The Whole Music Experience

I have a fascination with ancient musicians. I did not grow up with this fascination as it came later in life during my musical quest. When I performed and recorded my songs I wasn't thinking about my musical forebears, at least not past the 1960s. However, once I began exploring metaphysics and testing various music on my body and emotions I began to wonder where it all started.  Here is an exploration found in Chapter One of my unpublished book, Whole Music. If you like this sort of thing and would like to read the whole book, help me either raise the funds to self-published the book properly or find a publisher brave enough to publish this material--that I'm sure the music industry doesn't want you to know. If we all demanded higher vibrational music, then the music industry would have to shift. Delphi Temples & Pyramids: Healing Music of the Ancients Where does human music originate? Were the first humans inspired by frogs chirping in ponds, by the s...

Finnish Kalevala, Wikipedia Excerpt from Whole Music (Soul Food for the Mind Body Soul) Musical Treasure Hunt I started out as a folk-rock musician, but over the years, I have reviewed just about every kind of music on the planet.   For me my introduction to world music began when a music librarian in Seattle introduced me to nuevo (new) tango by the Argentine bandoneon (small accordion), player Astor Piazzolla and an owner of an independent music store introduced me to the Portuguese vocal tradition, fado.   Both tango and fado expanded my music consciousness, and eventually sent me on a quest exploring the world’s music traditions. Similar to treasure hunts from our childhood, I’m going to send you on a music treasure hunt in which the pleasures are many. Pretend that you are a song catcher visiting other cultures where you collect new sounds. While I mentioned sound healers earlier, another important player with music preservation a...

For this post I'm pulling an excerpt from my book Whole Music (Soul Food for the Mind Body Spirit) and including runo-song examples I found on YouTube.  If you look at "Finnish Runo-Song" on YouTube, you will pull up a collection of wonderful videos.  In fact, you could easily spend an entire afternoon listening to those wonderful Karelian songs. Finnish painting of scene from The Kalevala, Wikipedia Magical Chants While these chants felt strange to my ears at first, I felt attracted to their primal qualities.   In my adult years, music has acted as the vehicle that has brought me closer to the world’s cultures.   Besides, it didn’t hurt that Nordic music had enjoyed its days in the spotlight, thanks to small American labels such as North Side Records in Minneapolis, who also booked US tours for Nordic acts.   True, trends come and go, but in this case, I delved further into the shamanic roots of the runo-song.   Imagine that in ancient time...