Music as Community Building
“Music is the lining of beauty. What makes the flower, or anything, beautiful is the music inside. Music is not just playing the instrument; it's many other things. Music is the kid who needs a glove for the baseball team so you go out and help him out. Always helping people and giving the people, it's part of the music. Part of the service or training should be service to the community as a musician. You're trying to give in many other ways. It's all an extension of that idea, so supporting other musicians or doing your own events, it's a part of extending yourself to giving the community more.” – William Parker
The time tested method of building community that I’ve observed firsthand is:
Make music with your friends
Share that music with your other friends
Invite them together to experience that music in person
Let word spread
This is broadly what happens in the germination of a music “scene” — but I think that word underplays the communal value and the connections that can be formed. Music serves as a locus of joy and emotional-spiritual context, and in doing so becomes the medium for connection. Further, it provides a recurring reason for coming together in a repeatable ritual context for building enduring bonds.
In an age where success as an artist is measured in the arms-length abstraction of streams, musicians would do well to focus on being locally great and participants in a community of mutual exchange. This is the real fabric of life, and provides more nourishment to all sides than a commerce oriented measurement of success.
In these communities, the key is that it’s inherently participatory, and that all activities are vital to its success. It’s easy to put the artist on a pedestal, but they’re just providing a center of gravity. Fans, venues and staff, visual artists, dancers, and others gather to contribute their own energy, and I believe an audience of great listeners is as important to making great music as the artists on stage.
Over time my own musical ambitions have gone from the notion of trying to “make it” to being focused on making music with friends for other friends. I hope that I can keep doing that for decades to come, and that we can hone something beautiful over time rather than trying to succeed quickly.
My belief is that this is what the world we’re living in calls for: deeper in person connections to people we know rather than idolize and adore parasocially, a shared space for self expression through sound and dance, a nourishing give and take.
Listening as Practice
“Sit quietly and attend to the presence of sounds. You can use speech, music, or any sounds that happen to appear. Do not get trapped in the labels and significations that sounds bear, but concentrate on the quality of the sounds themselves. This amounts to learning to see more deeply into all communicated presences, rather than being stopped by their surface partitioning.” - Tarthang Tulku, Time Space and Knowledge
Listening is an activity that can be taken in its mundane sense, or it can be broadened to encapsulate a liberative, transformative state of openness. This latter definition of listening is less sensory experience interpreted literally by a mechanistic mind, and more an active gentleness that dissolves the barriers between subject and object.
This mode of listening is experienced as a creation of space where each sensory input has room to be experienced in richer detail. There is an innate creativity, wakefulness, and aliveness that occurs when we are able to access this space.
The fodder for listening is with us every moment. External sensory stimulus of all kinds can be listened to, not just what is processed by our ears. Our ear drums are the most sensitive organ where we receive the vibrations of sound waves, but they collide with our entire body. Further, we can take the same approach and apply it to all of our sense experience: we can listen to a flower with our eyes, to a smell, and to any manner of touch. Every iota of our bodies is sense-able — and by opening to hear them, an unfolding and expansion occurs.
When this approach is applied to trusted sounds of nature or music created with a certain intention, it can give way to transformative states — and indeed the ritual use of music is understood in many cultures to be a gateway to bliss and altered states. While music mostly fills a role of entertainment in modern culture, you can see how this human impulse to experience the transcendent through collective sound ritual is reflected in many modern concert cultures.
By learning to listen, we let go of the discursive impulse to make sense of the world through ontological categorization. Listening is a form of deep acceptance of what is at any given moment.
An Individual Note: of Music, Sound and Electronics by Daphne Oram
Daphne Oram was a pioneering British electronic musician, composer, and inventor of a musical instrument called the Oramics Machine. She wrote a book called An Individual Note: of Music, Sound and Electronics, which is a fascinating combination of electronic music primer and philosophical manifesto. In it, Oram describes the math and mechanics of electronic music, complete with diagrams and formulas, but always in the context of the resulting sound and its effect on the listener.
She explicitly states at the beginning that while the book is instructive, it’s not meant to be a textbook, and is explicitly for the amusement of the reader. I found it amusing, and playful — as much like hanging out an expert who knows a topic deeply, but is still engaged in the joy of the topic and ignites that in their companion. And while I certainly learned many facts in the course of reading it, what made a bigger impression on me was her explorations of the nature of sound and music, and her engagement with the inherent mystery therein.
Working at the dawn of electronic music, Oram contemplates how a capacitor is similar to a composer, and how the juxtaposition of a composer with electronic instruments might function. She’s not just concerned with how it will work in isolation, but in relationship to the human act of creation.
Oram makes use of extensive analogies between various sound shaping techniques and the human body and experience. She presents a thesis that interacting with art, and specifically music, changes the listener if they can open themselves to the experience. Further, she explains how the profound experience of music is a phenomenon that is mutually arising between composer and listener.
So if I do give any advice, it would be to meet the music without any preconceived ideas. Remember that the signal reaching your consciousness is as much you as it is the music - it is the sum and difference of you and the music. If you can clarify vour own wavepattern and clear it of all irrelevances, before you modulate the music with it, then you have more chance of finding the experience rewarding. If you can become so sensitive to the music, so related to it, that it lifts you to a different region of resonance, then that achievement is almost as much to your credit as it is to the composer. - Daphne Oram
I’ve only touched the surface of this book here — it’s a profound work that stands among the most important books on music I’ve read in my life. She writes about sound, technology, humanity, drugs, dance, life, and everything in between. If any of that sounds interesting to you I recommend you seek out a copy.