Music in the Space Between Reflections on Living and Working on the Borders of Music

Michael Deason Barrow

‘Mind the gap!’ This is what you hear when you stand on a train or an underground platform in London. This puts me in mind of a conversation I had many years ago (when I was touring as a professional singer) with my piano accompanist. She asked me, ‘what was my vision about what we were doing?’. I remember replying along the lines, ‘I am trying to building bridges in the space between musical polarities (and their often mutually distrustful camps), so that people can expand their musical practice and experience a greater sense of wholeness.’ At its most obvious this means exploring the space between the seeming polarities of visual vs. aural learning; Western Classical Music vs. World and Folk Musics; the Classical canon vs. Early Music: on the one hand and Avant Garde contemporary musics on the other; or between improvising vs. playing from fully notated compositions, etc. On this basis I have ever since been offering workshops on ‘music in the space between – renewing music as a community art’. My accompanist’s reply somewhat shocked me. She said, “You’re not building bridges: you’re drowning in the space between.” And indeed her words have continued to ring true throughout my musical life, because, rather like the keys and notes of a piano, I have frequently found myself falling in the gaps between them. (For instance, from a very young age I had huge questions about tuning and intonation. I heard Indian singers and Javanese Gamelan and I was drawn to the natural tuning of the horn in Britten’s glorious Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. I heard folk and jazz singers using loads of gliding tones between the notes of a melody. And then there were the micro-tonal worlds of Ligeti and Xenakis and the overtone singing of Stockhausen’s ‘Stimmung’. All of this, you could say, took me away from my musical keynotes, namely, my musical homeland of Tallis, Handel, Schubert and Vaughan Williams, etc. which I still love to this day, but have felt the overwhelming call to expand my map of music beyond the borders of the beautiful worlds of tone they offer.) When I was a student at the Royal College of Music, the director asked me at the end of my graduate years what line of study I wanted to pursue in the post-graduate year they were offering me. I quickly replied, ‘Mongolian Long Song’. This led to a response somewhat akin to Monty Python’s ‘Don’t be silly! Try again!’ (To which I wanted to reply using Pythonesque language, ‘Time for something completely different!’) Instead I asked if I could study Macedonian Praise singing. This too got the same answer. I then proceeded to say I would like to study the Irish Gaelic singing idiom called Sean Nós (which is the aural equivalent of the Celtic knotwork found in the Book of Kells and would have meant living with itinerant Irish Travelling communities as my teachers). It got the same response. So I asked if I could research Medieval Troubadour songs in its heartland of Southern France. At last, with Troubadour songs I had reached a musical idiom that the authorities had heard of, if not actually heard, in those early days of what is now known as ‘Early Music’. So I was grudgingly allowed to pursue this rather than going into the Opera School – which had been the recommended option. To get into this theme of Music on the Borders I’d like to share with you two more anecdotes of living musically in the space between, as Martin Buber famously called it. Business gurus frequently say, ‘if you can’t speak your U.S.P. (i.e. your unique selling proposition) – namely what your unique vision is – in less than 2 minutes then you’re not going to get anywhere. I was faced with this same question when Michael Kurtz asked me to write about the vision behind the Tonalis Music impulse which I founded in 1991 and still lead today. But here’s the problem. How do you speak of the WHOLE of music – rather than its division into compartmentalised, specialised parts – in just 2 minutes? This feels rather like one of those alternative theatre companies presenting a whole Wagner opera in 5 minutes. (A musical analogy here might be singing with the infinity of possibilities of an

undifferentiated pitch space vs. dividing it into the discrete categories we call tunings and scales!) I face the same problem when I write brochures for the music trainings and courses I offer. In fact I find it impossible to find a right form of language that addresses the Classical cognoscenti on the one hand, amateur and community musicians on the other, as well as spiritual seekers (including the so-called New Age market). Put in another way, different forms of musical, social and spiritual language speak to different groups. Typically a reader of a brochure looks for language that gives them a sense of ‘I belong here’, or on the other hand, ‘I don’t feel welcome here’. All this has meant that the best advice I have been given is to write at least two different brochures for each course I run. (Good advice – in some ways – but very costly and time consuming to do!) What all this shows is how easily music divides into the ‘my music / your music’ syndrome. As a final picture of falling in the space between, consider the following story. When I was a student at one of the world’s leading music conservatoires studying singing, I was given appalling vocal advice which, alas, led me not only to lose my voice altogether, but to develop a vocal pathology. To compound the problem I was also given appalling medical advice that led me to undergo 6 different forms of surgical intervention to try and right the problems I had. They didn’t work! But here’s the thing! Not one vocal professor in the whole college knew how to help me post the surgery. I desperately needed singing therapy and guidance to help me with the burgeoning questions I had about vocal health, and, by implication, the nature of vocal pathologies. But no one could help me until I finally met Jürgen Schriefer and the School of Singing for Uncovering the Voice. (Blessings on this great human being and teacher for helping me so much.) This situation still seems extraordinary to me. Such was the degree of vocal specialisation needed to help nascent professional singers, it became clear to me that singing teachers had never considered studying the opposite, namely what happens when a voice breaks down? But break down they do! Now you might think that this situation would not pertain today, but five years ago I was leading a singing masterclass in a celebrated music conservatoire when lo-and-behold one of the students who stepped forward clearly had a vocal pathology. Immediately I could hear the problem and my heart immediately went out to her. But I wondered why she’d been put into this public situation when it was clear that her voice could not function as she wished. She clearly did not want to be on stage, and so after a short period of questioning her, the audience realised that this was not the right moment for me to try to coach her in any way because what she needed was lots of singing therapy (and a visit to a voice clinic). When I asked her if there was any recognition of her problem in the conservatoire, the answer came, ‘no’ and she promptly burst into tears!

Living on the Borderlands of Music Living on the border means taking the risk that all certainties might be replaced by new ways of seeing / hearing the world. In a manner not wholly unlike the idea of religious conversion it implies discovering that there’s a whole world out there that you hadn’t really been aware of. In the old days living on the border meant keeping doors metaphorically shut. Here there was no idea of giving and receiving. Significantly it’s often streams and rivers that form the boundaries between different lands, and the streams are, of course, full of movement. Most of my life I have lived in border country. I live on an island surrounded by water. I have lived on the borders of Scotland, and today I live on the borders between England and Wales. In other words it’s the border where the Anglo-Saxon world meets the Celtic otherworld. Constantly I am challenged to move across thresholds whilst still remaining firmly rooted in the place where I physically and culturally belong. Yet even though this is a place of rooting, it is never a static place. It reminds me of the title of a book on interfaith encounter that I once read called, ‘Celebrating Difference – Staying Faithful’. It also reminds me of when the Social Democrats formed as a new political party in England in the 1980s. They were a

party of the centre ground between the politics of left and right, but they were constantly challenged to say what their ‘position’ was. Because they were seeking to hold the balance between these opposites they were never able to state their position, as it was rather like the famous sculpture of the dance of Shiva where you can see how centred balance is achieved through a dance of movement. Boundaries and containers – as any good psychologist and music therapist will tell you – are very important. But frontiers as barriers designed to exclude the other leads to forms of apartheid. The rule of St. Benedict, on the other hand, offers the opposite of this. Here hospitality is constantly offered as an open door and open mind ready and willing to listen and exchange. It is all rather like all those religious paintings where we see God seated in glory inside and outside of time. The Psalms of David sing, ‘Darkness and light are both alike to thee’. This is something the contemporary English composer, Jonathan Harvey, would have appreciated. One of his great longings was to create what he called ‘light-dark chords’ which unified the seeming polarities of major and minor tonalities into one big chord. Every day we experience the cross-over moments of dawn and twilight and every year we experience the changing thresholds of light and dark in the seasons. “The Resurrection is a sign that, even in death, the border is still, contrary to our expectations, open.” (Esther de Waal) The growth of extremism and fundamentalism – political, religious and cultural – leads to polarisation, and the ability to listen to one another seems to have diminished. When Mark Tully gave a lecture after the fall of the Twin Towers in New York the subtitle of the talk was, ‘From Dogma to Dialogue’. In it he drew on his own experience of belonging to two worlds, namely India and England and said, “Those who are dogmatic and certain that they are right don’t feel vulnerable and have no desire to have conversations.” Ryszard Kapuściński in his wonderful little book called ‘The Other’ speaks of three possible responses to the challenges of encountering cultural difference. 1. Go to war 2. Fence yourself in behind the wall to isolate yourself from others, e.g. apartheid and nationalism) 3. Start up a dialogue. (Dialogue, however, involves effort, patience and the will to understand.) Today have shallow globalisation and mass culture, but the dominant cultural attitude often involves limiting oneself in one’s private egotistical ‘me’ within a tightly enclosed circle of people who have the same training and belief system as oneself. But the aim of dialogue is mutual understanding and learning leading to an expansion of our consciousness. Of course we have multiculturalism in music, but even here the stranger/other still tends to be treated as an object of research rather than a partner. The modern buzz words of diversity and plurality are often applied to music today, but whilst there is indeed a poly-musical world out there, there’s still relatively little dialogue. Mostly Classical, Folk, Jazz, World, Early and Contemporary musicians stay in their own worlds. The contemporary musician no longer finds him/herself living in a neat linear corridor of historical tradition. Rather it is like living in a large mansion with innumerable rooms, not connected by hallways, where each room is immediately accessible. Musicians can go into any room he/she wants, regardless of distance. More distant cultures are as available as those closer temporally to hand. But in the main, musicians from different musical cultures and belief systems are given grants to go and play in one of these rooms with the door shut. So in spite of living in the same mansion there is still little dialogue, and by dialogue I don’t mean mere fusion or cross-over music. We have multi-cultural music, but we tend not to have inter-cultural music In short, we need the musical equivalent of trade routes and the great Silk Road, not the Great Wall of China, so that Classical musicians can learn from oral/world traditions, improvisers and composers, and vice a versa, etc. The idea of being at home, in one place, whilst being part of a wider horizon has been the key to the development of Tonalis. In the rest of this article I will therefore try and outline

some of the deep musical questions I have encountered living in the borderlands of music. Some of them I will go into in some detail, but others I would just like to name now – most of which I am sure you are all aware of – because the length of this article precludes going into them further. Suffice to say these questions have been as much a part of my musical journey as the borderlands outlined in more detail below. Acoustic vs. Electronic Music Subjective Expression vs. Objective Impression in Music The Use of Newly Designed Instruments vs. Conventional Instruments Sound vs. Silence and the Rests between Notes and Phrases Stage Performance Paradigms vs. Musical Offerings in the Community Young Children’s innate musical improvisations vs. Music composed for Children Music Therapy vs. Sound Therapy

A Question of Balance – The 4-Fold Human Being in Music A central tenet of ‘Anthroposophical Music Therapy’ is connected to the idea that: we are healthy and balanced when our 4 bodies (physical, etheric, astral and ego) interact with each other in a rich exchange. On the other hand, when one part becomes too independent or one-sided, it leads to imbalance (or discord to use a musical term). Thus a foundational stone of ‘Anthroposophical Music Therapy’ is that all four bodies need right nourishment, and all these four bodies can be addressed musically in unique ways. In this connection I found it interesting that, “the word health comes from the old English ‘hal’, a root word signifying whole and healing. Moreover, ‘heal’, in Northern Middle English, means ‘to make sound’, to become healthy again. We [also] use the word ‘sound’ – as a synonym for health and wholeness to signify basic vitality. To heal therefore means to become whole, in harmony and in balance.” (Don Campbell)

“The notion that art has a role in re-balancing us emotionally promises to answer the vexed question of why people differ so much in their aesthetic tastes? . . . . Our tastes will depend on what spectrum of our emotional make-up lies in shadow and is hence in need of stimulation and emphasis. Every work of art is imbued with a particular psychological and moral atmosphere: a painting [or a piece of music] may be either serene or restless, courageous or careful, modest or confident, masculine or feminine, bourgeois or aristocratic, and our preferences for one kind over another reflects our varied psychological gaps. . . . . and we dismiss as ugly one that forces on us moods or motifs that we feel threatened or overwhelmed by. Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness.” (de Botton)

In this connection it’s also important to consider the particular imbalances of each historical period of music. A grasp of the psychology that lies behind our tastes won’t necessarily change our sense of what we find beautiful, “but it can prevent us from reacting to what we don’t like with simple disparagement.” (de Botton)

The Whole of Music vs. Western Music “We have inherited a way of thinking about music that cannot do justice to the diversity of practices and experiences which the small word ‘music’ signifies in today’s world.” (Nicholas Cook) This reminds me of Niezshe famous saying, “Your God is too small.” As music is inherently multi-cultural, then surely music education ought to be multi-cultural in its essence. In addition, idioms such as Folk and Jazz, etc. have a wonderful place within the whole world of music. Of course I live in the western world (as I am sure do most of the readers of this magazine), and therefore musical education I would suggest needs to start from a knowledge of our own cultural homelands, but from here we need to reach out

The Whole vs. the Part. The Universal vs. the Particular. Tempered vs. Pure Tuned Heiner Ruland and Herman Pfrogner have written wonderful books on the archetypal ground or deep structures of music beneath the surface differences of individual musical idioms. Ruland, for instance, has researched how every culture makes its own unique relationship to the one inherent structural factor behind all sound all humans relate to, namely the Overtone/Harmonic series. This series of tones acts as a kind of universal mantra, or chord of nature, which is both the lesson of the world to man and an objective unalterable fact of nature. The Harmonic Series represents what we are when we are ‘whole’. Everything else is only part of the truth, or, as acousticians will tell us, is only a 'partial’. All tuning systems that are different to ours are not out of tune, but rather 'in tune, but different’ to what our cultural conditioning has led us to believe is consonant or discordant. In other words it is literally in another key. I won’t write further about the question of Tempered vs. Pure Tuning because this is written about in the most wonderful way by Heiner Ruland (and a booklet on this subject, I have written called, ‘The Inner Life of Tone’). What I would like to mention here, however, is that there is a very special way of working compositionally in the space between the tempered scale and the archetypal tuning of the harmonic series. This can be found when you work with the 4th octave of the harmonic series, but in its tempered form. This creates a wonderful bridge between the worlds of nature and nurture and has led me to explore this in a number of choral compositions I have written, most notably in ‘To See a World in a Grain of Sand’, which has the wonderfully apposite words by Blake, ‘Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour’

Specialist Musicality vs. Comprehensive Musicality With modern cameras we can put them into spotlight or floodlight mode. The one gives a sharp focus, the other illuminates its subject less brightly but detects wider patterns and connections. What is the significance of this image you may be asking? “It is that there is a danger today that every increase in focus simultaneously expands our field of blindness.” (Eastham) The risk of getting stuck in a tighter focus is a loss of open-mindedness. All over the world today we can witness fundamentalism in all walks of life, including music. Fundamentalism is the attempt to reduce the manifoldness of human life to one dimension whether religious, cultural or artistic. Tragically we are also witnessing a new form of closed- mindedness today in tertiary education, namely, the epidemic fragmentation of knowledge which leads to so much compartmentalised scholarship. Put in another way, we have broken the pattern that connects. ‘Specialist Musicianship’ (i.e. compartmentalised scholarship) inevitably provides a limited view of what music is and it often leads to a kind of musical, tribal possessiveness. ‘Comprehensive Musicianship’, on the other hand, calls for a more interdisciplinary approach and a broader range of skills, genres and roles necessary to craft new responses to the deeper set of freedoms that our age offers. The task of music training today is to provide education for all levels of musical activity - (without any hierarchy as which of these is more important) - namely: · Performing · Teaching · Composing · Improvising · Community Musicing · Soundscape Design and · Music Therapy, etc. I call this ‘cross sector training’. So where do you go today to find out about – or more importantly – experience the whole? Who is responsible for teaching the whole of music? “Surely”, as composer Frank Denyer says, "the time has come for a framework that can articulate mankind’s whole adventure with sound from the earliest bone whistle to the Greeks to today.”

The Classical Canon (i.e. Monteverdi to Debussy) vs. Early & Contemporary Musics You may know of the three Fates, of Lachesis who sings of the things that were, of Clotho who sings of the things that are and Atropos who sings of the life to be, and you may know of

the lutenist, Anthony Rooley – of the well-known Early Music group – ‘The Consort of Musicke’, who said, “Every age sounds a different tone and operates in a different scale.” These vignettes beg the question, ‘where are we ‘now’ in music’? The answer, concert researchers give us is 1812. Why 1812? Because it is the mean/average year of compositions offered at Classical concerts today. Thus, lovers of Classical music are basically living nowhere near the present. They haven’t got into the 1900s, let alone the 21st Century. So it’s clear to many people that we have lost the key to the authentic present. This is deeply concerning! When the music historian Charles Burney visited the composer Glück he was astonished to see a full length portrait of Handel opposite the head of his bed. The reason he was astonished was up until this time the music that was performed was always contemporary music, namely music of its time. Now Glück is worshipping the music of the past and the idea of a musical repertoire and concerts of ancient music was born. Glück’s response to Burney was, “There, Sir, is a portrait of the inspired master of our art. When I open my eyes in the morning I look upon him with reverential awe.” To paraphrase Burney, our reverence for old authors [composers] began to prevent us from keeping pace with the present. As the 1812 overture above makes clear, this new tendency in the late 18th century has now become so extreme that it weighs us down with old forms and backward perceptions that prevent us from finding ways to live into the musical present and free music’s future so that we can attempt a new art that transcends the old accepted frontiers.

Rhythmos vs. Tonos and Harmonia Between Heiner Ruland has written of this further Music in the Space Between phenomena in his inspiring book ‘Die Neugeburt der Musik aus dem Wesen des Menschen’ to which I am deeply indebted. In brief, Rhythmos (streaming) processes in music includes such elements as gliding tones, opaque musical textures, sympathetic vibrations and the sounding of lots of overtones and non-measured rhythms, etc. Tonos (form holding) processes in music include such elements as discrete pitches, measured rhythms and metres, clear structures in terms of scales replete with a strong tonic/home note, and clearly differentiated forms. All this is manifested most clearly on the piano which embodies the discrete uniform pitch space of the tempered scale and the triumph today of the Tonos realm. But just how did the Western man’s soul become so well-fretted?, or, as the composer Percy Grainger asked, “Why does music always have to hop? What’s wrong with gliding?”. This gliding is something that both blues singers and rock musicians, such as Jimi Hendrix, strongly felt the need to do through their bending the notes of the tempered scale. In this connection, Grainger in his quest for what he called ‘free music’ said, “The object of the modern composer is to bring music more and more into line with the irregularities and complexities of nature and away from the straight lines and simplicities imposed by man.” Clearly the Tonos realm of form and structure needs to be animated and enlivened by the Rhythmos realm of life-energy and expression, just as the Rhythmos realm needs to be shaped and stabilised by structure. In music what many people appreciate is the way mystery complements precision. When Tonos and Rhythmos meet together in the space between we arrive at what the Greeks called ‘HARMONIA’, which – unlike today’s meaning, does not mean squeezing tones together into chords – but connotes a breathing balance or dialogue between opposites. Indeed, this very state of balance is manifested in the well-known symbol of the Caduceus – which shows two snakes coiling themselves around a staff – that is used as the key symbol for the healing professions. This balance is something that we are all searching for in our lives. When the two sides come together (i.e. in Harmonia) the realm of the sacred emerges as a third presence, just like when 2 French horn players playing the same note in unison are sanctified by the presence of the interval of the 5th.

The Primordial Essence of Music vs. Culturally defined Languages of Music

When you listen to a great tam-tam sounding, you hear something that is universal. Here music cannot be categorized into specific scales, rhythms or harmonies. Instead a tam-tam offers us a sense of infinity. Alas, today there are not so many people who bear witness to the ocean when life, as I said above, has been reduced to researching puddles. Trapped in our cave of prejudices and lacking the reflective practice of truly investigating the roots of our musical tastes, we are often unable to comprehend the ultimate realities of music.

Ancient vs. Modern Many people today take refuge in the music of the past because they find it too difficult to artistically encounter the deepest existential questions of our time in the realm of music. I was one of these people. When I was at my music conservatoire I found it very difficult to engage with Boulez and Babbit, et. al. At the same time I felt overly enclosed by the music of the Classical canon. Fortunately, at this time the Early Music phenomena was rising up and this allowed me an escape route through engaging with the newness that ancient hidden languages of music from Gregorian Chant and Pérotin to Machaut offered me. And so I disappeared into this world so much that I became a university lecturer in Early Music with my area of specialism being the early Gregorian Chant notation from the monastery of St. Gall. But all the questions of contemporary music and the Zeitgeist of our time continued to call me, as it did many great contemporary composers whose music is also been inspired by the well- springs of ancient and early music sources. So Webern was inspired by Lassus, Pärt by Pérotin, Tavener by Russian and Greek Orthodox music, Maxwell-Davies by Dunstable, Harvey by Tibetan overtoning and MacMillan by Gaelic psalm singing, etc. All you have to do is listen to Sandström’s ‘Es ist ein Ros’ to hear Praetorius’ beautiful carol sounding anew in the contemporary dress of the secundal chords we associate more with Ligeti. Listen to Tavener’s ___ and you hear the Cruxifixus of Bach’s B Minor Mass in an utterly new way. So too I experienced a coming together of sonic experiences emanating from the most ancient traditions (from the iron age Scottish carnyx to overtone chanting) with contemporary paradigms in music. And so the old became new.

The Bel-Canto Voice vs. the Whole Voice It is becoming increasingly clear that we have inherited a way of thinking about singing that no longer does justice to the diversity of vocal practices manifesting in the world today. Over the last 30 years a multiplicity of extraordinary new vocal and choral styles have emerged in our midst, including stunning Multicultural Voices (e.g. Bulgarian, Tibetan, Georgian and Indian, etc.) plus many other alternative voicings (e.g. Medieval Singing, Jazz and Popular Styles) and 20th Century Extended Voice Techniques. Clearly, the full possibilities of the voice are not revealed in any one singing style. Indeed, our overspecialised - some-times one-sided restricted voices - means most people only use a small part of their vocal potential (beautiful as they may be). Consequently a key goal of mine over the years has been to help reveal as much as possible the infinite possibilities of the voice to students. Due to the changing consciousness of singing techniques these voices are bringing about, major changes are going on now in our perception of what singing is as we witness a move away from earlier more narrowly defined ideals of singing (which were based on a voice aesthetic and a sound world designed for 18th and 19th century music) to new more open- minded and holistic paradigms. This growing awareness of the expressive spectrum of vocal possibilities (which I call ‘Expanding the Borders of the Voice’) increasingly asks that we recognise that it is no longer possible to maintain a single definition or ideal of vocal aesthetics. This can sometimes be challenging for some pupils. For instance, I have had pupils who felt very affronted by Inuit Throat singing. (Their limited cultural definitions of singing and vocal aesthetics meant that they couldn’t allow that Inuit voicings were singing.) Likewise, I had another pupil who studied for her major singing diploma with me. The repertoire given in the examination list was basically from 1650 to 1910. I found this very difficult and very limiting because I think if you are going for a singing diploma

then you should demonstrate at the very least vocal capacities in both Early and Contemporary Music. Her examiner, in his report, unsurprisingly recommended that she work more diligently with creating more vocal nuances and colours in her singing. So I suggested that we should spend a time working with the flexibility of jazz voicings. This recommendation was declined, however, on the basis that jazz idioms didn’t fit with her limited view of singing. Many classical singers fear that expanding the borders of their voices – as referred to above – may hurt their voices. But I have found if attention is always given to vocal care and vocal health, then working with a wider range of voice styles brings about not only more flexibility, but a greater range of vocal colours and nuances which can enhance a student’s singing of classical repertoire. Two examples of this would be singing Gregorian Chant from 9th century neumes develops a much greater awareness of grouping and phrasing in music, whilst singing in different tuning systems has helped make my sense of intonation even more acute. The coming together of this new knowledge emanating from both world vocal traditions and early music performance practices, along with modern scientific research, means we now have the opportunity to learn from all these voices, which teach us different concepts, aesthetics and beliefs regarding vocal beauty.

The Path of Werbeck Singing vs. Classical Voicings The pathway of the School of Uncovering the Voice has brought immeasurable gifts to my life. Undoubtedly, in my estimation, it brings about the greatest awareness of the role of the subtle body in singing. Werbeck’s work with the etheric tone is preeminent, as is her deeper understanding of the unique being of each vowel and consonant as they apply to singing. These are immense gifts for all singers. But singing music also calls for physical, visceral and emotional vocal expression: from anger, lamentation and courage to expressions of vulnerability, intimacy and love. Our voice therefore needs to be like a whole orchestra – not just a single instrument with a monochromatic timbre. A singer has a brass instrument inside them, as well as a violin, a flute, a cello and a percussion section. Gregorian Chant, sacred Renaissance polyphony and the contemporary music of Webern and Pärt undoubtedly call for the glowing light-filled resonance of the singer’s etheric body to be sounding out from the music. But Schubert’s Der Doppelgänger, Britten’s Tyger and Frank Martin’s Sechs Monologe aus Jedermann require something completely different. Just as importantly, the training of singers calls for a massive investment in the schooling of musicianship, performance practices, the balance of the physical body and an incredible amount of work on getting inside the text. All these elements need to be worked on as much as working on the tone quality of a voice. But seldom is this the case!

New Anthroposophical Impulses in Music vs. Classical / Folk / Jazz, etc. Approaches I have benefitted hugely from the astonishing impulses of Werbeck-Svärdström, Pär Alhbom, Heiner Ruland, Norbert Visser (Choroi), Manfred Bleffert and many others. What I noticed however in going to their respective workshops – as well as to the Section Meetings for musicians at the Goetheanum – during my journeyman stage of musicing, was that I’d meet very different groups of people there. What I yearned for was a dialogue and mutual fructification brought about through the meeting of these impulses. What would happen when a choir uses new instruments, improvisation and different scales in new choral music? I didn’t find this however. Instead, I felt a gap in the space between these individual impulses. I also felt a gap between these impulses and what I would call the best practices of classically trained music teachers. (For instance, I’d benefitted enormously from my work with the great singer Peter Pears.) Another terrible gap I have experienced constantly is the one between music teachers in Waldorf Schools who have been inspired by new Anthroposophical impulses in music vs. the conventionally trained music teacher. To this day I still find it astonishing that musicians can take on the role of music teaching in a Steiner school and yet make little or no effort to drink from the inspiring waters of the new music impulses. In one case I know of, a conventionally trained music teacher even made it a condition of their employment that they would not have

to meet or work with anything to do with the new Anthroposophical impulses in music education. So one of the key goals of the Tonalis impulse has been to become a crucible for a living exchange between all these great impulses.

The Given Work vs. Improvisation. The Open Form and Music from the Inside Out “Creation is the only place of human freedom; it consists not in choosing between given possibilities, but in producing a not given possibility.” (Georg Kühlewind)

Why do so many musicians let so much creativity evade them? One reason is that the dominance of playing music from notation has led improvisation to be undervalued in the holistic development of the musician. Mattes puts this very succinctly. “By their very nature, improvisation and ornamentation remove themselves from musicological research that is traditionally based so much on written material, both theoretical and practical.” Thus, in conventional worlds of music making, improvisation isn’t the first word that comes to mind. In fact, it’s sometimes perceived as being irrelevant, as a way of faffing about, or as something that only belongs to jazz musicians. Most musicians today – particularly classical musicians – excel at reading music. People who go to concerts are astonished at how musicians can just sight read or sight sing music. But where our music education system is incredibly lop-sided is in the complementary skill of inspiring musicians to create their own musical ideas. To paraphrase Brockmann, if we never wrote our own words, but only read the words of others, we’d never learn about developing our ideas, sustaining the interest of the reader, how to create links, or how to create an ending. In fact, we’d think it incredibly strange if we were not encouraged to write our own words. The creative part of our musical musculature, however, remains, for the most part, under- developed. Now many readers might say that musicians actually spend loads of time on exploring and creating an interpretation of a work that exists as a notated score. This is indeed an astonishingly creative and rewarding way of being with music, but it doesn’t encourage the creation of your own musical ideas. So what is inhibiting our creative musculature? Why don’t we just metaphorically dive into the lake and go for it? A key reason for this is connected to all the side effects of all those years of regimented training, and hours and hours of repetitive drills. Then again, it’s because classically trained musicians see themselves as re-creators whose job it is to present someone else’s work and to prevent that work from being damaged. Here’s the celebrated clarinettist Anthony Pay on the subject, “I start from the accuracy point of view, not from a musical point of view.” Thus, “The dominant position in Western Music has been occupied by the ‘composition’: one man’s thought developed into a blueprint for collective performance.” (Prévost) Just as significantly, classical musicians often object to improvisation on the grounds that: i) “it’s for jazz musicians” and ii) that there’s no need for improvisation training in the world of classical music since most players are not called upon to improvise in the 18th and 19th century repertoire they typically play. So why learn to do it? But it’s only in the last two hundred years that improvisation has disappeared from Classical Music (apart from specialised uses of improvisation such as organists use as part of the drama of a church liturgy). A key reason for this is that composers during the 18th and 19th centuries wanted to exert more control over what performers did and inhibit them moving away from the ‘guided tour’ of the score. This means that even the musical forms, such as the ‘fantazia’ – which should all be about creativity – show the composer controlling the majority of the

elements of a performance while simultaneously creating the outer impression of improvisatory freedom. But I would say, “Improvisation [shouldn’t be] just an occasional freedom, but a whole approach to the creation and performance of music.” (Ansdell) All this means is that one of the biggest gaps in music education today is the lack of opportunity students have for exercising their intuitive and imaginative selves and practicing creative imagination (e.g. through composing and improvising). I believe it is an absolute tragedy that so many musicians are content to let so much creativity evade them. Modern trainings’ emphasis on perfecting technical skills and music reading - i.e. music from the outside, rather than on the act of creation – has left us with many players who feel ill-equipped to engage in spontaneous invention. Of course we must continue to develop fine singers and players who can play / sing all our brilliant masterworks from notated scores. Of course we must continue to practice instrumental skills and music reading, etc., which remain fundamental to achieving these aims. But we also need to acknowledge that music is an aural and creative art and that equal attention needs to be given to nurturing the inner creator within each student. At the heart of this question is the belief that the development of creative musical imagination through composition and improvisation should not be add-ons in Music Training, but should be central to it. It’s time that all musicians discovered that creativity is not an elite gift for the few, but a deep reservoir of resources requiring only a right method and a supportive atmosphere for it to flourish. Kenny Werner puts this perfectly. He says, “the STUDY of music should not rob us of the ability to PLAY music.” All of the above wouldn’t be so much of a problem in the Classical Music world if Classical Musicing represented a completely self-enclosed world constantly propagating only past forms of music. (Some commentators call this the ‘museum culture’.) But Contemporary Classical composers today are frequently asking classical musicians to improvise in their works today. But the very musicians they are asking to use their own creative imagination are often the musicians for whom improvisation praxis has been missing in their training! Many of these musicians have difficulty with performing the type of emancipated compositions that employ improvisation that many contemporary composers are creating today. To play such compositions both orchestral players and singers must become emancipated musicians.

Visual vs. Aural Learning Left Brain vs. Right Brain vs. Harmonia of the Hemispheres The great conductor, Bruno Walter, wrote about the key differences between what he called intrinsic and extrinsic musicality, and how the great musicians were those who were able to bring into an equal balance these two fundamental ways of working with music. From an early age it was clear that my intrinsic musicality operated at a very high level, whereas I had to work hard to bring my extrinsic musicality up to this level, as the following story will make clear. Each Summer, in the late 1970s, I went out to Ireland to do field research, until one evening - during a session in a pub in Connemara, a group of musicians - who were actually farmers by trade who were in town to sell their livestock - played a haunting tune on fiddles which none of the local musicians knew. In spite of this, after just two renderings of the tune, everyone was joining in, and within a very short time everybody was freely improvising on the melody as well. Meanwhile, I, - as the so-called professional musician/musicologist/ music teacher - was trying to notate the highly ornamented melody and not getting very far. After the piece ended the musicians saw this and a huge peal of laughter rang out in the pub. Then in a new rite of passage, they all poured liberal amounts of Guinness over me in friendly mockery of the ‘professor’ in their midst, as they used to call me. This was indeed an awakening call, and I knew then for sure what I had always suspected, namely, that my training had left many aspects of my musicianship relatively untutored (such as my aural schooling – as this story makes clear). Today I would say I had only been learning music

with half of the brain – my left hemisphere - and as for my body, soul and spirit participating in music learning, well ---! From then onwards I began my quest for music making that would embrace what the contemporary Dutch composer Ton de Leeuw called a ‘Harmony of the Hemi-spheres’. The Old / Left Brain Model of Music Training – The Outer Musician This model concentrates more on music coming from the outside and students being inheritors and conservers of a tradition that is predominantly learned through ‘formal’ methods of instruction. Here lots of time is spent on: · Mastering Instrumental/Vocal Technique · Learning to Sight Read · Learning the Music Theory that stands behind Western Musical idioms · The exploration and appreciation of Western Classical Music idioms (predominantly from 1600 – 1910) · A limited – and somewhat abstract view – of aural training enclosed by boundaries of Western music theory and · Preparation for Stage/ Concert Performance paradigms. The Right Brain Model of Music Training – The Inner Musician This model concentrates more on music coming from the inside and students discovering music through creating with it, often via engaging with ‘informal’ methods of instruction and practice. Here lots of time is spent on: · Improvisation and Composition - so that the inner creator in each human being is involved · Working with the Psychology and Emotional Intelligence of students · The Practice of Inner Listening and Inner Musicality · The Practice of Playing Music by Ear · An Exploration of Sacred and Spiritual Perspectives in Music · A Living and Deeper Understanding of the Elements of Music as they occur throughout the world · An Exploration of the Healing Properties of Sound and Music. A Proposal for a New Model of Music Training I would suggest affirms that for balanced musicing to take place – where the ear can be turned inwards, as well as outwards – we need to give equal amount of times to working with the processes that belong to both the inner and outer musician as outlined above. In addition, it is fundamental that students are given the chance to work with: · Contemporary Music and the new thinking and new modes of perception that stand behind it · Oral Traditions e.g. World & Folk idioms · Aural and Music Theory training from a global perspective · The training of Soundscape Designers and Aural Ecologists · The Musical Future of Children · How to bring music ‘making’ into the heart of everyday life through training in Community Musicing and performing in community contexts. In particular, it’s obvious from the above that we don’t need the either/or polarity of visual vs. aural learning (even though our musical education may have led us to a dominance in one of these domains). Instead, in our modern age – with its awareness that every human being has different learning styles – we need to employ multi-modal and multi-sensory learning methods that balance visual, aural, kinaesthetic and creative learning in the pursuit of balanced and holistic music education. The pièce de résistance of this multi-sensory approach is to work with Heiner Ruland’s marvellous picture of the 12 senses in connection with music teaching and learning.

Measured Time vs. Non-measured Time Much of our thinking about rhythm and time today is centred on clock/measured time and linear concepts of progress. But music history shows us wonderful examples of music in non-measured time from Gregorian Chant, Hildegard of Bingen and Troubadour songs, to Irish Sean Nós and Scottish Pibroch traditions and the Alap sections of Indian Ragas. There’s also nature’s time, breath time (as in Zen shakuhachi playing) and other non-linear forms of time embracing cyclical, psychological, primordial and eternal aspects of time.

Normally these different worlds of temporal awareness are represented as either / or polarity, but in some contemporary music we can hear these different worlds of non- measured time meeting measured rhythms simultaneously (rather like they do in the visual realm of Chagall’s paintings). It is like listening to two or more choruses asking different questions of us simultaneously, in what amounts to an interplay between the temporal and the eternal. Just last week I composed a piece based upon a celebrated Irish folk tune which is often sung as a hymn in four parts with the words ‘Be thou my vision’. As I was working on a new arrangement of this melody I heard the non-measured keens of Irish Sean Nós folk tradition wanting to sing with this hymn. So in the end the typically Western chorale-type harmony is present, but it simultaneously shares its structure with the free eternal time of Celtic Sean Nós – replete with Celtic knots in their aural form – lots of improvisation and even the sustained drone of eternity sounding underneath it all. Thus many of my compositions seek to bring about what the Finnish composer Rautavaara calls, ‘A Glimpse of Eternity through the Window of Time’.

Western Sacred Music Praxis vs. Theologies of Music for Inter-faith Practice Clearly the Divine Ground of All Being is not Western or Eastern, but hears the Whole World and clearly there are many people today not bound by the walls of any one religious tradition, who are seeking to explore how all the different cultures of the world are instruments of the spirit of humanity. From this we can say that the Divine is universal, but religions - like musical languages - are particular. Thus the theologian Paul Tillich asked, ‘How can the conditioned form of human cultures work with the unconditional nature of the ultimate ground of all being?’. If we look at the situation of religion in the world now we can see a direct analogy with the challenges people involved with sacred music face. The more we realise our growing unity as a human race, the more we encounter the challenges of religious and musical diversity, namely how can we meet, understand and learn from the sacred music of other faiths? Just as there are many religious and spiritual paths, so musical pathways to divine presence are many, each of which is more apt for expressing different aspects of our relationship to the divine ground of all being, Like a great cathedral rose window, inter-faith musicing aspires towards a greater WHOLENESS, whereas, ‘fundamentalism is the attempt to impose a single truth on a plural world’ (Johnathan Sachs). For the first time in our history we have the chance to work with a broader range of sacred music than any one cultural perspective permits. So I would suggest that a key question sacred music animateurs need to ask themselves today is, ‘do we just work within our culturally tuned paradigms of music and sacred practice, or do we our allow our new global musical awareness to help us re-pitch and re-tune our music to more universal understandings?’ Tonalis’ goal in its work with sacred music praxis is to train animateurs to serve the needs of people from all faiths seeking to live an authentic spiritual life relevant to the modern world. It takes as its starting point the words of Pietro Archiati ‘the human being today is a synthesis of all the religious - [musical] - paths we have trodden in the course of our long development’. The Comparative Study of World Musics in Sacred Praxis can help people learn from musicians of other cultures who have different musical beliefs in a manner analogous to the way ‘WORLD BELIEVERS’ are emerging in contemporary spirituality. Inter-faith musicing can thus help people experience THE DEEPER RICHNESS OF GOD’S CREATIVE DIVERSITY via exploring how our relationship with religious ‘others’ represents A ‘DIFFERENT KIND OF HARMONY’. Through this work musicians can come to the realisation that they don’t sing all the parts, namely that the Human Symphony is a Chorus of Many Voices. Through Tonalis’ work with its ‘Song of the Earth’ projects our goal is to enable all its singers to become World Believers so that they can become New Instruments of Humanity.

Music in the Concert Hall – Indoor Music vs. Music in the Soundscape – Outdoor Music And one final theme for you to reflect on that is nearly entirely neglected in the musical world at large, as well as music trainings. It’s clear that where music takes place, namely its contexts, deeply influences musical forms, what instruments are used and the type of musical listening we employ. Our human journey with sound has gone from music out in nature (i.e. the soundscape) to music in the enclosed sacred spaces of temples and cathedrals to music in the concert hall to the totally enclosed, private individual virtual space of music via headphones (which is where most people have arrived today). Clearly this has cut us off from the realm of nature and should absolutely be viewed as having a key role in our present environmental and ecological crisis. In the Middle Ages and in the Renaissance there was clear concept of outdoor and indoor music and the outdoor and indoor instruments needed to sound in these very different contexts (i.e. the bagpipe vs. the lute). This is something that is being wonderfully addressed by the new instrument makers inspired by Anthroposophy, from the metal instruments of Manfred Bleffert to the glorious stone instruments of Beat Weyeneth.

Coda – Living between Worlds Following on from what I have just written above, and in conclusion, I want to acknowledge how important it has been for me to work with ‘music in the space between’. One way I have been enabled to do this is via using the new instruments created by great craftsmen and artists inspired by Anthroposophy that have been made for working with the space between musicians (e.g. Choroi’s bordun lyres and its lap xylophone and Bleffert’s metal instruments). Other crucial ways of working with new improvisatory processes in the space between have been Pär Ahlbom’s circle games and the choral improvisations I have created for bringing about what I call ‘double listening’ and attuned ensemble awareness (e.g. through always hearing the note you are singing as part of the chord that is sounding vs. merely learning and holding your own part in choral singing). For more on this see my two volumes on ‘Creating Choral Excellence’. And so – to sum up. Standing on all the above musical thresholds for me has meant finding myself in a place where two or more musical worlds meet, and inevitably this leads to two questions, how do I hold this together?, and how can I make this a creative encounter? To answer this I turn once more to Esther de Waal who gives a great response. She says, “Our God is too big for either/or. Instead he [/she] asks us to say both/and.” The Tonalis impulse has been my attempt to create these meeting places and to bring about the dance of Harmonia (as Ruland calls it) referred to above.

What Tonalis does Now Tonalis offers part-time, modular foundation training courses on a range of subjects, such as Sing with Your Whole Voice – Open up to a New World of Singing Bring Music to Life – The Art of Song Interpretation The Inner Life of Music – Journey into the Hidden Mysteries of Music and Discover the Heart of Musical Meaning The Musical Future of Children – Music Education in Waldorf Schools The Story of Music – Past, Present and Future Creating Choral Excellence – New Horizons for Choir Singers and Choir Leaders Music as a Therapeutic Art – Social & Therapeutic Music Making Renewing Music as a Community Art

Tonalis has 2 choirs Illumina – a high level chamber choir

Choros – an intermediate level choir specialising in singing new choral arrangements of Folk and World Music

Tonalis runs numerous weekend music workshops and 5 day courses during Easter and Summer holidays. It also offers In-service Days and an Advisory Service for Steiner Schools.

Please see the Tonalis website to see details of all of these – www.tonalismusic.co.uk

We self-publish under ‘Tonalis Edition’ a wide range of books I have written, from books on: — Music Education — Music and Singing Therapy — The Elements of Music — Voicework and — Choir Training; as well as books of — New Sacred Choral Music (Illumina and Glossolalia) and — Songs for Children (The Song Tree) I have composed. Lastly there are books of — Arrangements of English and Celtic Folk Music for the Cycle of the Year and — Collections of Choral Music for Community Choirs. All the books are listed on the website.

Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the enormous inspiration given to me in writing this article by the following authors: de Botton, Alain – Art as Therapy, Phaidon Press, 2013 Campbell, Don – The Mozart Effect, Avon Books, NY Claxton, Guy – Wise Up – The Challenge of Lifelong Learning, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2000 Cook, Nicholas – Music – A Very Short Introduction, O.U.P., 2000 Denyer, Frank – Finding a Voice in an Age of Migration, in ‘Contemporary Music Review’, Vol. 15, ‘Leaving the 20th Century’, Leigh Lands & Frank Denyer (ed.s) Eastham, Scott – EyeOpeners: A Little Something to Think About, Horizon, 1999 Higgins, Kathleen M.– The Music between Us, Is Music a Universal Language?, The Univ. of Chicago Press, 2012 Nettl, Bruno – Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music, University of Illinois Press, 1995 Pfrogner, Herman – Lebendige Tonwelt – zum Phänomen Musik Ruland, Heiner – Expanding Tonal Awareness: Musical Exploration of the Evolution of Consciousness Guided by the Monochord, Rudolf Steiner Press – Musik als erlebte Menschenkunde: Musiktherapie in der Praxis, 2003 – Die Neugeburt der Musik aus dem Wesen des Menschen: Künstlerische und therapeutische Aufgaben einer erneuerten Musikkultur, 1987 Scruton, Roger – The Aesthetics of Music, O.U.P., 1997 de Waal, Esther – Living on the Border, Reflections on the Experience of Threshold, Canterbury Press, 2011 Wingate, Andrew – Celebrating Difference – Staying Faithful, How to live in a Multi-faith World, Longman & Todd, 2005