This blog brings posts that provide valuable insights into the role that contemplative practices deliver to musical practitioners, whether composer, performer, or listener.
This blog is for people who love music, love thinking about music. It is for people who realize that much can be accomplished by using contemplative methods to gain insight into music and other aspects of life. It is for people who understand that music brings healing, builds community, that its roots are as deep as anything we know, and that ancient knowledge and practices can bring utterly modern insights into music. It is for people who know that meditation allows insight to arise, and that the insight that arises is as important as any knowledge we have. It is for people who are interested in using scientific methods to carry ancient, insight-derived, or alternative truths to modern humans who need such proof in order to believe in the magic of music known already or yet to be discovered.
As a person with a life spent in music, from days of performing in my youth to more than 30 years as a composer and teacher at the college level, I will bring ideas and practices that benefit composing, developing aural skills, listening and deep study, musical community, and deep understanding of musical processes. Posts will collect naturally around central topics: listening skills and strategies, composing, theorizing, learning, my research, specific pieces, the nature of sound, musical analyses, sources of my present fascinations and practices – all holding together by virtue of the thread of meditation. Though some might call me old, I am a person who never stops questioning, never stops learning, so expect that I will share new insights on a regular basis: no stale old artifacts of ideas here!
I started this blog some years ago in hopes of spreading the word about my innovative, globally-oriented method of analysis, the Sound-Energy Aggregate. As practices developed from that – workshops, papers, classes – and more and more insight showed up from my Zen practice and elsewhere, posts expanded. I’m rather starting fresh here, on a new platform, but I will likely bring some of those older posts into this blog while still focusing on new insights as my work delivers them. One of my posts early on is likely to be a chronological outline of how my consciousness developed toward these current ideas, and I’ll likely use that outline as a source to expand treatment of the many realities it contains.
As for me and my background, a little important information is probably suitable here. I grew up in rural North Carolina, took piano lessons from early on, and was a trumpet player through college. A liberal arts music major, I spent a lot of effort honing musical skills after college and during graduate school. Along the way, I gradually became aware of meditation, and did Zen meditation for a very long time before eventually finding a teacher where I now live, in the Boston area. I have a doctorate in composition, but have learned that one of the most important things I can do is to set that officially validated expertise aside when teaching, to allow true expertise to bubble up from the unconscious as situations stimulate it, and to learn from those I supposedly teach. In many ways, this outcome reflects the coming-together of the multiple strands of my life, and is the heart of what I advocate in this blog. The motto for my workshop, Just Listening, sums it up rather well: “Shared listening creates a sound haven that awakens compassion for ourselves and others.” (A more traditional biography can be found on my professional website.)
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