“Well, growing up in the sixties in the San Francisco Bay Area, you really couldn’t avoid rock music. The Jefferson Airplane hit it big when I was eleven years old, in 1967, followed by bands like the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service; these bands defined the San Francisco, Fillmore West kind of psychedelic rock music. I liked their music—to this day one of my goals in life is to be able to play Embryonic Journey6—but I wasn’t into the psychedelic scene at all. For one thing, at twelve I was a little young, but I also found myself being drawn to a different style of music as I learned to play the guitar.”
“How did that happen?”
“In that same year, 1967, my brother Charlie came down with the mumps and was confined at home for two weeks. Being bored to tears, he borrowed a guitar from a friend and, being a gifted natural musician, taught himself to play. Charlie is left-handed, so he played the guitar upside-down like Paul McCartney. He got pretty good pretty fast, and began entertaining us with Beatles songs and so forth. I couldn’t stand that Charlie could do something that I couldn’t so, using the same borrowed guitar, I started teaching myself as well. Thus began a lifelong, usually friendly, competition between brothers playing music. In all fairness, Charlie pretty much won this competition hands down. He not only had great natural ability, but he became an excellent student, learning to play and excel at the piano and the electric bass. I mostly just farted around on the guitar, but I had another musical outlet.
“In the fourth grade my parents rented me a cornet so that I could begin playing in the school band. Oh, how I loved that cornet! It’s an instrument that has by now been almost totally supplanted by the trumpet, but the cornet is one of the sweetest sounding brass instruments there is. Although I never really mastered the cornet either, playing in band broadened my musical horizons beyond the Beatles and San Francisco rock to the world of classical music. At about the same time my Dad bought a brand new stereo system and recordings of Broadway musicals, which he would play loudly while he lay on the sofa and pretended to conduct. In other words, by the time I was twelve my home was filled with an eclectic and wide range of musical styles, which led to my lifelong love of an eclectic and wide range of musical styles.
“In 1969 I became a teenager, and to be honest one of the big attractions of playing the guitar was that girls liked it. I had long red hair back then and walked around with a guitar strapped to my back, looking for all the world like a young hippie on the upswing. Thank God I wasn’t into drugs, but I was certainly eager to attract a girlfriend. By 1971 my parents were able to buy me my first, and very cheap, acoustic guitar—which I still have—and I took it everywhere. Fortunately for me I found music that didn’t require an electric guitar so, equipped with songs by Simon & Garfunkel, the Beatles and Crosby Stills and Nash, I set forth into the world of teenage girls. I was good enough to attract a crowd of listeners, but ironically it was my trumpet playing that snagged me my first girlfriend.”
“I knew it!” Alan interjected. “I knew we’d get around to girls! Buddy, you’re digressing. Unless your girlfriend was a teenage Zen master, please get back to how music led you to become a minister!”
“Well, sorry, but I guess like everybody my love life had something to do with my spiritual journey. Through playing the cornet, then later the trumpet, I got involved in my high school jazz band. It was a really good band, and we ended up playing at festivals around the Bay Area and appeared on a local TV show: that kind of thing. Julie, my high school girlfriend, was kind of a jazz band groupie who, amazingly, fixated on me. The band went to a competition in Monterey for a chance to play at the Monterey Jazz Festival, and Julie and her family came along, and, well, the rest is history. But, you know, that’s how I viewed music back then. I liked it, but it was also the means to an end. There weren’t any conscious connections with spirituality back then. I was in many ways a pretty unconscious kid, just absorbing music like I did Zen and nature in an unexamined way.
“And yet,” said Alan sarcastically, “you said it was like, you know, super-important!”
“Did not!” We both laughed, then I continued.
“I’m trying to describe some of these formative experiences. I wasn’t conscious of spirituality when I was around Suzuki-roshi either, I just felt it. I just absorbed it without analysis. The same is true of the natural world. I was in it, like a fish in water, but not necessarily consciously aware of it, as a fish is not aware of the water. But my entry into music, which later became instrumental—pun intended—to my spiritual development, was at the time rather venal. It elevated me socially and allowed me to compete with Charlie as the center of attention, and I acquired a pretty girlfriend because of it, but at the time I completely lacked the discipline to actually become a really good musician. But what I did absorb was the possibility of becoming a good musician, just as I absorbed from Suzuki-roshi and Pinecrest the possibility of becoming a Zen-Druid! And yes, I did then and at other times in my life aspire to become a professional musician, but that same lack of discipline always prevented me from doing so. At times, when I would really knuckle under and practice, I could get to be pretty good, but I just couldn’t ever sustain it for very long.
“But I also became an excellent listener of music, which made up for my lack of performance abilities. In the early 1970s Seiji Ozawa was the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony, and he took that rather moribund institution and revitalized it. He brought the symphony down the peninsula to play concerts in the gym at Foothill Junior College in Los Altos. My mom, who loved all things Japanese, was delighted to take us all to see another Japanese phenom. Ozawa cut quite a figure on the podium, eschewing the traditional stiff white shirt and bow tie for a comfortable turtleneck underneath his tuxedo coat. But in spite of the absolutely abysmal acoustics of the college gym, the music was spectacular. At one concert he conducted the orchestra in Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet and I was simply bowled over. But other performances of pieces by Beethoven and Tchaikovsky introduced me to the realm of absolute music.”
“Absolute music?” Alan interjected.
“Music that doesn’t have lyrics and is not programmatic: it’s not trying to tell a particular story. Think of Bach’s great Toccata and Fugue in D Minor: it’s evocative, yes, but it isn’t telling a story. Its meaning comes from within each listener. For some, the meaning is in the structure itself—the complexities of a fugue, for example—but others find the music to be evocative, stirring up emotions and associations that aren’t tied to a particular narrative. But there’s something else, something only the performers can provide; something mysterious that allows music to touch us beyond logic or analysis. Musicians know this; they talk about the difference between playing the notes and playing the music. Beginners are usually satisfied if they can just get all the notes correctly, but as a musician matures, if they desire to really elevate their game, they learn the notes quickly, then concentrate on interpretation. They try to meld their own uniqueness as a person with the intent of the composer expressed on the page to co-create the final performance. In other words, they try to blur the distinction between themselves and the music.”
“Co-create? I thought the composer created the music, and the musicians just played it.”
“Not exactly. Co-creation is a critical component of music that goes beyond the notes, and it is also critical to understanding our place in the relationship with God. That’s why I’m telling you about this now, because out of music came for me what I call ‘shared learnings.’ Wisdom and knowledge acquired in one discipline become analogous and informative to another; in this case, the spiritual life. So, let me give you an example of co-creation and maybe you’ll see the analogy.
“This happened much later when I was in college in Hayward and living in Berkeley. My friend Terry and I took BART into the City to hear the great classical guitarist Andrés Segovia. The train deposited us on Market St., and the concert was at a hall at the
