Description

• Composer: Vijay Iyer (1971-)
• Instrumentation: Piano, Violin
• Work: The Diamond
• Binding:
• ISMN: 9790600012916
• Size: 9.0 x 12.0 inches
• Pages: None

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Description

In The Diamond Sutra , an early Buddhist text also known as The Diamond that Cuts Through Illusion , the Buddha leads his interlocutor, the Elder Subhuti, through a series of questions and provocations. The Buddha then concludes the session by offering this teaching to those assembled:

All composed things are like a dream,

a phantom, a drop of dew, a flash of lightning.

That is how to meditate on them;

that is how to observe them.

This duo piece is in four sections, corresponding roughly to these four disparate visions of impermanence: four distinct moments of interplay between form and emptiness, four corners of a diamond. This series of images is itself a “composed thing,” gathering dissimilar elements into a unified system. It suggests that the things we make are similar to things that exist beyond intention. The Buddha’s utterance helps us hear so-called “composition” and “improvisation” – or the encompassing category, “music” – as part of an even larger aggregate: that which forms and recedes.

– Vijay Iyer