Mountains and Rivers Trio

Mountains and Rivers Trio Program Note 8/11/25

The Mountains and Rivers Trio begins softly and mysteriously, unfolding with increasing intensity before settling into a gentle violin melody. The work quickly grows faster and more passionate, reaching a big climax that fades into a quiet cello melody, beginning a melodious slow movement, that comes to a quiet end. A fast and lively scherzo breaks in, its repeated notes becoming a background for a restatement of the original melodic material, which grows into a big climax and a fast conclusion, resuming the drive of the scherzo.

The title of this work perhaps requires an explanation. In 1987 my Zen teacher at the time, the photographer and video-artist John Daido Loori Roshi,asked me to provide music for a video, Mountains and Rivers, based on the Mountains and Rivers Sutra of Dogen Zenji, the great religious figure, writer, and philosopher who founded the Japanese Soto school of Zen. Here, Dogen treats the mountains and rivers, “just as they are” as in themselves a teaching of the Buddha. Daido Roshi’s video features beautiful footage of the changing landscape of the Catskill Mountains moving from the end of winter through the seasons and finally to winter again. In 1990 mountains and rivers were still in the air and had found a place in the music of the Trio – and so, when  I didn’t know what to call it, my wife, the Schoenberg scholar Severine Neff, suggested Mountains and Rivers.