Music ,creativity and reinventing musical knowledge

Music ,creativity and reinventing musical knowledge

If you forget yourself and merge in the music ,that is creative music.Creating music is not just making images of some one elses’s music but creating a new ritual of value afresh.It is not just occupying spacetime as any object do,but living and identifying with spacetime which is eternal.A musical mind has a deeper sense of listening to one’s self and to nature and to other musical minds ,an intuitive sense in making musical responses and increased ability to embrace sounds and confidence in musical expression .Such a musical mind-set made me to plunge into a new project of music therapy using Indian music .

Why did I want to make music for healing ?
What made me aware of this property of music?
How did I develop this awareness into a fullfledged project ?
The answers to these questions will probably lead to an extensive autobiography from age 3 onwards when I became a music lover and a lover of Meera and Krishna through the music of M.S.Subbalakshmy and my childhood experiments with developing children in our joint family and later on my Medical knowledge and my later experiments with music .But am I a good singer ? Do I play instruments? At what level are my technical skills in music? Have I received music education?The answers to all these four questions are in the negative.

What do I have to say musically?What are the unique qualities of my musical ideas which will be of use to the entire humanity?How can they be developed and enriched for humanity and the peaceful co-existence of world?And how much these ideas have helped me to improve quality of my life?These questions will give answers which can make the contents of a series of books.Music had a profound positive impact on my life and I have seen that impact on a lot of people ,both musicians and nonmusicians.Healthy and unhealthy,children and octogenarians,males and females .At musical grassroots lie my intellectual and aesthetic wisdom.For creative thinking,intuition,motor skills,social skills and creative social problem solving I have been using my love of music .Music has given a balance to my rational logical scientific consciousness and nonrational intuitive spiritual poetic consciousness.Individual musical expressions ,spontaneity,soulfulness are subjective concerns but they make what is original .The technical perfection gives music an inhuman mechanical character.
The music has to be valued for the effect it produce on the listeners and the performers.Not just by the competence and technicality of performer for it to give a healing effect.If both combine in a balanced ratio it becomes good healing and creative music.There are several moments of spontaneity,unpredictability,and surprises in a live musical performance and the sense of spirituality is preserved in creative live musical performance of a good singer.It enhances a love for life ,an understanding of one’s self,and of the oneness of entire creation .
Good listening ,creative expression and musical intuition are needed for healing experiences.There is an inner self in each of us which loves good music.That self is touched by good music .
In every Classical music concert,one can notice improvisations done by the vocalist and violinist(a duet),and between Mridangist and a ghatam player(another duet)and improvisation involving all the four(a quartet)Such a free form of improvisation is what makes the Indian classical music so creative through ages.Sharing of music by family,village,and festival seasons,and temples where members of community share musical repertoire was a tradition and still is ,in India which have helped to bind together the society .Performing,Listening,questioning and improvising together ,and final analysis and recording are the four steps in improvisation of music.Creativity is a quality which can be continually improved and improvised and is originality developed from a basic set of rules of music.Most of our ideas are creative and not logical and come out of the blue when we are in sushupthy or totally relaxed by intuition,but they happen to be logically correct and verifiable.This quality of our brain is not much understood by scientists .I have been wondering at this quality of human mind right from my childhood and the answers fit into the slots of a jigsaw puzzle by my musical intuitive mind ,not by my scientific intellectual logical mind ,but could be explained in detail with that part of my mind.How the musicians intuition works is exactly in this way.

Aesthetics of music depends on who you are,where you are,and what you are doing because these determines your Musical life panorama(MLP).This is the reason for our individual preferences .Beauty and meaning are created by individual and therefore a good aesthetic sense is a blessing .
1.Listen and be silent.
2.Try to play something similar to what is heard
3.Try to play something different from what is heard .
These are the three options musicians have.All have its own value.Changing rhythmic groove(time),raaga,and swara prasthaara ,musicians do improvise .But to make improvisation on the saahitya/literature one needs literary and language abilities as well.The good vocalist of Karnatic music have developed all these abilities .
The drum or mridanga/ghata etc have cycles of rhythms and they if played alone,exclude melody and harmony.The Indian Chenda and the western drum do this exclusion..The drum playing maintain the time groove,in fixed repetitive pattern(Thaalavritha) now called ostinato in west,with a time feel from idiomatic music .
Recording for educative,promotional and commercial purposes and the rules related to copyrighting of performance and recording are too complex here to discuss(Ref The future of the music business .How to succeed with the digital technologies.A guide for artists and entrepreneurs by Steve Gordon .2005.) and being a healer and a spiritualist, I am not very proficient in that field .

Listening :-
This is a field in which I am interested for healing experiences of my clients .Good listening or audiating is also most important for developing into a good musician.Good listening is mentally active performance.It permits us to detect nuances and reach a intuitive nonlinear mode of understanding.It is the primary means by which musical concepts ,familiar and unfamiliar is assimilated,stored,brought to memory for later use.Building a musical vocabulary is a life-long exercise for a good music maker and listener.Good listening increase our musical vocabulary.New ideas of music enter through the gateway of good listening.the more you listen the more you hear and understand its meaning and delight in the new discoveries made.
1.Take deep breaths and relax to listen music perfectly .
2.Do not make judgements of what is heard.It does not help good listening.It even inhibits one’s listening capacity.
3.Try to attend /notice the sounds heard as best as possible.
4.Float into the music and merge with it,enjoy it .Making judgements can wait.Let us enjoy good music by good listening.

Objective listening is identifying the various elements of the music ,-instruments,rhythm,raaga,pitch,tempo,harmony ,mode,timbre form,words and so on.
Subjective listening is imbibing the emotions or bhaava and rasa of the entire piece ,looking inwards and identifying personal moods or emotions created by music –The effect of music on the listener .Then compare the emotional effect one had with effect of same piece on others making the assessment objective.It is an interpretation of the effect of healing music on clients.A music therapist has to use both methods ,the first for research purposes and creating data for coming generations,and the second for therapeutic effects for the patient/client/listener who is in immeadite need of it.Both should go hand in hand.The individual variations,the reasons for these variations,changes that occur as time passes causing improvements in the client both in music listening and healing effects and so on has to be documented clearly .Supplementary listening with musical examples should be studied as well.Recorded familiar and unfamiliar music,familiar and unfamiliar female and male voices etc can be used.Then the effect of background sounds can be eliminated .The parameter of music is to be researched one at a time (for example the sound alone without accompanying instruments ,and with instruments ,and their different effects ).And what health parameter showed change with that single or combined parameters should also be noted.In this way to build a meaningful vocabulary for music therapists to share with each other,to practice and to teach should be generated.

After an example music is played, I get a written feedback from the listeners regarding what they felt while hearing.And also I collect objective data of both psychological scores and of parameters like BP,Heart rate etc .The listening at home and a second sitting after 10 days when the procedure is repeated and a third session after another 10 days (total 30 days) gives several new insights into human mind,body and soul and to use of an assortment of raagaaas and not one single raaga as the best for healing experiences.
Try the listeners to answer questions like:-
1.What is important to this music?
2.What are main musical ideas of this music ?
3.What does the composer/performer communicate to you?
4.What makes this music distinctive/unique ?
5.In what way one particular type/raaga affected you in this particular session and why was it different from others?
6.What was new in it to be different from others?
7.Was there something which you felt you didn’t understand ,any hidden message ?
8.what would you think will increase your understanding and thus healing experience with music?
9.Is it intuition or logic that helps you enjoy music?
10.When you listened what feeling you had?What imagery happened in your mind?
11.Did listening to this music help you in any way /If so,in what way?
Finding meaning in a musical experience means understanding music and self healing with it.Try to help the client in such selfhealing experiences .
In schools it is ideal to give inter-disciplinery links between music,astronomy,physics,social studies,interpersonal social behaviour and medical healing experiences .Every teacher and every parent wants the children to be able to work independently and know what they are doing .That is needed for a successful life.The way to do this is easily taught by the method of interdiciplinery study and of improving listening skills with music as described above.In a concert situation ,there is more meaning than what we have expected to find .So to help audiences to have meaningful experiences of listening , have contact (interpersonal)with them and a good musician always have such social skills with his/her rasika.The contact with listeners on stage is disrespectful according to orthodox musicians ,but it helps a lot for improving musical repertoire and to understand the musician and his music .The words need not be a technical speech,just a few opening words and personal remarks or sharing experiences will do.
I have listened to Dr K.J.Yesudas’ concerts for research into such social contacts he makes to his millions of listeners in different stages and different cities and villages .Even those listeners who have no education into musical technical vocabulary get benefits from such personal communication and improve their musical listening tastes .The aim of a musician is not just making his/her technical skill approved by the elite musicians and scholars of music.Ofcourse that is an important part of life for any respectable musician.But beyond that there are some dimensions.
It extends to teaching and improving the standards of the masses and that only makes one a Guru for the entire musical world.Indian classical music has a rich repertoire of vocabulary which is inapproachable or difficult to approach by the masses and by the western mind alike .But performers like Jesudas have crossed such barriers and made a musical advaitha possible .This musical advaitha had been used in my healing music exercises with my clients .