Education Quote by Joseph Jarman

There is something quietly radical in Jarman describing Buddhist teachings not as an “influence,” but as material he can literally work into a chamber score. The phrasing is practical, almost casual - “I discovered it was possible” - as if the spiritual and the compositional simply clicked into alignment once the commission arrived. That matters. He’s not presenting enlightenment as a private epiphany; he’s framing it as a set of tools that can be translated, engineered, and shared.

The subtext is about legitimacy and access. A chamber orchestra commission signals entry into a prestige pipeline that historically hasn’t known what to do with Black avant-garde artists, let alone those shaped by the AACM’s experimental ethos. Jarman doesn’t apologize or code-switch. He takes the opportunity and widens the frame: Western concert instrumentation becomes a vessel for non-Western philosophy, and the “teachings” become structural - an approach to time, breath, silence, repetition, attention. In Buddhism, form and emptiness aren’t opposites; in music, sound and silence aren’t either. He’s hinting that the score can model a mind.

Context sharpens it further. Jarman’s career moved between free jazz’s ecstatic rupture and disciplined ritual: performance as ceremony, improvisation as listening practice. So this isn’t spiritual branding stapled onto art; it’s an argument that music can do spiritual work without preaching. The intent feels less like conversion than integration: composing as a way to make ethics audible, to embed a practice of awareness inside the polite architecture of chamber music.