In her recent Op Ed piece (“Music of the Unquiet Mind,” NYT, 9/1/12), the pianist Margaret Leng Tan recalls how counting in music was relief
for someone who suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder. “You can imagine
how delighted I was to count the beats in a piece of music,” she remarks. “I
could now count to my heart’s content in a totally creative fashion.” The piece is also a recollection of her relationship with John Cage. In l944 Cage had
composed “ ‘Four Walls,’ a 70 minute work using only the white keys of the
piano.” The piece had not been performed for decades when she came upon it
in the ‘80’s. “Its repetitive insistent nature struck a
deep chord within me. It was as if someone had entered the innermost rooms of
my mind.” The music is not only a triage of sorts, it facilitates her
relationship with Cage whose anthology of writings on Zen, Silence, enables her to attend to her condition. “Running like a
vein through the writings in ‘Silence,’ is what Cage liked to call the ‘now’
moment,” she explains. “Living in the ‘now’ moment means relinquishing the
previous moment and forgoing anticipation of the next…I have recently
discovered that this focus on the ‘now’ moment can counter the grip of an
O.C.D. attack.” Who would have thought that one of the great modernists, a
maverick composer whose work eschewed the soothing content and order of the
classical canon (and of music itself in his famous ode to silence 4’33”), could
have provided the script (in a pharmaceutical sense) that diagnosed and
attended to OCD. Well stranger things have happened. Didn’t Alexander Fleming
discover penicillin by accident? Indeed, as it turns out, chance (in the form of the I Ching) was another way that Cage made music.
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