RockOm

The dictionary definitions are not enough for those of us who are alive to the sense of the sacred which we find in so many unexpected places ... and are often disappointed not to find in so many expected places.

Perhaps a better question is: what is the sense of the sacred? What does this word mean to us in a universal sense, in the context of our contemporary world of pluralism and multiculturalism, a world in unprecedented evolutionary crisis?

It is my belief, based on travel, research, and the experience of performing sacred music for people of radically different worldviews and religions, that religious tolerance, like interfaith dialogue, is growing by leaps and bounds, far outstripping the old intolerances and insularities we are all too familiar with. The mass media might make it seem otherwise --- but as we know, they thrive on bad news, and are parsimonious in reporting the good news which is happening right under their noses.

The best short response to this question I've heard is from Pierre Rabhi, founder of agro-ecology, and author of the book As in the Heart, So in the Earth : "The sense of the sacred is a sense of humility, where gratitude, knowledge, wonder, respect, and mystery all come together to inspire and enlighten our actions."

This would have seemed pretty obvious to people of ancient times. Only in the last few centuries of modernism and postmodernism has it become fashionable to ignore and disdain the sacred, much as it has become fashionable to ignore and disdain beauty, and to revere irony.

But for those who will not allow this sense to wither in them, listening to sacred music can be a heart-opening experience, even when it comes from a tradition or a culture which is strange or bizarre to them, even if they disagree with certain doctrines of that tradition, even if they reject all religion, and even if the music itself has no formal connection to any sacred tradition.

The awakening of this sense, at least in listening to music, does not depend on having specific beliefs, or even on knowing the meaning of the texts that are being sung or chanted (though it can of course be infinitely deepened by knowing and studying their meaning).

Music can be an ambassador for peace where other embassies have failed. I first learned about this power of music over twenty-five years ago, when I participated in a two-day conference at an American university, which sought to bring Jewish, Christian, and Muslim (mostly Arab, but a few Persian) students together in dialogue concerning the Palestinian problem. This was in the days of the Carter administration, when such hopeful attempts were more common. I was part of a small student musical group (oud, santur, percussion, guitar, and a male and female vocalist) thrown together at the last minute, and our job was to offer a short concert of a mixture of Arab and Jewish songs at the close of each session. The first day was very difficult, because we had to play after a stormy session with several shouting matches, much anger in the air, and little if any real dialogue. On the second day, we asked the directors to let us open the program instead of closing it. We had to beg, then insist, and they reluctantly agreed. What a difference it made! Not only was there no shouting during that conference, people really listened to each other --- and there were even some friendships made! I can't attribute it to the quality of our music (my oud-playing was pretty amateurish in those days), but I did learn something important about the power of the intent of music. Whatever our shortcomings as an ad-hoc musical group with too little rehearsal together, our individual and collective intent was so strong on that second day, that it communicated a message of peace which words alone could not have done. Last, but far from least, our motivation, on that day at least, was for our music to serve --- to serve something higher than the usual desire to shine, to thrill, or entertain, that had previously motivated us.

This was also my first inkling that the influential modernist doctrine of l'art pour l'art --- art for art's sake --- is a fatuous dead end. From the earliest times of performance art, all the way back to its beginnings in shamanism, authentic performers have always known that they are at their best when their art serves something higher than art. Individually and collectively, we are beginning to rediscover this ancient truth, but in new and mysterious ways...

By Joseph Rowe
http://www.naturalchant.com

also, see my significant other's site:
http://www.myspace.com/catherinebraslavsky

and my memoir of my teacher, Hamza El Din:
http://www.naturalchant.com/hamza.htm

In this week's podcast episode (#66, "Through the Frame of Faith"), musicians Derek Webb and Josh Garrels share how their spiritual convictions inform how they write music. Other topics you will enjoy include how to understand the new face of the music industry, how music is impacted by the setting in which it is written, connecting to the divine through nature, understanding the role of the artist, and more.

CLICK HERE to visit our Podcast page to download this and other episodes of the RockOm Podcast. While you're there, be sure to hit the Subscribe link to get automatic downloads of episodes as they come available.

By Trevor Harden, Trevor@RockOm.net

To many, speaking out against sexual prejudice or using an occasional four-letter swear word is no big deal. When an artist with nearly a million career Christian albums sales and ten GMA Dove Awards under his belt does that as part of a major label release, however, people sit up and take notice.

Singer-songwriter Derek Webb has been known to many in the CCM scene for years having been a long time member of Caedmon's Call, the City on a Hill projects and also through his solo releases. His latest album, Stockholm Syndrome, is an honest - and often biting - foray into sexuality, the church, government and culture.

Stockholm proved so provocative, in fact, that Webb's record company removed the song "What Matters More" because of its explicit language, even though the powerful lyrics - in many's opinion - were both prophetic and appropriately used: "'Cause we can talk and debate until we're blue in the face / About the language and tradition that he's comin' to save / Meanwhile we sit just like we don't give a shit / About 50,000 people who are dyin' today."

Using smart marketing techniques, Derek whetted the appetite of his fans prior to the album's release by sending out a series of coded emails and tweets, directing people to a secret website featuring an elaborate alternate reality game.

This is a man who knows how to create buzz.

Because of this, some say his contentious lyrical content is solely for the purpose of attention-getting. Others believe him to be a powerful voice speaking out against societal and religious ills, taking on a set-in-its-ways Christian subculture. Derek himself, however, sees things differently. RockOm recently spoke with Derek Webb about Stockholm Syndrome, the controversy the album has sparked as well as his motivations for songwriting.

Trevor: Since for Stockholm Syndrome you used some interesting marketing techniques as well as the way in which you are selling it - by using various tiers - I'm just wondering what your general thoughts are on where the music industry is right now, how the business models are changing and where you, in your opinion, think it's all headed?

Derek: It's something I think a lot about because more than ever this is the time for creative people to apply their creativity as much to the distribution of their music as to the making of it. So I try to really pay attention and stay up on whatever seems to be around the bend to see if there's any way we can harness it to our advantage somehow. Little by little the industry is coming around and they're starting to figure out the technologies that they originally thought were going to ruin them. They're finally starting to see that the revenue streams of the last thirty years are closing down. The money's never going to come in that way again, but there is money to be made if you can just restructure and unplug yourself from the matrix of the old way of thinking about revenue and music. The people who are hanging on to those old structures and fighting for them are the people who are missing the opportunity to the tune that many of them are having to close their doors. By the time it dawns on them what they could have done it'll be too late because they have put all the money that should've gone into research, development and new technologies into lawyers who basically sue their audience, alienating all of their customers.

The most basic part of it is that anything that is digital can and will be free; that's the bottom line. In my opinion, I think it's going to be a lot more common for music to be free over the next five years and basically be a loss-leader for exclusive content, touring and artifacts that enhance the music itself. There are all kinds of ways to get creative about that. People will then start to employ what Chris Anderson (editor for Wired Magazine) calls "freemium," where you give people the content itself and then if they want more - more exclusive, enhancements or higher-quality - then those are the types of things on which you can make the same, if not better, money than you could the old way.

The thing I've learned from it the most is that more significantly than getting money out of your fans today is getting information and meaningful connection with them. If you can get that then you're not going to have any problems making money. Money is not really the problem; the problem is getting fans to trust us as media providers in general. If you can get their trust - and along with that you can make connections with them - then that's your long term asset. I would just as soon give all my music away if it gets more people on the radar for whom I have information. I would have a career for the next ten years if I wanted to at that point. That needs to be the posture for at least the indie community, who should see the value in that. Unfortunately indie artists on the whole aren't known for their marketing skills.

Trevor: It's no secret that you've said some things on this album that have challenged the status quo in many circles and bucked the system a little bit. It took courage to step out like that and say what you really felt needed to be said, so I was wondering if you could talk a little about how you felt emotionally both before and after this album's release. Did you feel an urgency that inspired you to speak up? Were you scared at all to go out on a limb as you did?

Derek: I wasn't really nervous about it because I don't think about that sort of thing while I'm making records or when I'm conceptualizing. I've said this before but it's the best answer I've got: I see it as my job to be the same thing as any other artist, which is to look at the world and tell you what I see. That's the only agenda that I have. Beyond that I don't have any kind of plans or way of thinking I'm trying to convert everyone to or conversations I'm trying to get people to have about issues. I'm not trying to do any of that at this point. I'm just trying to do the very most basic job that I have and that is to look around me, to filter what I see through my particular personality and framework and to tell it to you as honestly and immediately as I can. This is just what comes out.

I wasn't thinking "Who's going to hear this?" or "What are they going to think about it?" These were just the songs that got written. I don't always understand why particular songs get written at particular times or why they wind up being about certain things and not about others. I don't feel like I do a lot of editorial work in my creativity; I write twelve to fifteen songs a year and I record every one of them. Of those, they mostly come out pretty fully formed. I just sit down and write them and I don't fully understand how that process works; it's more of an art than a science.

But if this had been calculated and about me making a statement about these particular issues and wanting to engage a particular community with these questions, then yes, I probably would've been really nervous about it because I would've been thinking about the trouble I was going to get into. I'm never nervous trusting my instincts.

Trevor: I'm sure you've seen the blog posts and the message boards, of people talking about the themes and content of your album. It certainly has sparked - if not controversy - at least a conversation. What are your feelings about how it's being received?

Derek: Man, I'm just thrilled it's being received at all. I'm thrilled people are finding it these days. I'm way down in the niche in terms of what I do. I know it's not music for everybody; I've got a really small tribe of people that I make music for who seem to resonate with the music I make. I can pretty much depend on those people and I hope they can depend on me. But beyond that I'm just really thrilled that people still care enough about music to listen and to give themselves over emotionally to it and get bent out of shape and get all pissed off and write a bunch of blogs. Honestly I'm thrilled that one way or another people are willing to engage with it and that people didn't just toss it off. Some people probably did and that's OK too.

Again, if I had a particular audience I was trying to speak to and say something specific to, if that had been part of my agenda for making the record, then I probably would be a wreck right now. I've heard a handful of comments from people who maybe even support me or agree with me saying that it's a real bummer that the people who should be listening to it won't be either because of the style or the content or the language - that I'm shooting myself in the foot. See the thing is, there's nothing I'm trying to accomplish. I'm not trying to use my music as a tool for anything beyond itself; I'm just trying to make cool records.

Trevor: Our website explores the bond between music and spirituality, independent of particular faith or religious traditions, and so we have a very diverse audience. Since your past work has been mostly in the Christian music industry circle, I'm wondering if Stockholm Syndrome has been received outside of that circle and if so what the response has been?

Derek: Yeah, it has been. It's been really encouraging actually that a handful of different communities seem to be picking up on it and wanting to get behind it and support it. Personally that's gratifying because whatever message is there seems to have gotten across to the right people. We've had splashes of support from here and there from folks who probably would not have supported what anyone might call "Christian music" before that. That's how a lot of what I've read starts - someone will be writing something and say, "Well, hell has frozen over today because I'm about to recommend to you a Christian music artist." But it's never that simple. Those kind of categories don't mean anything to anybody other than marketing people who are trying to simplify demographics and make you buy stuff.

It's the oldest adage in the book at this point but I just don't believe in "Christian music" or "secular music." I mean there are Christian and secular people who make art but all art reflects the framework of the person who made it. In that way the worldview of every artist is stamped on every piece of art they make. Now I'm no different than anybody else. I'm a follower of Jesus so you're going to see the fingerprints of that from time to time in my music. There are certain seasons in my career where I've taken a little more liberty to talk about the frame or the grid itself that I'm looking through. Here in the last so many years I've been more in a season of looking through that grid and telling you what I see beyond it. I'm at liberty to make both kinds of music as would any artist with any kind of belief.

Trevor: Hearing you say that is so refreshing. People don't usually believe Christian musicians can write music as observation as opposed to being for some influential purpose. Why can't a person have a particular faith and create music without an agenda?

Derek: What a novel idea, right? Art suffers most when someone is trying to use it as a tool to do something beyond just be great art and have intrinsic value as great work. I'm at a point in my career that I just want to do great work. I want to try to do honest work and be a trustworthy artist. There will be a lot of people I'll lose along the way and that's OK because my whole career has been a cycle of self-sabotage, which seems to work pretty well for me. I lose as many as I gain each time around. The people I wind up with are people who understand me and who'll be forgiving their first time through a new record if it's something out of left-field. Maybe they'll want to stick around or maybe I'll lose some of those people and their friends join in. All of that is beyond my concern because that seems to operate outside of anything I can have any sort of influence on. I just try to trust my instincts, make the best records I can and hope that there are people out there that are going to hear about them, like them and come out to some shows. [Laughs] It's as simple as that.

LINKS: www.DerekWebb.com

NOTE: Please visit derekwebb.com to purchase the unedited version of the album. Edited (for explicit language) versions are available at all other retailers such as iTunes and Amazon.com.

By Margaret M. Treadwell

Being who you are won’t always please your parents. The American film classic St. Louis Blues depicts musician W.C. Handy (1873-1958, pictured) as a pioneer, betraying his minister father who believed “there are only two kinds of music, the Devil’s and the Lord’s.” In marrying hymns and gospel music to blues and jazz, Handy became a legend known as The Father of the Blues. His memory has been honored annually for the past 28 years at the WC Handy Music Festival in his northwest Alabama birthplace.

Many musicians who have played for years at the festival describe themselves as feeling like they rejoin their family each summer. Indeed, their exquisite improvisations sound like they never cease practicing together, yet in the community of this spirited festival each shines forth their special talent as an individual artist. Like Handy, many had an overriding desire to make music as if there really was no choice, no matter how much their fathers discouraged their career decision.

“What part does your spirit play in your music and how does your music play on your spirit?” I asked seven male musicians who agreed to talk with me in a roundtable discussion for an hour between gigs. Their responses debunked the myth that “men are out of touch with their emotions,” added a new dimension to my week, and gave me some life lessons to share.

Drums: “Music is a musician’s whole life. It’s what you are rather than what you do. Spirit is everything. When I play, I open up my whole self to let it out. Communication is so important; you can’t do the music without relating to other musicians like an unspoken promise where you want to express yourself but encourage others to do the same – opening to possibilities of sharing everything we are. I’m hesitant to say that I’m channeling the music, but I think that selflessness happens to all of us at points during improvisation. We compose, the music is out there, and then the moment is gone which makes it all the more precious. Music is like life.”

Keyboard 1: “Yes, and being perfect ruins it. You have to take risks or the music wouldn’t be real. I think of it as the “Zen style” of playing which can get me into the zone – that’s the spiritual part of it. The worst thing I can do is to think too much about it.”

Vibes: “Swing is spirit and swing is everything. It gives back, lifts me up and always is there when I need it. There is mystery in the improvisation. It’s not about the instrument you play but about the humanity in the person.”

Trumpet: “My wife is an artist; we are speaking the same language in different mediums which is spiritual for me. It doesn’t really matter what your instrument is although trumpet – a wind instrument – gives me a chance to have a true voice, which started in 6th grade. Paradoxically, I’m not a trumpet soloist; I must trust and be with others to see where they’re going in community.”

Sax: “I’m a creative writer and the principles are the same as in art and music – contrast, design, color in the broader sense, and organization. To stay the course in a different professional way of life requires faith and tapping into the creative spirit every day. Music is a religion with a different language. Music is spirit and must be followed; spirit follows spirit.”

Trombone: “The spirituality of music is like group therapy for me. I couldn’t play when I had cancer, and I thought I would go crazy. Music keeps me on course.”

Bass: “I’ve played music as long as I can remember, and it gives me a direction even though I don’t think of myself as a man with goals. I’m spontaneously composing when soloing; when the others join me there’s a certain vocabulary we all use with phrases we know but never said before in the same way.”

Later I spoke with two other keyboardists. One said, “My music has started to flow through me from a secret place only God knows. It feels like I have come “home” to a place all of us look for. I do much of my work in prisons, churches and other places I can talk/sing about spiritual concerns. It’s dangerous if God is only in our heads; He starts to sound an awful lot like us.”

The second reflected, “Music will exalt anything to which it is attached – God, family, sex, hamburgers. It is a spiritual force second only to love. King David made it a requirement that the 4,000 Pharisees he dispatched to spread the word of God’s kingdom had to be musicians largely because music transcends language and speaks directly to the spirit.” As St. Augustine is credited with saying: ‘He who sings prays twice.’”

Margaret M. (“Peggy”) Treadwell, LCSW -C is a family, individual and couples therapist in private practice. She has been active in the fields of education and counseling for thirty-five years. Following a long association with Rabbi Edwin H. Friedman, during which she served on his faculty, she co-edited and helped posthumously publish his book, A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix. She may be contacted at PeggyMcDT@gmail.com.

This article was originally published at EpiscopalCafe.com

W. C. Handy photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1941 July 17

By Roger Hatfield

I have to hurry. I don’t want to lose this amazing feeling without expressing it. My trip to the Toledo Museum of Art today was wonderful. While I am not a big fan of the city, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the museum’s exhibits. Ah, the enterprises of Man. We saw jewelry that was created as long before Jesus was born as it now is after - that is to say, 2300 BC. It was gorgeous!

After a break in the cafeteria we headed out to the sculpture gardens and subsequently across the street to the Glass Museum. After viewing some beautiful glass art creations, we went and sat down in the area where a glassblowing exhibit was occurring. That is not really fair; there was serious glass blowing occurring by a team of five artists. Though we were watching, they were not doing it for our benefit. It was an incredible dance - turning, cutting, into the kiln, out of the kiln, cutting and torching, three torches at a time. I have seen this on TV but I never felt the heat and the intensity of the people in this spontaneous improvisation. Into the kiln, out of the kiln, torches blazing, cutting and shaping. Very few instructions were given; it was a collective consciousness that simply knew what to do. I remembered the feeling from having been engaged in a musical improvisation with other musicians. I can remember being surprised by the eruption of applause from the audience when the trance was broke and the song ended.

Now from across the workspace came a young woman with a glass bowl rotating slowly on the end of her long blowing rod. “Ready?” “Ready, now!” The bowl was joined to the double-stemmed object of their torches and their attention. Turning, heating, back into the kiln and out again. Again she returns, this time with a smaller glob of ruby red glass that was applied to the top of the rotating bowl, some sort of rudimentary lip I thought. What looked like a large compass was brought into play and the opening of the now-attached bowl was spread open. Back into the kiln - spin, spin, spin. One of the glass tentacles began to twist just slightly and the entire piece elongated, now looking to be at least four feet tall. Cindy and I sat there with our mouths agape. I said it was like a dance; maybe there is a better analogy. It was like a jazz quintet launched on a high-energy quest, all instruments improvising spontaneously, free but connected.

Another snip. All three torches were burning now, engulfing the piece in flame as it went back into the white-hot kiln, which was so hot that the doors had to be opened by long metal rods with hooks on the end.

They opened the doors and brought up the shield as the piece was slid into the glowing opening, still being rotated, the flames firing from the opening of that benevolent hell.

CRACK!

NO!

The team quickly pulled it out, torched it, and brought it back to the rotating stand to keep it hot. They stretched it. But it was too late. It was gone. The dream was dead. Leonard, the leader of this jam session walked away as the others extinguished their flames. “Shut the doors,” said Leonard. He walked in our direction.

Cindy and I looked at each other then back at Leonard. The pain on his face was astonishing. I saw it, I felt it, and tears came to my eyes. Brows were mopped and shoulders were shrugged. Disappointment was everywhere, but it was obvious that they had all been here before. Leonard reappeared. They stood in a little group and dissected what had just happened. Zen acceptance. It is how they get better. It speaks to the impermanence of all matter.

Today I saw the pain of dying dreams and the sweetness that is earned only by failing so many times. No time to mourn; all we have, and all we ever have, is right now. If there is a moral, it is this: Keep creating, keep playing, keep dancing, keep doing what ever art you do, even, and especially, when the glass breaks.

Please visit my music website www.nowbehere.com

Every once in a while a piece of writing comes along that touches all who read it. Recently the following excerpt from a 2004 welcome address given to parents of incoming students at The Boston Conservatory by Dr. Karl Paulnack, Director of the Music Division, has been making its way around the internet. Dr. Paulnak has given RockOm permission to reprint his writing here and we're quite confident that what you're about to read will move you on many levels.

One of my parents' deepest fears, I suspect, is that society would not properly value me as a musician, that I wouldn't be appreciated. I had very good grades in high school, I was good in science and math, and they imagined that as a doctor or a research chemist or an engineer, I might be more appreciated than I would be as a musician. I still remember my mother's remark when I announced my decision to apply to music school-she said, "you're wasting your SAT scores!" On some level, I think, my parents were not sure themselves what the value of music was, what its purpose was. And they loved music: they listened to classical music all the time. They just weren't really clear about its function. So let me talk about that a little bit, because we live in a society that puts music in the "arts and entertainment" section of the newspaper, and serious music, the kind your kids are about to engage in, has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with entertainment, in fact it's the opposite of entertainment. Let me talk a little bit about music, and how it works.

One of the first cultures to articulate how music really works were the ancient Greeks. And this is going to fascinate you: the Greeks said that music and astronomy were two sides of the same coin. Astronomy was seen as the study of relationships between observable, permanent, external objects, and music was seen as the study of relationships between invisible, internal, hidden objects. Music has a way of finding the big, invisible moving pieces inside our hearts and souls and helping us figure out the position of things inside us. Let me give you some examples of how this works.

One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940 and imprisoned in a prisoner-of-war camp.

He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose, and fortunate to have musician colleagues in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist. Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for the prisoners and guards of the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire.

Given what we have since learned about life in the Nazi camps, why would anyone in his right mind waste time and energy writing or playing music? There was barely enough energy on a good day to find food and water, to avoid a beating, to stay warm, to escape torture-why would anyone bother with music? And yet-even from the concentration camps, we have poetry, we have music, we have visual art; it wasn't just this one fanatic Messiaen; many, many people created art. Why? Well, in a place where people are only focused on survival, on the bare necessities, the obvious conclusion is that art must be, somehow, essential for life. The camps were without money, without hope, without commerce, without recreation, without basic respect, but they were not without art. Art is part of survival; art is part of the human spirit, an unquenchable expression of who we are. Art is one of the ways in which we say, "I am alive, and my life has meaning."

In September of 2001 I was a resident of Manhattan. On the morning of September 12, 2001 I reached a new understanding of my art and its relationship to the world. I sat down at the piano that morning at 10 AM to practice as was my daily routine; I did it by force of habit, without thinking about it. I lifted the cover on the keyboard, and opened my music, and put my hands on the keys and took my hands off the keys. And I sat there and thought, does this even matter? Isn't this completely irrelevant? Playing the piano right now, given what happened in this city yesterday, seems silly, absurd, irreverent, pointless. Why am I here? What place has a musician in this moment in time? Who needs a piano player right now? I was completely lost.

And then I, along with the rest of New York, went through the journey of getting through that week. I did not play the piano that day, and in fact I contemplated briefly whether I would ever want to play the piano again. And then I observed how we got through the day.

At least in my neighborhood, we didn't shoot hoops or play Scrabble. We didn't play cards to pass the time, we didn't watch TV, we didn't shop, we most certainly did not go to the mall. The first organized activity that I saw in New York, on the very evening of September 11th, was singing. People sang. People sang around fire houses, people sang "We Shall Overcome". Lots of people sang "America the Beautiful." The first organized public event that I remember was the Brahms Requiem, later that week, at Lincoln Center, with the New York Philharmonic. The first organized public expression of grief, our first communal response to that historic event, was a concert. That was the beginning of a sense that life might go on. The US Military secured the airspace, but recovery was led by the arts, and by music in particular, that very night.

From these two experiences, I have come to understand that music is not part of "arts and entertainment" as the newspaper section would have us believe. It's not a luxury, a lavish thing that we fund from leftovers of our budgets, not a plaything or an amusement or a pass time. Music is a basic need of human survival. Music is one of the ways we make sense of our lives, one of the ways in which we express feelings when we have no words, a way for us to understand things with our hearts when we can't with our minds.

Some of you may know Samuel Barber's heart wrenchingly beautiful piece "Adagio for Strings" [Listen]. If you don't know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn't know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what's really going on inside us the way a good therapist does.

Very few of you have ever been to a wedding where there was absolutely no music. There might have been only a little music, there might have been some really bad music, but with few exceptions there is some music. And something very predictable happens at weddings-people get all pent up with all kinds of emotions, and then there's some musical moment where the action of the wedding stops and someone sings or plays the flute or something. And even if the music is lame, even if the quality isn't good, predictably 30 or 40 percent of the people who are going to cry at a wedding cry a couple of moments after the music starts. Why? The Greeks. Music allows us to move around those big invisible pieces of ourselves and rearrange our insides so that we can express what we feel even when we can't talk about it. Can you imagine watching Indiana Jones or Superman or Star Wars with the dialogue but no music? What is it about the music swelling up at just the right moment in ET so that all the softies in the audience start crying at exactly the same moment? I guarantee you if you showed the movie with the music stripped out, it wouldn't happen that way. The Greeks. Music is the understanding of the relationship between invisible internal objects.

I'll give you one more example, the story of the most important concert of my life. I must tell you I have played a little less than a thousand concerts in my life so far. I have played in places that I thought were important. I like playing in Carnegie Hall; I enjoyed playing in Paris; it made me very happy to please the critics in St. Petersburg. I have played for people I thought were important; music critics of major newspapers, foreign heads of state. The most important concert of my entire life took place in a nursing home in a small Midwestern town a few years ago.

I was playing with a very dear friend of mine who is a violinist. We began, as we often do, with Aaron Copland's "Sonata", which was written during World War II and dedicated to a young friend of Copland's, a young pilot who was shot down during the war. Now we often talk to our audiences about the pieces we are going to play rather than providing them with written program notes. But in this case, because we began the concert with this piece, we decided to talk about the piece later in the program and to just come out and play the music without explanation.

Midway through the piece, an elderly man seated in a wheelchair near the front of the concert hall began to weep. This man, whom I later met, was clearly a soldier-even in his 70's, it was clear from his buzz-cut hair, square jaw and general demeanor that he had spent a good deal of his life in the military. I thought it a little bit odd that someone would be moved to tears by that particular movement of that particular piece, but it wasn't the first time I've heard crying in a concert and we went on with the concert and finished the piece.

When we came out to play the next piece on the program, we decided to talk about both the first and second pieces, and we described the circumstances in which the Copland was written and mentioned its dedication to a downed pilot. The man in the front of the audience became so disturbed that he had to leave the auditorium. I honestly figured that we would not see him again, but he did come backstage afterwards, tears and all, to explain himself.

What he told us was this: "During World War II, I was a pilot, and I was in an aerial combat situation where one of my team's planes was hit. I watched my friend bail out, and watched his parachute open, but the Japanese planes which had engaged us returned and machine gunned across the parachute cords so as to separate the parachute from the pilot, and I watched my friend drop away into the ocean, realizing that he was lost. I have not thought about this for many years, but during that first piece of music you played, this memory returned to me so vividly that it was as though I was reliving it. I didn't understand why this was happening, why now, but then when you came out to explain that this piece of music was written to commemorate a lost pilot, it was a little more than I could handle. How does the music do that? How did it find those feelings and those memories in me?"

Remember the Greeks: music is the study of invisible relationships between internal objects. The concert in the nursing home was the most important work I have ever done. For me to play for this old soldier and help him connect, somehow, with Aaron Copland, and to connect their memories of their lost friends, to help him remember and mourn his friend, this is my work. This is why music matters.

What follows is part of the talk I will give to this year's freshman class when I welcome them a few days from now. The responsibility I will charge your sons and daughters with is this:

"If we were a medical school, and you were here as a med student practicing appendectomies, you'd take your work very seriously because you would imagine that some night at two AM someone is going to waltz into your emergency room and you're going to have to save their life. Well, my friends, someday at 8 PM someone is going to walk into your concert hall and bring you a mind that is confused, a heart that is overwhelmed, a soul that is weary. Whether they go out whole again will depend partly on how well you do your craft.

You're not here to become an entertainer, and you don't have to sell yourself. The truth is you don't have anything to sell; being a musician isn't about dispensing a product, like selling used cars. I'm not an entertainer; I'm a lot closer to a paramedic, a firefighter, a rescue worker. You're here to become a sort of therapist for the human soul, a spiritual version of a chiropractor, physical therapist, someone who works with our insides to see if they get things to line up, to see if we can come into harmony with ourselves and be healthy and happy and well.

Frankly, ladies and gentlemen, I expect you not only to master music; I expect you to save the planet. If there is a future wave of wellness on this planet, of harmony, of peace, of an end to war, of mutual understanding, of equality, of fairness, I don't expect it will come from a government, a military force or a corporation. I no longer even expect it to come from the religions of the world, which together seem to have brought us as much war as they have peace. If there is a future of peace for humankind, if there is to be an understanding of how these invisible, internal things should fit together, I expect it will come from the artists, because that's what we do. As in the Nazi camps and the evening of 9/11, the artists are the ones who might be able to help us with our internal, invisible lives."

Karl Paulnack, Director
Music Division
The Boston Conservatory
8 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02215
www.bostonconservatory.edu

"Music is your own experience, your own thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But, man, there's no boundary line to art."

[Charlie Parker, Source: "Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground"]

RockOm contributor, artist, community member and friend, Michael Garfield interviewed groundbreaking author and philosopher Ken Wilber in early 2008. In this excerpt, the two discuss the evolving "role of music."

Michael Garfield: Well, one of the things that I've been talking about with my friends is something that's kind of central to a lot of people's world right now: the changing role of music in our culture. That there's this technological revolution that we're going through now, it's a revolution of communication, and so the role of communication is expanding - like it tends to, in the middle of a technological revolution.

Ken Wilber: Right.

MG: And just as someone who's given a lot of thought to what the consequences of new modes of communication and discourse are going to mean, in the 21st Century, how do you see the role of music expanding or changing in the next ten, twenty, fifty, hundred years?

KW: Yeah. Well it depends on how you look at music, in terms of its actual functionality, its actual contours, its actual definition. We sort of begin with pointing out that music is an artifact. So it's something that is created, meaningfully, by human sentient beings. And it has a component of it that can be looked at as just purely expressive, which is something in a sense that an artist can theoretically just do alone, but then it also has a communitive aspect. Something that is meant to be conveyed to another sentient being. And that then opens the artifact to being interpreted at the altitude that it's created at.

[Ken's uses the word "altitude" to mean a particular station along the continuum of psychological development. The more developed you are, the higher your altitude.]

And this then leaves music's self-expressive and communicative capacity coming from a particular altitude. And different types of music, or even within types of music, individuals and different artists in specific types of music can pretty much span almost an entire spectrum. And so what we're looking at is a range of signifiers [signals] that are both self-expressive and communicative. And particularly in the communicative mode, it's a system or pattern of signifiers that's going to go through a particular medium, and the medium itself can be an important part of the message, but it goes through a particular medium and then is decoded as a signified [the signal's meaning] in a human or a group of human beings.

And so that essentially means several things, in terms of the role of music, what music is doing, and so on. And one is that you can look at the actual content of music, its actual altitude, and whether it's evoking a sort of second or third chakra rock and roll beat -

[The chakras of the body's subtle energy system are roughly equivalent to the stages of human psychological development - chakras two and three are correlated with the emergence of the ego and personal power.]

- or whether it's more cerebral, and Bach-classical music sort of sixth or seventh chakra [the nexuses of intuitive insight and divine union, respectively]. And you can look at it in terms of that kind of altitude evoking, and that refers essentially to the structure of music, and the structural altitude that music fits into as a signifier - and, again, whether it's aiming at lower chakras or intermediate chakras or higher chakras - but you can also look at music as its capacity to evoke states of consciousness. And this is probably one of the most important aspects of music as a spiritual transmission. Because music at any level can start out as a third-person artifact, and then can actually end up as a first-person identification. A person can actually end up feeling one with the art in a nondual flow state [in which the boundary between self and other is completely dissolved]. And if not a flow state, then as a pure witness, a contemplation of the art as being so beautiful or so arresting or so provoking that one is thrust into a causal witness state.

[The witnessing state is a state of pure awareness, unidentified with any of the objects of consciousness - the featureless self of this state is "causal" in the sense that all things arise within its spaciousness, and so there can be no prior origin.]

And if that deepens or intensifies, it will go from that third- or second-person into a first-person identification, and one gets into a flow state, one loses one's self in the art. The art evokes and pulls forth a capacity for causal or nondual Spirit. And this can happen at, again, virtually any altitude, just as states, peak experiences can occur at any altitude. But looking at the state transition itself is one of the really important aspects of looking at art, because at whatever level a society is at, art is one of its primary means of transmitting causal and nondual Spirit.

And you had some questions about environment and in the modern world, as artists are the primary spiritual speakers - one way to put it - and in a sense, that's true. So what we're looking at are two different scales of what art does. One is the altitude that the signifiers of art are flying at, and that's a developmental altitude, it's an altitude of complexity, an altitude that is put into the artwork by the consciousness of its maker, by the artist, and will then tend to evoke the same level - in viewers or readers or listeners - the same level of signifieds as the level of signifier. And so in the modern, in the coming world, art does two things - one, it has a world of higher signifiers open to it, it has a world of integral or second-tier, in some cases, third-tier altitude open that it can resonate from.

["Second-tier" refers to the altitudes at which all previous altitudes are recognized as essential elements of one's own being, and less-developed individuals are treated compassionately and appropriately according to their own development. "Third-tier" refers to the altitudes beyond second-tier at which the self/other boundary begins to unravel - not merely as a temporary peak experience, but as a permanent feature of one's identity.]

And whether it's in music, or painting, or literature, it can transmit that second-tier evocation, that integral transmission. And then another is its capacity for states, and in this capacity, as in the past, art has a possibility of evoking state experiences in the viewer, listener, or reader. And these can be subtle states, of just emotional intensity, but it can be spiritual states of causal contemplation and nondual flow. And it was nondual flow, for example, that Schopenhauer had in mind when he talked about art transmitting spiritual awareness, where subject and object become one in the viewer, and that's a nondual flow state. So, sort of two parts - and that's just an analytical, third-person answer to the question.

There's also first-person answers to the question, which are just more aesthetic responses to what aesthetics is. But that's kind of an overview, a third-person view, of where art is and that it's opening up on a frontier now of a second-tier transmission as well as being able to transmit and evoke states of consciousness. And those are essentially similar in the past, except that they are going to be interpreted. If somebody comes out of a nondual flow state, and somebody happens to be at turquoise -

[Ken uses a color-coding scheme to refer to specific altitudes. "Turquoise" refers to a mature and stable realization of so-called "integral" or "second-tier" consciousness. See the chart from Integral Spirituality (hi-res image viewable here).]

- and the art itself was composed by a turquoise mind, then if you asked the person, the listener/hearer/viewer to explain the artwork, they will explain it from an integral vantage point. They'll explain it from an turquoise vantage point, in terms of just the effect it has on them. And whether that's music, and it just somehow "makes me feel whole," and whether it's literature, and there's a consistent writing from a second-tier perspective that's taken and conveyed and evoked in the narrative itself, or whether any sort of art in its communicative form now has signifiers that are available at second-tier. And this is basically, this is a fairly novel breakthrough. And certain great artists of the past have had a chance to push into second-tier cognitively and relate that aesthetically, but we're coming to a point now where there are a large number of everyday individuals that are at that - they're advanced everyday individuals, but it's somewhere upwards of five percent of the population, so that adds a mix to art that was not present before.

And the last thing I'll say about is, when it comes to art recognized by art critics, we have basically just about run the course of postmodern art, and that's art that has green-altitude signifiers [conveying an awareness of the social construction of the ego and systematically "deconstructing" it by illuminating its reliance on cultural context] and is heavily invested with normative judgments [declarations of right and wrong]. So art basically has been politicized, which is not really its function, but that's what green postmodern artists and critics have done with it. But we have about run that course, and so what's new is signifiers coming from integral. Signifiers coming from post-postmodern. And whether that's just in music composed by individuals at second-tier, kind of a certain resonance that comes across in that, or whether its actual narrative forms that convey these second-tier perspectives either explicitly by talking about integrative material or implicitly by coming from that altitude - however the form that they are, it has the capacity to use signifiers, and it is going to start using signifiers, that are post-postmodern. And that's going to be kind of huge. We're waiting to see how it breaks out, waiting to see what form it takes, waiting to see what narrative form it takes and particularly what visual arts do in the face of integral.

So that's all right on the horizon, and that's why it's a very exciting time in the art world, we're watching the death of a huge movement and the birth of what will be a huge movement, and we're right on that cusp.

Read Michael's entire article and interview here.

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER: 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.

Johnette Napolitano has been involved with several successful projects throughout her career, most famously as the lead vocalist and songwriter for Concrete Blonde. In the last 6 years, she has released three solo albums, the most recent entitled Scarred.

RockOm.net recently spoke with Johnette about her album Scarred, religious art, the play of light and dark and her career.

RockOm: One of the songs that stood out to us from Scarred was "Poem for a Native." What can you tell us about this song and what you are communicating through the poetry's colorful imagery?

Johnette:  That's a strange one. I'd written that a long time ago and had recorded it, but had never used the old version.  I was inspired by a trip to Morocco and my lifelong interest in all things Native American. It is said that there is Native American on my mother's side somewhere, and I believe it; my Aunt always looked like she'd stepped right off the back of a nickel or something, black braids and all.

I was lucky enough to work with John Trudell, a legendary activist and poet. Sometimes in spite of myself I stumble into things; I truly have been blessed that way. In any case, I live out here in the desert where those spirits are very strong, and walking around one morning I found a piece of paper blown up against the chain-link fence.  It was 'Poem', a piece I'd completely forgotten I'd written and was perfect for one of the tracks I'd been working on with Will (Crewdson, who I was working with on Scarred). I think it's my favorite track on the record.

RockOm: Another track from the same album, "Like a Wave," implies being swept away beyond one's control and drowning. Share with us about your inspiration for "Like a Wave" and were you intentionally trying to make the song mirror the lyrics in that it builds and crests at it's ending?

Johnette: It was the other way around. Music is a full on multidimensional experience for me; I used to lay with my head under the hi-fi when I was little and choreograph entire ballets to Gershwin in my head.

The music does crest and break, and the music wrote the lyric, really. In that sense the chorus comes first and you have to fit everything else around it, build it up to that. I'm particularly pleased at the flanging on the vocal there, the way they overlap, the phrases, like waves on the beach. The lyrics and the music became one... human emotions are as endangered as any other species.

RockOm: The song "Save Me" has a similar lyrical tone to "Like a Wave" in that it, too, implies a sense of drowning and desperation. How are those two songs alike - or different - in subject matter?

Johnette: The Chinese have a thing - you have to bend like a reed, let everything just happen, sometimes when you know things are just too strong and too much and it's just this constant sensation of another wave breaking over you. In this case, I was literally having dreams and nightmares during Hurricane Katrina, just black water creeping up, seeping into everything and the hell... it was just hell. I couldn't sleep at all... [it was] just fucking horrible. Smashed windows, storefronts, beautiful things just floating alongside excrement... I pick all that up, and as anyone else who is that intuitive knows, the challenge is to try to control and channel all that. I just had no choice than to pound away, write like crazy. I was exploding. In "Wave" it's more metaphorical, surrendering to it is the only thing to do. In "Save Me" it's a very literal story, and people were fighting every minute, every inch of rising water, and I could feel that.

RockOm: We came across an older poem you have written entitled "The Dark." The last section of which says this:

Yeah. I know the dark. I knew the dark for a very long time.
There are certain sects that prohibit the eating of anything that grows in the dark. Bad things grow in the dark. Doubt, fear, deception... lift the stone and expose the rot, the cancer, the things that need the dark to thrive.
I will never understand the dark again, because the light will always come, and the light is always certain. Wait a little while. Give equal time to the light. Feed the light within. Many sparks create the sun.

Would you care to share your journey between the dark and the light and what each mean to you now?

Johnette: The first thing that strikes me as the polite thing to say is "I suppose everyone has things to overcome" but the fact is some people don't, and just cruise along on the surface just fine. It will never be like that for me, and I accept that, things are just very screwed up from the earliest DNA formations. From what I've had to work with I think I've done very well, have maintained a balance, and have recognized the need to; it is so much easier to live than we make it. I have learned when, at what time of year, what time of day, season, etc., I function most effectively depending on what I need to do to take care of myself. It is very conscious, something I have to work at -a rhythm. It gets easier as you get older because the things that affected childhood so much fall further and further away, and it's a great thing to take spiritual responsibility for oneself. In the winter I write a lot, by spring release records, etc., in the summer I'm outdoors more so I build my art and play live more. The season calls for it, the fall is my birthday season and I'm most alive then. It's consciously overriding the things in your own mind you shouldn't trust - fear, it's not real. The past - it is gone. The future is from this very second on, and if I listen and pay attention and appreciate my place in the flow, and trust it, the big picture will be fine. I'm just a little belch in time, the only job I have is to at least belch in tune.

It's work. It's work to stay away from the influences that are there to take our natural ability to live in the world away. A lot starts in the body: minimal, organic food. Taking care of the body is extremely important. We have issues of pressure and stress that are quite unnatural for the human body and soul, and it is hard to feel mentally or emotionally bad when you feel good, physically, and vice-versa. I pretend that every day is my last as of course it may well be, and in doing so I find the hours, then days, take care of themselves.

Having said that, one person's poison is another's sustenance. Knowing one's physical, mental and emotional needs is pretty much a life's work in itself - especially for a woman, who has all this other hormonal shit going on every decade or so depending on whether you have kids or not, etc. It's truly a science, the female body.

RockOm: Your Myspace bio sites "14th century religious art AND all religious art for all religions" as some of your influences. What is it about religious art that inspires you?

Johnette: The inspiration itself, I suppose. The combination of inspiration and sheer craftsmanship that you just don't see a hell of a lot of anymore. There was a quote where someone said, "Those men were full of God" and I love that; never mind what your concept of God is or whether or not you need one at all, to be that full of spirit, of emotion, of passion that one would be driven to create some of that stuff - fucking incredible. There is a luminous quality. I love the purity of the Santeros, the Saint-Makers, Spanish Colonial art, the simple folk art. So beautiful. The artists, so honest. So humble. Pure. I was very lucky to study with Juan Quezada in Mata Ortiz, Mexico, who had such respect for the clay. I remember the village would be in church Sunday, but to Juan, the clay was God, and everything revolved around the clay, which supported everyone. If the clay were soft and ready to work, you worked it... screw Mass, screw everything, but be ready when the clay is. I believe when artists are truly filled with Spirit that we hear it and see it and taste it in their work... that's what we are moved by and drawn to.

RockOm: Finally, you're involved with music, art, film work, and even a book – can you tell our users more about some of your most recent involvements in any of those arenas… anything new you've got in the works right now?

Johnette: Will Crewdson has been here for a couple weeks from the UK and we just did a few shows on the West Coast to pimp out our cover of Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning" which we uploaded as an MP3 on ITUNES via CDBABY and all that. I'm a big fan of this point in time; it's a hassle making records fast enough and I like the fact you can upload something as quick as you can record it these days.

We've recorded a few more tracks and I'm compiling Sketchbook 3, third in a limited edition series of demos, ideas and home recordings. I love making those, my little art projects. I do 1,000 of them and sign and number them. The book thing is better than I thought it would be... select lyrics and comments on lyrics; I think any major serious writing endeavor (if I care to get deeper) is a few years away. It's a great time in my life; I don't have an overhead so I can pretty much do what I want. We're recording covers now just for the sheer fun of it and haven't had a whole lot of opportunity to play together aside from these three West Coast gigs. We've done Mott The Hoople's "I Wish I Was Your Mother" and we recently uploaded our version of Monster Magnet's "Baby Gotterdamerung." That's a pretty amazing lyric. It's really great to record something on one day, get it up and people are the first to discover it in the middle of the night... I love it. I'm working to have Sketchbook 3 available by Xmas.

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Thanks to Anissa Mason of the Brookes Company

In RockOm's short existence on the web, we've posted a number of compelling articles and blog posts that have since found their way into the inner archives. There are many new readers and users since those "early days" (4 short months ago) and so occasionally we will pull out old posts for you to read (or re-read) and meditate upon. Here is an excellent article posted during RockOm's very first week by a musician in France named Joseph Rowe. Take a look and then head over to the forum to discuss.

The dictionary definitions are not enough for those of us who are alive to the sense of the sacred which we find in so many unexpected places ... and are often disappointed not to find in so many expected places.

Perhaps a better question is: what is the sense of the sacred? What does this word mean to us in a universal sense, in the context of our contemporary world of pluralism and multiculturalism, a world in unprecedented evolutionary crisis?

It is my belief, based on travel, research, and the experience of performing sacred music for people of radically different worldviews and religions, that religious tolerance, like interfaith dialogue, is growing by leaps and bounds, far outstripping the old intolerances and insularities we are all too familiar with. The mass media might make it seem otherwise --- but as we know, they thrive on bad news, and are parsimonious in reporting the good news which is happening right under their noses.

The best short response to this question I've heard is from Pierre Rabhi, founder of agro-ecology, and author of the book As in the Heart, So in the Earth : "The sense of the sacred is a sense of humility, where gratitude, knowledge, wonder, respect, and mystery all come together to inspire and enlighten our actions."

This would have seemed pretty obvious to people of ancient times. Only in the last few centuries of modernism and postmodernism has it become fashionable to ignore and disdain the sacred, much as it has become fashionable to ignore and disdain beauty, and to revere irony.

But for those who will not allow this sense to wither in them, listening to sacred music can be a heart-opening experience, even when it comes from a tradition or a culture which is strange or bizarre to them, even if they disagree with certain doctrines of that tradition, even if they reject all religion, and even if the music itself has no formal connection to any sacred tradition.

The awakening of this sense, at least in listening to music, does not depend on having specific beliefs, or even on knowing the meaning of the texts that are being sung or chanted (though it can of course be infinitely deepened by knowing and studying their meaning).

Music can be an ambassador for peace where other embassies have failed. I first learned about this power of music over twenty-five years ago, when I participated in a two-day conference at an American university, which sought to bring Jewish, Christian, and Muslim (mostly Arab, but a few Persian) students together in dialogue concerning the Palestinian problem. This was in the days of the Carter administration, when such hopeful attempts were more common. I was part of a small student musical group (oud, santur, percussion, guitar, and a male and female vocalist) thrown together at the last minute, and our job was to offer a short concert of a mixture of Arab and Jewish songs at the close of each session. The first day was very difficult, because we had to play after a stormy session with several shouting matches, much anger in the air, and little if any real dialogue. On the second day, we asked the directors to let us open the program instead of closing it. We had to beg, then insist, and they reluctantly agreed. What a difference it made! Not only was there no shouting during that conference, people really listened to each other --- and there were even some friendships made! I can't attribute it to the quality of our music (my oud-playing was pretty amateurish in those days), but I did learn something important about the power of the intent of music. Whatever our shortcomings as an ad-hoc musical group with too little rehearsal together, our individual and collective intent was so strong on that second day, that it communicated a message of peace which words alone could not have done. Last, but far from least, our motivation, on that day at least, was for our music to serve --- to serve something higher than the usual desire to shine, to thrill, or entertain, that had previously motivated us.

This was also my first inkling that the influential modernist doctrine of l'art pour l'art --- art for art's sake --- is a fatuous dead end. From the earliest times of performance art, all the way back to its beginnings in shamanism, authentic performers have always known that they are at their best when their art serves something higher than art. Individually and collectively, we are beginning to rediscover this ancient truth, but in new and mysterious ways...

By Joseph Rowe
http://www.naturalchant.com

also, see my significant other's site:
http://www.myspace.com/catherinebraslavsky

and my memoir of my teacher, Hamza El Din:
http://www.naturalchant.com/hamza.htm

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