The Whole Music Experience

image from Pix a Bay (free images) Often when we think of mantras, our minds turn to religious chants such as kirtans. We intentionally use mantras with our meditation practice or perhaps, when we feel frightened or alone losing our connection to the Divine, we chant mantras. However, this article is not about the warm fuzzy feelings we experience from sacred words and phrases. My definition of a mantra is a phrase that we repeat either mindfully or mindlessly. While some mantras are obvious such as the Moola Mantra or the Gayatri Mantra which are sung in Sanskrit, repeated words in everyday songs also act the same way on our brain as sacred mantras. While, a sacred mantra brings us closer to God or our god-self experience, a mundane mantra manifests our everyday life experiences. As modern-day humans, we surround and cloak ourselves in mundane mantras--ranging from the Rollingstones' "I can't get no satisfaction," to R.E.M.'s "I am superman and I can...

Photo by Patricia Herlevi, All Rights Reserved When I was 18 years old, I returned to my parent's house for college spring break and I shuffled through my mother's classical records. I found a recording of Claude Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of the Faun. The title intrigued me so I listened to the composition. I immediately fell into a trance. Musical trances weren't new to me at that time as I had fallen under musical trances as a child numerous times. But I found myself swooning to Claude Debussy's impressionistic music. I followed the different instruments as they rose and descended then hid behind other instruments such as harps, French horns, oboes, and flutes. Then, years later, I felt a craving for French Impressionist music. I bought recordings of Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy. And again, I swooned when I heard Debussy's prelude. I spent a summer exploring French Impressionist recordings in my music lab that I created in my Seattle apart...

Try this experiment. Next time you hear music coming from a passing car while you're out walking, pay attention to your body's reaction. Pay attention to how your body rearranges itself to match the rhythm and tempo of the song coming from the passing car. I've noticed this with myself. I'm walking on a city street at my own pace and cadence. Then a car passes by with rap music pouring out of the speakers. I notice that my step picks up, my heart races, and I end up walking to the rap rhythms against my will. Alternately, if I'm walking into a shop and a Bach prelude pours from a speaker, I pay attention to my body's rhythms as they slow down and my mind travels from worries of the day to contemplation. Or I stop thinking obsessive thoughts and I remember music history lessons about the Baroque Era--Bach's music. Right now, I'm listening to Marvin Gaye's greatest hits on YouTube as I type this post. I'm feeling my heart swelling with compas...

In our sped up world, we don't often take the time to deeply listen to music. I remember taking a music appreciation class at college in 1982 where the professor played a recording of Bach's Fugue in G minor every day for the entire quarter. We learned every nuance of that fugue, even if I didn't seriously listen to Bach' s music several decades later. So, for this practice get out your headphones and your music diary. Then listen to Kate Bush's "Man with a Child in His Eyes" which I'm including below. But first, I'm going to give you my impression of the song. Usually, when I review music, I review an entire album and I don't meditate on a single song. However, for this exercise, I have listened to this song several times through headphones. I've also heard the song many times in my adult life because I'm a fan of Kate Bush's work. It's important that you hear the song as opposed to just listening to it with your ears and...

H ere is the closing chapter of my book, Whole Music (Soul Food for the Mind Body Spirit). I look at the difference between mindful and mindless music. Some music is purely made for entertainment purposes while other music has healing or awakening intentions embedded in it.  This is not to say that all pop music is mindless as I found in my research that some pop songs are deeply therapeutic even if the musicians had little knowledge of this healing potential when they recorded or performed the songs. And then there is music which just adds more noise to an already chaotic background. We also need to look at psychological manipulation embedded in some music, especially background music in public places and used as commercial jingles to get us to buy products or change our behaviors in ways that don't benefit us. Closing: Super Music Versus Junk Music Like many other Americans, I spent my childhood eating junk food and listening to pop music.  Both the junk fo...

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...

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...