New Music for Meditation: Flute Recordings

Beginning work on a new recording project. Having had several flutes restored to me recently, I have been planning to do some new recordings towards a new album project. This past winter, recording Darshan, a new album of music for meditation, yoga, healing, and Reiki, has also renewed interest in recording more new music in that mode. I am also continuing to write new lyrics for new songs. I'm not writing many poems right now, but that's normal when I'm working on music.

Tonight I was finally able to set up the microphones and do some recording. (I'm writing this while taking a short rest break.) I've had some computer issues lately, but now things in the studio are working again. I've got the stereo mic pair set up in the living room, and when I'm done tonight I'll leave everything set up so that all I have to do to record some more is throw a few switches and start playing.

I recorded a first piece with the Zen flute, and another with one of the shakuhachi I hadn't played in awhile. Mostly I'm exploring. I'm recording everything, expecting to trim most of it away later, leaving just the best music. I will probably make one piece from this session with a lot of space in it, to make an ambient piece with flute events widely spaced apart.

For tonight's session, I'm just improvising. Getting to know my flutes again. You record everything just in case you come up with something really good. I've made several piano pieces that way, and even more Stick pieces. Tonight's session is a reintroduction to some old friends. Finding our voices together again. I'm not worried about perfection at all for this session.

When I play back a solo flute piece, sometimes I hear Stick or keyboard parts to go with it: they emerge from within the gestures and spaces of the music. What I'm doing for this session is also listening to play back with reverb added, to hear how things sound in a large acoustic space. (I have some of the best software reverb emulators ever now: the software algorithms just keep getting better.)

I feel like working on into the night. If I run out of air, I will keep going with other instruments.

I am making raw tracks here. They will assembled later. This is all raw material. Some of it might turn into finished pieces, some of it may be mixed in elsewhere. It's like a painter taking sketches to later repurpose them into finished paintings. That's a good analogy, actually. Tonight I'm recording sketchbook pieces. Something good may emerge from them later. Meanwhile, it just feels incredibly good to playing my old flutes again. A year ago, I'm not sure I would have even had the breath and stamina for this; so I guess it's true that I'm getting stronger, now, even if still very gradually.

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I've put in about two hours now tonight. Time to stop and let the ears rest. I find that I can't really go much more than four hours at a stretch without my ears getting tired. Two hours of continuous recording is pretty good, overall.

I recorded some ambient soundscapes, when I was tired of playing flute. Some of these larger bamboo flutes require a lot of air to play, so they're actually tiring to play for a long time. I recorded another take on the Zen flute, and some more shakuhachi.

Then I fooled around for awhile trying out ambient synth patches. One or two ideas that won't escape the sketchbook, probably, but one or two that might be good music beds, once I massage them a little. One in particular might end up being good to blend with one of the flutes, later on. I'll see how that goes.

Zen: Stop when you're tired. Eat when you're hungry. Chop wood, carry water. Sleep wherever you fall. Live in the moment. Play.

Begin Again, Keep Going

Having completed a large commission of songs for male chorus and piano, which occupied all of my attention for several months, and which produced a concert's worth of music, I have this past week been newly commissioned to do another, very different musical project. A CD I had made on commission almost a decade ago, a CD of trance music to be used as background for yoga classes, meditation, and similar situations, has led to a commission to make a sequel CD. Not a repetition, but the next level. I'm a better composer and musician now, or at least I hope I am, since time is meant to improve your art-making, not stagnate it.

This new CD I am recording now will be used for meditation, yoga, healing, massage, Reiki sessions, and so forth. Thus I'm writing it to sustain those purposes, not interrupt them. That calls for a particular kind of music. A particular tone and tempo very different from the dramatic, narrative songs I've been writing for most of this year. It will be completely non-verbal, instrumental music. It will use original recordings of Tibetan and Japanese Buddhist meditation bells, bells recorded from my own collection. It will use a fair bit of shakuhachi. No doubt there will be some synthesizers and keyboards in the mix, and Chapman Stick. It will have a variety of shapes and tones, but overall will hopefully take the listener deeper into meditative states of consciousness, the opposite of overstimulated, stressed-out, Type A caffeinated states of mind.

There's a lot of bland, boring New Age music out there. The best of that genre has always been music first, New Age music second. I think of musicians such as Paul Winter, Will Ackerman, and a few others, who pretty much invented the genre, but also transcended it. Contrast their vibrant, emotional music with the soulless boring pap of Stephen Halpern's random noodlings on electric piano. Contrast the powerful presence of the music in Stephan Micus recording against the flatlined neutral of most New Age music. Even ambient music, created in modern times by Brian Eno, inspired by Eric Satie's semi-joking idea for "furniture music" a century earlier, has more soul than most music you hear played in New Age bookstores, or most healing centers, massage offices, or new Age spiritual healing seminars. People often make the mistake of equating music meant to be unobtrusive and supportive with toneless, dull, bland, and spineless.

Yes, I do have strong opinions about New Age music.

That's because I was a participating witness to the development of this music from its start, back at its inception in the 1970s. Some roots of that style of music are ambient (Eno), folk, cool jazz, especially West Coast jazz, and the encounters of improvising musicians with the musics and spiritual values brought over from India, Japan, Tibet, and China in the 1960s. A lot of improvising musicians from the jazz and rock world contributed to growth of New Age music by introducing multicultural music into Western pop. The movement was strongly influenced both by world music, and by spiritual and moral ideas from the East.

If you want to blame someone, blame The Beatles: their introduction of Indian classical music into Britpop in the late 60s and early 70s, instigated by George Harrison's encounters with India, opened that door to a million and more people who otherwise would never have heard the music, or learned to meditate. The influence of popular culture icons, especially those as beloved, and as restless, as The Beatles, cannot be underestimated. George Harrison's post-Beatles solo albums have been part of the trend, seminal and central, even when basically pop music.

The music I tend to create, now, when asked to make healing music, or trance music, or meditation/yoga music, tends to be on the ambient side. Not static and unchanging, but not tonal or harmonic, not based on Western ideas of music theory, and essentially timeless. One of my influences is of course my years playing Indonesian gamelan music. Another strong influence is Buddhist music from Japan, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia, all of which I have listened to and studied for decades.

I am making it up as a I go along. It's an improvisation on a theme, a tone, an idea, a feeling. Most of my music is just so, whether notated or improvised. Art is improvised, life is improvised. It's all of a piece. So I keep going, making art, giving myself something to do that means something, a reason to go on, a purpose and a meaning, for my own life.

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Music surrounds hate and forces it to surrender. —Pete Seeger

Hate, fear, all the corrosive forces of entropy, give way before music's power to make us all come together in harmony. So Mote It Be.