The Whole Music Experience

currently unpublished seek publisher Here is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of Whole Music (Soul Food for the Mind Body Spirit). I wrote this chapter based on my fascination with interspecies music. My fascination began when I read one of Masaru Emoto's water crystal books in 2006. If water has consciousness and registered vibrations with words and music, what else was possible? This is not a Bugs Bunny Cartoon Those of us brought up with logic-brain thinking and whose parents told us that we have an overactive imagination, will feel at odds with the interspecies music.   On one hand, jamming with animals feels like an enchanted dream come true.   On the other hand, we feel kind of silly taking our instruments to a city park to play duets with songbirds. However, David Rothenberg who has jammed with whales and cicadas after first exploring wild bird jazz recommends taking our instruments to the animal kingdom.   Why not play music at a zoo? “It shou...

Wikipedia For as long as I know, humans have bonded with the natural world through songs.   This includes a human-non-human musical interaction or the human grabbing inspiration from bird or frog songs.  Within my own time, I've encountered musicians who either play music in a natural setting as an interaction with non-humans (David Rothenberg) or collect natural sounds to wed to sound healing recordings (Marjorie De Muynck).  And let's not forget indigenous musicians who play flute, drums or didgeridoo in the wild. While I could provide an exhaustive list of such recordings, today I prefer to focus on recordings of natural sounds such as birds, whales, and wind.  Okay, I sense a few yawns from readers of this post.  We remember those early new age recordings of nature sounds that we used to induce sleep or ease tension, am I right? And I prefer to spend time in a wooded or marine setting listening to nature in the raw.  However, that's hard to d...

photo by Patricia Herlevi Ever so often I wake up with an idea for a new blog post for working with sound and music.  Today while meditating, I started paying attention to how my body responded to the songbirds outside my window.  Then I pondered the question, what constitutes music? Since I have listened to music from around the world in a variety of modes, scales, and structures, I understand that when even 3-notes are repeated in a pattern, this constitutes music.  Since all of this music came from humans there was no question as to its status as music.  But when we deal with nature do we consider the frog and bird songs actual music? And what about the frequencies contained in these nature songs, how do they affect our health and well-being? Do you ever wonder? To indigenous musicians and people this is a no-brainer.  To them of course nature provides music and healing frequencies.  Indigenous people the ancients believe that the world is made...

David Rothenberg Why Birds Sing Terra Nova Birds have inspired musicians, poets and artists of various discipline for centuries. Birds and their joyful songs have enlightened saints, prophets and mystics, not to mention bird watchers and ecologists. Birds have been the subjects of songs, entire music compositions and Alfred Hitchcock's film, but obviously, old Alfred did not quite understand the bird kingdom--he was a product of a paranoid society. (And I don't care much for that film). However, David Rothenberg, musician, author, professor and philosopher has chosen to befriend the bird kingdom through its musical language. Not only did he write the book, Why Birds Sing (reviewed on this blog), but he also co-produced a remarkable CD of the same title that combines nature with modern technology. While I am not into electronic music myself, (I do not find it healing due to the electromagnetic fields), the music on Why Birds Sing recalls sacred yoiks of the Saami...