. Reijo: Very physical in the end. Elan: Yes, very practical. Is it possible to talk about objective music without wiseacring? Well, because wiseacring is fun but what use is it? Now, the second thing to look at in terms of objective music is ourselves as receivers of vibration. There is this assertion: God is great, God is everywhere. But as I am, can I perceive God? No. Reijo: We have, in the author of mysticism, this beautiful saying that God is always present but I am not. Elan: So, there you are. What’s objective in music may always be there but if we are not present to it, then what’s the use? Now let’s go back to our conversation about Madame de Hartmann where she was saying, “You play the notes, you just play the notes, you don't have a connection, nothing comes through.” There are two parts. The instrument is not just the piano. There is another part of the instrument, myself, and myself has to be tuned. Thus, we come all the way around, back to work on myself, in order to hear what is objective in sound. I work at sensing my body, I open my feelings, I discipline my thoughts. From the Prayer of the Heart to struggle with habits, to working with Movements, Gurdjieff’s teaching offers almost innumerable techniques for inner work. For performance it is the same. When my Self becomes in tune, then I become part of a double instrument, and the possibility arises for something higher to come through . Reijo: I have a question about the way Gurdjieff talks about the objective art. He makes a very big point about these lawful inexactitudes. Elan: May we get to that in a moment? Before we get to the lawful inexactitudes, let’s look at this preparatory level, setting the groundwork. To me, the essential thing which has got to be opened is our feeling center so that it becomes a true receptor for higher energies. Reijo: Instead of a reactor. Elan: Instead of a reactor, instead of going on a lower fuel, which Ouspensky calls Hydrogen 48. Very scientific and dry. But perhaps accurately. So, we have to open our instrument. We have to open the feelings because if we don’t, there is nothing in us which can perceive in depth.. The thinking is analytical, comparing, criticizing. Very important, but no depth. Reijo: There is an author called Porphyrion who said something like, to be able to a Christian, you have first to become a poet. And he talks about the same thing in different words. Elan: Once again, we come up against our limitations in language. We are trying to describe something for which there are no words. One way is through metaphor. Somethimes our different spiritual paths hide the fact that we are all the same human beings underneath. Reijo: I have this theory that Buddhism is actually very popular today because they don’t have God; it is much easier not to ask what is God. Join Buddhism and you’ll be going to consciousness or whatever you call it in a very much easier starting point and it is very much the same as Gurdjieff work. That is another subject that would be interesting to talk with you about. What is the relationship of Gurdjieff work to religion generally and maybe, you know, I am touching this only as a point, and we can continue maybe. Elan: Yes, but first we need to get to this subject of the lawful inexactitudes. Let us first set up this groundwork: We need to open up the feelings in order to have a chance to really understand something about objective art. And what is objective? It is what we call the Higher Emotional center, which includes these feelings of Wish, Hope, Faith, Acceptance, Love. These are the same for all of us. In Arabic they are called latifas, meaning subtle . They have specific locations in the breast, which we can come into contact with, not by force, but by being receptive. When we have a taste of these higher emotions, they are the same in me as in you, as in Thomas, as in Petra. Whereas our ordinary emotions, Hydrogen 48, are different for different people: I like beer and Petra likes wine, and Thomas likes cognac… This kind of emotion, which is really attraction and repulsion, this is different, this is subjective. But with the Higher Emotions, when we open to them, then we have a touchstone for objective art because objective art, which is something that touches everyone in the same way. And so, now, these lawful inexactitudes - there are two parts to that. First there is noticing where Gurdjieff puts in these lawful inexactitudes. And then, there is coming to some interpretation or some understanding, or some perception of what’s happening there. And I have to say, I have seen a large number of places where there are inexactitudes in the music, but I can’t honestly say that I have uncovered the secrets that he says are locked up in them. Reijo: You talked yesterday a little bit about it. Elan: Yes, we talked about that. For example, in one of the pieces that I played last night, it is the piece for Mr. Gurdjieff’s wife {Elan hums a tune at this point}, the rhythm is in two. But in two places in the piece he changes the rhythm to three. It does not fit the pattern, but it is essential to the feeling of the piece. It sort of slips your feeling into a slightly deeper place. You are going along, then you slide, then you regain your balance in the original pattern. Reijo: That’s what I was trying to say in my way, in comparing it to Chi-Gong; the movements to Chi-Gong, not the music. The Chi-Gong movements are continuous. But in the Gurdjieff movements the movements are abruptly changing. And for me, that actually means that the lawful inexactitude is disturbing us. Elan: It is giving us a chance Reijo: It is giving us a chance and if we can’t be there then, then we lost it. Elan: Now, there is another really interesting thing that you reminded me of, in Bartok, and again you see these things in very simple pieces much more easily. Bartok wrote 150 Mikrocosmos. They start as simple training exercises, but they get very complicated, suitable for the concert stage. Well, there are 2 beginning exercises which are very interesting. One is called Parallel motion, the other Reflexion. In Relexion, the right hand plays up when the left goes down, and vice versa. It makes for a very dissonant piece! Each of these pieces has a lawful inexactitude.. Parallel Motion ends in contrary motion, and Relexion incorporates parallet motion at the end. It turns out that neither piece can complete itself without this inexactitude. They would only end “up in the air.”. I have always found it interesting, by the way, that Bartok in his own way, was doing what Gurdjieff did. He went to the East, to North Africa, he went to Hungary and to Romania, and to Bulgaria, and he found all these ancient sources of music and then he recorded something like 10,000 of these on his little Edison phonograph. He transcribed many of them and the music got into his blood stream. His composition became a synthesis of Eastern and Western music. Reijo: I had no idea about that part of his life. I know only that he was Hungarian. Elan: He was an interesting guy. When I first found Bartok’s music, I was 14. My teacher gave me the 3 Rondos on Folk Tunes, from Hungary.I was at the Juilliard Preparatory School, and I needed something modern for the final exam of my first year there. I played it through once and I didn’t understand it. The second time, I was addicted.. For years, I was playing only Bartok. Anyway, going back to the subject of lawful inexactitudes, you can find them. When you spoke of the Movements changing abruptly, I think there is a clue here. They take you out of your flow. This is probably a good place to begin understanding them. . Reijo: And the big thing is that you can then somehow be brought back into the flow even though you are brought out of it, in this way, and that is the beauty of the movements for me, anyway. Elan: And that brings up another response to what you were asking before. I just want to put this on your recorder. I don’t know if we are going to use this. But there is a very interesting thing about waking up that Mr. Bennett once said. We had a staff meeting at the beginning of the Third Basic Course, or it may have been the Fourth Basic Course. he said, „We think that we practice self observation in order to remember ourselves. . But the real purpose of self observation is to see that you cannot remember yourself. It is not to remember yourself. It is to see that you cannot remember yourself.” Reijo: That’s good. I thank Mr. Bennett for that. That’s beautiful. Elan: Then he added, “Now I don’t remember myself all of the time.” and this was a person who had spent 50 years in the Work, and who had come a long, long way.. And finally he said, “But when I need to, I can. I want to add something to that because, in my experience what really happens with self-remembering is not that I remember myself, but that I am remembered by something higher. In other words, something higher comes in, and wakes me up, and this is connected with something as simple as noticing. So, every time, I notice, I have a spark of consciousness. When I notice that “Oops! I am going to be late,” This is self-awareness. Reijo: That’s very nice. Thank you very much. It’s been very, very interesting to listen to you talk. Really, we have got to keep up the contact. www.gurdjieff-internet.com |
More information on the three men collaborating across time and space to produce these events is given below...
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866?-1949) was born to Armenian-Greek parents, spending his early life in Kars (now in Turkey). As a young man he embarked on a search for lost knowledge with a group of companions, the “Seekers of the Truth”. He sought the answer to the question: What is the sense and aim of human existence?
During these journeys, to remote parts of Egypt, Tibet, and countries of Central Asia, Gurdjieff came into contact with the music, ritual and dance of many ethnic traditions. In 1913 he moved to Russia where he started to pass on this knowledge, and was joined in 1916, in St. Petersberg, by a young composer, Thomas de Hartmann and his wife, Olga. They traveled via the Caucasus, Constantinople, and Berlin to France where in 1922, Gurdjieff finally settled at the Chateau de Prieuré, at Fontainebleau, near Paris, establishing the Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Here they continued with their collaboration of original compositions influenced by the music Gurdjieff had heard in the temples and monasteries during his travels, which he conveyed to de Hartmann, who transcribed these rhythms into Western notation adding his own harmonies.
Thomas de Hartmann (1885-1956) was born in the Ukraine to Russian parents. He was drawn to the piano at a very early age and was encouraged to follow a musical education, receiving, in 1903, a diploma from the St. Petersberg Conservatory, then under the direction of Rimsky- Korsokov. de Hartmann was a fellow student of Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Prokofiev. At the age of 21, he received great acclaim for his full-length ballet performed before Tzar Nicholas ll. He was part of the pre-war avant-garde cultural movement in Munich, searching for a common spiritual basis of artistic expression. Then, in 1916, he met Gurdjieff and his life changed.
de Hartmann spent twelve years studying with Gurdjieff, and during a short period in the 1920’s they together created the music you will hear this evening. It is a testament to his brilliance as a musician that he was able to develop the melody and rhythms whistled or tapped out to him by Gurdjieff into European notation for the piano, creating these unique works that can convey the deeper essential character or kernel of the music, which is intended to speak directly to the listener’s innermost self. de Hartmann left Gurdjieff in 1929 continuing to compose and also to write scores for films. In the late 1940’s and early 50’s he worked with Mme. Jeanne de Salzmann, one of Gurdjieff’s closest pupils, giving recitals of the music he had composed with Gurdjieff and composing new pieces for the Movements, or Sacred Dances. In 1950 he moved to the United States, where he lived until his death in 1956.
Note: Please follow this link for information about the Thomas de Hartmann Project.
Elan Sicroff received a classical musical training at the Juilliard School and at the Oberlin Conservatory. In 1972 he was introduced to the music of Gurdjieff and de Hartmann while attending a ten-month residential course in England, run by J. G. Bennett, one of the exponents of Gurdjieff’s teaching. He remained at the International Academy for Continuous Education for a further two years as Music Director. In 1975 he met Mme.Olga de Hartmann, widow of the composer, who had invited him to participate in a concert of her husband’s music at McGill University in Montreal, and subsequently worked with her on the “Gurdjieff music” as well as on de Hartmann’s classical works, until her death in 1979.
From 1977-1983 Sicroff lived at Claymont Court in West Virginia, a Fourth Way community set up by J. G. Bennett shortly before his death, where he taught music and continued to perform – giving recitals at Carnegie Recital Hall, London’s Wigmore Hall, the Longy School in Boston, as well as many University campuses. Sicroff currently lives in rural Massachusetts, where he is part of a group formed over the past twenty years to work practically with the teaching of J. G. Bennett and G. I. Gurdjieff, the Millers River Educational Cooperative, located at Camp Caravan in Royalston, Massachusetts. He has released two CD’s of the Gurdjieff/de Hartmann music. He recently returned from a concert tour including the Vatican City and Malta, and excerpts from performances may be viewed at Youtube. Sicroff will instruct a small group on this music at the Gurdjieff/Bennett 2010 Intensive beginning in June at Camp Caravan. (Please note that the dates for the Intensive have changed.)