A correspondence with Yale historian Tim Snyder began in 2011 when I found him online to answer questions I had about anti-Semitism in 1920’s Germany, eventually meeting briefly after a lecture he gave at a Beverly Hills synagogue years later. At one point, Tim was very kind to write, "Your continuing fruitful work amazes me!" He also afforded me priceless advise about how to approach lecturing pertaining to nuances of interaction with listeners prior to a presentation I gave at Bard College.

Interestingly, another professor outside of music I found online, this time for information about the poem Oil and Blood by William Butler Yeats, Helen Vendler, an English professor at Harvard, wrote me, "Your intriguing set of instruments suggests that you are doing something quite new in American music." On another occasion she added, "Thank you for the notes and the music, with its shimmering version of the music of the spheres." We enjoyed a voluminous email correspondence for years.

Yet another outstanding person outside the music world, Kitty Pilgrim, a Columbia University graduate who became an award-winning CNN anchor and correspondent, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote after hearing my music, "You have been blessed with genius," an opinion articulated by a number of people both in and outside of music. For example, Lee Konitz told me in regard to my meruvina music: "I think the definition of genius is when someone tries to do what the current leaders in music are doing, finds that impossible, and then develops something new out of necessity."

The last thing Lee said to me during a phone talk a few months before he left us, is how he wished very much for me to begin playing jazz in addition to my composing. I regret he's no longer here to experience the direction I've taken with jazz improvisation at the piano, the chosen instrument of his jazz teacher, Lennie Tristano.

And to be clear, I'm definitely not stating the description two paragraphs above myself, only repeating what others have said, just doing the best I can guided by instinct and what feels and sounds right. Our only true guideline is self-validation, and getting too high or low from what others say is something to seriously avoid as NBA players often say.

One thing these three highly sensitive and brilliant people share is freedom from the conventions and politics of music.

Leonard Altman, who attended Harvard with his friend, Leonard Bernstein, took the extraordinary actions of inviting me to study at Tanglewood, including asking Gunther Schuller to mentor me while there, and later asking Steve Reich to mentor me. Altman also trusted me to report back to him how the acoustics were effected by a renovation of Carnegie Hall.

My best friend in high school graduated close to the top of our class, and after following family tradition serving in both the Navy and the Peace Corps, continued at Brown and Harvard, becoming a leader in business. My closest childhood friend went to Cornell and The Wharton School, and became a leader in several different fields.

Our high school band director startled me on one occasion, telling me I was the most intelligent person in our graduating class. (Quite a few of my classmates went to Ivy League schools following graduation.) Of course, being unconventionally creative, constitutionally unable to conform to superfluous conventions, may inadvertently cause conflict.

At several of the universities where I lectured, I felt compelled to correct as diplomatically as possible the professors who had invited me when pertinent musical issues arose spontaneously, and have not been invited back.

Nazir Ali Jairazbhoy was extremely noble in this regard, agreeing with me that the wording regarding a key element of Indian classical music in his most famous book was misleading, but he was unable to have the book republished with the correction I had pointed out.

Listening to Tim Snyder’s lectures on YouTube is always incredibly educational and fascinating, and heard him just a few days ago highlighting a German word that resonated with myself which translates to mean “the absence of alternatives.”

While I feel extremely fortunate for all the attention given my music by others, and while I appreciate hearing from them, it has been disappointing to receive emails from Alex Ross and Amanda Petrusich at the New Yorker; Mark Swed at The Los Angeles Times; and Jon Pareles, Giovanni Russonello, and Corrina da Fonseca-Wollheim at the New York Times, without any follow-up to date in terms of writing a piece about my music. Perhaps one or more of them wishes to, but their editors rejected the idea.

This actually happened to me once. Derk Richardson told me he was planning a piece for Yoga Journal, but his editor at the time said he disapproved of the way I was so self-involved with my music, including the nature of the meruvina, and how I own Azure Miles Records. One wonders if the editor forgot about the person who brought yoga to the Western world, Paramhansa Yogananda, who named his teaching centers the Self-Realization Fellowship!

At the time of forming Azure Miles Records, Leonard Altman suggesting I add, "the Music of Michael Robinson," Karlheinz Stockhausen was the only other composer I was aware of having his own imprint. Later on, Ravi Shankar formed his own label, and now myriad artists do so, of course.

Norman Lebrecht, residing in England, whose blog is the most visited Western classical music site online, featured my writings about music four times in 2020-2021 even though his tastes are rather conservative, thus not focusing on my actual music with the exception of Maria Improvisation, an unplanned, spontaneous piano recording when there was time left over in a meruvina session.

All About Jazz, among the world's leading music publications, has presented a number of most insightful and informative writings in the past eighteen months, demonstrating a keen interest in music defying traditional genre groupings. Another leading British cultural site featured me together with Meister Eckhart and Julian Schnabel during the summer of 2020.

The writers mentioned above who sent me emails profess to be interested in composers and improvisers of our time, yet they are saddled by a profound lack of alternatives, covering and extolling music that is entirely predictable and similar, and oftentimes underwhelming.

For instance, if you look at the composers Alex Ross lists at his blog for being notable in our time, there are only a few computer-electronic music composers included even though we are living in the age of the composer-programmer just as the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were the age of the composer-pianist. After writing the previous sentence from memory, I went to recheck, and it appears the entire list of composers has been deleted for some unknown reason likely unrelated to my writings.

Furthermore, Ross actually stated in his recent book about Richard Wagner, “Wagner is the most widely influential figure in the history of music." In our time, at the very least, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Ravi Shankar, the Beatles and John Cage are all more influential, as are Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Claude Debussy and Igor Stravinsky.

Part of the problem is how Ross, like many in the realm of “Western classical music,” has scant knowledge and experience with the music of Parker, Coltrane, Shankar, and the Beatles, and with the traditions and schools these artists represent, they being only the most famous from their respective genres, not to mention that jazz and Indian classical music are the most

It's possible I'm inaccurate about Alex's familiarity with the Beatles. I base my statement on how when asked to name his favorite Beatles song, he hesitated, suggesting a lack of comprehensive familiarity, instead stating he was much more interested in Bob Dylan, and avoided answering the question. While being as great a Dylan admirer as anyone, no knowledgeable person would equate the pure musical invention of the Beatles and Bob Dylan.

Ross also stated, "Wagner was vulnerable to exploitation by the Nazis,” but that is most disingenuous and glib given how Wagner was the person who first made anti-Semitism acceptable in German society, and how he advocated and wished for the very things the Nazis went on to do, including being by far the person who most influenced Adolf Hitler. Like many others, I enjoy Wagner's overtures, but have difficulty with the operas, this not being the setting to get into specific details as to why.

Writing about Wagnerian influence upon film music, Ross focuses on the Apocalypse Now helicopter scene dramatizing the horrors of war, more specifically in this instance, a horrific depiction of war as hellacious sport - to be sure, this is how it was presented in a movie - Wagner's music accompanying the firing of rockets, machine guns and rifles from above at a Vietnamese village filled with woman and children together with soldiers.

Alex curiously overlooks how the music of The Doors actually sets the rasa for that memorable film, both opening the movie and reappearing at climatic moments.

Robby Krieger told me how the song used, The End, was largely inspired by an Indian raga - himself and John Densmore having studied with Harihar Rao, my first Indian classical music teacher, who also taught Lalo Schifrin, Don Ellis, George Harrison, Brian Jones and Ed Shaughnessy among many Indian musicians.

One surmises Ross lacks experience and understanding pertaining to the revolutionary, exalted music of The Doors, and how crucial they were towards helping bring awareness of Indian classical music to the Western world together with John Coltrane, George Harrison and others.

Another thing I will confess to finding curious is the thought process behind the cover design of the new book about Wagner having militaristic tones of black and gold framing center font of pure white. Perhaps I am overreacting, being a highly sensitive person who often notices details others may miss, but this is my honest response. I mean, were they even aware of the plausible, even blatant symbolism?

When I think of the best of Wagner, the opening of the Tannhauser Overture comes to mind with green and brown hues symbolizing nature and German forests, or for the Tristan and Isolde Overture, sensual colorations are suggested, certainly not the frigid starkness of black, gold and white for his actual music.

While any music must speak for itself, and not be dependent upon prior experience and knowledge, it’s also true that a good deal of original music is an acquired taste, including some degree of understanding and experience with relevant genres and specific artists. In fact, Derk Richardson made of point of mentioning this phenomenon with my music, relating how it was so unusual the true import and meaning only become apparent through a number of exposures.

Similarly, Jeremy Bye wrote, "A composition inspired by midnight on the island of Maui, and played on a variety of instruments I can neither pronounce nor spell, Michael Robinson‘s Nightmarchers is an album unlike any other I’ve heard whilst writing for A Closer Listen, and for a long time before that, probably since Moondog."

I might add that I had never heard the music of Moondog, and that the unusual nature described by Bye (love writing "by Bye") is evident in all of my 146 albums to date.

Related, Kyle Gann gave what I later learned is his highest compliment for a composer, writing about my second album, Fire Monkey, from 1994, "No telling where he's going to spin off to, but he's an original." Gann also included me in a list of composers of our time, and electronicmusic (dot) com included me in a list of artists of our time who use music technology.

How amazingly prescient of Kyle to predict I might "spin off" somewhere, later that same year beginning my formal immersion into Indian classical music, an ongoing study that became vitally transformative.

And with the writers I have named above, I confess to suspecting they perhaps are disapproving of the meruvina concept itself, believing acoustic instrumental timbres are only sanctified if they are played by traditional musicians. Some may be intimidated by my assimilation of Indian classical music influences, feeling this falls outside their area of expertise, but that would be a self-defeating attitude because they would learn about that great tradition through interacting with my music and myself. Together with my unique assimilation of Indian classical music elements into composition, my interviews with Indian masters related to my studies are highly valued by both musicians and scholars.

They might perhaps question the unusual expression and form in my music, but that would expose their clinging to the expressive qualities of traditional musicians, and their failure to understand the jazz and Indian classical music forms that largely inform my compositions.

In chess they sometimes say the best defense is a good offense. My father, who was offered draws by legendary grandmasters Samuel Reshevsky and Miguel Najdorf, taught me to play chess, and I would prevail over him once in a blue moon.

If someone simply has no positive connection to my music that is a valid (and likely welcome) reason for not writing about it, of course.

I am also a more traditional musician given my recent albums of piano improvisations, admittedly at an early stage of development, and for my compositions feel the meruvina concept represents a natural evolution of Western classical composition and performance. 

When Lee Konitz passed away in April 2020, it was stunning how the New Yorker utterly ignored the loss of this historic figure being one of the key individuals who created modern jazz, and also Jewish American. This snub was even more egregious because Konitz lived in Manhattan for around seventy of his ninety-two years, and it's difficult to think of anyone who better represented the cultural life of NYC than Lee, who also spent part of the year at a second home in Cologne for a period. I would be very curious to hear editor David Remnick's explanation for this glaring omission. My best guess is he was compromised by a lack of jazz knowledge and sophistication in his music department.

The musical direction I took with composition began with sensing that the John Coltrane and Rashied Ali Interstellar Space album, originally released in 1974, represented a transitional moment in time.

While many have taken to copying jazz styles of the past both avant-garde and traditional (something most Western classical music writers are oblivious to, lacking significant experience with jazz history), I entered into a new musical medium, subsequently named the meruvina. Astonishingly, much of my music for meruvina is more spontaneous sounding and original, and thus more about jazz given my deep jazz roots, than most current traditional musicians generally classified as such.

More so, given how American jazz and Indian classical music superseded the Western classical music of the world I was born into, something affirmed by the music of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Philip Glass, my music represents a unique assimilation of improvisation into composition. All four of these composers were deeply transformed by Indian classical music and jazz, of course, Steve specifically citing John Coltrane's modal period engendered by Ravi Shankar and Bismillah Khan.

Reich has also said he envisions people who enjoy Western classical, jazz, and world music having interest in his music, and I concur regarding myself, adding computer, electronic, rock and pop listeners, too.

In my junior year of college, an electronic music professor asked us to write a definition of quality, this being in the context of music, of course. Preferring not to consult a dictionary, I composed: “Quality is epiphany illuminated by a jewel of the lotus.” This professor, Don Funes, said he didn’t understand the meaning, so I explained how lotus represents the world; jewel represents an individual; and how epiphany represents noteworthy content.

When it comes to myself, at least, the writers mentioned above seem determined to maintain an absence of alternatives in music while denying originality in music simultaneously. I also suspect, again, they may feel recognizing music for meruvina is unacceptable because I have broken some kind of dubious arrangement the academic computer-electronic music world made with traditional musicians whereby traditional acoustic timbres performed in certain ways are out of bounds because of a misplaced fear traditional musicians may have of being replaced. While such things certainly happen in some commercial music situations, it is completely irrelevant and even impossible when it comes to art music. And, as others have pointed out, the academic computer-electronic music world has a tendency to be as conformist as serialism was at an earlier time.

It’s no longer such a simple and segregated world where Western classical, jazz, Indian classical, and new technological instruments are separate.

The absence of alternatives in music or most any field is troubling, and it is essential for a range of genuine, valid approaches and views to be presented, even those that happen not to be one's personal favorite and comfort zone.

The main reason for writing this is how I wish young people of all ethnicities and social classes to be exposed to alternatives in music, especially those who are frustrated by the prevailing absence of alternatives in their lives, being denied essential information.

- Michael Robinson, April 2021 with additions made April 2024, Los Angeles 

© 2021-2024 Michael Robinson All rights reserved

Michael Robinson is a Los Angeles-based composer, programmer, pianist and musicologist. His 199 albums include 152 albums for meruvina and 47 albums of piano improvisations. Robinson has been a lecturer at UCLA, Bard College and California State University Long Beach and Dominguez Hills.