Transforming music

 

In your New York apartment in 1971, days away from defending your PhD in Philosophy, you are listening to the music of John Coltrane when you notice an intense pattern of lights outside your window. They have no obvious origin - unidentified aerial phenomena would be their future designation - and your girlfriend, Jane, sees them too. They appear entrained to the music, answering it with their own dance. You watch haunted until they disappear and then you both rush to the rooftop, trying to figure out what you have just seen so marvelously. There a young drummer, who lives in the same block, and who you have just turned on to Coltrane’s music, has seen the lights to.  Three witnesses of a meaningful spiritual event held under the rubric of music.

For the author, Michael Grosso, one of the prompts from this luminous event was to undertake a deeper exploration of music, music that prompted soul, that helped one go beyond the simply intellectual in life, at once opening it to transcendent dimensions that, paradoxically, required it to become fully embodied and present.

But where to go on such an exploration? Why ‘round the corner’ for as ‘luck’ would have it life quickly presented him, reinforced by a dream, with the opportunity of studying with an adept of a rare form of musical yoga, right in the heart of New York City. Enter Swami Nada.

A teacher of ‘taan’ or vibration yoga, he was living in an ashram in Manhattan at the Shivananda Yoga Vedanta Center. Michael, with modest prior musical experience, signs up for lessons. This leads to the book’s second phase - a warm, thoughtful, open account of Grosso’s encounter with this extraordinary teacher, the experiences he underwent, and the understandings that emerge both from the teaching and the man himself. 

A key realization of which is that first and foremost any musician’s instrument is their own mind-body, its attentiveness, alignment, and ability to merge with the harmonies and patterns of the music either self-generated or through an instrument, is the key to a genuine unfolding of sacred music. This requires patience, practice, and above all a recognition that a certain kind of habit is good, when we remain fully present to its operations, and bad when we slip into over-familiar repetition. In the terms of Zen, when we bring to all that we do an alert, open, beginner’s mind (embodied in an alive, vulnerable body).

A second key realization is that we each carry within us, what Grosso calls an ‘inner saboteur’ - a belief system that says ‘we cannot’ - it is too difficult, what’s the point, would n’t I rather be - and we need to recognise this, and find mechanisms to outwit it, not once but repeatedly, and yet if we do, we come through to a new space where whether we are playing or the music is playing us is a moot point, and we begin to harmonize with the deeper harmony that is the underlying nature of things.

A third realization is that when this harmony is achieved not only does wisdom flow, behavior change but also healing happens. This latter phenomena being often reported after Swami Nada’s concerts. Interestingly, he did not imagine that the healing was as a result of anything he did but as a response to the emergence of a place through the music played where a person found a renewed alignment with the underlying harmony of the world, where love and consequent healing abides.

These realizations and more emerge out of Grosso’s engaging, sympathetic account of not only his encounters with his teacher but from what he comes to learn of the Swami’s life, philosophy, and, most importantly, way of being. The Swami comes over as a rare gifted practitioner, tasking, but not a taskmaster, and a wholesome human being from which Grosso learned much.

The final section of the book casts it's net wider and looks at ‘transcendent music’ more broadly and explores a number of those traditions that have seen in music both an access to deeper wisdom - in Pythagoras and Neo-platonism, for example, or in the delivery or real life effects in magic and healing. Thus, we have clear, engaging sketches of, say, Marsilio Ficino and his connection between music and healing, and the Papago, an indigenous people in the American south-east, who use song to imagine into being potential futures, amongst others. Grosso makes a compelling case for taking music seriously as a discipline of self-discovery, healing, and philosophical exploration, liberally illustrated with thought-provoking, engaging examples.

Overall the book is a highly enjoyable and thought-provoking encounter with the sacred possibilities of music - where lived wisdom, personal encounter, and cultural reflection blend harmoniously into an invitation to listen more deeply, play more seriously, and step into a renewing harmony of the spheres, and of ourselves.