Celebration of the annual Hindu/Sikh/Jain religious festival of Diwali has been happening bigtime throughout our part of Central Jersey this weekend, with innumerable depictions of Lord Krishna holding/playing a flute. And the flute is often used in Hindu devotional music, heightened perhaps by the belief that the instrument’s tonal vibrations produce a mental state that helps the listener move forward along the road to Pure Awareness.
Started wondering: is anybody using their flute or whistle to play Irish Traditional-type Music to get deeply in touch with Higher Power-type feelings? Would love to hear about it!
I think in general, ITM is too “busy” both melodically and in tempo to be medatative.
I’m sure the flute or whistle could be used in a more “relaxed” melodical sense for meditation, although I think “drone” instruments lend themselves more to this end.
I think the low whistles lend themselves to free-form meditative playing, similar to NAF. I sometimes find myself doing something along these lines on my low D and alto G. The instruments just seem to ask to be played that way.
But playing Irish traditional music surely sharpens your focus and heightens your awareness. So much is about listening. I imagine it could be as meditative as rock climbing. But it is not devotional music to transport you into a blissed-out state of mind, like devotional chanting may do. Still, it may make you happy, feel good and centred, and very aware.
BTW I have not seen any image where Krishna is playing a whistle, it always is the flute.
Interesting responses all, and very insightful. So what may be the case is that within the parameters of what we know as current ITM – mostly dance music and a few short song airs – there isn’t much room or intent to use those melodies beyond their current function. If that did happen with ITM and the whistle or flute, we’d be talking about a completely new genre. Hmmm.
I keep thinking of the dancing Sufi dervishes, though, and how the music builds and builds and they get into a progressively deep ecstasy state … closest thing I ever encountered was playing in a session at Gaelic Roots in 2003 with Kevin Crawford leading a reel that was repeated about 12 times through… after the 5th time everyone sort of got that the idea was to keep going and keep building so that when you came back to the start of the tune each time it was like a huge wave crashing onto shore – but with the momentum not slacking but still moving forward not quite ever reaching a peak.
Don’t recall if anyone was dancing, but everybody was sure smiling.
I think there is a lot more to this music than its “function” for dance or song. There are dimension to the music beyond that, it can move you in quite other ways than just dance. Read the 1994 interview with Martin Hayes to get his take on this: http://www.ceolas.org/artists/Martin_Hayes/interview.html
Yes, surely if you repeat something loads of time it has the potential to move you into an ecstatic state. But mind that the dancing dervishes are not the musicians, and that they spin around and around as well, which then can lead to their specific kind of ecstasy. As a musician you need to keep a different presence of mind, you can’t just totally let go. Especially playing complex tunes as in ITM. So even if you play the same tune again and again repeatedly, you still are exploring the tune, you are still totally with it, you are not in an ecstatic transcendental state of consciousness. I don’t think ITM is suitable for that purpose. But do mind the other purpose, as indicated by Martin Hayes.
Yes, that’s what old-time music is for.
(Unfortunately, you don’t see whistle much in old-time music.)
Seriously, one of my favorite descriptions of old-time music is something I overheard when someone asked an old-time musician why they play the same tune over and over so many times. He said that in old-time music, you play until you “get there,” and once you’re there, you stay awhile and enjoy it.
It’s a very different outlook and experience than the typical Irish session setup, in which each tune is only played a few times through before going on to another tune. Although there is a certain “riding the wave” sort of ecstasy in an Irish session, I think the old-time jam with its repetitiveness is more conducive to “an ecstatic transcendental state of consciousness.”
YES! completely forgot about OTM and trancing out… I still remember playing in a midnight campfire session at Union Grove in the late '70s at the big Memorial Day Weekend gathering and hearing a single tune go on for up to 10 minutes (it seemed, but who in the dark and with good moonshine floating around the circle was really keeping an accurate timing?)… my ITM mind was “okay, we’ve done this four times, let’s move along and attack this next tune” – but when you realize you may play the tune 50 times you start apportioning your energy and coming up with highly unusual variations.
I find that some Breton dance music creates almost a trance-like state… Listen to stuff at a Fest Noz, especially binou and bombarde couples. Simple tunes, you get in the groove and can just keep playing over and over. This is true of some (usually Welsh, for me, 'cos that’s what I play) pipe tunes.
I played for awhile some years back with French musicians Serge Laine and Lisa Whatley in Austin, Texas – did just a few Breton tunes, but once they got going it was definitely trance-like.
No wonder some of the places we played we only played once… proprietors probably saw us stuck in an andro and figured we were zombies!
I’ve been in late night sessions at festivals where the same core group has been playing together for close on ten hours or more and where the tunes are being played through four or five times. Everyone is in the zone, the music is hot - and yes, it’s meditative and trancelike. It’s fantastic when it happens and there’s no going home to bed when it does.
