The Whole Music Experience

  I t's been a long while since I shared a musical post with you. Today, I'm thinking about music that blew my mind or caused me to swoon. I have heard thousands of songs during my life time from various genres. And every song leaves an impression but not as big an impression as the following ten songs. 1). Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faune by Claude Debussy I heard this song the first time when I was on college break. I was bored and I rummaged through my mother's record collection. Since I had taken a music appreciation class I wanted to listen to classical music even though I was more into rock music. I found the record with Claude Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faune. Not knowing what a faune was and what a prelude to the afternoon might entail, I placed the record on the old-fashion turntable. When the first strains of the harp came through the speakers I nearly fainted because the music was sheer beauty to my ears. Two decades later, I rediscovered ...

Wikipedia image (Here is another excerpt from my book Whole Music (Soul Food for the Mind Body Spirit ), the chapter on classical music). Date with Immortals: Western Classical Music European classical composers represent the stuff of legends.  These immortal musicians traipsed through the centuries landing in the digital age.  Would classical composers capture our imagination if movie makers had not recreated their lives?  Would we have fallen in love with the classics if Mozart had not landed on the big screen played by quirky Tom Hulse or if Gary Oldman had not rendered our beloved Beethoven and unraveled the German composer’s mysterious romantic life? We knew that the biographical pictures gazed mainly at the personalities behind the music, while tossing sound bites of the composers’ music at viewers.  Lush eye-candy grabbed our attention while we learned little about the actual music.  What is classical music? Why have we add...

Wikipedia As I mention in my book Whole Music , when I was a child I fell in love with timbre and the voices of the individual instruments we listened to in music class.  Each instrument conjured a specific emotions or feeling in me.  The French horn caused me to feel majestic and the cello invoked melancholy.  My moods would shift with each instrument that I heard and my moods would shift quickly. Today, I listen to more than timbre, but I have an understanding of how tone, frequencies of the tone and timbre (the color of the tone) affect me on all levels.  And I wonder what listening to an entire symphony does with its many voices, themes, keys, musical passages etc... In the concept of "whole music" I prefer not to separate musical components, but in the case of this post, I will present solo instruments for your listening and feeling pleasure. If you keep a music journal (and I hope that you do by now), write down the emotions that come up with each instr...

 Muse Frequencies Musicians talk about getting into the flow or about channeling music.   Some musicians such as Mary Youngblood in an interview I once did with her saw herself as a vessel of the Divine or God.   She mentioned her two-word prayer, “use me.” Then she would pick up her flute to record or perform live.   The Canadian virtuoso pianist Glenn Gould cited in biographical books and movies, which he had to transcend through the music in order to survive a performance on a badly tuned piano. This brings up a good point and that musicians often need to contend with drafts, overheated venues, noise from audience members, problems with an instrument (I had my guitar pickup die on me once while I was giving a performance in London) and some musicians have to deal with awful sound engineers, bad microphones and the list goes on. Fortunately, we have muses who come along to keep us inspired and to open doors for Divine energy to flow through all...

A Romance on Three Legs Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano Katie Hafner Bloomsbury USA In 1982 or 1983 I experienced a supernatural encounter in a department store in north Bellingham. My mother and I both recall me walking up to one of those electronic keyboards in fashion at the time, turning it on, and then playing something virtuosic. I only remember turning the keyboard on and then waking from a trance and seeing a small crowd of people standing around applauding. My mother recalls the actual impromptu performance. Prior to this “episode” I had never taken piano lessons, thought I sucked as a musician based on a personal tragedy I experienced when I auditioned for the high school band and I had nearly flunked music theory at Western Washington University. I had given up the notion of ever pursuing my dream career as a musician or composer until a boost of confidence from the department store incident changed the course of my life. That was my firs...

Angela Hewitt Plays Handel & Haydn Hyperion Records In the past I have listened to award-winning Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt’s Bach recordings, which I found as delicious as the Bach interpretations of the late Glenn Gould (also Canadian). So when I put the Handel & Haydn CD into my player, I thought I was listening to Bach. I even pulled the CD out of my computer to make sure that Hyperion had not made a mistake and accidentally put a Bach recording in the jewel case. They had not. I read Hewitt’s liner notes in which she discussed the similarities between George Frideric Handel’s Suite No 2 in F major and Bach’s repertoire. “If you play this for somebody without telling them who wrote it, I bet the last person they would name would be Handel. Many would say Bach.” I would say the same about Chaconne (with 21 variations) in G major , which Hewitt opens the recording. But why should any of this surprise me? Handel and Bach were contemporaries, both of Germanic ...