WRITINGS
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Living Music
David Hahn
away dream all away
Not too long ago in Philadelphia, a lone woman was running along a wooded trail. Her swift feet crunched on the dry gravel. She was listening to her iPod and did not notice the tell-tale cracking and rustling leaves. She was later found crushed to death by an uprooted tree.
Walking in a sunny, lake-side park recently in Seattle, I stopped to pet an especially friendly dog. He seemed to be smiling. I looked up at the owner to say how sweet the dog was and was shouted at: “Can’t hear you!” Then I noticed the earbuds.
Somewhere in a lonely Nevada town, a casually-dressed young man is is sitting in an air-conditioned room playing a video game. He sits comfortably before a large shoot-em-up style screen with realistic-looking cross-hairs moving at his control through a desert city-scape. He gently applies pressure to the red button on his joy stick. An explosion rocks the screen. People actually are killed.
Blue planet Earth rolls on. With the ever increasing burdens of war, overcrowding, extinction, and pollution, our race (the human one, that is) stares distractedly at screens, listens to ipods, gabs on cell phones. The tumultuous whirl of contemporary visual and mental stimuli imposes on us a falsely soothing state of fewer thoughts and fewer ideas. Often our thoughts arise not from reflection, not from listening to our inner selves, but from incursions into our lives. We -- and I include myself -- are practicing a pattern of terminal avoidance and disassociation. The result is increasingly less connection with the human community. Lacking adequate active and participatory involvement, the screen becomes an option over the human face, war becomes an option over peace, and greed parades as a positive motivating factor.
As a composer, the consideration of this condition constantly concerns me. Living Music requires living listeners and we have diverged quite a bit from John Cage’s Silence where the creation and reception of art is characterized as a “focus of attention.” Listening, really listening is a skill that becomes increasingly difficult to learn, to teach, or to find time to do.
This is why the living composer is so essential as an “antennae for humanity” (to use Ezra Pound’s words). This is why the world desperately needs music. Living Music can facilitate a sensitivity to deeper levels of consciousness as well as open up ways to interact harmoniously with the world and even outwardly express--without using words--personal perspectives.
Listeners can be considered as group meditators whose thoughtful reflection can help to change our minds and reconnect with the community of humans. A world summit featuring Living Music would certainly open more dialogue, help find more solutions.
There is a light within all of us, and I am pretty sure there are certain things we humans all agree yet are not presently equipped to see. We simply need to find (or create) the space where minds begin to change. It all begins with the silence.
The Spirit is the Conscious Ear.
-Emily Dickinson
Not too long ago in Philadelphia, a lone woman was running along a wooded trail. Her swift feet crunched on the dry gravel. She was listening to her iPod and did not notice the tell-tale cracking and rustling leaves. She was later found crushed to death by an uprooted tree.
Walking in a sunny, lake-side park recently in Seattle, I stopped to pet an especially friendly dog. He seemed to be smiling. I looked up at the owner to say how sweet the dog was and was shouted at: “Can’t hear you!” Then I noticed the earbuds.
Somewhere in a lonely Nevada town, a casually-dressed young man is is sitting in an air-conditioned room playing a video game. He sits comfortably before a large shoot-em-up style screen with realistic-looking cross-hairs moving at his control through a desert city-scape. He gently applies pressure to the red button on his joy stick. An explosion rocks the screen. People actually are killed.
Blue planet Earth rolls on. With the ever increasing burdens of war, overcrowding, extinction, and pollution, our race (the human one, that is) stares distractedly at screens, listens to ipods, gabs on cell phones. The tumultuous whirl of contemporary visual and mental stimuli imposes on us a falsely soothing state of fewer thoughts and fewer ideas. Often our thoughts arise not from reflection, not from listening to our inner selves, but from incursions into our lives. We -- and I include myself -- are practicing a pattern of terminal avoidance and disassociation. The result is increasingly less connection with the human community. Lacking adequate active and participatory involvement, the screen becomes an option over the human face, war becomes an option over peace, and greed parades as a positive motivating factor.
As a composer, the consideration of this condition constantly concerns me. Living Music requires living listeners and we have diverged quite a bit from John Cage’s Silence where the creation and reception of art is characterized as a “focus of attention.” Listening, really listening is a skill that becomes increasingly difficult to learn, to teach, or to find time to do.
This is why the living composer is so essential as an “antennae for humanity” (to use Ezra Pound’s words). This is why the world desperately needs music. Living Music can facilitate a sensitivity to deeper levels of consciousness as well as open up ways to interact harmoniously with the world and even outwardly express--without using words--personal perspectives.
Listeners can be considered as group meditators whose thoughtful reflection can help to change our minds and reconnect with the community of humans. A world summit featuring Living Music would certainly open more dialogue, help find more solutions.
There is a light within all of us, and I am pretty sure there are certain things we humans all agree yet are not presently equipped to see. We simply need to find (or create) the space where minds begin to change. It all begins with the silence.
The Spirit is the Conscious Ear.
-Emily Dickinson
