Russian mystic and composer, George Gurdjieff Photo: Creative Commons
Gurdjieff is remembered as one of the great mystics of the early 20th century. He was a spiritual teacher whose charismatic personality attracted prominent disciples, including Katherine Mansfield, who towards the end of her life lived at his Institute for Harmonious Development of Man outside Paris.
But did you know Gurdjieff was also a composer?
As a young man Gurdjieff travelled throughout Asia visiting ancient temples, learning from spiritual masters and absorbing the music of all the countries he visited - Afghanistan, Central Asia, Tibet and more.
When he returned to the West he began composing music inspired by what he'd heard in the monasteries and temples of Asia. The often intimate and meditative music he wrote was mostly transcribed for piano by one of his disciples.
Portugese-born New Zealand guitarist Gunter Herbig came across the Russian mystic as a teenager when his mother gave him a book of Gurdjieff's philosophies.
Herbig says: "I didn't realise at the time that he was also interested in music and movement and that he had composed - or devised is almost a better word for his style of writing - hundreds of melodies that he would later on dictate to one of his students, Thomas de Hartmann, who was a well-known Russian composer at the time."
For decades Herbig wanted to transcribe Gurdjieff's piano pieces for his own instrument but found the short decay of acoustic classical guitar strings insufficient to capture the style of Gurdjieff's reverberating music. It wasn't until he began to experiment with electric guitar that he found a feasible way of doing so.
"When I almost by chance started working on an electric steel string guitar, all of a sudden I realised how the sustain of the note became much more singing. Also the dynamic and colours of the electric guitar, and the whammy bar that I use actually added an element and a depth to this music that the classical guitar couldn't have captured."
Gunter Herbig has recorded the results on his new album Ex Oriente, released on BIS Records.
Listen to Kim Hill talking to Gunter Herbig about the album.
