Gurdjieff International Review Summer 1999 Issue, Vol. II No. 4The Gurdjieff / de Hartmann MusicEditorial IntroductionGurdjieff embodied his teaching in three forms: ideas (both written and oral), movements, and music. An accomplished professional composer, Thomas de Hartmann collaborated on several hundred musical compositions with Gurdjieff in the 1920s. This issue is focused on this music and its legacy. On Listening
|
![]() |
![]() I had a very difficult and trying time with this music. Mr Gurdjieff sometimes whistled or played on the piano with one finger a very complicated sort of melodyas are all Eastern melodies, although they seem at first to be monotonous. To grasp this melody, to transcribe it in European notation, required a tour de force. Thomas de Hartmann It is the consistency and objectivity of his [Gurdjieffs] essential tone that is so compelling. Whether in a delicate dance, a soulful song, or an uncompromisingly stark hymn, one hears always his call to return to and confront ones inmost being. Laurence Rosenthal The music is very varied, from folk songs to sacred hymns, and the responses evoked are equally varied, sometimes speaking of the suffering and joy of a human life, sometimes eliciting a strange and quite unfamiliar coloration of the feelings, and sometimes, for me at least, as if conveying a definite knowledge hidden from my ordinary thoughts. Anonymous We had been brought to a level of pondering we had never before experienced. Finally she [Olga de Hartmann] planted a seed that grew inside this silence: There is only one important thingto actually develop our possibilities. We should not be content with anything else, or anything less. Thomas C. Daly An object attracts us; we do not attract the object. Objects govern us from outside. They make us do all sorts of things. It is not the woman who buys the hat, but the hat buys the woman. The man does not smoke the cigarette; the cigarette smokes the man, as Mr. Gurdjieff said. The attention and the will generated by outside objects, through the senses, are not our own. They are part of the mechanism of Nature: Nature works us. We do not conquer Nature; Nature conquers us. Thomas de Hartmann In order to awaken you have to think: all this agitation is external to me. You need an act of reflection. But if this act sets off in you new automatisms, in ones memory and ones reasoning process, your voice could continue to maintain that you were still reflecting: but instead you would have again fallen asleep. Thus you can spend entire days without awakening for a single instant. Waking is not a state but an act. René Daumal
Copyright © 1999
February 16, 2018
|