My Dear Readers,
Thank you for jumping on board with me this past year as I launched my new website and blog. Your support has been both invaluable and encouraging—I cannot thank you enough!
As you may have noticed, I recently added a new category in addition to the primary one (My Story). The new one is “On Music and Musicians”. Can you blame me? Music has been such a central part of my life, that I found a driving need to share my thoughts with you.
Also, music is, and has always been, profoundly connected with my spiritual life. So, although my upcoming book Visions, Visitations, and the Voice: My Intimate Journey with the Sacred is primarily about how I experience transcendence in the form of direct visits from the Sacred, music for me has always been a conduit for, and of, transcendence.
What do I mean by that?
You may know by now that I spent much of my childhood seriously studying piano. By the time I arrived at college, I majored first in Philosophy and Religion but studied pipe organ as a minor. Eventually, that became my major, and I went on to earn a Master of Music degree in Pipe Organ Performance from the Boston Conservatory.
It was always my burning desire to connect with the original intent of the composer whose music I was playing, as I practiced or performed. This became deeper and deeper as I grew older and matured as a musician. As a result, I realize now that I entered into an “altered state of consciousness” whenever I achieved my goal of connecting with the composer’s original inspiration. That inspiration, I always assumed, came from God. Hence, the transcendent experience of the Sacred, through music.
You might have noticed that I have made no mention of “interpreting” the music. That is because I do not believe that interpretative thinking is my job as a musician (except, perhaps, for programmatic music that is based on a theme-that is a topic for another time). My role in playing a composer’s music is always to connect with the original divinely-inspired intention of it, not to interpret it.
I could probably write volumes on this alone, but I will leave it here with the promise to add more, and possibly other themes, in the future. (Substack, anyone?)
Thank you again for your interest and support, and please tell me—what interests you?
May you all be blessed in the New Year, by the Sacred in your lives!
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