SuttaCentral
DhammaWheel & DharmaWheel have this thread, so I decided to bring it here.
What music are you listening to right now, presuming you listen to music, and what would you suggest to your fellow internet wanderers?
For the purposes of this thread, any audio that is devoid of “significantly attracting visuals”, even if it is speaking alone, constitutes “music”.
The Ruin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcIZrlid5UE
The recital is in Old English, with Dominic Leonard’s modern English translation in subtitles. There is, however, a much better (i.e., both more accurate and more vital and animated) translation by Michael Alexander:
J.S.Bach - Passacaglia & Fugue in c-minor:
Classical, solemn: (Notre Dame Paris)
Modern bravura: (Cameron Carpenter)
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (transcription): (Royal Philharmonic / Respighi)
This is worth adding – only the Passacaglia, but with refreshing expressive feminine energy:
Martha’s Vineyard seems very good. But the bass guitarist seems somewhat out of place.
Radha Krsna Temple - London
Once listening to this piece (for the nth time) I thought “this was the equivalent of a rock concert of it’s day … massive ‘stacks’ of instruments, loud and thrilling”. These organs are also massive, technically complicated instruments for a pre-electronic era. It’s erotic for me in the original meaning of eros in Greek: something that speaks and stimulates the senses.
Which brings me to ask: what does the EBT say about ‘indulging’ in the eros of music?
I recall instructions about idle speach about music and musicians among other entertainments.
Just knowing what is to come in the big “release” adds to the excitement of anticipation.
Anyway @cjmacie, thanks I listened to the several versions.
[quote=“Feynman, post:10, topic:5727, full:true”]
Once listening to this piece (for the nth time) I thought “this was the equivalent of a rock concert of it’s day … massive ‘stacks’ of instruments, loud and thrilling”. These organs are also massive, technically complicated instruments for a pre-electronic era. [/quote]
Actually, more large-scale acoustic pipe organs, even tracker-action, exist today that ever, and are still being built and installed throughout the Western world – from San Francisco to Sidney, but even in China and Japan. Cameron Carpenter’s “International Touring Organ” (that he plays here) is actually, as you probably know, a “virtual” pipe organ – every individual sound (pitch and register-”stop”) is a recording, in extreme hifi, of actual physical organ pipes “speaking”, stored digitally and then accessed and combined using state-of-the-art high-speed multiprocessing, not to mention 20,000 watts or so of amplifiers and a huge battery of speakers (not unlike roc-concerts). I’ve witnessed him playing that instrument live, in fact in a concert, last year, in San Francisco, where he ended the program with this Passagalia & Fugue in c. It wqs a s/w cleaner performance than this youtube one, and impressed me no end, as the program was not
pre-announced, and that particular piece might well be the one I’d elect to have on hand at the only piece of music on a proverbial isolated desert island.
(Disclosure: I played pipe organ starting about age 12, and seriously continued that study expressly in order to play the complete Bach repertoire. Having done so, I don’t dwell on it a lot now-a-days, but occasionally go back to it, albeit vicariously now.)
[quote=“Feynman, post:10, topic:5727, full:true”]
Which brings me to ask: what does the EBT say about ‘indulging’ in the eros of music? I recall instructions about idle speach about music and musicians among other entertainments.[/quote]
Exactly. Even “classical” music can be entertained in an extreme of piti-type experience – thrilling, and where does it leave you afterwards? On the other hand, outstanding examples of music (Western-classical type, as in my limited experience) can also have a kind of profound
mental-spiritual dimension, where one can recall the whole of the piece, independently of the process of listening through it in time; to my mind, a level of “insight” – especially with reference to some larger scale, “multi-media” (“Gesamtkunstwerke” in Wagner’s term) works like some operas, cantatas, the Bach “Passions”, etc.
Also, the Passacaglia, as well as Bach’s Chaconne in d-minor (from a violin suite), have the peculiar quality of being “meditations” on a constantly recurring theme (a cantus firma ‘chant’, if you will).
There’s also the dimension in which the bulk of Bach’s music is liturgical, delving the depths of religious experience, as distinct from more mundane entertainment. For instance this chorus is, to my mind, a quintessential statement of ‘anicca’:
BWV
26 “Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig is der Menschen Leben…”
Ach wie flüchtig, ach wie nichtig ist der Menschen Leben!
(Oh how fleeting, oh how nothingish is human life!)
Wie ein Nebel bald entstehet und auch wieder bald vergehet,
(Like a fog suddenly appears and then suddenly disappears,)
so ist unser Leben, sehet!
(So are our lives – Dig (see) it!)
Then too, there’s the matter of chant: what is it that can make a profound difference between just reading the text and listening to the chanting of, for instance, the Karaniya Sutta or the Rattana Sutta?
"And what is lack of food for the arising of unarisen sloth & drowsiness, or for the growth & increase of sloth & drowsiness once it has arisen? There is the potential for effort, the potential for exertion, the potential for striving. To foster appropriate attention to them: This is lack of food for the arising of unarisen sloth & drowsiness, or for the growth & increase of sloth & drowsiness once it has arisen. Sn46.51
I use fast paced music when I’m feeling tired when driving. It tends to raise my energy and dispel sloth and torpor.
A good example is Freed from desire (!) by Gala:
Hello fine folks, I definitely like the idea of this tread! I created a playlist on Spotify a week ago with the same impetus. You can find it at: spotify:user:127651394:playlist:5DGwFl1lngYMDYMoc1fvWi
The playlist I created is basically rock with spiritual or religious references. I tried to stay away from overt romantic songs. The playlist itself is intended to be undogmatically focused upon the concept of religion in general within rock music, but the main influences are Christianity, of course, because this music originates in the West which is religiously based in biblical themes, Hinduism with such artists like Kula Shaker and the Beatles, and Rastafarianism from artists like Bob Marley and other artists with a similar vein like Ben Harper. I included the songs I like, and not just every song. Unfortunately, I don’t know of any rock and roll with overt Buddhist influence. There are songs that seem Buddhist to me like ‘Castles Made of Sand’ by Jimmy Hendrix, but it is not overtly Buddhist. Anyways, it was fun to do, and for me I am happy to listen to rock music that I like, that has some kind of meaningful message, and is not overly sexual or romantic. I hope you enjoy.
Peace and Metta, Weston
In recent years I’ve been listening mostly to jazzy stuff.
These Bhante Gnanaloka uses in his ‘Dhamma rock concert’. I was very inspired by him so I use these to bring up that feeling.
