I'll name that tune in one

The first note contains the possibility of all others.

But the first is closest to the image of the last more than anything else. One cannot play the first note unless one has in one's mind what the last one is.

Is the piano central to western sensibilities the way the sitar is, say, to Indian ones? Barenboim's fascinating point: the piano itself is neutral, like a blank wall on which any colours can be painted; the piano is 'open' to the millions of variations of movement of hand and mind. Structure -of course-but a 'text' only comes alive when the human touch is introduced, the human angle...the meeting of the vertical with the horizontal.

The one circles around itself, waiting to break, to become two.

Minimalism: to express everything in a single note or the simplest and faintest of brush strokes on a blank canvas, a vital movement that is at once entirely free, spontaneous, and at the same time the product of great learning and technique. A single note that expresses the different worlds: the natural, the human, and the cosmic. It is reached if one slows down the passage of time , frame by frame, to a single point, the whole point.

There is nothing to say after the point has been reached. The first note emerges from silence and holds that silence within its innermost chamber; its very structure is permeated by that nothingness; and it must return to that primal state.

If one unravels the note one can hear ancient and modern tunes: the co-mingling of a timeless Japanese stillness that dreams itself into the pain of longing from a Persian poem...and then, with a slight shift of emphasis, to a Highland lament. If one is attentive one can just discern a return to 19th century classical Vienna or the onward rush of the first settlers, frontiersmen, seeking out open spaces and new futures. The first note is always old because of its relation to the origin but also always new because it contains the unexpected, all that hasn't been thought of...

The first note has all the freshness and innocence of the first times, but all of the regret and sadness of the last times as well. A sound thought: a thought without mind. Each voice is present, each vital-as in an infinite stone bridge; to take away but one would be reduce the whole to nothing....

It is a small step from liberty to anarchy.


A line of stars would be of no interest to us. But a pattern where some are bunched together and others are hopelessly isolated in the infinite distances, forlorn, as if rejected by fate, is a different matter; in other regions some burn with a scintillating brilliance whilst others quietly fade into insignificance; these fantastical differences remind us of our own fabulous story: the creation of the universes is as the creation of a single soul.

The constant star that never wavers, that is a sure guide; the star without a name; the one that dazzles all others with its white light; the blue, mournful one; the star that never stays in the same place, that one has to search and search the skies for until, by chance, it is found; the one that caroms through the night sky, zig-zagging erratically through the universe. Is this not a better way of thinking about life?
---the swami.

(quotes by Daniel Barenboim)