Tower takes flight.
Sometimes, going to the edge of spirituality starts by finding the center. Bay Area musician/teacher/researcher/sound explorer, Alan Tower has been on the cutting edge of music, sound and spirituality for over thirty years, by exploring the depths of Natural Resonance, through his leadership with The Green Music Network which has organized a series of inspiring and leading edge cave concerts in The Marin Headlands, in conjunction with The US Parks Service.
The latest installment of the Cave Concert Series takes place on October 17th, where Tower and GMN in partnership with Samevesha is producing "Hang Rhapsody" a world premiere performance, featuring the otherworldly sounds of The Hang Drum, a percussively harmonic instrument that resembles a UFO with measured divots.
Here is a look at the hyper-productive life of Alan Tower.
When did you realize that you were not cut out to fit into any one mold, either personally or spiritually?
"It comes and goes. As a kid I wore two socks of different colors all the time and then realized one day it was not normal. It would come up throughout relationships with women over the years as well. It seemed to be fueled both by natural tendencies, mixed with an ego based drive. The ego now is mostly dissolved back into the water of life, but the fit into a mold question appears once in a while when someone who is very eclectic and iconoclastic presents themselves to my world, and I realize that I am just like that in my own way as well. Other times I feel like the most normal joe as can be. Not having an interest in any form of mainstream religion, while being pulled like a moth to light when it comes to the spiritual side of life, has been an indication as well."
Give a basic overview of your practice.
"My current practice has evolved from intensive practice on the acoustic guitar (5-7 hours per day) for many years in the 70’s -80’s to composing on unusual instruments for large numbers of hours, but with no practice associated, just composing. From there it has evolved to a very specific practice I developed which is sitting in this Resonant Body Chamber for 1-2 hours per day using my voice to enter a river of resonance. It feels like coming home and is very very compelling. My teacher is helping me grok how the practice is truly one of exploring consciousness through sound. I do this generally before sitting down to the computer each day which grounds me in the stream of life (before the electronic vibrations of electromagnetism and indirect communication with others starts) Organizing programs and people’s energy is a major part of my day in orchestrating events for Green Music Network. Composition is still a major part of my life coming in big spurts (lately 3 new pieces for Hang) and then fading back a bit."
What was your most radical, spiritual, breakthrough?
"It started first when I was paralyzed at 24 from the neck down. Everything up to that point had been complete grace and easy. That experience turned out to be wading deeper in grace as it opened me to the world of spirit through physical pain, and shook up my comfortable world of music, women and friends.
Then much later in adult life I took a Landmark Education Advanced Course thanks to my wife, Nika.
Probably the most radical transformation occurred when I got verbally slapped around by the Landmark trainer in front of 100 people in the community taking the course. I ended up choosing to admit publicly that I didn’t really care about any of them and that I was actually better than them. At that moment my being shifted and continued to crack open to a new reality of recognizing for the first time that the light in each of us is singularly the same and it was not possible to believe any more that we were not all completely equal in our divinity – regardless of what worldly accomplishments etc. present themselves on the surface for each of us. This changed everything for me. What has ensued have been experiences, for example, of being everybody and nobody at the same time, of looking in the mirror and having no name or identity in the image."
How do you see music and spirituality converge?
"Everything is in vibration at one level or another, constantly forever. Vibrations organize all form in our world, or better to say, the secret code inside vibration organizes all form. Sound is extroverted vibration accessible to us. Music is organized sound. This, for me, provides what seems like a direct link into the mystery of existence. To me, spirituality is the direct experience of being part of the whole of existence - feeling in the stream of all life, not separated but holy part of it. Realizing we are source itself acting as source. Sound and music for me is the most compelling mode of interacting with world in this way. Music is vibrational art in the air. We need air to breathe. I came in as an intellectual type, reading everything and thinking everything of importance occurs in thinking, through concepts and ideas about things - through the machinations of the mind. This was it for me for most of my life. Once my various teachers, Brian Swimme, Mark Deutsch, Nika Tower, Allaudin Mathieu, Landmark, Anurag Gupta, Rafael Bejarano challenged me, shaking me into another opening for feeling and seeing the world . . . music became an even more powerful window into the spirit, and another way of being not dependent on mind as much and more on heart and connection to others and the whole. My current teacher Allaudin often says, “The mind is the willing slave of the heart”."
What is one thing about music that you think people overlook?
"We are in a state of amnesia in western culture about how music became organized for tonal consumption. We have completely forgotten that in the 1700’s we in the west made a very specific decision (that some other cultures did not make) to adjust our tonal template, putting all out notes slightly out of tune with each other through what is called Equal Temperament (ET). We took the Harmonic series which is a spiral and made it linear. It was a quite brilliant compromise, a remarkable system in many ways, but in a fundamental way it distanced us from the beauty of sonic resonance. In the west we are all about taking narrative journeys musically. We love to stack notes to create chords and then create a progression of chords in one key center, and then find ways to elegantly leave that tonal center for another and them craftily come back home.
We are about the external adventure, while in India and other cultures in the Mideast its more about the internal journey. It’s based on creating a sonic ground, a still point, an unchanging vibrational core with wonderfully resonant tones on top that are related to how nature actually organizes sound via the harmonic series. There is generally no stacking of notes into chords or changing of tonal centers. This system allows for an experience of deep resonance and contemplation that we are missing in some ways in the west. The two systems are therefore very different, but could offer each other insight, if only there was an opening for this. Often, however, there are judgments made about each system from proponents of the other system, or at least a real misperception about what each culture is up to. Equal Temperament appears so be slowly taking over the world. My work is therefore about creating direct experiences of resonance for transformations of consciousness. This occurs through resonance based fixed pitch instruments and approaches. As a western guy I still love stacking notes into chords and sometimes changing chords, but this can be done in a conscious way through different forms of tuning and by knowing the strengths of each system. Resonance as a way(ve) of life"
Why do you abstain from using the term, "sound healing?"
"The world is essentially a compete mystery of grace provided us. There is pain and anxiety, of course, as part of the experience of all humans. I personally don’t think we know enough about how its all put together, our energy centers, our desires, our bodies experience of a particular moment to do more than have an intention for sound and music to contribute to our lives. I have nothing but respect for all the folks who are looking for ways that this remarkable mystery of sound can contribute. But it sometimes appears to be about what people want to believe, rather than an integration of science, body, sound and spirit that has a real ground to it. What I am drawn to is to provide experiences of resonance, produced directly by participants, to create a window into have an experience of who we truly are. What people may term “sound healing” may come out of this for some, but I don’t presume that there is anything that is broken or needing to be healed, or that it is me providing this healing. Just having an experience of dropping mind for body resonance with sound can provide a window, an opening for future experiences for people that can feel like oneness with all. This to me is something that has a lasting effect, and can launch people into all kinds of creativity and work. This kind of depth of being in the world can shoot someone past the concept of healing, into a place where there is a just such a basic resonance with others and the world that our body/mind/spirit is vibrating in a whole way. We can then leave others lit up with our light, which is the next stage after awakening. Its like an mobius strip feeding back on itself in ever widening spirals."
Have you reached the cutting edge in your music yet? If not, where out there or in there is that edge?
"My teacher Allaudin Mathieu says that what musicians do is make the impossible familiar. This rings true for me. My compositions often take between 50-80 hours of refining until they are completed, and can then become free as a foundation for improvisation. I sometimes listen to one of own albums from years ago and can’t believe some of it was possible. All the muscle memory and specific neurology required is crazy. So there is no cutting edge in that realm. Its just one changing continuum.
The cutting edge is probably bringing 30 years of composing and practice into the world of improvisation. Being able to create music in the moment with other musicians at a high level of connection and skill is a life’s work. The other area is developing tools of resonance for people to experience sound as a life path and model for living. The SoundStone out of Germany, by Klaus and Hannes Fessman, will be a new challenge for me to learn how to play this remarkable tool and instrument. They are very expensive and will require some real creativity to bring them into the states and begin to learn how to play and then offer them therapeutically.
Lastly, the Resonant Body Experience (RBE) is the thing that has come through me in the past year that is the most compelling. Its reminiscent of Burning Man in odd way. Burning Man is an intentionally designed environment – an environment designed to call forth “being” . It does this through 5 or 6 core values woven throughout the Festival. The Resonant Body Chamber is akin to this. The RBE is specifically designed in this way, providing a place to swim in a river of resonance for an experience not of mind, but rather of “being”. The difference is that there are no core values or rules to adhere to. Its pure exploration with your own voice and body tuning into the cosmological form of sound and the harmonic series. The practice has countless directions it can go for both practicing musicians and intuitive musicians (all of us). It’s very exciting – the potential. I am offering workshops at www.greenmusicnetwork.org
The “in there” part is still coming related to connecting with the audience."
What has been the biggest challenge for you to go deeper in your work?
"Funding. My work has so many dimensions, at this point in my life in my 50’s, there is really no challenge I feel directly pushed by, other than developing funding to allow this resonance based work to flourish. When we do something this long, things sort themselves out and for me things have become much more clear in the last few years.
Creating a Center of Resonance or Resonance Institute of sorts is the next major step beyond finding ways to hire staff for Green Music Network. This will take a collective of people, artists, donors and investors to bring into being. I don’t know if I have the skill set to facilitate this but its what I will do with my life from here on out. What else is there to do?"
Can you talk about the body itself as sound?
"I don’t have a lot to say about this one. I do know that the work of Alexander Lauterwasser, the heir apparent to Hans Jenny, put a didjeridu sound through transducers into a pan of water and amazing beautiful forms, shapes immediately came into being. Sound creates the forms in our world. Sound waves hitting our body must be constantly effecting us as we are approx 70% water. Most religions say that in the beginning was THE WORD. By this they don’t mean language spoken but sound/vibration/movement. We are nature, our body is pure nature and so we are part of that lineage. The body is a really powerful portal into the experience of oneness or wholeness through its ability to produce and feel vibration. If we put microphones throughout the body and its organs, what a symphony of being we would have to feast on."
Where do you think we are headed as a species as it relates to sound?
"The direction right now is towards less and less quality in our sound listening. From records to CD’s to MP3’s to ear buds there is a strong movement to quantity and ease of listening vs. quality of actual waves of vibration.
Our world is also getting louder and more dense in the area of sound. Murray Shafer treats this well in “The Tuning of the World”. My work is about reconnecting us to nature, ourselves and others through the beauty of elemental acoustic sound. Given our whole world of form is created through sound there is a core connection we will always have to this great mystery of sound. I don’t fear for where we are headed anymore. I don’t feel like our world is broken and needs desperately to be fixed. Lately there is more scientific traction for the Mutltiverse idea. Many universes at once existing concurrently. The whole thing is on fire. A fire of life and beauty and pain and longing and compassion at its core. We are all living as a whiff of spirit, a puff of consciousness that comes and goes like everything else. We offer what we are during these singular moments and then the ultimate resonance of evolution and its arrow continues forever."
How does the Earth itself play a part in sounding us?
"The Earth is the greatest teacher we have. At times I have felt like the Earth itself is the true spiritual master. Why do we have our saviors and saints always as men and women? The Earth is being assaulted daily by human consciousness with injury to its remarkable 5 billion year developed systems. We humans are still too young to really know who we are and what our role is. In the midst of it all the Earth continues, while in pain, to produce infinite beauty and potential for our transformation of consciousness. Just today volunteers cleaned up 2 tons of plastic bags and garbage around SF bay. It would not be possible for a human to throw down a plastic bag on the sand or in the water if they had a direct experience of being the Earth itself. This could not occur if we all had a direct experience of being the whole of existence, a fractal form of the whole. That is the work, to provide ways people can remember who they truly are. The Earth provides this sound of eternity in countless ways and we then create resonance out into our world. The other species we coexist with are tuned naturally to this, but without the self reflective consciousness that makes it such an interesting journey for us humans."
What are you listening to now?
"Nothing specific at this moment though sometimes that occurs. In the past few years I am not an avid listener to music except in spurts. I play and compose throughout a normal day instead. Being a producer of concerts series as well as a musician means I get a lot of CD’s given to me. I listen to those in the car and sometimes cooking in the kitchen. I will once in a while go through a retuning into Peter Gabriel’s work or the Beatles.
Generally less equal tempered music and more resonance based music."
Five artists that changed your life and why.
Peter Gabriel – To me he is the most creative musician, producer, lyricist, performer, arranger of the past 50 years and he has inspired me in the area of emotions and arrangements..
Michael Hedges – Solo acoustic guitar for me was the whole musical ball of wax for 20 years until I injured my hand, could not play any more and was introduced to a whole new world of organic sound. Hedges was on this track as he used more resonance based tunings for guitar and was the first the free up the normal connection between the right and left hands on the fingerboard. A true pioneer, I began composing in his style in 1980.I was devastated when he died. He was quite a free person.
Gaudi – He is the most organic architect to ever come along. Inspired wholly by nature’s form his work relates in visual spatial form to the internal coherence of resonance based sound and music. There is a real fundamental resonance between Mark Deutsch's work and Gaudi’s. I went to Spain last year to make this connection between the two over there. Not real successful but what came out of it was a huaca piece, Gaudi!
Mark Deutsch – He opened me up to resonance based sound vs. ET. He is creating music on a newly invented instrument that is remarkable and ahead of its time. 20th century composers constrained by the format of ET were trying to achieve what I think Mark is achieving today on his Bazantar.
Alex deGrassi - Alex is the consummate finger style guitarist. He took me under his wing in a way and helped me to connect with labels for my guitar work. He produced some of my solo guitar pieces and I recorded solo guitar in his studio back in the late 80’s. He has moved into other areas of jazz and improvisation and I just love his musicianship and sense of sound. He also uses resonance based guitar tunings. A big inspiration over the years.
Five movies that have lasting meaning for you
Well these are kind of random as there are many . . . .
Deer Hunter – The pure intensity of the emotions and feeling of war being something unnecessary and destructive to human culture..
Stranger than Fiction – A recent movie, there was one line in it that struck me as actually profound.
Century of the Self – A 6 hour documentary about how our modern world was shaped by WWII, Freud and a advertising promotion man who manipulated our American culture in the 50’s creating what we have today in the area of consumerism.
Milk – An example of a man who was not about pleasing everyone to look good but his actions and spirit came from a simple connection to humanity
Last Temptation of Christ – – A great treatment of a man who has had such a huge impact on western culture.
What is one thing you could live without?
"The suffering that we all bring upon ourselves through allowing our minds to own our experience. Being drawn to wanting things to be different than they are in each moment, and being unaware of that. A core unawareness that permeates our lives."
What is one thing you couldn't live without?
"The Resonant Body Experience and playing music on cool new instruments like the Huaca, Hang, Didjeridu and modified Shruti Box in order to share with others. Also my wife, though she isn’t a thing so that doesn’t count."
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