Getting to the Root of People, Places and Things Musical Modern Music, Forgotten Medicine
Music is interpreted and viewed in many different ways. In the same way, a person looking at a prism sees many different refractions, but ultimately, what the person is observing is simply light itself.
Most of us know music in its contemporary cultural forms. We see it as something that presents songs about life, love and culture. Beyond these changing meanings, however, our music ultimately presents us with combinations of melody, rhythm and harmony with words.
This time, we are going to look at music as an utterance, a vibration that comes out from the silence. Since we know, as Kem people, that existence is full, we also realize that it is human perception which leaves us with the illusion of a complete silence, of a total void from which something can spring. What this suggests is that music (rhythms and melodies, etc.) is latent in the web of the existence, and that it is we who have the opportunity to call or tap into it and to express it, amplify it through sound, and then bounce it off our brothers and sisters, and so penetrating and altering the very core of each other's essences.
Most songs are composed of many notes in very beautiful and elaborate combinations. Each single note or sound that makes up the song has a power within itself. Lets move away from the idea that music is a complexity (a song made of many notes) and move towards appreciating the music in just one note... Just as the person who now likes to sing first cried as a baby exiting a mother's womb, we who like to play music tend to rediscover the miracle of the beauty of playing just one note first.
Many people today are familiar with the chants of Buddhist monks. They sing the word "Ohm" and sustain the same note over very long periods, often in large groups. It has become popular to use recordings of the chanting of these monks to invoke a meditative ambiance. This is no surprise, because the single tone chant is a very powerful and elemental gateway for emergence into life itself. In the Kemetic tradition we use chants of single notes and syllables to affect the energy of our bodies and essences. In our case, these syllables are often the names of deities. While seated, we do these chants, and their during their expression. resonance alters us as a whole. Now, imagine the power possible when those single tones and simple syllables are combined into something as complete as a song. For thousands of years, indigenous peoples all over the world have experienced music as something more than mere entertainment and used very powerful combinations of tones and rhythms to penetrate the supposed boundaries between multiple dimensions.
Today, we think of a song as having a good beat, a stimulating melody, and some meaningful lyrics. Let's deconstruct this and look at these three parts of the whole, in order to retrieve the potency of what we have forgotten in music.
First, the beat. A beat is a component of rhythm. We find rhythms in nature. The rising and setting of the sun is a complete rhythm once the sun has risen again. That means, the period from one rising to the next rising is one cycle. Each rising is a beat, and two or more risings are a rhythm. The rising and falling and rising of the tides are also rhythms. Reincarnation is but another rhythm of birth and death, and then the next birth. Each birth is a beat in the rhythm of human existence. Existence is filled with countless rhythms on countless levels. The most primary rhythm of a human's body is the heartbeat. When we play a simple rhythm, we are tapping into the very pattern of our existence. We can look towards the great medicine traditions of the indigenous peoples of America and look at their ceremonial drumming. At first it seems very simple and repetitive, yet, it is this simple repetition which is the gateway into the very fabric of the patterns of existence. Each beat of the lead drummer's stick can be felt as powerfully as the rising and setting of suns flying forth through time in cycles as a dance. So, now knowing the power of a simple beat, can you see the power of the rhythms used in spiritual medicine? In today's music, we see a funky drummer kicking a stimulating beat. Well, we can say that it excites us. We can say that we are often transported and altered by this. Now consider this: in most such cases, these drummers are not fully aware (if at all) of the indigenous medicine traditions from which their style borrows all of its parts. Our ancestors treasured the emergence and usage of these components as communion with the fabric of existence. So, if an unaware modern drummer can still affect space immensely, imagine what the drummer who is aware can accomplish.
Second, melody. A melody is colorful and exciting, often invoking many emotions, attitudes and internal postures in the listener. We hear melodies in bird songs, in the cries of animals, in the howling of the wind, and most importantly, in the resonant frequencies of every space we inhabit. For example, if you stand in a room and clap your hands loudly one time and then listen very hard, you will hear melodic notes trailing off as the vibration plays every corner of the room like an instrument. You have to listen very carefully to hear this, but it can be done with practice. This vibration or frequency also permeates every aspect of existence. Even the light you see and the things you touch are resonating at a certain frequency. These things that compose all of the elements in the existence are resonating or vibrating at their specific "notes". Melodies are often played from a palette or selection of particular tones. These palettes can be called modes or scales. They exist naturally in all nature. You can hear the most common example if you'll one note while chanting the sound "OH". Now move your tongue back and fourth between the back of your throat and your lips. If you listen carefully, you can hear an extended mode being traversed in the upper harmonics of the notes being produced in your mouth. This mode extends over several octaves and has different characteristics in each octave. Western music tends to limit the parameters of a mode to the space within one octave, but, in actuality you can have tonal variation over several octaves, producing a mode that would require several octaves to express it. "The overtone series" is what modern musicians call the mode I just explained that you can produce in your mouth. But it is an extremely ancient, and is an example of a naturally occurring mode. Many indigenous melodies use notes selected from this mode.
Third, harmony. Playing two or more notes simultaneously is called a harmony, and these are simply combinations of tones from an endless array of modes. Modes are really deeply spiritual tools, almost like keys that unlock, or formulas that tap into sacred expressions of resonant frequencies. As just explained, the modern drummer, aware or not, is still wielding a tool of great power on a total level; in the same way, the modern tonal player is playing with the very fabric of existence and usually feels it. Many indigenous traditions wield tones and harmonies as sacred keys to open gateways and "head spaces". So we can safely conclude that the beats and melodies of everyday music are borrowing and employing sacred communions whose roots have been forgotten to some degree over the passage of time. This is not true in all cases, but it is a general trend that can be observed.
Finally, we come to lyrics--words, meaning, or whatever name you prefer. When we listen to some good lyrics in modern music, they often tell a story we identify with, learn lessons from, are inspired by, or all of these. Now let us recall what words are made up of before they even attain meaning. Words are made up of syllables or individual sounds. For example, "Who don't care what you need" could be sung as a projection of a sentence that means something in a particular language, this one being English. Yet the components that make up the words themselves have their own powers before we assemble them to form a modern language. "Who don't care what you need" can be broken down into a sequence of primary sounds. "HU' "DO" "KAY" "WAA" "CHU" "NEE". Each of these sounds has a potency by itself. If they are chanted individually, and meditated on, this will be noticed. Indigenous peoples have used syllables for sacred purposes for countless generations. Syllables are known to have particular effects and are used for different purposes. A modern language like English is really a "Frankenstein" of syllables, put together to express, in a degenerated way, an over- linear communication of desires and ideas. Considering this, when we sing, or even speak something, we might not even be saying what we think we're saying! Or, at least while projecting our requests or ideas, we will be affecting the space on a wholly different level through the sounds that we are using. So like the modern drummer and tonal instrumentalist, the modern lyricist or singer is employing something of power that has an effect whether or not they are aware of it.
So, all in all, the concept that I am illustrating in this article is that what we consider music in all it's permutations, for better or for worse, consciously or unconsciously, is a communication of great power with the very fabric of all becoming in all its rhythms and at all its frequencies. The modern musician may feel that a "sorcery" of this type is going on, yet can't put a finger on exactly what it is. When we turn on the radio and hear pop music, as spiritually devoid as it may seem, it is a mutation of forgotten sacred things, in a desecrated semi-perverted expression of once treasured utterances. You cannot get mad at the producers because we live in a time of spiritual amnesia. The best we can do is learn from the great indigenous traditions and try to return to our roots as humans. Try to become more conscious of the power of everyday things, and honor and cherish them because what we have been programmed to believe about the world we see, is far from the truth of what our ancestors once knew.
In the next issue, I shall discuss relationships and similarities among musical styles from diverse parts of our planet, and the myth that the vastness of "neighborhood Earth" is impossible to traverse. Hotep and best wishes from your brother.