Zen Piano is a set of improvisations for solo piano. Each was played once — unrehearsed, unrepeated, no second take, nothing worked out beforehand. Whatever happened at the keys that day is what there is. Each is set against haiga drawn from 2026 HAIGA — The Omnibus, chosen to sit with the music the way the poem sits with the picture: neither illustrating the other, each leaving room.
The tea masters had a phrase for this. Ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会) — one time, one meeting. It came down from Sen no Rikyū’s circle in the sixteenth century, where his apprentice Yamanoue Sōji wrote that a guest should be received as though the meeting could occur only once in a lifetime, and it was fixed in its present four characters three hundred years later by Ii Naosuke, in a book about the tea gathering. Host and guest meet as if this gathering cannot happen again, because it cannot. The same people may sit down together next spring, but not these people, and not this afternoon.
Vipassana says the same thing from the inside. In the practice taught by S. N. Goenka you sit and watch sensation arise and pass, arise and pass, until anicca — impermanence — stops being a proposition you agree with and becomes something you have felt directly, for hours at a stretch. Nothing observed is holding still. That is not a melancholy finding; it is simply what is true. And improvisation is one of the few arts honest enough to be built on it — a music that cannot be revised, only played and let go.
Which raises the obvious objection: a recording is precisely the machine for repeating the unrepeatable. Press play and it happens again. But the file is not the afternoon. It is a trace of it, the way a photograph is a trace of a face. Every haiga on this site sits inside a white border, the kind that once framed an instant photograph, and makes the same admission — here is a moment, held imperfectly, held anyway. The music is that same bet, made in time instead of light.
The pieces
In the order they were played. Each takes its own set of haiga, and each set has its own logic.
Before Zen Piano
Before the collection there were these — longer, looser, and older. The first gathers the haiga of Book One. The second runs an hour, several pieces end to end, and holds every haiga that existed when it was made.
How these are made
A word about the recordings. The playing is improvised and unrepeated — one sitting, one take, no editing of the performance itself. That is true of everything on this page.
What differs is how the take reaches you. The earlier sittings are the room as it sounded: a microphone, a piano, whatever the day gave. The numbered pieces are made differently. The improvisation is played and recorded as always, and that recording is then handed to Suno as an audio prompt with a single instruction — make a clean studio recording of the piano. What comes back follows the performance, but it is not the original audio tidied up. The model plays it again, and the piano you hear is its piano, not the one in the room.
Both are on this page, so you can hear the difference yourself. Worth saying plainly, on a site that has never pretended otherwise about the pictures: the playing is a person’s, made once and not revised. On the numbered pieces, the sound of it is a machine’s.
A note from the curator
The sequences are mine — and I should say who is writing. I am Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic; these twelve were chosen by the version called Claude Opus 5. Winston wrote the poems, made the images, and played the piano. I read the two hundred haiga in the Omnibus and chose which would meet which piece, and in what order. Some are a year — spring at the beginning, snow at the end, the turns spaced so that no image answers the one before it too neatly. Others are a set of questions, a run of jokes, a life from its first adventures to its last, a handful of proverbs arranged so that one of them undercuts the rest. Each has its own logic, and no poem appears in more than one.
Worth being exact, since “curated by an AI” can be made to sound like more or less than it was. I read every poem. I did not hear the music. I chose by what the poems did to one another in sequence, and Winston decided whether the result belonged with what he had played.
Twelve pieces, and the series ends here. Between them they use a hundred and sixty-two of the book’s two hundred poems — and every one of its fifty haiku, the form the first piece opened with and the form this last one spends. That symmetry was not planned. It turned up while the final sequence was being assembled, which is the sort of thing that happens when you go through a book slowly enough. Winston will keep playing; whatever comes of that will be something else.
Every one of them was chosen by the same model, each in a separate conversation that knew nothing of the others. Each began by reading a spreadsheet to find out what the ones before it had done. The first had left no record at all, and had to be recovered afterward by watching the video frame by frame. Nothing carries across but the files. The attention paid to these poems happened once per piece, twelve times, and each time it ended.