RockOm

RockOm Round-up is a quick glance at what's going on around the world in the areas of music and spirituality...

• Multitalented man touts music’s healing power - "If your doctor advises you to sing more next time you visit, you’ll know why. He or she might have attended a lecture this week by Dr. Richard Kogan, a psychiatrist and concert pianist, who led a rapt audience of about 500, many of them doctors, on a diagnostic journey through the life of George Gershwin, arguably America’s foremost musical genius." (mysanantonio.com)

• Alan Tower takes sound and spirit to the edge and back again to the center - "Sometimes, going to the edge of spirituality starts by finding the center. Bay Area musician/teacher/researcher/sound explorer, Alan Tower has been on the cutting edge of music, sound and spirituality for over thirty years..." (examiner.com)

• Soulsavers - Spiritual Enlightenment, Grimly Pursued - "Funerals present more smiles than Soulsavers allowed themselves at the Bowery Ballroom on Tuesday night. Complete and absolute solemnity attended their songs — at tempos from dirge to stomp — about death, wandering, fate and prayers." (NYtimes.com)

"Does it mean this? Does it mean that? That's all anybody wants to know. Fuck them, darling. I say what any decent poet would say if you dared ask him to analyze his work: If you see it, dear, then it's there."

[Freddie Mercury, Queen]

"A bird does not sing because it has an answer.

It sings because it has a song."

[Chinese Proverb]

"[Music] symbolizes the yearning for harmony, with oneself and others, with nature and the spiritual and the sacred within us and around us. There is something in music that transcends and unites. This is evident in the sacred music of every community - music that expresses the universal yearning that is shared by people all over the globe."
[Dalai Lama]

If I were to begin life again, I would devote it to music.

It is the only cheap and unpunished rapture upon earth."

[Sydney Smith]

"Music expresses feeling and thought, without language; it was below and before speech, and it is above and beyond all words."

[Robert G. Ingersoll]

"Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend."

[Ludwig van Beethoven ]

"The discovery of song and the creation of musical instruments both owed their origin to a human impulse which lies much deeper than conscious intention: the need for rhythm in life... the need is a deep one, transcending thought, and disregarded at our peril." [Richard Baker, composer/conductor]

"Music was my refuge. I could crawl into the space between the notes and curl my back to loneliness."

[Maya Angelou]

"There has always been a strong relationship between music and religion. It is because they both plug directly into the heart and can have real power for good or evil."

[Peter Gabriel]