The Whole Music Experience

I woke up this morning, with a storm slamming against the windows.  I decided to stay in bed longer and listen to Bach keyboard works.  I slipped Murray Perahia's Bach Partitas 2, 3 & 4 into my portable CD player and listened to Bach's solo piano via headphones.  The ostinato (bass line played with left hand), and the counterpoint so skillfully played by Perahia calmed my nerves. My mind was racing at the time with thoughts tripping over each other. So I focused on the music, and listened intently while absorbing every nuance into my cells. About 15 minutes of listening to this recording, plus an eye pillow over my face, gave me the same affect as a half an hour of sitting meditation. I realize that anyone who has read sound healing and healing music books would have seen Bach's music at the top of a healing music list.  Experts discuss the architecture and the mathematics of Bach's ingenuous compositions, not that I comprehend the intricacies of Bach's...

After years of feeling affects of different types of music listened to in different settings, I came up with the concept of tracking responses to music via a journal. The benefits of keeping a music journal include, developing music consciousness (how music affects your mind, body, and spirit), exploring musical genres you wouldn't otherwise, and a journey into sound healing. This exercise is more challenging for people with a short attention span or who live busier lifestyle. But the physical act of keeping a journal divided into columns with the headings Type of Music, Artist, time of day, emotional effects, and physical effects does the job.  You don't need to run out and buy a fancy leather bound journal, a cheap spiral notebook will do the job just as well.  So how do you get started? First you purchase the journal and create the columns.  You can even keep an online journal using Access or Excel, if you spend more time in the typing mode.  Then you need t...

I'm not writing about a new topic.   I write this essay in preparation for two workshops I plan on teaching this winter.  I adapted my course Exploring Music with Ecological Themes into a 2-hour workshop where I feature 5 songs hailing from diverse traditions.  We will explore the Finnish runo-song (sadly a fading tradition), indigenous music (haven't selected the tradition yet), the "wild bird jazz" of David Rothenberg and the sound healing-jazz of the late Marjorie De Muynck.  The exploration reads like a shamanic adventure, but my workshop also focuses on lost healing arts. Sadly as a planet, we have mostly lost touch with the natural world and the purposes of music.  I feel that disconnected from nature and intentional music leads to dis-ease and destruction of the planet. If we perform ignorantly music with ill intentions then we lead ourselves further into dis-ease.  I cannot stress this enough.I see music used purposefully by advertisers who sell...