Music, Meditation, and Weather

Weather and music seem to be intimately connected at times. That makes sense when you think about it: the first music people ever heard was the rush of the wind, the fall of rain, the crunch of snow. As winter and spring are negotiating the weather in my neck of the woods just now. it has me thinking about music, weather, and contemplation.

R. Carlos Nakai plays Native American flutes; Will Clipman plays all manner of percussion, including Frame drums, claves, Tibetan bowls, bodhrans, all sorts of other things. For Awakening The Fire they’ve paired up the fluid melodies of flutes with striking, beating and chiming notes of percussion in a dialogue which leads them through ten tracks of original music. By turns fast paced and reflective, pieces including Kindling the Essence, First Morning, and Portal evoke the landscapes of the southwestern United States, landscapes which often suggest mediation themselves with the fall of light and shadow.

The landscapes of the Highlands of Scotland have a different character altogether. They inspire and evoke reflections as well, though, through their wooded glens, dramatic coastlines and rugged crags, all with falls of northern light with characters all of their own as well. For Celtic Airs and Reflective Melodies Ian Green of Greentrax Recordings has chosen eighteen slow airs and reflective tunes from across the Greentrax catalogue, a creative companion and a doorway to meditation that speaks without words. Harp, fiddle, and pipes are the primary instruments as artists including Fiddlers’ Bid, Ceolbeg, and Tony McManus lead the way through tunes including Cairn Water, Ye Banks and Ye Braes, and Wendel’s Wedding.

you may also wish to see
Hanneke Cassel: For Reasons Unseen

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Music and forgiveness

 

Forgiveness: it is a circumstance that holds both past and present -- and at times, future -- and ways of finding balance among all those things. At times it’s necessary to forgive others, once and many times, and at times it is just as necessary to learn how to forgive one’s self. A place of peace, an open vista, room to grow, and a hard road, sometimes, to get there. It is a subject musicians deal with directly and indirectly, and music is often a good companion on the journey.

Music to go along with these ideas

Carrie Newcomer  Hush
Cathie Ryan Be Like the Sea
Carrie Newcomer  Before And After
Cathie Ryan In the Wishing Well
Bill Cooley Requiem for a Mountain


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rest in music
cathie ryan: the farthest wave

photograph was made in Derry, Northern Ireland, and is copyrighted. thank you for respecting this

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Music, meditation, creation

Contemplative neuroscience -- it makes sense that such a discipline, which includes the study of brain function in people such as Buddhist monks and others who are known as world class meditators, would exist. It is a recent branch of the study of how the brain works, though, which I learned while listening to Krista Tippett interview scientist Richard Davidson for the program On Being..

As they were talking about the brains of monks, and of teaching children how and when to use meditative techniques, and noting that, as Davidson remarked, the word mediation is like the word sport in that it covers a lot of approaches and techniques, I was thinking about how meditation plays out in the practice of being an artist.

Creating a piece of music, interpreting another’s composition, writing a story, deciding how to play a character, making a photograph, or a painting, or a bowl or a quilt - -- acts of creation such as these are also meditation, I think. They are places where the contemplative and active strands of meditation twine into each other. Artists of all sorts often have practices of mediation as part of their daily lives, and as part of specific preparation, reflection, and thanksgiving before and after making something, as well.

Then there’s the whole communicative aspect of this creative meditation, as well: the effect the art has on the listener, viewer, and reader.


Music, meditation, creation, reflection -- all part of the well of creative practice.

Music to go along with these ideas

winter meditation: aine minogue
India to Indiana in song and image
Hanneke Cassel: For Reasons Unseen

and a thought about architecture as meditation
on Renfrew Street in Glasgow

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music and intention

In her song Stones in the River, Carrie Newcomer sings


...today I’ll drop stones into the river.
And the current takes them out into forever.
And the truth is most of us will never know,
Where our best intentions go.
Still I’ll drop another stone.

Intention is always a subject for reflection and contemplation and question, in music and in other parts of life. Then there’s the whole aspect of the space between intention and action -- and the spaces around both of those. No accident, I think, that Newcomer chose to place this song on the album she named Before & After.

What does all this have to do with music? Ideas about that

Music is a handed on thing, a shared art, from composer to performer to those who listen -- even those at times that may be all the same person.

Every person who goes to a concert has a different experience. In part that holds because of what each brings to the time, and in part that is because of what each hears, and what each takes away.

What each remembers comes into it too. Songwriters -- any sort of writers, really -- know they cannot control how someone will take what they have written, how they will understand it, and what they will make of it. It is as Newcomer suggests in her song, a balance between creating and letting go. Leaving space for whoever receives your art make it part of his or her own life.

Try this: think of the last three songs (or if you prefer, other things you have read or heard) and write down one thing that you remember most from each. How has that become part of your life? What do you learn from thinking about that?

photograph of stones is copyrighted. thank you for respecting that.

here is a video of Newcomer singing Stones in the River



you may also wish to see
Music Road: India to Indiana: Everything Is Everywhere from Carrie Newcomer
Music Road: reflections with Adrienne Young
Music Road: Shadow and Light: Irish Music from John Doyle

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here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.

winter meditation: aine minogue

Winter: a meditation

Aine Minogue has considered the light and dark of winter in her music, and she does so as well in the dvd she has created to extend those ideas.

Minogue is a harpist from County Tipperary in Ireland, now based in the Boston area, so it perhaps comes as no surprise that she includes both ancient and modern ideas and visual elements in her work on Winter Mediation.

There are forest scenes at sunset and at sunrise. There is a burning fire which may suggest yule logs or an even older ceremony. Dancers and other figures move in and out of landscapes, half seen as they suggest stories and ideas yet to be told. Children dance; snow falls, stone spirals seem to speak. The light changes, and snow falls again, all led by Minogue’s harp through eleven tracks of music both familiar and new. Visual elements and music together make thought provoking companion as winter begins.

stills and a bit of music from the dvd




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Music Road: winter music

Music Road: creative practice: winter thoughts

Music Road: ceol chairlinn: sharing music in winter

Music Road: disclosure policy

R Carlos Nakai: Talisman

R Carlos Nakai
Talisman



RC Nakai’s latest recording begins with music that’s like a quiet walk into evening darkness, and continues with wonder and the stars, the many version of night, and then through early morning hours through sunrise. Speaking as I just was in the post about Billy McComiskey about music that could last through the turn of seasons, this also could be a quiet soundtrack of preparation for the work of winter.

Nakai, who is of Navajo and Ute heritage, plays traditional Native cedar flutes here. It is to the spare sound of solo and duo flute her returns, in the midst of a career long exploration of the possibilities of Native music on the cedar flute, and exploration which has seen him found an ethnic jazz quartet, play with many symphony orchestras, collaborate with a Japanese ensemble, and work with many other artists as well as create adventurous music of his own. He has earned two gold records - the only Native American recording so far to do so -- and has received eight Grammy nominations. And is is to simplicity that he returns.

yuo may also want to see

Music Road: looking toward Christmas: Bill Miller

Music Road: season of change: music for autumn 2008

Music Road: now playing: cathie ryan: the farthest wave

-->Your support for Music Road is welcome and needed. If you are able to chip in, here is a way to do that, through PayPal. Note that you do not have to have a PayPal account to do this. Thank you.