On Aug. 5, 1966, the Beatles released their seventh studio album, Revolver.
Although “Tomorrow Never Knows” was the first track the band had recorded, it became the final track on the record — two minutes and 58 seconds that represent perhaps the Beatles’ supreme fusion of music, lyrics, instrumentation, technical innovation, and Eastern philosophical influences.
The song begins with a chant-like recitation: “Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream / It is not dying.” The lyrics are drawn from the eighth-century Buddhist text known as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Traditional Indian instruments — tanpura and sitar — contribute to the modal background. From there, the musical influences and textures meld together in a spectrum of then-cutting-edge techniques — sampling, overdubbed tape loops, and reverse recording of instruments and vocals, all blended with electroacoustic recording effects associated with musique concréte. With this song, the Beatles launched the genre of psychedelic rock.
“The whole point is that we are the song,” George Harrison later wrote of “Tomorrow Never Knows.” “The self is coming from a state of pure awareness, from the state of being. All the rest that comes about in the outward manifestation of the physical world (including all the fluctuations which end up as thoughts and actions) is just clutter. The true nature of each soul is pure consciousness. So, the song is really about transcending and about the quality of the transcendent.”
It’s been almost 60 years since the release of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” but the interest that the Beatles showed in exploring the intersection of ancient Eastern traditions and ultrasophisticated scientific innovations has never been more alive than it is today — from the popularity of sound baths, yoga, and meditation to the fantastic voyage of mapping the brain’s neural pathways in real time.
It is this fascinating intersection of East and West that has stimulated the research of San Diego-based neuroscientist Tim Mullen. And it was Mullen who more than a decade ago co-founded the symposium “Mozart and the Mind” in conjunction with San Diego’s Mainly Mozart festival and its CEO and artistic director, Nancy Laturno.
“The goal of the ‘Mozart and the Mind’ symposium,” Mullen explains, “was to bring leading researchers, therapists, and clinicians together with world-class musicians and composers to explore the impact of music on our minds and health. Our first principal speaker was Aniruddh (Ani) Patel of Tufts University, a clinical psychologist whose specialty is the cognitive neuroscience of music. During that event in 2012, Ani interacted with [then] St. Paul Chamber Orchestra principal cellist Ronald Thomas to illustrate the relationship between the neurobiological process of making music and the evolutionary development of our nervous system, demonstrating how the body reacts to different modes of music and frequencies.”
In addition to his work as a researcher, Mullen is also a musician and an artist who designs interactive soundscapes. It was in this realm that he began a fascinating collaboration with neurologist Adam Gazzaley, who is executive director of the Neuroscape center at the University of California, San Francisco; the Silicon Valley technology company Nvidia; and Grateful Dead percussionist Mickey Hart. They called the project the Glass Brain.
His Brain on Music
In 2014, in conjunction with Mainly Mozart, Hart, Gazzaley, Mullen, and music therapist Christine Stevens presented a live concert that included a high-resolution electroencephalography (EEG) recording of Hart’s brain activity in real time as he participated in a drum circle while inside a virtual reality world. (Whoa!) During the performance, Hart could improvize inside his VR environment as a screen projected his brain-wave activity and mapped neural pathways as they were being activated.
“It was quite literally mind-blowing,” Mullen recalls. “There were hundreds of people there: tie-dyed Deadheads, tech executives, healthcare professionals, community organizers, middle schoolers, educators, musicians, and scientists, all dancing and drumming together. Above us all, a jumbotron displayed a gorgeously colorful cutting-edge visualization of Mickey’s brain activity. His avatar was a Grateful Dead skeleton. At the same time, my avatar could fly to any sector of Mickey’s ‘glass brain’ as it was activated. I believe everyone there felt music’s power to heal body and mind, to transcend individual differences and bring people together as a community.”
Today, Mullen’s research is focused on the way modern scientific techniques can be applied in order to understand ancient non-Western forms of music and healing, from the brain-stimulating rhythmic patterns and ritual nature of Indonesian gamelan performance to the chanting of the four-tone Vedic mantras, which date back to the second millennium B.C.E. Precise chanting of these Vedas is meant to stimulate specific energy centers of the body’s nervous system — the chakras, which are a central precept in Tibetan Buddhism.
“It’s important for us to understand the intersections between the Western and Eastern approaches in the context of how music can be used in healing,” Mullen emphasizes. “There is ample evidence of the therapeutic potential of music in many different forms: the ancient Greek philosophies of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle; the Five Elements theory in traditional Chinese medicine; the specific tones of Indian ragas that are part of the ancient practice of Ayurveda medicine; the chanted tones of the Vedas; and Native American healing rituals. Studying these forms can help us develop deeper paradigms for music therapy in the West.”
Sonic Devas
Without question, we are living through stressful times, and many people are seeking healing and regeneration from non-Western sources, be it prana (the life-force breathing technique central to the practice of yoga), the deep massage and chakra stimulation of craniosacral therapy, guided meditation and the chanting of Vedic mantras, or giving oneself over (dropping in) to the immersive experience of a sound bath.
Sound baths are decidedly trending. At the same time, the form is attracting an ever-growing number of highly trained classical musicians who have chosen to forsake the rigors of classical performance in favor of a more relaxed and inclusive performer-audience experience.
Two such converts are singer and multi-instrumentalist Helane Marie Anderson, who is currently on the faculty of the USC Thornton School of Music, and flutist Lynda Arnold, a graduate of the DePauw University School of Music. Together they are key members of the unique ensemble known as Sonic Devas.
Anderson’s classical musical path led her from the conservatory to working behind the scenes in the administration of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the music publishing company Boosey & Hawkes. The work was intense and paid well, but, as Anderson explains, “there was a part of me that wasn’t being expressed. I didn’t feel free.” Then she discovered the world of sound baths.
“It was 10 years ago that I gave my first sound bath,” she recalls. “I had been dabbling on my own with gongs, crystal singing bowls, Tibetan metal bowls, and tuning forks. At the same time, I was learning about healing through sound modalities and energy channeling [and about] the chanting of Vedic mantras and practicing the techniques of craniosacral therapy. It was an entirely different way of approaching music than the way I had been taught. [This different way] functions on two different planes simultaneously — the physical and the realm of psychic energy.”
Committing herself to a serious course of study, Anderson enrolled in a 200-hour certification program taught at the Globe Institute in Sausalito. That course, Anderson says, expanded her musical skills as well as her openness to Eastern forms of meditation and healing, particularly through the practice of singing.
Since those formative days, Anderson has greatly expanded her sound bath experiences to include a wide range of instruments: Native America flutes, various percussion instruments, and most recently, harp.
But it was her association with Arnold— a professional sound engineer as well as a flutist — that led Anderson to introduce electronic phasing into her performances. The result, as I experienced during a performance at the Malibu home of Carla and Leigh McCloskey, was remarkable. Sitting in the enveloping environment of the McCloskeys’ Zen garden, the crystalline nature of Anderson’s voice — phased and overlaid with various instruments — was truly transcendent as tones layered on tones, the setting sun dappling the leaves as clouds passed overhead.
“I have a basic template of musical ideas I begin each performance with,” Anderson explains. “But by being able to control the electronics as well as the instrumental choices, I can modify and adapt each performance to match the energy I feel coming from the audience.”
In terms of their classical training, Anderson and Arnold share a common insight.
“In performing classical music, you’re taught to strive for perfection and play exactly the right notes,” Arnold explains. “It wasn’t freeing me. I craved a different form of artistic expression. I would go to clubs with my flute and improvise with the DJs. That led me into recording. Sound baths have allowed me to rediscover myself. I get this wonderful sense of being energetically involved with my audience, the way playing music felt when I was young. Playing with Sonic Devas has opened up a whole new world of sound.”
Sonic Devas, a flexibly scaled ensemble of mostly women, presents concerts of original compositions, as opposed to the open-ended nature of a sound bath. The songs blend elements of Eastern and Western melodic styles, and many incorporate Vedic mantras sung in Sanskrit. The group’s success has led to concert tours and the release of recordings.
In a Landscape — Have Piano, Will Travel
If you were to listen to a recorded piano recital by Hunter Noack, you would likely be impressed by his skill and the range of his repertory. You would, however, be completely missing the live performance component that makes his ongoing series of site-specific concerts, In a Landscape, so unique.
I attended a performance by Noack in the remote wasteland of the high Mojave Desert at an isolated architectural anomaly called Folly Mojave. It’s a set of monumental abstract structures that rise from the desert like Egyptian relics.
The performance was sponsored by the Palm Springs Art Museum, and getting there was not half the fun. Folly Mojave is about as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get, situated at the end of a seven-mile dirt road. Four-wheel-drive transportation was recommended.
There, perched on a flatbed trailer, was a Steinway grand piano. Noack entered and seated himself at the keyboard. Ordinarily under these circumstances, the acoustics would be problematic. In fact, the location’s total isolation and impossible acoustics are exactly the point. That’s because to experience an In a Landscape concert, visitors are outfitted with high-quality headphones.
Once Noack was in place, we were instructed to put on our headphones. What transpired over the next 90 minutes was a recital like no other. Noack functioned as narrator and soloist, encouraging us to either watch his performance in the traditional manner or come and lie under the piano or — and this was the most remarkable part — wander off alone into the desert, our heads filled with the piano music of Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, J.S. Bach, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Frédéric Chopin. The experience of being alone in your head with Mozart was, well, otherworldly.
When the recital ended, to a rousing ovation, Noack thanked his audience and prepared to pack up his piano and head on down the road. In the coming months, In a Landscape performances are planned for Lesley Miller Dunes Meadow Park in Gearhart, Oregon (Aug. 30 and 31), Shore Acres State Park in Coos Bay, Oregon (Sept. 4 and 5), Fort Ross State Historic Park in Sonoma County, California (Sept. 10), and Crissy Field in San Francisco (Sept. 13).
It was Rudyard Kipling who incorrectly mused, “East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” Rather, the best thing to do is to take the Beatles’ advice to turn off your mind and float downstream.
