RockOm

This week's featured track of the week at RockOm is by Canadian singer/songwriter/musician Veda Hille.  We caught up with Veda this week who shared with us about some of her inspiration, her career and the non-Christian approach to Christian hymns on her latest album, This Riot Life. [This audio from this interview is also available in a new podcast, released today.]

RockOm: Your most recent album is entitled This Riot Life and let's just start with a general description of the album – how did the project come to be? Is there any particular story about the motivation behind it or the process of recording it?

Veda: I had a commission to write a set of new songs for this great festival in Vancouver called the Push Festival. They gave me free reign to write a bunch of new stuff to premiere at their festival in '07.  That coincided with a period of very intense feeling for me where I suddenly had a lot of very personal things to write about.  So it was nice that it didn't become an academic exercise, because sometimes with those commissions you have to search for the things to write about.  But I based it around a set of hymns from my grandmothers' hymnbook that I rearranged as new hymns. I consider that to be the core of the album and am attempting to have a portrayal of ecstatic feeling in music.

RockOm: As you discovered that book and started to dive into it, what spoke to you in there?

Veda:  I really loved the language.  It's the United Church hymnal from 1930 with a lot of old hymns from the 1500s and 1600s.  I loved that the language was so gusty. It's really visceral, it's almost sexual in its passion for Christ and godliness and all those things.  It really moved me even though I'm not a Christian; I didn't find that it needed to be that specific for me to be moved by it.  And that in conjunction with these fairly sweet melodies, it's really blood and guts stuff in those old hymns but then is tempered by this great simple beauty.

RockOm: With songs like "Book of Saints" and "Ace of the Nazarene," there's no doubt that the spirituality from this hymnal is part of the record.  Tell us about one or two of the tracks in particular that were most influenced by the book.

Veda: "Ace of the Nazarene" is probably one of the strongest. The interesting thing about that one is that it's a hymn about Jesus – and most of the time I try to rearrange it so that it's a little broader, a little more secular. I almost felt naughty. I just loved singing about Jesus when I found those words: “Faint for the flaming of thine advent feet.” It's so devoted and I found it really enthralling to sing those words. But then I put them over top of an 80's Casio rock beat. I didn't want to be too puritanical with it and wanted to bring out the fire and the sexuality of those words. That one is often quite surprising to people.

RockOm: The first track on the album is entitled "Lucklucky" and is the RockOm Featured Track this week.  Musically, it's playful and whimsical with a lot of fun layers, but I was hoping you could speak a little to the meanings of this song or your inspiration for this piece in particular.

Veda: I went to art school way back when and one of the things I remember most was this course called “Creative Processes” and the teacher telling us that "the map is not the territory." The whole idea is that there is the world and then there is the map of the world that we overlay on top of it in order to navigate it. The world is too big for us to take in so we have these series of maps. ["Lucklucky"] is about the city I grew up in – or that anyone grew up in. I've lived here for 40 years and so everywhere in this city I can see the physical realities but I also see all the things I did in every place - it has become a huge memory map.  So it's about that but also about stepping forward and finding the new stuff – fighting the good fight out there.

RockOm: Lastly, besides your songwriting and performing, you're also involved with theater and film.  What sorts of projects are you involved with currently or what's on the horizon, either with your music or in one of these other arenas.

Veda: I'm just finishing up my first opera, which is quite exciting and a bit of a stretch for me. It's an opera about trees called “Jack Pine” for children. I'm workshopping that this week.  I'm also working on a version of Peter Pan, I'll be writing some music for that for Christmas in a couple of years.  I belong to a band that makes rock songs for kids called “Duplex." We put a record out in 2005 and I think we're going to get together and make another one of those. You can always find out what I'm up to at VedaHille.com.

VedaHille.com
Veda on iTunes

[By Trevor Harden, trevor@RockOm.net]

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There are at least three levels of motivation for making a funeral mix. As I have mentioned (in Part I and II), personal comfort - planning-as-insulation from an intensely impartial and unforgiving void - is one. But beyond the narrow constraints of such half-conscious, fear-motivated scrambling - the secular and self-serving penitences of our iPod culture - there are nobler reasons to leave a funeral playlist (or any artifact) that communicates something you are no longer able to say.

A moment of explanation. Back in 2005, I heard Ken Wilber speak in Denver, and he was discussing how we can't determine a person's motivation from their actions alone. This is because as we mature psychologically, our sense of self becomes more complex and extends to more and more of the world we experience; what used to be "it" becomes "me." We start in a swirl of undifferentiated experience and learn through laborious error that there is a difference between "self" and "other." Then we learn that we have a body, but are not exclusively that body; then we learn that we have thoughts, but are not exclusively our thoughts. All of these things are there the whole time, but as our inner world becomes richer, we learn to recognize them as distinct objects of our experience - and, simultaneously, learn that these things that are parts of us are not us, in the sense that "I" remain "I" without them. As a child grows, what she considers "me" (and therefore "mine") grows in an expanding concentric ring, and this passage - from "egocentric" to "ethnocentric" to "worldcentric," or concern for self, then family, then all people - offers an entire spectrum of reasons for her to do any particular thing.

Ken offered, as a mundane example, the use of makeup. Someone can wear lipstick because it makes her feel pretty (egocentric); or because it will please another person or other people, or it's "the right thing to do" (ethnocentric); or because by beautifying herself, she's making the whole world more beautiful and thus acting in service of a universal ideal (worldcentric). And you'll never know by watching someone make kissy faces in the mirror whether she's doing it for one of these reasons, and not another.

(If any of this is unclear, here's more about egocentrism, ethnocentrism, and worldcentrism.)

With that in mind:

If I'm going to make a list of songs to be played at my funeral, I want to do it for the noblest reasons I know. I'm not going to do it merely to sandbag my own fear of mortality, or to relish forcing my will on people in a moment of unique vulnerability. I want to make an offering of music that has helped me deal with mortality and bereavement, in the hope that I can bring some modicum of peace to a world defined by suffering. I want to share the sole remaining thing I will be able to give people after I die: perspective.

After all, losing someone is scary. Even when we can't completely fathom the death of our own bodies, we feel death directly in a small way when the people with whom we identify pass on. "I feel like I lost a piece of myself," we say, and the truth is that we did - even if our limited Western notion of compartmental identity doesn't acknowledge it as such.

The music playing at my funeral, then, is also the music playing at their funeral. And what would you want to hear when you're dying? A dispatch from the other side, alleviating the unbearable mystery? Loving acknowledgment and the permission to feel what you're feeling? A reminder of how this passage is what unifies you with everyone else? Music can offer all of these things in one form or another.

And peace is contagious - so if I have the means to offer it to even a few people, it can ripple outward through their thoughts and deeds and affect everyone else, people I never had the chance to meet. In fact, why wait until I'm dead? Why conserve the gift for a handful of friends and family?

From here on out, I'll use this column to examine the songs I would offer to anyone who survives me. This is the music that accomplishes (in my opinion) the highest potential of music: to connect us so deeply to the world that we are dead before we are dead, that we are unafraid of death (and thus, unafraid of life). Affirmative even in their difficult truths, these songs have given me a solace I haven't found anywhere else. Hopefully, they'll make you feel a little bit more capable of handling the grim reality of my death, and yours.

Previous articles in this series:

PART I: The Soundtrack To Your Funeral, I: Playing DJ To The Bereaved
PART II: The Soundtrack To Your Funeral, II: Putting Death in a Box

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael Garfield is intent on demonstrating that everything is equally art, science, and spiritual practice - to revive cultural and individual investment in the renaissance thinking that finds equal value in thinking and feeling, description and experience. Working as a scientific illustrator and essayist by day, and a live electronic musician and performance painter by night, Michael divides his attentions between exploring and celebrating the vast complex vibratory spectacle that is our musical universe. His work has been featured at integralnaked.org, realitysandwich.com, and paullonely.com, and in Cause & Effect Magazine, iMAGE Magazine, and H+. Links to his painting gallery, live and studio recordings, and visionary music blog can be found at myspace.com/michaelgarfield.

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You've been so kind and generous
I don't know why you keep on giving
For your kindness I'm in debt to you
For your selflessness--my admiration
For everything you've done
You know I'm bound--I'm bound to thank you for it
[Natalie Merchant "Thank You"]

In the spirit of Thanksgiving the entire RockOm team would like to convey our thanks to all of you who have connected with us and found a home here. We feel music’s main role is to express profound emotions, one of which is giving thanks through spiritual celebration. In this light we’d like to offer up some contemporary lyrics that remind us to be thankful.

“Thankful for relaxation, complication, hibernation
and irrational seclusion, confusion, all of my impurity and insecurity
cause I know it's God just perfecting me
that's why today I take life as it comes.”
[India.Arie, “Gratitude”]

Now we’re asking you to tell us which songs strike a chord and move you to be thankful. There are many examples and artists we could sight, but now it’s your turn. What songs remind you to be thankful? What lyrics move you into gratitude? Which artists capture your feelings of true thankfulness?

Best wishes for a blessed and safe Thanksgiving. Again, thank you for being here, now with us at RockOm.

Thank you India
Thank you providence
Thank you disillusionment
Thank you nothingness
Thank you clarity
Thank you thank you silence
[Alanis Morrissette, “Thank You India”]

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The RockOm store is now open, featuring several excellent products that you'll want to gobble up (Thanksgiving pun intended)! Check out RockOm's JUST RELEASED first compilation album "The Offering" or pick up a shirt to show your proud affiliation with the site.

RockOm is largely supported by our users and community, so if you love the exclusive interviews, entertaining podcasts and insightful posts, help support the cause by picking up the album and/or apparel. If you have any questions or other comments, email us at info@RockOm.net.

Get your RockOm on!

Happy Thanksgiving to each of you! May your week be filled with food, friends, family and football - but most of all the time to reflect on that for which you're grateful. We also wanted to take this opportunity to thank each of you who are involved at RockOm, whether you're a casual reader or an active part of the community in some way!

Lastly, this week's featured track of the week is from Veda Hille, whose music could be described as "somewhere in the murky lands of folk music, art song, and esoteric rock." Be sure to listen to her track "Lucklucky" on the homepage all this week as well as to swing by her site and iTunes store to pick up her excellent album, This Riot Life!

by Veda Hille

VedaHille.com
Veda on iTunes

Canadian songwriter/musician/singer Veda Hille's 13th album This Riot Life is largely based on hymns found within her late grandmother's copy of The Hymnary (a United Church staple from the early 1900's) and is her interpretation of ecstatic religious music channeled through her own singular creative lens. Songs run from a hurtling, lighthearted look at the life of Jesus in "Ace of the Nazarene," to a dreamy romantic paean to her husband in "Sleepers," to a startling artsy take on Paul Hindemith's setting of Shelley's "The Moon."

Featured Track: "Lucklucky"

Click to Play

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In his book Creativity, author and theologian Matthew Fox uses the story of Prometheus to talk about the role of the artist.  As you may recall, Prometheus was punished by Zeus for stealing fire and was sentenced to be strapped to a rock, where a vulture would feed on his liver every morning.  Mr. Fox goes on to comment on how the artist relates to the "archetype of the liver":

"The liver cleanses and recycles. The artist, too, cleanses and recycles the toxins in a culture. Artists turn pain into insight and struggle into triumph and darkness into light and ugliness into beauty and forgetfulness into remembering and grief into rejoicing. Artists add awe to awe and beauty to beauty and wonder to wonder. When the liver is healthy, the person is healthy. The artist is to the community or body politic what the liver is to the human body: a cleanser and recycler of waste and toxins."

Have you ever allowed a piece of music to filter your toxins? To transmute your negativity? To, like an artistic alchemist, turn your waste into gold?

As a musician, have you ever felt the healing power in getting your feelings out into a song, thereby purging those toxic emotions from within? In doing so, you will find that this healing is not for yourself only, but for your listeners as well.

This week, as your moods shift and your emotions sway, see if you can utilize music in your life as a sort of transmutation agent. Surrender to a piece of music that has the potential to convert your mood. If you're angry, get it out by singing full volume with Rage Against the Machine. When sadness overwhelms you, put on something that lets you cry it out. Allow the artist to do what he's so good at: to lead you into and through a healing and recycling process.

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To add to a recent run at RockOm regarding rests, silence and space, here is some footage from Icelandic musician Bjork during a BBC program entitled "Modern Minimalists."  In this clip, she interviews Arvo Part, a "serious composer who - in a very sensitive way - has got the whole battle of this century inside him."  In a world dominated with music that has, in Bjork's words, "500 billion notes," it's quite interesting to get the perspective of a musician who seeks fullness and "lushness" in a few, well-chosen pitches and plenty of "divine space."

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"The water tastes funny when you're far from your home, but it's only the thirsty, that hunger to roam" [John Prine]

Once upon a time I had the unique and awesome opportunity of swapping songs on guitar while in Negril, Jamaica with Alan Jackson. No, not THE Alan Jackson but a humble Jamaican who also shared the same name and who was so shocked that we would ask him to pull up a chair and share a beer with us. Negril’s own Alan Jackson would play a Bob Marley tune and sing his heart out for us and then I would answer him back with a song by James Taylor or The Eagles. I couldn’t say who was more enthralled - our little group listening to this shy man playing his music on a worn and badly tuned guitar or our new friend, with the sheer astonishment that we would be interested enough in him and his music to ask him over to our table. I’ll have this memory with me forever of our group singing songs on the cliffs of Negril, the light of the full moon shining above, and two cultures coming together through music and song.

If you could choose to escape all that’s familiar and comfortable to explore the music, culture and diversity of a favorite exotic locale- where would that be? Where is that place far from home you’ve always dreamed of visiting, specifically to take in the music? Is it India or Tibet? Or perhaps the Four Corners region of the States to experience Native American music first-hand? What about Jamaica, Ireland, Austria, China or South Africa? The possibilities and places are endless!

We become so accustomed and familiar, complacent with our surroundings that we sometimes forget there’s a whole world of music waiting for us to directly experience. Sure, we can download most any song available on the internet but if you could choose one country or region to take in the music in person, immerse yourself in the tastes and tunes or perhaps even take part in the festivities, where would that be?

Tell Us:

1. Where in the world have you traveled in your journeys and what have you discovered about the amazing ability of music to bridge languages and cultural divides?
2. Where would you like to travel and experience the music and diversity?

By Tom Crenshaw, Vice-President of RockOm.net

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Newswise — Silence in music is not really silent. Research by a University of Arkansas music theorist, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, reveals how context affects listeners’ experience of silence in music.

“The same acoustic silence, embedded in two different excerpts, can be perceived dramatically differently,” Margulis wrote in an article in the current issue of Music Perception that explores the transformation from acoustic silence to perceived silence.

Silence offers “an opportunity to study the active participatory nature of musical engagement,” Margulis wrote. There has been little experimental study of musical silence up to now.

“Silent periods could provide a unique chance to study the way that past musical events shape expectations about future ones, and the way that under acknowledged, often taken for granted musical elements (such as rests) are actually suffused with the full extent of ‘musical’ listening,” she wrote.

Silence in music communicates in a similar manner to silence in speaking, Margulis said. Sometimes the duration of the pause indicates the importance of the segment. In written language, a pause at the end of a paragraph is longer than the pause at the end of a sentence. Pauses in language are also used for expressive effect, Margulis explained:

“For example, I could say ‘You know what happened?’ Pause. ‘He called her.’ And that pause in the right context is really tense, and you get everyone leaning forward. Music can do something similar.”

When a listener encounters silence in a musical work, Margulis wrote, “Impressions of the music that preceded the silence seep into the gap, as do expectations about what may follow.”

Listeners’ impressions and expectations can have a powerful effect on how they hear a silence, to the extent that identical acoustical silences may come to “sound” quite different. For example, Margulis found that musical context can cause two silences of the same duration “to seem like they occupy different lengths of time or carry different amounts of musical tension.”

Margulis’ research involved two experiments, one using musical excerpts from commercially available recordings. The second experiment used simpler musical excerpts produced specifically for the study with carefully measured and controlled silences.

Participants without musical training were selected for both experiments, so that their responses would reflect reactions to the music they were hearing rather than assessments based on formal musical training. They proved to be “highly sensitive” to the subtleties of silence in its musical context.

“I’m interested in showing how listeners without any special training know more than they think they know,” Margulis said, “You don’t need courses and lectures to understand music; it’s meant to naturally speak to you.”

Margulis is an assistant professor of music in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Arkansas. Her article “Silences in Music Are Musical Not Silent: An Exploratory Study of Context Effects on the Experience of Musical Pauses” appears in the June 2007 issue of Music Perception.

Your Turn: We'd love to hear your responses in one of several ways:

1. What stood out to you in this article? (or other such general responses)
2. Have you ever noticed this before?  Where a silent pause in a song or a piece of music serves a greater purpose than just a time of "no sounds"?
3. The essence of silence and stillness are the basis for mediation and centered prayer. If indeed we, "don't need courses and lectures to understand music; it's meant to naturally speak to [us]," can we say the same for either listening to or performing music AS meditation and prayer?

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