The Music of G.I. Gurdjieff

Introduction

The music of G.I. Gurdjieff and Thomas de Hartmann was composed in Fontainebleau, France, during the 1920’s. It is only recently that this music has been introduced to the general public, yet it has been an integral part of Gurdjieff’s teaching for over 60 years.

Gurdjieff’s burning question about the meaning of man’s existence led him and a group of companions to begin a search for a body of knowledge. He believed this knowledge had its roots in ancient traditions. He and the other ‘Seekers of Truth’ travelled to Egypt, Tibet, and Bokhara province (Now Uzbekistan) and other countries throughout Central Asia. Such journeys gave him the opportunity to listen to and assimilate the music of many ethnic traditions and ultimately led him to certain temples and monasteries, where he studied special forms of ritual, dance and music.

After 20 years of search and research, Gurdjieff appeared in Europe with a complete system of teaching that bridged the esoteric knowledge of the East and the scientific method of the West. The ‘ancient teaching’ thought to have existed in 2500BC had been rediscovered.

In 1916 Gurdjieff met Thomas de Hartmann, when de Hartmann joined a teaching group in St. Petersburg.

Thomas de Hartmann

Thomas Alexandrovitch de Hartmann (1885-1956) received his musical education in the Russian school. At the age of nine he was enrolled in the academic military school of St. Petersburg. By the age of 11 his talent had been recognized and he was accepted by Arensky as a pupil in harmony and composition, and by Madame Annette Esipova-Leschetizky for the piano. He later studied with Taneiev, and received his diploma from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1903, which at the time was under the direction of Rimsky-Korsakov. At the age of 21 he wrote the ballet ‘The Scarlet Flower’ which was premiered to great acclaim by the Imperial Opera of St. Petersburg with Legat, Pavlova, Karsavina and Nijinsky in the cast. Tzar Nicholas II was present, and in recognition of de Hartmann’s accomplishment, authorized his release from active military service. He became reserve officer so that he could devote all his time to music.

In Munich between 1908 and 1912 de Hartmann joined the avant-garde cultural movement started by Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky. Their anthology ‘Der Blaue Reiter’ articulated the modernist search before World War I for a common spiritual basis of artistic expression. De Hartmann’s article “On Anarchy in Music”, proclaimed “By discovering the new laws, art should…..lead to an even greater, more conscious freedom – to different, new possibilities”.

In 1912 De Hartmann returned to St. Petersburg where his career continued to flourish. His meeting with Gurdjieff in 1916 gave a new direction to his life. De Hartmann said:

It was clear to me long before I met Gurdjieff….that to be able to develop in my creative work, something was necessary – something greater or higher that I could not name. Only if I possessed this ‘something’ would I be able to progress further and hope to have any real satisfaction from my own creation….. [1].

For the next twelve years de Hartmann and his wife worked closely with Gurdjieff. Between 1922 and 1929 the de Hartmann’s lived at Gurdjieff’s Institute in France where most of the music now published by Schott [2] was composed.

In 1929, de Hartmann left the Institute and resumed his career, composing sonatas, concertos, ballet music, symphonies, the opera ‘Esher’, song cycles, and a setting for voice and piano of the final pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses. During this period he earned his livelihood by writing scores for films.

In the late 40’s and early 50’s , de Hartmann was invited by Jeanne de Salzmann, Gurdjieff’s closest disciple, to give recitals of the music he had composed with Gurdjieff and to compose new pieces for Gurdjieff’s movements and sacred dances. From 1951. de Hartmann lived and worked in America until his death on March 26, 1956.

The Music

Gurdjieff came to believe that the music of different cultures both preserved and revealed essential qualities and that music could convey deeper meanings rooted in their traditions. It seems from the vast range of musical expressions, that Gurdjieff had an extraordinary ability to remember the intricate melodies and rhythms he heard during the years he was living and travelling in Central Asia. His ‘remembering’ was crucial as this music was never written down. The musician from these traditions had to have exact knowledge of the music in order to communicate the sense of harmony, melodic line and complex rhythmic patterns. The systems of ‘tuning’ varied from region to region and divisions in our western octave gave unfamiliar sounds.

De Hartmann, a musician of European culture, needed time and special preparation to become sensitive to a musical language so different from his own.

Objective Art

In the words of Lawrence Rosenthal:

Gurdjieff’s views on the subject of music stem from his differentiation between what he terms subjective and objective art. Most of the music we know is subjective. Only objective music is based on an exact knowledge of the mathematical laws that govern the vibration of sounds and the relationship of tones. Sounds will always evoke a response in the human psyche, and this sonic quality will be translated into some form of inner experience. [3]

Thomas De Hartmann himself speaks of the ‘higher’ nature of music:

I can’t keep to tell something about Georgi Ivanovitch. Here we understand why Georgi Ivanovitch put always a great weight on music. He himself played and also composed. If we compare it with the music of all the religions, we can see that music plays a great role, a great part in the so-called religious service. But after the work of Georgi Ivanovitch we can understand better that music helps to concentrate, to bring oneself to an inner state where we can assume the greatest possible emanations. That is why music is just the thing which helps you to see higher. [4]

A Musician’s View

The sounds of the music are unusual and often strange due to the frequent use of the harmonic minor scale where the interval of the augmented 2nd brings a feeling of ‘longing’ and ‘pathos’ to the melodic line. The music also has ‘modes’ which are not part of traditional sounding scales. Also, there are multiple rhythms where right hand and left hand are playing in what seems to be in opposition to each other (a type of contrapuntal music as found in Bach)…..yet in spite of this the music conveys a simplicity which evokes a higher aspiration: in fact the music is a call to something higher…..Fourth Way student.

G-HRecords

This music is the result of the extraordinary collaboration between G.I. Gurdjieff and the Russian composer, Thomas de Hartmann. Gurdjieff traveled for twenty years in the Middle East and Central Asia to discover and develop the teaching which now bears his name. In the 1920’s he and de Hartmann worked together on the music included in this collection. These are the only recordings available of Thomas de Hartmann himself playing the music he composed with Gurdjieff.

References