Organic Music - an essay

A while ago I wrote a letter (which was later turned into an article) for the "Organic NZ" magazine in New Zealand for their "organic music feature".

Hello Allan

I was wondering too what you had envisioned for an "organic music feature".

As for myself I see music as being enough unto itself - I'm not keen to jump on one of the bandwagons that are available to musicians these days, ie music for Sunday mornings, music for yoga, music for studying etc. However I have found that people play my music while doing certain activities and I'm of course happy if they do. I've been told that relaxation, reiki and meditation go well with my music.
I'm a meditator and I make music from a meditative perspective - leaving some space in the music for silence to emerge and to be felt.

I have always felt that I can be a better musician if I can become a more developed and wiser human being and vice versa.
Charlie Parker once said: "Music is your own experience, your thoughts, your wisdom. If you don't live it, it won't come out of your horn."

This insight helped setting me on a path of meditation. Music to me is a form of meditation, a process of raising one's awareness. In the context of practising and playing and in the context of musical interaction with other players. Questions like: when to play and when not to play, to listen while playing, to be active and receptive at the same time, to take the lead and to support etc. are all wonderful opportunities to become more aware and to be in the 'here and now' - which is according to me, what meditation is all about.

How does this tie in with organics? I think the case for "organic music" is a little hard to make without broadening what we understand the term "organic" to mean. But I think there is a lot that both have in common.
Music is on the one hand a set of scientific phenomena involving sounds - how the ear works and how the brain interprets.
If you tie a string between two fixed points and apply a little tension, you can hear a note when the string vibrates the air. Take a bottle neck and place it at the half way point and pluck the string again and you'll hear the octave of that same note.
The scale that decides where the frets of a guitar go was defined by Pythagoras...

On the other hand music is an inexplicable art, a mystery, an invisible vapor...
I have heard from an enlightened mystic from the East, called Osho, that originally music was conceived by meditators to express something of their experience of meditation - to express something that cannot be expressed in words.

How does the organic world stack up against that? I think the scientific ground upon which that world stands is becoming more and more solid. Without being an expert, it sounds to me that the concept of the soil being a web, alive and breathing, is a sensible one. The same for putting back into the earth what has been taken out, and judging foods by their nutritional value rather than their weight. More highly nutritional food yielding more human health, sounds entirely rational too.

I recently bought a refractometer - I wanted to measure how my garden is doing. This piece of gear originates from the wine industry where it is used to measure sugar content in grapes, to help the farmer decide when is the best time to harvest. I learned that with this "Brix measuring device" the levels of sugar can be measured in all kinds of fruits and vegetables and there is a correlation between sugar levels and levels of mineral and vitamin content in a plant.

Last month we put on compost that we obtained from a composter (is that a word?) that makes his compost according to the Soil Food Web specs of Elaine Ingram.
With the refractometer I have taken a 'snapshot' of our garden last summer and put the results into a spreadsheet to compare against the Brix chart of recommended good levels. I plan to do the same this coming season and hopefully we'll see some improvement where needed in our sugar/mineral/vitamin levels.

How about the mysterious side of the organic world? I only have to think about the healing an organic diet can bring and the joy of growing fruits and vegetables for your fellow human beings that can strengthen all of our bodies. Or the many stories I have heard or read about how people's eyes have been opened to the organic world and its benefits, sometimes by going through difficult processes of discovery.

The sensitivity one has to develop when you grow your own fruits and vegetables. How to read mother nature - to be her guest - to go with her, not against her and to know when the time is right to harvest or sow - to nurture a balance in the world around you. These are all very musical qualities.

Whenever I visit a health food store, an Eco trade fair or an exhibition of organic growers, I can never help noticing the brightness of people's eyes, the intelligence, the quiet leadership. As a musician I recognize the creative spirit in those people - people who are doing something because they know it is the right thing to do. These people radiate a certain dignity.
All of that is the mystery of life at work.

I hope this explains a little of where I'm coming from.
If you think what I have written qualifies as an article, I'm happy for you to include it in Organic NZ. I myself have learned so much from reading within its pages for many years.

A musician I admire called Pat Metheny, has expressed very well one of the points I've made above - what it means to be a creative human being these days. I have added his quote below.

Sambodhi Prem

Question: You have stated before that music is the truest thing you have ever found. Could you elaborate on that?

Pat Metheny: Music is a very difficult thing for me to quantify anymore. As I get more involved and more advanced as a musician, I see that everything I do has the potential to be music and vice versa. For me, the line between what I do as a musician and what I do sitting here talking with you gets blurred at times. If you could trace somebody on a piece of paper, the outline of who they really are could be music. In my case, it is a reflection of the best part of being here on Earth at this time.

Sometimes I almost feel like music is a mistake - like we are not supposed to know about it. We have noses so we can smell, ears to hear, and eyes to see. Music, of course, comes in through our ears, but we all know that it is not just sounds. There is something else included in music that is very difficult to define. It reminds us of where we were before and where we are going after. It is a mysterious vapor that somehow slips in the cracks between this plane of existence and some other one. The people who are good musicians have the ability to conjure up more of that vapor than others. Everyone recognizes it when it's there. It is something universal that goes beyond language and beyond race, country, or nationality. We recognize it as something we all have in common. More and more, I see that it is the same thing you find wherever there is love, intensity, energy, or human potential. All those good things include this same mysterious vapor that is the fabric of music.

While I acknowledge that my primary function on Earth is to be a musician, I also see that music is nothing more than the essential component of humanity - it is all the same material. My feeling is that the more I can learn about music, the more I learn about other things. So far, it has worked for me.