My newest addition to Momentary I . I feel like my study of Hindustani music, theory, and practice has informed this piece, which as I explain in the notes, has been around for nearly 8 years. Take a listen, and I hope you enjoy. This comes direct from my heart, as a ray sent to all reaches of the sentient blogosphere.
Developmental considerations reveals considerable flexibility in the options available to human societies in their educational and socializing practices. ... The challenge in arts education is the modulate effectively among the values of the culture, the means available for arts education and assessment, and the particular developmental and individual profiles of the subjects who are to be educated.
Integral Art includes all of these concerns and considerations, due in no small measure to Gardner (a true pioneer) and his colleages at Harvard's Project Zero. In my words (after Gardner): What professors, teachers, and facilitators of Integral Art face is the negotiation between AQAL theory, the span of methodologies available, and the edges of particular artists who want to be trained. New consciousness can bring new art - it can be that simple, but as teachers we have to evoke that realization in students, on their own terms, or edge. And to do so, Integral Art teachers have to be versed in the depth and span of the best of what is available, must possess deeply informed and authentic experience in whatever field they work, and must be Integrally-informed / AQAL certifed. The last thing we want is a view of Integral Art based upon largely armchair metaphysics.
I am closer than ever to release of my newest record, I Am Sound. And when I do, all three of my records will be simultaneously released. Just for fun. Stay tuned for a special discount price for the 3-record set (Curious Brew, Spiral Suite, I Am Sound).
In the meantime, check the track list for I Am Sound over on the album's page, here.
...all of the arts (whose purpose is to fill uses and needs of man) are brought to life by that breath of life which God breathed into the body of man...
God - as synonymous with Goddess, Nature, Creator, Creatrix, Spirit.
Man - as synonymous with any creature, sentient and nonsentient, manifest and unmanifest.
And dear Hildegard - as one of the midwives of Integral Art - thank you.
Some very sad news from my friend Bill Epperly, good friend of Brother Wayne Teasdale. Br Wayne was one of the world's true and authentic interfaith pioneers. What follows are three emails.
Dear Friends of Br. Wayne
Br Wayne passed on from this life to the next early this morning (Wednesday). His passing was peaceful. There was no advanced warning that his time was approaching. He had been staying at the home of his friend Dr Martha Howard; Martha discovered that he had passed away when she went to see him this morning.
Funeral arrangements are being made. There will not be a wake. The services will probably be this Saturday morning at 9:30am, at Holy Name Cathedral, Chicago. I will post an update with additional information this evening.
I wish that I could have called to pass the news on in person. There are many details to be attended to.
Let us join in prayerful remembrance and joyful celebration of this great light and wise one whose presence we have been graced with for these years.
Bill Epperly
* * * * * * *
Dear Friends of Br Wayne,
Br Wayne's Mass will be held on Saturday, Oct 23rd, at 9:30am. It will be at Holy Name Cathedral, Chicago, at the corner of State and Chicago Ave (http://www.holynamecathedral.org/).
Immediately folllowing Mass, there will be a burial service at Calvary Cemetary, Evanston, IL (301 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, IL 60202 (847) 864-3050. (Chapel Service only)).
In lieu of flowers, we are requesting donations be made to the Bede Griffiths Foundation. Information on how to do this will be distributed soon.
Please check the remembrance website that my wife Claire is creating for details on donations, photographs of Br Wayne, tributes, etc. The site is a modest one and is under construction now. We hope it can add a dimension to our celebration of his life and work. If you have a photo, a story, or a verse you'd like to share with the global internet community, we hope this little web page will serve as a place to share such things. Again, we hope it will be more or less complete by early morning tomorrow. The url is http://cp-epperly.home.comcast.net/BrWayne/ .
Please let me know if you have any questions or if I can help in any way to connect you to resources.
Blessings to you,
Bill Epperly
* * * * * * *
From: "Bill Epperly" To: bepperly7@hotmail.com Sent: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 23:26:57 -0500 Subject: Pallbearers and Helpers Needed
Hello,
Please forgive the brevity of this note.
I am looking for a few volunteers....
1) Someone to recruit, orient, and organize the pallbearers for the funeral Mass on Saturday. We need 6 males. I would like someone to take responsibility for recruiting the six, for meeting with them beforehand on Saturday to go over their roles, and for making sure everything goes smoothly in this area. Volunteers please email me at your earliest convenience.
2) I need some folks to help prepare the bulletins for the service. Specifically, there are some 500 or more ribbons to be tied and affixed to programs. Those interested will report to 1 E Superior, Ste 304 at 1 (or 2pm) tomorrow afternoon. Expect to work for a few hours or so. If interested, please email me by noon Friday, if you can, or just show up.
DIVINE CANTO The best music seeps Over time, as ocean through rock To become who you are - Disbelief, suspended - as a waved Person in the world Who can know & Flow as Music In-bodied.
"Indeed, the decline of egocentrism, reflected in the emerging ability to serve as one's own best critic, is a crucial criterion for an individual who would eventually achieve success in a symbolic domain. Unless you can speak to other individuals, unless you can don their ears, their eyes, and their interpretive systems, you are unlikely to attain success as a human creator."
A school's entire curricula for art production can be built, in part, around that second sentence. In order, for example, for an artist to 'don' another person's interpretive systems, the artist has to know (both cognitively and experientially) what the systems are. In other words, beyond a superficial grasp of these systems, the artist has to go futher: to dig around, ask questions, discuss with others, experiment in symbolic creations (ie, artwork), and really learn these dynamics (which include knowledge of audience response, worldviews, values, and semiotics, all in an Integral context).
This is just one example, but my point is that for that kind of inclusive education, amongst a community of like-minded artists people, come to the Integral Art Center of Integral University, moreso as it grows as an institution.
Hannah and I took in Stuart Davis' show last night. Fun, riotous time, as always with Stu. I have caught all of this shows in Chicago in the last 15 months, and he is something else. I noticed that the tempos to some of his songs have slowed a bit. The fluctuation of tempos by musicians from show to show is always something I note. Sometimes it signals a certain boredom with the songs, while other times the signal is more of 'intimate embrace', almost as an impressionistic work of art. With Stu, I think it is the latter. You play songs as often as he does, the subjective stuff that drove the songs' emergences becomes more objective. The songs sounded really great a bit slower. And he played two of my favorite songs: Nothing in Between and Inventions.
The night was great for other reasons. I met several great Integral folks. We actually picked up Adam Leonard up in Evanston and brought him to the show. Rollie Stanich, of Integral Naked, was there, along with Christina Barr, of Integral Institute. Christina and Adam live in Chicago---the IntegralChicago team grows by the month. And another Integral artist, Gwen Mitchell, offered me her recent CD, which I was honored to accept.
Afterwards back at our house, Hannah showed a bunch of her recent movies, and I played a bunch of my compositions for Stu, Rollie, and Mark Raterman (another IntegralChicago cat). And Stu and I got into a good conversation about the role of long-tone singing in an Integral Music, in the case for composers. How often do composers learn how to legitimatly sing? And do they treat singing as a meditative, yogic act? They should! I will shout this from my grave, because long-tone singing has been a completely transformative process for me, over the course of the last three years that it has been part of my practice.
And this morning, a nice breakfast with Rollie (a great conversationalist) and Colin Bigelow, from Integral Institute as well. They were both in two to meet with Brother Wayne Teasdale because he is very ill with cancer. All of our hearts go to Brother Wayne. He is a pioneer and a beautiful soul.
As I have expressed to my composition teacher, I sometimes feel that as a more or less 'traditional composer' (i.e., someone who arranges notes on a score for others to play), I am like a salmon who fights against a current that rushes in the opposing direction. This is not meant as a 'victim complaint' of any kind, but simply a recognition that the forces of music production in our contemporary world will leave a mark on the tradition forged through centuries of composers, usually of the West. I am certainly open to change in what entails the processes and products of a 'composer'; indeed, if I wasn't, I'd be just silly.
On the interior consciousness side of things, I use the term the inner ear to describe in general the phenomena that music-creators experience consciously and unconsciously. Musicians of this nature, from the best I can tell, have been continuously disatisfied with the incongruities between what the inner ear senses, and the outer ears hear. And it is this incongruity that, in many case, appears to drive the composer to continue with his or her efforts to realize more accurately, fully, and expressively the silent but symphonic music of interior experience.
My point is that the technology composers use to create their music should always be in service of one's inner ear, in a fundamental sense. There are other forces at play (from the nature of the occassion to compose, to the performers' skills, to the intentions of the composer for a particular piece, and so on). But if, even temporarily, strip away these forces and instead feel deeply into the song of our inner ear, then, I believe, the difficult paths towards the realization and composition of music can be illumined and lit-up.
Pure technology is never the point of anything musical (aural, yes, but musical, no). Technology is a means. The display of technical brilliance has its merits, but true music has nothing to do with this kind of bravado, or this type of skill. The ability to play scales at 250 bpm is as much a 'technology' as Garageband on Apple computers. Technique and technology both have the root word techne which in its Greek form simply means 'craft'. Thus, in general, I refer here to the objective actions that any musician can choose to learn and employ. But what it is that is crafted? What is technology and technique a means for?
In the most general sense, technology is a means for composers to capture and evoke the music heard by his or her inner ear. Technology is a means for composers to evoke consciousness. The swells, the ebbs, the flows, the discord, the consonances, the tensions, angers, joys, confusions, deep unity, and any other kinds of feeling, and consciousness of the feelings, is what composers use technology for. Composers bring the sounds that are heard only faintly, or only through deep consideration, to the fore of awareness and reception, as if fish that are brought to shore, to feed others. The inner ear is a Sea, and the sounds of that Sea are the trout, bass, salmon, sharks, plankton, coral, scampi, and the whales. And as any wise fisherman knows, some fish are easier to catch that others, and some fish are better left uncaught.
Where do I point right now? I point to the fact that as our consciousness, collective and individual, gains what appears to be a greater hold and appraisal of the Sea and its contents, our technology changes and adapts, simply to catch up. Some of the newest music technology is under examination and application by our world's DJs. Perhaps what DJs the world over can express as sound (and not just as an abstract idea) is that the world's cultures can truly interact and cohabitate. If two cultures' music can be integrated and fused into a song, why not everyday on the ground of the Earth? If the humanity of our DJ composers can show, even in sound, how reconciliation can occur between cultures at war for tens, hundreds, and thousands of years, then by all means I say, "let's allow the people to hear and experience this music!"
And then I wonder, since in truth I am not a DJ in practice, if nonetheless the model or, dare I say, archetype of the DJ is one that does connect with my own compositional practice. The DJ weaves together beats, rhymes, and sounds for the new resonances that are brought forth, as a means to dance, make love, party, study, listen, and contemplate. While the raw material might not be of the DJ's own creation (though sometimes it is), the combination is. A DJ stitches together a multidimensional pattern, with yarn that can come from the further reaches of the globe, and from all levels of sentience that can be recorded.
Thus, while again I am not a DJ in actual practice, I nonetheless have great empathy for the pursuits of all DJs, and learn from their experiments, and learn from their music. The technology that DJs use to realize the music of their inner ears is not technology I generally use, but what pops forth I can use, and can consider, react to, and use as model for my own compositions. And I can simply love the work of my favorite DJs, and I do.
If we can continue to find and support the points of agreement between traditional Western composition and contemporary DJ composition, then I suggest we can have a deeper, wider, and more inclusive awareness of music. Not only through a comparison of various means of production used in both cases, but also through a comparison of the music structures and the audience reception can this integration happen.
And what grounds both endeavors, and is thus utterly crucial is the fact that in both cases (and in all cases beyond the two mentioned here), the dynamic is the realization of the inner ear. All my composer friends, and all of my DJ friends, and all of my musical friends (known and unknown)--we all share this journey! And the journey is none other than the realization of One Sound in the Many, of the core vibrations at the heart of the roots and fruits of our music! There is no other realization than the simple recognition that what pokes forth over the horizons and behind every breath is common to all of sentient and nonsentient life. Music births that life. Music clears worldspaces for life to emerge. Music is who we are, without ever the need to think about it.
Integral composers and Integral DJs flow on and as a river. The waves, and the currents, of the river are the echoes of the Sea, further up and down stream. When we recognize the Many, we flow on the river, and when we recognize the One, we flow as the river. When we release to what we truly are, the river flows as alchemy of both. It flows not only down its already-carved path, but flows through space and time to carry the rest of humanity in its current. All of the Kosmos floats dimensionless as the Sea. Our music, as the Music of the Kosmos, is what Life breathes in, and what Life breathes out.
"In his Critique of Practical Reason (1956/1788) Immanuel Kant spoke of two experiences that filled him with awe: the starry heavens above and the moral law within himself. To Kant's list, one might consider adding a third miracle - the young child engaged in creative artistic activity."
Here, here to that! To witness a child's first scribbles, first traces of vision as form, can take one's breath away just as much as Michelangelo's David, Beethoven's Ninth, Rumi's Quatrains, Hildegard's Symphonia, or any other masterwork. To experience and taste the same Divine ground from which any kind of art emerges is to experience resonance -- a resonance that knows no name, body, bias, or prejudice. Authentic creativity knows no levels of development, or stages of evolution. It is spontenaity emergent through whatever lenses and tools we have around. And it is a miracle.
I found a decently comprehensive online article about Augustin Barrios. He was a Paraguay-born guitarist and composer, whose work has only been recognized for its depth in the last 30 years on any kind of wide scale. Here is what one of our most regarded contemporary guitarists, John Williams, has said about Barrios' music:
"... as a guitarist/composer, Barrios is the best of the lot, regardless of ear. His music is better formed, it's more poetic, it's more everything! And it's more of all those things in a timeless way. So I think he's a more significant composer than Sor or Guiliani, and more significant composer --- for the guitar --- than Villa-Lobos."
Part of why I mention this is that my performance of the first movement of Barrios' perhaps best-known composition -- La Catedral -- will be on one of my upcoming records.
RSS