For Indian people, the drum symbolizes Mother Earth and the beat symbolizes the Heartbeat of the earth. It is symbolic of Life itself. This music comes from the earth and comes from creation, and so it is a natural music. Without the drum there would be no music. Without the drum there would be no dance, no religion, no ceremony, no culture.


Music is a lifeline linking us into other people.

• Step outside and go for a walk. As you walk, be aware of your internal dialogue. Turn inside and give your attention to it for a few minutes.
• Turn your attention outside. Concentrate on seeing. Use your peripheral vision to take in everything at once. Let the mental voices slow and stop as your vision takes up all your attention.
• Turn your attention to your hearing. See how many separate sounds you can discover. If you're in the city, are there cars? Airplanes? machines? If you're on the beach, are there seagulls? Waves? Seals? Are there trees or bushes rustling? What kind of sounds are you making? Any other people nearby that you can hear? Do you hear the wind?
• Are there any sounds you can't identify? Try to determine where they are coming from, how close they are, what they might be.
• If you hear birds, how many different kinds of birds do you hear? How many of each kind? If you come near them, do they make different sounds, or stop altogether?
• Let your hearing broaden. Stop focusing on individual elements and listen for the total sound. If a single sound or group of sounds attracts your attention, gently but firmly move your attention away so that you are again listening to all the sounds at once. Don't think about the sound. Let it flow through you unanalyzed. Keep walking, and let your sounds (the sounds you make) blend with the sounds of your environment.
• When you get home, sit and think about your experience. How did the sounds blend with one another? Did some sounds overpower others? Was it pleasant or unpleasant? What did various sounds have to do with each other?

      Everyone who is blessed with the sense of hearing lives in an environment of sound. It goes on all around us when we are waking and when we are sleeping. There is always some sound coming into our ears. The following is a list I made of sounds I heard on a quiet summer day in a nearly empty grocery store:

• Cooling systems: low/midrange humming, blowing, high-pitched "cricket" sounds
  
• Rattling sound from walk-in cooler
• Cash register: ticking sound of tape drive and printer, beeps, sound of drawer opening and closing, click of the money clips.
• Customer rattling keys
• Paper bags rustling
• Quieter rustle of plastic bags
• Voices
• Footsteps
• Radio playing 50's music
• Cooler door closing
• Clanking noise of rotisserie as it revolves
• Occasional car noise from the street outside
• Squeaking and rolling noise of deliveryman's hand-truck
  

      Because we have this constant input of sound, we tend to tune it out. It becomes background noise, and we take it for granted. Most of us are not aware of the enormous part that hearing plays in our daily lives.

      We are much more aware of vision as a primary way of gathering information. Vision can be shut off at will by shutting our eyes, so we have blackness to contrast with light and color. In the constant barrage of sound we live with, few of us ever get to experience quiet. Having no silence to compare with, we never get to appreciate sound. To do so, we need to cultivate an inner silence that can serve as a comparative.

      When we begin to pay attention to the sound around us, to listen without judging or conceptualizing, we become aware that the environment of sound is music in itself. Sounds blend with one another, or clash violently. They provide counterpoint and harmony, rhythm and tonality. They speak to us on an inner level, telling us things, about our world.

      We ourselves are a part of that counterpoint. The sounds we make are harmonizing or clashing with all the sounds around us, and those qualities of blending or nonblending give us vital information about our state of being and about our relationship to the rest of the world around us. We are all musicians, and we are all making music all of the time.

• I) Blindfold a friend, and take him on a walk.(1) Use touch and voice clues to guide him while walking. Try to include different textures underfoot (sand, concrete, gravel, grass) and different environments (quiet road, busy street, beach, indoor spaces). Try to include challenges - things to step over or duck under, stairs, narrow paths - anything that makes him more dependent on your lead.
• II) Have your friend return the favor. Put your trust totally in his hands. Close your eyes. Keep them relaxed but firmly shut. Remove your attention from your eyes and concentrate on what you hear and feel. Try to keep from talking unnecessarily.
• III) Choose a time at night, when it is dark and fairly quiet. Start with a regular trust walk. When you are both well into the mood of the walk, the leader should let go of your hand (warning you first) and walk a few feet ahead. He should continue to watch you to make sure you don't get into trouble. At first, try to carry on a conversation so that you can follow his voice. Talk about the exercise, how you feel, what you're experiencing. Later, stay silent, and follow the sound of his footsteps.
• IV) Talk with your friend about what happened during the trust walk. Did you miss being able to see? Was it a limiting factor, or a freeing one? Did the world appear different without seeing it? What about your relationship with your partner - was it easy or difficult to trust him? Did you feel differently about him after the exercise than before? How? Can you describe the difference?

      As a musician, you need to use your eyes a certain amount of the time - to receive cues, to read music, to establish your hand position relative to your instrument.

      Still, the music demands that you use the senses of touch and hearing as well. To understand rhythm, you need to move your body in time to that rhythm. To understand harmony, you need to be able to hear the harmony and reproduce it. The trust walk is a way to learn to use these senses independent of your eyes.

• I) find a place that is not too noisy, but that has a variety of sound sources. Meditate and listen to the sounds around you. Begin by isolating separate sounds. Pay attention to each one without judging or identifying it, Accept the sound for its own sake, and not as "frog" or "car" or "pretty" or "ugly."
  
  When you have heard all the sounds separately, let them combine. Let yourself experience the sounds in patterns. Listen to the harmonies and rhythms set up by different sounds as they interact. Start with two or three sounds and let others join in until you are hearing all the sounds interact.
• II) Choose one sound, and using-your voice, your instrument, or anything else you have near, imitate that sound. Try to catch every nuance of that sound - the pitch, the volume, the rhythm. Move on to a second sound and imitate that one. Continue until you have imitated all the sounds. Are some sounds easier to imitate than others? Why? When you have been through all the sounds individually, imitate the way various sounds blend. Let yourself become the relationship between sounds. Let your full concentration go into imitating the sound environment. It is important that your mental voices be still. Don't think about what you are doing. Let the sound come out of you.
• III) Let yourself silently meditate and listen for a while. Then, begin to make a sound of your own. Listen to the way your sound blends with each of the sounds around you. Then, broaden your hearing again to include all the sounds together, including your own sound. Let yourself forget that you are making that sound. Let it blend in with the rest.

      Traditional music theory puts a lot of emphasis on ear training - learning to hear and distinguish musical pitches. The world around us has to offer sounds that are much subtler in tone, much more variable in pitch; sounds that have to do with our surroundings and our living connection to our environment.

      To open up to the sound around us is to open up to the world, to listen to the voice of our culture, the heartbeat of the earth, and to experience the connections between the two.

      One foggy night when I was living in San Francisco, I was about to drift off to sleep when the foghorns out in the bay caught my attention. There were three of them blowing at different intervals from three different Places. As I listened, I began to notice the ways in which the three horns interacted. The horns each had a distinct rhythm, but they weren't in synch, so that together they formed a constantly shifting rhythm pattern that was mesmerizing. That three horns, each playing at set intervals, could produce such varied and complex patterns was amazing to me. The pitches of the horns were also different, and the shifting rhythmic relationships brought them together to form a progression of melodic bits and chords that was quite musical, and every bit as varied as the rhythms. Listening to the way such simple, rote, automated machines could produce such quietly beautiful music brought home to me that it is not the sounds that are made, but their relationship to each other and to the hearer, that create music.

      We use our sense of hearing to get our bearings in the world, to communicate and to receive communication, to sense our connection to the world. Music should reflect that connection. When it doesn't. it loses its relevance to our life and being.

      Native American music is based on the human heartbeat. The drum echoes this basic and inescapable sound, becoming the heartbeat of the Indian nation. The Indian hears throughout his life the sound that he first heard in the womb; the sound that beats in his own breast from before birth to the moment of death, and this serves to bind together the community as one body with a single communal heart - the drum. The songs are concerned not with abstractions, but with realities - concrete images of the earth, sky, water, fire, and their role in Indian life.

      Traditional classical music training has no way of dealing with this connection. music is viewed as a higher function, an aesthetic experience that divides humans from lesser animals. The human spirit is supposed to be clean, aloof, divine. Classical art music was conditioned by the Catholic church, which expects us to separate spirit from body. No concession is made to our need for connection our need to recognize and live with the fact that our spirits and bodies are inseparable. This refusal to deal with body and spirit as a whole plays right into the split that already exists in our culture between Eros and logos.

      It is the rebellion against this denial that gave birth to rock music. Rock is body music - the rhythms and lyrics urge us physically and conceptually to dance, to run, to make love, to release ourselves in acts of physical exuberance, acts that express the sensual joy of having a body and catering exclusively to it.

      The opposite is true of classical music. Conceptual, abstract, it is aimed at the spirit, the aesthetic sense, and refuses to admit the human need to acknowledge the body.

      These are generalities. Classical music is passionate, earthy, and physical much of the time. Not all rock music is devoid of spirit and aesthetic value. However, the mainstream of each culture tends to denounce the other. Classical culture sees rock music as sinful, course, physical abomination. Rock musicians and fans are sensualists (which is bad). Rock culture sees classical music as formal, stilted, removed, devoid of emotion. Classical musicians and fans are spiritual, pure (which is bad).

      In cultures we tend to label as "primitive," musical traditions reflect life, connection to the world, and reason for being. Music is a societal function, one that brings individuals together to form a group, giving them a sense of connection and community

      Rather than uniting us, music in our culture often becomes a separating factor, making us fall on either side of the body/spirit split. Through the political and religious influences of the last twenty centuries, we have lost touch with our original, primitive musical impulse. Take a moment to reflect on your own personal musical heritage. What is it that makes you want to play music? How does that reason or reasons relate to the way music functions in today's society? How does music function for you, the listener, in your life?

• Choose some music you enjoy playing or singing. Something that is easy for you. The sort of thing you hum around the house or lapse into when you don't feel like practicing your instrument.
• Choose three environments in which to play or sing. The first should be a quiet place inside. The second is a quiet place outside. The third is any noisy place (think about the differences between noise indoors and noise outdoors).
• Play or sing in each of these environments. Notice how the environment shapes the music. Does the music sound different in the different situations? Do you feel different? Does the environment make you play differently? Do you, draw out tones in an echo-ey room, or sing louder to be heard over traffic?

      Musicians are always talking about spaces. Some places feel better to play in than others. Some places respond well to one sound and not as well to another. If the acoustics of the room make it difficult to hear yourself or to hear the balance between you and the other musicians, it is a severe handicap. In such a situation, I become unsure, play sloppily, make major mistake, or even forget entire sections of the music.

      The space is an important part of the total sound. The space in which you play is an extension of your instrument.

      A cave of echoes is a wonderful environment for a long slow flute solo, but a fast set of jazz changes or a Bach fugue on piano would get hopelessly lost. I have a room in my house that makes my guitar sound like a dream, but it .doesn't seem to do much for a flute or my voice. Many people like to sing in the shower because the tile floor and walls amplify and reinforce the purer tones of the voice while the white noise of the water drowns out less desirable qualities. Quiet music needs a quiet place with qualities that amplify and carry. Shrill, loud music needs an atmosphere that plays down the shrillness and absorbs the volume. For any type of music, there are places that are appropriate, and places that are inappropriate.

      Now, let me turn that concept around and give you a slightly different viewpoint. Rather than saying that certain places are better or worse for playing a particular piece of music, let me say that two different places may require two different ways of playing that piece. The fast set of jazz changes we tried playing in the cave with such disastrous results might not sound so bad if we slowed them down considerably, simplified the voicings, and let the reverberations of the cave provide the richness that speed and complexity brought to the fast version In one sense, this creates an entirely new piece of music. You may argue that the composer meant those to be fast, complex changes. But the composer probably also had in mind the crisp acoustics of a concert hall when he composed it. Interpretation is always required of you as a musical performer. You need to play the music in such a way that it is harmonious with you, your audience, and the environment in which you play. Musicians must always be flexible enough to adapt to the circumstances of playing. What is a perfect interpretation for practicing at home might not be quite right in the recording studio, and what is right in the recording studio might not work in the concert hall with a live audience.

• Again choose three environments, the same or different ones than before. Play or sing the same music in each environment, but try to be aware of ways you can, or do, alter the way you play to suit where you're playing. Are these changes large or subtle? Do you alter only dynamics and phrasing, tempo and volume, or do you find yourself altering the structure and melody as well? Do certain parts of the music seem to work better in different places?
• What is it that particularly identifies this piece of music? Do these changes in interpretation make it a different piece? How much can you change the music before it becomes different music, or before you start to violate the composer's intentions?

      The size and shape of a room or cavern can greatly influence the music that is performed there. Spaces that are not designed or acoustically modified for musical performances can present quirks that will contribute to or mar a performance depending on the attitude of the performers and the type of music played.

      Like the inside of a drum or flute, a room is an enclosed pocket of air that will vibrate at certain frequencies. These frequencies depend on the size and shape of the room, and are more or less present depending on the liveness of the reflecting surfaces present. If you play an instrument passing through this frequency range, you will discover that certain notes seem to swell and resonate in the room. These notes are overtones of the room's natural frequency. Some of these tones may be present throughout the room. Others may stay in an isolated part of the room, or in one spot exclusively, forming a standing wave.

      While these resonating patterns can cause problems for the sound engineer or performer who wants to ensure even resonance and sound distribution throughout a performance space, they provide exciting opportunities for the improvisational player. The room itself becomes an instrument with a few fixed pitches that can be triggered at will by the performer.

• Find a room that is relatively free of acoustically deadening materials (carpets, tapestries, drapes, soft furniture, people, sand, plants, animals). Bring an instrument that is tunable (your voice will do if you do not play a tunable instrument).
• Tap or strike the walls and floor. Does the room produce a tone when you do so? Use your instrument to help identify the pitch. Try to tune your instrument to the pitch of the room.
• Play some scales in the room, and listen for notes that swell or jump out at you. Depending on how live the room is, these could range from subtle differences in the volume of your instrument to an awesome, hum that makes the windows rattle. What relationship do the notes have to one another? Are some louder or more responsive than others? How does the room respond to notes that are not in tune, but close to these natural frequencies?
• Step outside of the room and play. Can you hear the notes you play resonating within the room? Do the overtones you discovered sound louder than other notes when you play them outside?
• Write a short, simple piece using the natural overtones of the space as key elements. Play the piece in the room, then other places. How does the experience compare - playing in the room it was written for vs. playing other places?

      Objects too have natural musical properties. There is nothing that cannot be used to make a musically meaningful sound. Often, these objects can be modified to enhance their musical properties and tuned to bring them into standard western pitch relationships. A junkyard can be a fabulous resource for the musician looking for alternative instruments. Empty pop bottles can be quickly tuned by adding or removing water, and played either by striking or by blowing across the top. My house, chicken coop, and garage are all decorated with wind chimes made from cast-off pieces of metal and ceramic.(2)

• Take a field trip with a group of people. Go anywhere you want - natural, manmade, wherever.
• Look around the site and pick up objects. Everyone should have a different object, if possible. Explore the sounds that can be made with your object. How many different sounds can you make with it? Can you classify the sounds in terms of pitch and relative volume?
• Sit in a circle and play your objects together.
• Don't worry about making it musically meaningful, but notice how the sounds combine. Are some objects in tune with each other? How many different pitches are represented? Can you come up with melodies for them to play together? What objects are the loudest? Do they drown out the quieter ones?
• When you have explored the natural sounds of your object, discuss what modifications could be made to enhance those sounds and make them musically meaningful. Make any modifications you can on-site and play again. How does the combination of sounds differ-from the non-modified group of sounds?
• As in the group clapping exercise, remove your attention from your own instrument and listen to the sound in the center of the circles How does this change the experience? Does it give you a different perspective on the sounds of the instruments?
  

      1. If you are comfortable keeping your eyes closed, the blindfold may be omitted. I find it useful, because my eyes tend to open involuntarily. Without a blindfold, I am tempted to cheat when I'm unsure of my footing, making me less dependent on my hearing and touch, and defeating the purpose of the exercise. Use your own judgment.

      2 Some of these chimes can be heard between tracks three and four of my album Introspection.