Music, Meditation, Pan Pipes.

A few leftover, musical, thoughts from a post earlier this month about meditation.

Music must be a helpful aid to meditation. My own restless mind will not stay still enough to meditate for more than 30 seconds, so I cannot claim a credible opinion on this, but when has that ever stopped me? I tottered around YouTube looking for inspiration. There are lots of videos promising "music for meditation", long videos of an hour or more. What would suit one person's taste could be anathema to another, what follows is simply my own opinion.

I sampled a few minutes of a couple of special meditation music vids, found them a tad synthetic sounding; experienced a similar reaction to some other New Agey offerings. What would I find soothing ? Gregorian chants sprang to mind - the wonderful echoey mystical musicality of it. Dang ! Gregorians Do the Beatles now?? What the.......? Granted there are still some traditional Gregorian chant albums around, but those I sampled didn't give me the right amount of echo - probably due to combined limited acoustics of YouTube and my computer's sound system.

How about Enya? A possibility, but from that thought my mind leaped immediately to pan pipes. Yes! Simple, natural, honest, organic (in every sense of the word - pipe organs were an evolution of the ancient pan pipes.)

Pan pipes: their history spans the continents of Earth. They appeared in various different cultures, perhaps not at exactly the same time in man-made time, but probably around the same stage of development of each culture. In the Americas, China, Europe, Africa evidence of this, one of man's earliest musical instruments has been found, stretching back for at least 6000 years. The instruments were constructed from reeds, bamboo cane, wood, clay, bone.....whatever was to hand in a particular location.

The instrument's name - or that given to it in the West, honours Greek mythological god Pan. The story goes that Pan, god of pastoral folk and their flocks, fell in love with a beautiful nymph, Syrinx. Syrinx didn't find Pan, with his cloven hooves and shaggy countenance in the least fanciable. She fled, with Pan in pursuit. When they reached a river bank with nowhere for Syrinx to escape, she became desperate. She called to the river god for aid and in response was turned into a reed. Pan, reaching out to embrace the nymph found only a bunch of reeds in his grasp. His sighs produced a strange melodic sound to echo through the reeds. To demonstrate his undying love Pan broke off some reeds and made them into a flute-like instrument, played sad melodies to his lost love, who he imagined to be embodied in the instrument he always carried.

A modern master of the Pan pipes is Romanian musician Gheorghe Zamfir. Here he plays Chopin's Etude no. 3 in E major
Opus 10 no. 3 "Tristesse".



Edgar Muenala plays "Chess"



This piece is titled only Tibetan Flute - Deep Tibetan music (1) - it's lovely, but politically slanted comments below have to be ignored!.




From Pan's Pipes, an essay by Robert Louis Stevenson from his book Virginibus Puerisque (translation "for boys and girls")
Last paragraph:

There are moments when the mind refuses to be satisfied with evolution, and demands a ruddier presentation of the sum of man's experience. Sometimes the mood is brought about by laughter at the humorous side of life, as when, abstracting ourselves from earth, we imagine people plodding on foot, or seated in ships and speedy trains, with the planet all the while whirling in the opposite direction, so that, for all their hurry, they travel back-foremost through the universe of space. Sometimes it comes by the spirit of delight, and sometimes by the spirit of terror. At least, there will always be hours when we refuse to be put off by the feint of explanation, nicknamed science; and demand instead some palpitating image of our estate, that shall represent the troubled and uncertain element in which we dwell, and satisfy reason by the means of art. Science writes of the world as if with the cold finger of a starfish; it is all true; but what is it when compared to the reality of which it discourses? Where hearts beat high in April, and death strikes, and hills totter in the earthquake, and there is a glamour over all the objects of sight, and a thrill in all noises for the ear, and Romance herself has made her dwelling among men? So we come back to the old myth, and hear the goat-footed piper making the music which is itself the charm and terror of things; and when a glen invites our visiting footsteps, fancy that Pan leads us thither with a gracious tremolo; or when our hearts quail at the thunder of the cataract, tell ourselves that he has stamped his hoof in the nigh thicket.