Three Mind-Expanding Discographies

Following a query from a friend about the tarot and music, I thought I’d re-work series of posts from my old blog that I called Mind-Expanding Discographies, culled from a number of books that I’d been reading on music and spirituality.

The first selection comes from Peter Michael Hamel’s Through Music to the Self (1976), which I first found on the shelves of a composer whose music I was engraving in around 2006. Hamel is, to me, a profound musician and composer, and he succeeded Ligeti as professor of composition Hochschule für Musik und Theater – big boots to fill! Much of his own work is in the a new age/minimalist style, some electronic, some for ensembles such as his group Between.

The book includes a great primer on how to ‘listen’ to Indian classical music, as well as some illuminating material on vowel singing, and a number of meditative exercises and ‘social practice methods’. The discography itself is fairly mainstream (as far as these things go…), but there are a couple of unsung gems in there:

Past/Present: New Recorder Music

The Famulus has recently published an audio journal on the theme of ‘everyday magic’, to which I’ve contributed a recording of Ten Meditative Fragments [pdf], played on treble recorder with effects.

Ten Meditative Fragments (2007)

Here’s the accompanying note:

The music of Ten Meditative Fragments was written in 2007 using chance procedures to compose ten musical fragments, which could then be freely interpreted as an improvisation on a monophonic instrument. While I have played the piece privately countless times over the past few years, it was The Famulus’ call for contributions that compelled me to record a version. 

Where is the ‘everyday magic’ here? To me it comes from the process of being able to combine disparate materials into a cohesive whole; to enter a state in which connections can be made between the seemingly disconnected atoms that comprise the piece and in which they appear to make sense. I feel this is akin to the special experience of looking out onto a landscape and being overtaken by the feeling of numinous unity that it expresses. If that’s not a magical feeling, I don’t know what is.