Performance & Composer's Diary

On 9/16/17 we had an afternoon of music I've composed and arranged. Jeff Poole of the Orange County Review, and a great photographer, was there in a private capacity and took these pics so unobtrusively I never noticed he was taking them. (Thanks, Jeff!)

Here's the music room with the 1923 Steinway where it all happened.

While people were gathering and getting their drinks, I played some of the piano pieces I wrote back in the late 80's and early 90's

Here's Karla, our hostess with the mostess, welcoming her guests.

The first number was Mosaic, dating from around '93 or '94, with Dr. Andy playing the lead on cello.

Then with Heather joining us on clarinet we did "Encumbrances of Angels", a poem by Dr. Andy's wife Janet I set to music sometime in the late 90's.

Here's Janet reading "My Tale", a poem of hers I set to music last year.

This pic shows Karla singing "My Tale" with Benjamin joining us on violin. 

I doubled Karla's vocal an octave down in the alto flute.

Lama Tashi was here from Arunachal Pradesh and we did the Mandala Offering and the Om Mani Peme Hung chant from Mantra Mountain, with Stephen joining us on cello.

From this pic it looks like I neglected to give Benjamin the music and he's having to look over on to Dr. Andy's music

Here's one section of the audience with top row from left to right my sister-in-law Carolyn, cousin John, his wife Kate, cousin Ada and cousin Wallace.

In this pic Heather, Andy and I are playing "explorations", a trio I wrote three or four years ago.

Here are Sage, Patrick and Benjamin playing Karlalied, which was written two years ago.

These three are all students at James Madison University and really fine players and here you can see them playing with a wonderful ensemble feel . . . 

. . .  and with marvelous expression

That feeling when you hear your music being played by others and you can just sit back and listen and hear them take it places you hadn't realized it could go.

Taking a well deserved bow

The last piece on the program was Mosaic again, but this time with Heather playing the lead and Dr. Andy playing an accompanying line I added just a few months ago

Lama Tashi News

Back in November Lama Tashi was in Palermo, Sicily performing the music from Kundun with an orchestra. 

Here are some pics:

Here is an article written about him.

And here is a photo he gave me years ago from, I think, the premiere of the music in New York, with him standing next to Philip Glass:

Lama Tashi Photos

Here are some photos of Lama Tashi that just turned up on Facebook. My guess is they were taken at the university he's been building from the ground up these past four or five years. The rather austere looking lama in the third photo looks to be Tsona Rimpoche.

Encumbrances Of Angels

My friend Janet, the wife of Dr. Andy, is a poet who publishes under the name J. M. R. Harrison. When I first read this poem of hers years ago I immediately thought it could be put to music.

Encumbrances Of Angels

With all eternity to ponder
the nature and cost of freedom,
even an angel might prefer
the rasp of sand between the toes
to the ethereal tug of cosmic tides,
choose the angularity of starfish
over the symmetry of stars,
desire---whatever the penalty---
the lash of wind-driven rain
on a back unburdened of wings.

http://www.lochravenreview.net/2009Fall/harrison.html

The first step, sometime back in the '90s, was to work out a melody over some guitar chords, with the only notation being the words with the guitar chords written in overtop. That's where things stood until a couple of years ago when we decided to actually notate the melody, add flute at Janet's request, and add standup bass as Dr. Andy was just starting to work with one, and turn the guitar chords into a keyboard accompaniment and adding an introduction.

We then got Nancy Lynn Marmorella, who had helped out on the Mantra Mountain CD, to make the trip down from Harpers Ferry to sing, and asked Hayley Parrish to play the flute part. We got together one afternoon, ran through it a few times, and then made this recording down in the living room. 

Dr. Andy

Dr. Andy, a.k.a Andrew Mosholder, and I have been musical companions for nearly 20 years.  He played bass and cello on "Mantra Mountain". On Saturdays, about once every six weeks, he makes the drive down from Harpers Ferry and we spend the afternoon playing Renaissance, Baroque, Dylan and things I've written, with him on cello or upright electric bass and me on mostly alto flute, keyboard, guitar and singing.

He also has other gigs, musical and non-musical. Here he is with Chatham Street opening for Dave Mason.

Photo credit: CUphotography

Military Mind Training

Regular readers of this blog will know that I think the Buddhist techniques of mind training can be helpful to music makers. This story on mindfulness techniques used by the U. S. Marines has some concise quotes on the general benefits of mind training.

Designed by former U.S. Army captain and current Georgetown University professor Elizabeth Stanley, M-Fit draws on a growing body of scientific research indicating that regular meditation alleviates depression, boosts memory and the immune system, shrinks the part of the brain that controls fear and grows the areas of the brain responsible for memory and emotional regulation.

Four years ago, a small group of Marine reservists training at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va., for deployment to Iraq participated in the M-Fit pilot program, taking an eight-week mindfulness course and meditating for an average of 12 minutes a day.

A study of those Marines subsequently published in the research journal Emotions found that they slept better, had improved athletic performance and scored higher on emotional and cognitive evaluations than Marines who did not participate in the program, which centers on training the mind to focus on the current moment and to be aware of one’s physical state. . . .

. . . . “It’s like working out in the gym,” said Ms. Jha, the director of contemplative neuroscience for the University of Miami’s Mindfulness Research and Practice Initiative. “Right now, the military has daily physical training. Every day, they get together and exercise. But the equivalent is not given to the mind. The more [these troops] practiced, the more they benefited.” . . . 

. . . Why the cognitive boost? The answer lies in neuroscience. Previous studies have shown that habitual meditation:

• Changes the way blood and oxygen flow through the brain;

• Strengthens the neural circuits responsible for concentration and empathy;

• Shrinks the amygdala, an area of the brain that controls the fear response;

• Enlarges the hippocampus, an area of the brain that controls memory

One thing I'd like to emphasize is that 12 minutes a day was enough to show a significant result. My friend Lama Tashi once said to me that a short meditation practice every day was far superior to great long sessions some days and none on others. I think that most music makers would agree that the same goes for practicing music. 

Generally speaking, though, I think all music makers could benefit from something that, "alleviates depression, boosts memory and the immune system, shrinks the part of the brain that controls fear and grows the areas of the brain responsible for memory and emotional regulation".

Made In Tibet

Thanks to Lama Tashi for linking this on Facebook. For the nearly 20 years I've been knowing Tibetans, the news from Tibet has just gotten more and more grim. This example of how they maintain their sprit in the face of all that reminds me of what an astonishing people they are.

Transmission

Over at On An Overgrown Path, Pliable has been doing a series of posts on his notion of "transmission". His idea is that for classical music to survive and thrive there has to be something going on between performers and audience more than the merely auditory, and that a lot of the new fangled attempts to bring in audiences actually interfere with "transmission".

He talks about that more in this post, mentioning music therapy, and then at the end giving a link to the CD over on the right I did with Lama Tashi. While that CD can be simply listened to, the main point was the insert which has all the chants notated for voice, guitar and keyboard so that practitioners might learn to do them themselves. Full transmission(?)

Anyway, here's the comment I just submitted:

As you might imagine, this post really struck a chord with me, even before the very pleasant surprise there at the end(!). Synchronicity being what it is, just got off the phone with Lama Tashi in Arunachal and he's doing well.

Another Jungian term you hint at with your title being so close to his "collective unconscious" is archetype. My feeling is that great music which is widely appreciated must somehow evoke something archetypal in most listeners.

I'm convinced of that in the non-classical folk realm in the case of minor blues tunes like "House of the Rising Sun", and "St. James Infirmary Blues", because performing those songs nearly always elicits a noticeably deep response from some listeners.

Your link to that old BBC story on the benefits of live music reminds me there hasn't been any follow up on that so far as I know.

One music therapy principle connected with your idea of transmission is that the first step is to play music which engages the client, which matches his/her mood as precisely as possible. Then once the connection (empathetic transmission?) is made, the therapist can use that connection to help the client get to different places.

My sense is that a lot of classical musicians present their work as take it or leave it. For them the canon trumps all, whereas for the therapist, connection/transmission trumps all.

Thanks so very much for putting music therapy in such a fine light for your very high level readership.

Lama Tashi at Harvest Time

An American friend of Lama Tashi is with him over in Arunachal Pradesh, with a group that's working to provide a healthier water supply to Lama Tashi's home village. Wanted to put up this photo with harvested corn because all the melodies on the CD Mantra Mountain except one were learned by Lama Tashi as a child at the harvest festival in this village where he grew up. The one other melody is by one of the early Dalai Lamas and kept alive via monastic oral tradition.

I just changed the links on the two photos of the album over on the right so that the top one goes to a generous review by Pliable at On An Overgrown Path and the bottom one goes to a post where you can read the music for the mantra of compassion. 

Have seen a few mentions of Satie's Vexations lately. Mantras can go on for just as long or longer and allow for easy improvisation.

Lama Tashi/Solstice Performance

My friend Lama Tashi performed at the Handshake Concert in Delhi on the solstice. This was the third annual event put on by the delightfully named Rattle and Hum Society, which works to broaden awareness in India of the far Northeast of the country. He's the one on the right in the photo above.

Here's a quote from one of the reviews of the concert (gompa is Tibetan for monastery):

They closed with a worship duet, alternating Angami and English verses, and setting the stage for Grammy nominee Lama Tashi and his ‘singing monks’ to take us to the edge of heaven, syncing chants with languorous drum rolls, soft cymbal clinks and reverbs from Tibetan longhorns. 

An overwhelming peace descended over the audience, as if we were deep within a gompa, in a meditative trance. From the rage of rock to the stillness of spiritual music, quite a transition.

Auspicious Symbol

Here's the front cover of the Mantra Mountain CD. The conch is one of the eight auspicious symbols, representing the sound of the dharma. Right turning conchs are meant to be more auspicious than left turning ones. 

I think you could make the case that the conch is a precursor of the horn, which would make it an auspicious instrument. That far carrying sound has been a part of human society for a very long time.

"Well, the lamb ram sheep horn began to blow, the trumpets began to sound,

Joshua commanded the children to shout, and the walls a come a tumbalin' down."

The Mantra of Compassion

Here's the back cover of the Mantra Mountain CD. Just wanting to see if the music is legible.

Tibet

Over on On An Overgrown Path Pliable has another excellent post on a Tibetan subject, this time about a young tulku, a recognized reincarnation. I made a comment on the post, and it got me thinking about the tortuous times Tibetans and Tibetan culture are facing, which is something I avoid doing a lot of, as it is such an overwhelmingly depressing situation.

I speak only a few words of Tibetan, and have no idea the meaning of the lyrics of this song, but I'm pretty sure the background video is of a tulku walking on the land and among the people with whom he's meant to have been associated over a number of lifetimes. Within another generation this video may seem like those early photographs of American Indians.

Speaking of which, one bit of info I can add to the great wikiweb is a bit of bolstering of the notion that there's maybe some genetic connection between Tibetans and American Indians. There certainly seems to be a strong cultural connection.

Lama Tashi once told me of a very high lama, while in America, being taken on a tour of American Indian artifacts in a museum somewhere in the upper midwest. When leaving he turned to his interpreter and asked something along the lines of, "Why on earth are they showing me all the Bön stuff?!?!"

The Bön were the aboriginal inhabitants of Tibet who were, mostly but not all, converted to Buddhism. So this high Tibetan lama was confusing American Indian artifacts with the Tibetan Bön culture.

I was reminded of that by this video, which to me, seems suggestive of the American Indian culture, with that long outdoor procession and the incense/smudge smoke. 

update - a friend sends this link to a New York Times piece on Arunachal Pradesh, Lama Tashi's home region and where he's now heading up a new college at the request of Tsona Rinpoche, who is the 13th reincarnation of the high lama associated with the area. 

Soundboard

Here's a photo of what I call the soundboard. It's the spinet piano I had as a child with all the action removed. All the strings are tuned to pitches in the B flat scale with the intervals being more just than equally tempered. There are more strings tuned to single pitches than there are on a regular piano and the white cloth threaded through the bass strings is there to help me keep straight which strings are tuned together.

The original idea was to strike the strings with felt mallets to get a nice humming going and to record that sound as a wash to go behind tracks on the Mantra Mountain CD we did for Lama Tashi. 

Currently it's mostly there to help me play in tune on the horn and flute. When you play the note in tune and with good tone, it sings back the note and others in the harmonic series as well, especially when some nice condenser mics are placed close to it and run through the sound system. When the Friday group meets it's a handy way for us to tune together.

Tibetan Buddhist Music

Pliable over at On an Overgrown Path has put up a post on the residency/performance of a group of Tibetan lamas near where he lives in England. As is often the case, he includes some great photos. There's also a link to a CD of Buddhist temple music that looks very interesting.

I met Lama Tashi back in 1992 when he was with a group of Drepung Loseling lamas doing a similar residency in San Antonio and stayed at Wanda Ford's Willow Way, where I had the great good fortune to live during my time in San Antonio. I'd never been around Tibetan lamas before and was deeply affected by their deep voice chanting, their deep and spontaneous laughter, and how well and humanely they dealt with all the very unusual people they attracted. Decided then and there to find out more about whatever it was they were up to.

When Lama Tashi was here with me last week, he did a puja in the altar room and I was reminded of just how different Tibetan notions of music are. He rang a small hand bell when reciting texts, and the rhythms were much more speech like than dance like. Years ago he played a tape of hundreds of lamas at Drepung Loseling chanting evening prayers. Intonation was not something they were the least concerned with, nor starting and stopping together. Sounded like large ocean waves with all their power.

Pliable includes in his post a photo of two Tibetan long horns and it reminded me that the first time I ever tried playing a brass instrument was giving one of those a try in 1993 when I was back here in Virginia and helping Gangkar Tulku and his group when they were on the Sacred Music & Sacred Dance tour that followed the one Lama Tashi had been on. After a performance the lamas were letting anyone interested try to make sounds on one. I had beginners luck, was very taken by the sound and the experience, and the notion of my getting a French horn was born.

Music & Ego

This spring and summer the subject of ego and music has come up in various ways on some of the blogs I follow, so I asked Lama Tashi about it. I began the conversation describing the feeling most music makers have from time to time that their ego fades and the music just sort of flows through them, and asking if that didn't happen to him from time to time back when he was Chant Master at Drepung Loseling, and how would he describe what was happening.

He knew exactly what I was talking about and said it was very similar to the type of absorption one tries to achieve in meditation. One is aiming to be like an "innocent baby" totally absorbed in looking at a picture or an object, with no "secondary thoughts" and "no concept of self".

He also said that while this kind of "focus" is what you're working towards, there's also "introspection", which is observing the meditation with a "neutral ego" to make sure things are going as they should.

Motivation

Talking with Lama Tashi about the issue of motivation in music making, he agreed with the statement, "One's motivation will affect the nature of the music one makes." 

He went on to tell of two famous lamas. One was known as one of the very best dharma scholars of his generation. Another was known for his great compassion, and his teachings always had more lamas in attendance than the great scholar had at his. So the great scholar went to a teaching given by the lama known for his compassion to see why he was so popular, even though it's very unusual for a high scholar to attend a lesser scholar's teachings. When asked what he thought of the popular lama's teaching, the scholar said he had learned nothing new, but that the teaching had given him a deeper understanding of the dharma.

Lama Tashi concluded by saying if you are making music to reach people and help them, your motivation will determine whether or not you make the connection and have a positive effect.

I asked him if, as my experience has indicated, every single teaching given by a Tibetan Buddhist lama begins with talking about setting the motivation. He agreed that is the case, and that karma (action) is simply karma. Motivation is what makes it good, neutral or negative.

Authenticity

I went to Google and found that Phil Ford post on Dylan and authenticity mentioned below. Back when it first went up I was struggling with how to go about making a CD of traditional Tibetan Buddhist prayer songs and mantras, using mostly Western musicians and instruments, i.e. myself, Susan(flute) and Andy(cello & bass). One approach would have been for us to try to be as much like traditional Tibetans as possible to try to create an "authentic" recording. But since the music was already Westernized by my fitting it to Western scales in transcribing it, and then adding Western harmonies, that seemed a non-starter.

Here are some snips from Phil's post:

>>But performance isn't always, or even often, a matter of sincerity. . . In my classes I often like to point out that the artistry of singers like Bob Dylan is largely directed at fashioning a rhetoric of authenticity. . .  It's a remarkable acheivement: between 1963 (Freewheelin' Bob Dylan) and 1967 (John Wesley Harding) he invented half a dozen ways of being authentic.<<

So out of all that I figured we could be authentic without trying to mimic what we knew of Tibetan performance practice. We could be Westerners making an authentic attempt to present Tibetan music to the West.

Just thinking about all this here in the last day or so, realized that's really what I'm about as a music therapist - helping people make music that's authentic to them, that's an authentic expression of who they are. Music educators are trying to get people to make music that's authentically a part of the canon. There's a big overlap, but there's a difference as well. 

Just as in Tibetan Buddhism, motivation is everything. Understanding why you're doing something is vital to understanding what you're doing and how best to go about it.

Mantra Mountain

Pliable at On An Overgrown Path recently put up this post on the CD I did with Lama Tashi and some friends couple of years back. He really understands what we were up to, has some very nice things to say about the project, and puts the CD in a context I hadn't fully appreciated before.

One of the aspects of music therapy I most enjoy is helping people use music for spiritual purposes, so making this CD was very satisfying. Pliable's coining the phrases "lean forward" and "lean back" to describe two kinds of music is very helpful. I think that for music to be successfully used in a spiritual way, on some level it needs to be "lean forward" music. For Mantra Mountain this is a subtle attribute, where when singing along with Just A Closer Walk it is much more evident.

Mantra Mountain

Google is now finding the blog in searches, and includes in the results a link to the Mantra Mountain CD some friends and I did for Geshe Ngawang Tashi Bapu. If you follow the link, there's a long explanation of the project taken from the insert in each of the CDs that also has the sheet music for each track. 

Basically, the Mantra Mountain project involved the transcription, arrangement and recording of traditional Tibetan Buddhist prayers and mantras. The idea was to make this music meant for spiritual practice available to Western practitioners. The sheet music has the lyrics, piano arrangements and guitar chords. 

As a music therapist, making this material available to the West, most of it for the first time, was an exciting and rewarding project. I feel a seed has been planted that may sprout and grow over time.