(See link to read the entire article on BioSonics.com by Dr. John Beaulieu, ND, PhD)
In my personal quest to integrate sound healing with the music I create I have experienced a variety of genres of music including expanded, improvisatory forms that I believe can be used to heal our planet. I found this article to be fascinating and resonated with my own mission at this time. Please click the link to read the entire article as this is just an excerpt.
The sound healing arts, like the musical arts, are undergoing a revolution. Just as there is a new music, there is a new healing. Speaking of the new healing, Dr. Larry Dossey states:
“…The spacetime view of healing and disease tells us that a vital part of the goal of every therapist is to help the client toward a reordering of his world view. We must help him realize that he is a process in spacetime, not an isolated entity who is fragmented from the world of the healthy and who is adrift in flowing time, moving slowly toward extermination. To the extent that we accomplish this task, we are healers.”(1)
For the new healers, the accomplishment of this task is through consciousness. In traditional medicine the focus of health care is on the physical body. Consciousness is no longer accepted.
“Everything is alive. There is nothing in principle, therefore, preventing the use of consciousness as a primary form of therapeutic intervention at all levels of matter – from the subatomic particles through molecules, cells, tissues, organ systems, etc.”(2)
The assumption of this article is that new music is opening the doors to a new way of being – that the experience of listening to new music can alter our world view and change our consciousness and thereby transmute our physical. And furthermore, that this transmutation is necessary for our next step in evolution, as well as living completely in our current reality.
Defining new music is elusive because the listener is the music. When the listener is “in self” and willing to go everywhere, without hesitation, totally involved and multi-dimensional without regard to any preconceived form (including his physical body) then it would be fair to say that all music is new music.
New music by way of the composer, composition, and performance challenges the listener to maintain his sense of self while being involved in a nonlinear multi-dimensional event.
New music is teaching and preparing us for a universe described by Einstein as “an aggregate of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping transformational events.” John Cage expresses it this way in his Experimental Music Doctrine:
“Urgent, unique, uninformed about history and theory, beyond the imagination, central to a sphere without surface, becoming is unimpeded energetically broadcast. There is no escape from its action. It does not exist as one of a series of discrete steps, but as a transmission in all directions from the field’s center. It is inextricably synchronous with all other sounds, not-sound, which latter, received by other sets that the ear, operate in the same manner.”(3)
Entering new music with our ears – listening – we seek harmony. Not harmony in the tonal sense, but harmony in the original meaning of the word, “to fit together.” We learn to let ourselves fit with and resonate with the sounds. Dissonance means not fitting. Dissonance is an inability to be flexible. It is the root of all disease. The physicist David Bohm speaks of health as the essence of non-obstructed, indivisible, flowing movement of the self’s internal harmony transcribed into the external world. When the internal and external are at odds with each other – dissonant – the result is disease or a break in harmony. In tonal music the appreciator sought the fundamental in the music as a metaphor of spiritual unity, the ending of a journey. In new music one seeks the fundamental in one’s self; the return to the fundamental is anywhere, anytime, and any direction, because the fundamental is everywhere and here.
“Location and times – what is it in me that meets them all, whenever and wherever, and makes me at home? (Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass)
“Wherever we are, whatever we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at fifty miles per hour. Static between the stations. Rain.”(4)
This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of new music, that the listener must not only appreciate the sound but give him or herself to the sound. John Cage says that sound:
“…does not view itself as thought, as ought, as needed another sound for its elucidation, as etc.; it has no time for any consideration – it is occupied with the performance of its characteristics: before it has died away it must have made perfectly exact its frequency, its loudness, its length, its overtone structure, the precise morphology of these and of itself.”(5)
Webster’s defines healing as “to make sound” It might be more accurate if we were to say “to become sound.”
