RockOm

By Tom Crenshaw, Tom@RockOm.net

Three melodic strings, a drumbeat and a passionate desire to connect with another can create a force that is larger than life. This immense, graceful force can be found in Christine Stevens and UpBeat Drum Circles as they travel the world, often venturing into hostile and war-torn territories to bridge cultural and spiritual barriers through music.

Music holds many keys for conflict healing and is an incredibly valuable weapon for promoting peace and reconciliation. Through music Christine Stevens has selflessly dedicated her life and resources in a mission to change the world one heartbeat and drumbeat at a time. Christine is an internationally acclaimed musician, author, music therapist and speaker as well as the founder of UpBeat Drum Circles. RockOm has made a dear friend in Christine featuring her work many times on our website.

We caught up with Christine recently to talk about bridging cultural barriers through music and instrumentation knowing she would have much to share with us on the subject. In connecting with Christine again we are introduced to the Strumstick: a three-stringed instrument whose small nature belies its capabilities. Through the Strumstick and drumming Christine has propagated goodwill, grace and peacemaking not only in Iraq but around the world as well.

Tom: In your work with Ashti Drum in Iraq, when you first are introduced to perform for a group is there an air of apprehension on either your part as a musician or those you’re meeting for the first time with regards to your being a Western musician? If so how do you make that first, all-important connection?

Christine: Well that’s a good question. "The beginning is half the whole" as they say and the first moments of a connection are crucial. A lot of preparation goes into going to Iraq. I dress according to the cultural norms; I dyed my hair, wore a hijab and prepared to meet people in their way. The first connection - what I noticed - it was all about making music and not talking at all.

More often than not, I introduce myself with drumming  and then wait and see if someone will answer you. [Laughs] What I love about the Strumstick and bringing a melodic instrument with me to Iraq to complement the drum circle program is that the Strumstick is in open tuning, like a drone. When you start to make that drone, people start to come. It’s a magnetic force for group gatherings. When you play a Strumstick it’s a call for singing and chanting. So I would play a simple open drone and often someone would just stand up and chant using Middle Eastern scales.

The idea for music for peacemaking has to do with some very important principles including inclusiveness and we get everyone to participate by handing out our rhythmic instruments. Everyone can join the beat. I love what Mickey Hart (drummer for The Dead) says, “When we drum together we create sacred space.” When we add the Strumstick and that drone - chanting and rhythm - we create a symphony of cultural sharing from the heart.

Tom: So using a Strumstick made the difficult work in bridging cultural barriers easier?

Christine: I would say that it makes it much easier because this time I had this fantastic instrument that was created by Bob McNally (he’s based in New Jersey and his information is at strumstick.com). What I love about it is that it’s three strings and no wrong notes! Anyone can play this! The biggest barrier is words, I think. As long as we’re aware of each other's culture and we’re sensitive, what is the real barrier? It’s words! With music, we can talk. We have to simplify to create that bridge for cultural connection.

The other thing I will say is that in my travels around the world with the Strumstick, everybody knows Bob Marley and you can play Bob Marley tunes on this real easily. According to the Dalai Lama, what we need to do to create peace on the planet is to have more music sharing and music festivals.

Tom: Oh, I agree. More music and more music festivals. That’s the plan and a perfect prescription. Many times we get caught up with words, like you say, when we simply should just let the music speak for us.

Christine: I think we’re becoming energy linguists. In sound and in music we can communicate best… our heart, our feelings. When we communicate on that plane there’s no conflict, there’s no war. We create “sacred space.” What happens in sacred space? We create connections and harmony. Just the word harmony is a metaphor for what we’re creating on the planet right now, one beat at a time.

Tom: Why is it that some people think they could never learn a musical instrument when drumming and the Strumstick, with only a fraction of instruction, turn anyone into a music-maker?

Christine: The key is having a very easy, immediate learning curve. We give up on ourselves too easily. If I had to sit down and try to learn piano scales right away I’d probably quit too, but because you can get a sound immediately on a drum, and a good sound immediately on a Strumstick without any training, all of a sudden children who have never played an instrument before can be in a jam session. I think it’s time to remove that dualistic thinking that some people have talent and some don’t and recognize that music is who we are - that we are biologically wired for music. We all have a singing voice, we all have a drum beat called our heartbeat, and it’s time to let go of all those myths and lies, find the instrument that calls to our heart and be part of the music.

Tom:  In your experience how important are the arts, especially music in connecting us with one another and why aren’t diplomatic efforts on the part of nations engaged in peace making more focused on cultural exchanges involving musicians and artists?

Christine: That’s actually not true. There are many diplomatic efforts right now happening through music. If you look at U.S. history one of the first efforts of diplomacy was sending an African-American gospel choir to Russia during the beginning of the Cold War. Louis Armstrong was paid by the State Department to travel and play music.  I just think we need more of this and the vision that I hold is that before the United Nations talk - we have to have dialogue - first we would have music together. First there would be a performance and then there would be dialogue. I don’t believe it’s only about the music; I think it’s about the whole protocol of combining music-making, musical sharing and appreciation of each other’s culture, and true listening.

Tom: What’s upcoming in the near future for UpBeat Drum Circles?

Christine: We have opportunities to train people in the HealthRHYTHMS program that Remo Drum Company sponsors and we’ll be teaching more in the sacred drumming and peace building traditions in places like the Shambhala Mountain Center. We’re working on some new books and CDs about UpBeat Drum Circle's and Ashti Drum's whole journey in the Middle East hoping to continue to build our drum ashram, our drum ministry, our peace drum corps and continue to collaborate with RockOm. We love learning so much from visiting your site and tuning into what RockOm is doing. Thank you so much for that, Tom.

LINKS:

Visit Strumstick.com to learn more and to see and hear Christine demonstrate its versatility

Be sure to view all our features and interviews with Christine Stevens:

The Rhythm of Life

Social Change and the Power of Music

Global Resonance

By James Heflin for The Valley Advocate

Doctors are discovering that music has very real power to heal

It's hardly news that listening to music can make you feel good. In a valley full of all stripes of therapy, music therapy is one of the most intuitive types around. But doctors, including one just down the road at Mass. General Hospital, are discovering the scientific side of why that's true, and what potential exists for specific medical uses of music. They're also discovering the details of why, for instance, playing rock at ear-bleed volume brought Manuel Noriega out of hiding during the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama (one wonders how often they played Van Halen's "Panama").

Research efforts and the clinical use of music have offered very specific results so far. In a recent MSNBC story, author Bill Briggs enumerated much of that research. Briggs reports that, though we may not necessarily realize it's happening, heart rates sometimes change to match a tempo. That's according to Dr. Claudius Conrad, a senior surgical resident at Harvard Medical School, who told Briggs, "Research has already shown that if you play a piece—like Mozart—at a certain slow beat, the listener will adapt their heart beat to the beat of the music."

Wild as that alone may sound, that's just the beginning. Briggs continues: "Based on interviews with neurologists and cardiologists, the journey from an instrument string to your heart strings goes something like this: Sound waves travel through the air into the ears and buzz the eardrums and bones in the middle ears. To decode the vibration, your brain transforms that mechanical energy into electrical energy, sending the signal to its cerebral cortex—a hub for thought, perception and memory. Within that control tower, the auditory cortex forwards the message on to brain centers that direct emotion, arousal, anxiety, pleasure and creativity. And there's another stop upstairs: that electrical cue hits the hypothalamus which controls heart rate and respiration, plus your stomach and skin nerves, explaining why a melody may give you butterflies or goose bumps. ... But what surprised Conrad is that the patients also showed a 50 percent spike in pituitary growth hormone, which is known to stimulate healing."

Several studies are underway, and music-savvy doctors are employing music (primarily classical, it seems) in hospital rooms and even surgical suites to aid healing.

In an age when nanotechnology, tissue-cloning and even human-machine interfaces point toward a high-tech, sometimes anxiety-producing vision of the future, there's something quite comforting about the notion of a very old and pleasant form of human interaction proving so useful. Maybe the future will be more Ursula LeGuin than Robert Heinlein, and that's probably a good thing. Rather than weird vision enhancements and Swiss-Army-knife robot arms, maybe we'll get implants to dial up the right tune to calm psoriasis, dilate blood vessels, or recover from heart surgery.

A related story on the same site points the way: turns out that the perfect tune for timing CPR compressions is the BeeGee's "Stayin' Alive." The possibilities for a personal health playlist seem endless, and surely one's gut instinct, the same one that tells us that music's power is obvious, can point the way. I don't know why, exactly, but it seems like Cream's "White Room" would probably aid constipation. Need a good dose of sedation? Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb."

So it's probably more of a rocket-science thing than that, but taking musical-medical matters into one's hands certainly seems to offer promise. It may even provide an alternative to single-payer healthcare if the Congress doesn't come through. We could put Bono in charge—much as I like him, he seems to nearly be a politician already. (On the other hand, hearing "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" during surgery might not be the most comforting idea.)

Kidding aside, research seems to point toward the efficacy of the harp in particular, with its unfettered vibrations of many strings. That kind of ancient tug at the heart strings, like the warmth of cello or the timeless drone of didgeridoo, makes sense as a helpful regulator of health, and connecting the ancient to the contemporary ought to make future medicine a lot more pleasant.

The musical term pedal tone (also known as a drone or organ point) is a low, sustained tone that remains steady in the bass of a composition while other voices move about above it. It's a presence that's always there, underlying whatever dance is going on above it. If the music gets intense enough the pedal tone may be completely drowned out, but even then it can usually still be felt.

Through the effects of a spiritual practice, or a relationship with God, or a connection with the Ground of Being or emptiness we too have the opportunity to have a constant presence at our side, a droning and infinite sustained “tone” that can always be at least felt during whatever may be going on in our lives. And that is precisely the purpose of having a spiritual practice – a regular, disciplined time of prayer or meditation or creative practice or interaction with the natural world... whatever it is that connects you with the divine. It trains us to be able to hear and feel that quiet “pedal tone” that we hear and feel when we are in the quiet of our practice out in the loud and restless world.

If you'e fallen out of disciplined practice, regular prayer respites, or scheduled meditation – consider jumping back into this week. Start tomorrow. Or start today. For if we find comfort and meaning in that droning “pedal tone” of our quiet times, we can certainly train ourselves in being able to experience it through the loud jazz of everyday life.

By Trevor Harden, trevor@rockom.net

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