~~A Circle of Sound.~~

~Dave the Flutes Ramblings~

It's always a problem thinking where to start articles like this, so I thought I'd jump strait in. Literally: strait into my trusty bathtub. Here I get many ideas and the thoughts tend to flow. Sorry about the pun it just arrived unnoticed. Now...

I have a theory that to communicate with music can be much more powerful that the spoken word. Its just we no longer understand music fully and have sort of "gotten" used to using speech. With the spoken word, to my mind you can only describe things, but with music you can feel things. Music can convey the emotions as well as just describe the everyday.

Maybe Music was the first language of ancient Babel? Every one twittering away in a gorgeous rich emotive song, a bit like birds and animals. After all, that far back we were much closer to the earth and the animal world. Then some bright spark had the idea of building a tower up to the Deity (insert as appropriate for your belief). Everyone felt the wonder of this venture so they start to draw plans. Deity thinks... this is not such a brill idea, but by this time humans are only listening to themselves. So one night, when they are all asleep s/he zaps them. Next day they all wake up and they have language. So via translators and in multiple committee rooms the politicians get talking and debating and arguing about the tower. They can't come to a consensus and it goes round and round in circles and very little happens about it. It seems to me to have been the same throughout the world ever since. The point being (by a long path) maybe music can be thought of as a universal early language.

Now have you ever played "Chinese Whispers"? That's were a group of people at a party form a circle (physical not caste!) and one person whispers a phrase to the next and it gets past round the circle. It always amazes me how the phrase gets distorted. If you think of each person as a generation that is handing on musical tradition, you can begin to see how that tradition could be bent and distorted. You need some way of finding out that first phrase, now lost in history, which started the use of music. This should enable you to understand music more clearly and by extrapolation, its use for ritual today.

Did you know that the only instrument old enough to be fossilized? It's a flute that plays a scale that we would still recognise today. Maybe music can link into this past.

I like to make ancient instruments, and to do this I need to learn again the skills used by our ancestors. I find this exercise in finding the past an important element in understanding my path. It makes me feel closer to my past and more prepared for my future (I'll explain the future bit some other time). It has also convinced me that the music of the past can be played today and invoke the same feelings it did a thousand years ago. This acts like a sort of tuning dial that enables me to access into the feelings and aspirations of past ages.

If you're still with the argument then think of how a modern ritual uses sound for energy raising, Shamanic Journeying etc. And consider how it may have been done in the past. Ask yourself, do you know about this use of music from reading about it, or being told about it (Chinese Whispers method)? Or do you have another way to get into ritual music. Do you use music at all, come to that? Maybe for Relaxation... for Dance... or to blot out your everyday world?

You could go and build a reproduction of the fossil flute and play it. Then you can really feel how it was used and what its powers were. I have just finished building a Cornamusa. (A medieval instrument from about 1400) All the professors and scholars of musicology have informed the world, for many years, that it only has twelve notes and you can't do very much with it. Having played it I now know it to be hauntingly beautiful and capable of a two-octave range (24 notes). So don't believe all you hear until you get down and try something. This applies to this article as well. But if you're not an instrument builder this may not be a lot of help!

An alternate way is to play a modern orchestral or traditional instrument and visualise your self into that past (I'll deal with instruments in a separate section). Ahhhhhh Buuuut I hear you say. I don't play anything...not a problem. You still have ears and you can listen. This is the starting point of every musician and in many respects gets to "the first phrase" we have been looking for.

What did early musicians listen to? Probably not an awful lot of music. Wind, birdsong, animal noises, Creaking of trees, rustle of leaves, the songs of the Dryads. Go out... listen... and you'll start to hear the music of the Earth. Then gently with feeling try to remember and copy and enhance those sounds in your head. If you're in a city or town listen to the sounds around you, even machines. If you're in the UK the mains electricity hum produces a "G" note, so I sometimes play along to machines noise using this "G" as a drone note. Create sounds in your mind. Listen to the sounds of simply running your fingers over different surfaces (tables, cardboard boxes, sandpaper, stones, tree bark etc), crumble dry leaves, listen to the pattern of your foot fall, listen hard and deep and try to remember. Try very hard to remember the sounds you hear. This is your key, a good vocabulary of remembered sounds.

You can now, if you wish, start to touch the edge of a powerful ancient language that can take you to other worlds and other journeys and other paths. This way is as old as the Universe and was here before us and will be hear after us. So start your journey now! In this column I hope I can help you to understand this language, though the ideas expressed are from inside me and are therefore subjective in nature. Other coming articles will cover, what is Music? Musical Shamanism, Musical Visualisation, Sound of the Barrows, and many other areas.

~Dave The Flute~