Origami Odyssey. Peter Engel

      Using imagination and the power of suggestion, two Japanese artworks evoke differing moods of water: a raked-gravel Zen garden and an interpretation of Hokusai’s wood-block print View of Mount Fuji Through High Waves off Kanagawa from the cover of Claude Debussy’s printed score for La Mer. Debussy owned a copy of the print and chose the image himself.

      My exposure to Indian crafts and music gave urgency to my struggle to escape the hegemony of geometric determinism in origami. I gained conviction, too, from the music and writings of a couple of Western classical composers whose works I had loved but perhaps not fully understood. Western composers began to absorb Asian influences into their music at the end of the 19th century, a time when the French composers Claude Debussy and Erik Satie struggled to break free of the Germanic determinism that had dominated classical music from Beethoven through Brahms and Wagner. While some British and Central European composers looked to native folk traditions, Debussy and Satie turned primarily to inspiration from ancient Greece, medieval mysticism, and the exotic sounding harmonies and rhythms of the Far East.

      Although Indian music was little known, the appearance of a Javanese gamelan orchestra at the 1893 Paris Exposition had a mesmerizing effect on Debussy. A keen collector of Japanese woodblock prints and other Asian objets d’art, Debussy began to experiment with the pentatonic scale (Satie was doing much the same with medieval scales), generating indeterminate and unresolved harmonies that possessed, in common with much Asian music, a kind of static motion. Much of the music that Debussy produced has subtle correspondences with nature and human experience—famous examples include the piano works The Sunken Cathedral, Pagodas, Evening in Granada, Goldfish, Reflections in the Water, and Gardens in the Rain, with perhaps his most famous work being the orchestral La Mer (The Sea)—but he rejected the notion that he was a mere “impressionist,” preferring to think of himself instead as a “symbolist.” In an incisive note about the creation of his opera Pelleas and Melisande, Debussy wrote, “Explorations previously made in the realm of pure music had led me toward a hatred of classical development, whose beauty is solely technical . . . I wanted music to have a freedom that was perhaps more inherent than in any other art, for it is not limited to a more or less exact representation of nature, but rather to the mysterious affinity between Nature and the Imagination.”

      Working nearly in parallel with Debussy, Satie was exploring the balance of stasis and movement in his own piano pieces and songs and undermining the seriousness of the Germanic tradition by marrying his profound mysticism to an absurdist sense of humor. He provocatively titled a set of piano compositions Three Pieces in the Form of a Pear to prove to his close friend Debussy that his music really did have form. (Pointedly there are seven, not three, pieces in the collection.) The same Zen-like mind later produced Vexations, which consists of a single musical theme repeated 840 times. Satie’s “white music” and Zen utterances would eventually inspire the aleatoric, chance-inspired music of the American composer John Cage, who with a team of pianists first performed Vexations seventy years after it was composed, in a performance that took over 30 hours. Satie’s deliberate disconnect between the name given to a piece of music and the music itself recalls the paradoxes evoked by Escher’s reptile and Hokusai’s magician, calling into question which is reality and which illusion.