FBSMC 12, Music and the Natural Worlds, Living Theater of Nature

Yesterday was an amazing time at ‘our’ creek. Quiet yet energetically so alive with the landscape constantly changing. The creek is under huge white pines, oaks, some maples and a lot of hemlock trees. The sun was shining but there were wonderful huge piilowy clouds that you could see a bit of under the canopy of branches and leaves from the trees. 

This created spots of light on the land that were rising gradually above the creek. The spots of light would flicker like giant fireflies and change in rhythm with the duet of wind and trees. Then, periodically a large wide and round shadow would come over the ground, akin to a long tone passing through the texture of swirling lines from woodwinds and strings in a grand symphonic composition. This certainly was a sound and light cinematic delight, full of wonder and elevation in the living theater of Nature. We felt humbled to be part of it.

There is no doubt that aspects of this will be woven into the upcoming composition dedicated to my former teacher Ron Ricketts, who is now flying in another sphere of space in the continuing life of soul and spirit. 

FBSMC 12, Music and the Natural Worlds, Beyond Brass Playing

When spending time building a relationship with the natural worlds, it is important to ‘tune’ ourselves to the environment that we are going to be in and fine tune when we are actually in it.

One way to prepare and ‘tune’ is to start to leave behind some of our thoughts from wherever we are coming from. This is not to be forced, but can come from a simple call over to oneself like, “I am now going to settle mind, emotions and body and enter a different environment.” Then one can do some of the vowel meditations or other soothing breathing exercises to unify mind, body and emotions. If our mind feels extremely scattered, find a tempo to attach yourself to and couple it with the breathing exercises. Perhaps you have song or simple melody or tone sequence that calms and settles. If super- hyped up and stressed, it can be useful to do some quicker, hyper breathing for a short period of time and consciously say to your self out loud, “I release this stress from my mind, from my emotions and from my body.” Then gradually get into slower and calmer deep breathing.

This is a simple outline of things to try and much more detail and specifics could be filled in. For example, when doing the vowel meditation, each one of the vowels resonates within a certain space in our body. From those spaces, one can add the phrase, “dissolve you stress from this space” and feel it dissolve You can also put other words that connect with you more than dissolve like, ‘melt away’ anxiety, peace please come.” The encouragement here is to find the ways and means that work for you and these are some examples.

Vowels are common to think about in brass playing but we can extend this use in so many ways and then bring that enhanced experience to our playing with fuller meaning.