by Lavender Suarez (Music 780.04 Sua)
One of my favorite music-related disciplines
is the art of deep listening, a practice that can help you to grow as a
musician, and maybe even as a person. There are a couple of related subjects
you can read more about at the Polley Music Library, too: music therapy and
sound healing. There’s a practical continuum happening between these seemingly
broad subjects. Music therapy is a component of generally mainstream psychology
and wellness practices, while sound healing trends toward more new age
concepts, but both disciplines share a kind of immersion in sound itself that
is a focal point of deep listening. And often both function through similar
kinds of sound immersion practices like “sound baths” and “sound meditations,”
using instruments like gongs, singing bowls, and tongue drums.
Author Lavender Suarez has worked across all
of these disciplines. She studied deep listening methods with Pauline Oliveros.
She has a degree in psychology, certification teaching Reiki, and is a member
of the Sound Healers Association. She hosts sound bath and sound meditation
events that dissolve the boundaries between wellness retreats and musical
performances. In fact, last year she performed at the Bemis in Omaha. And she
releases music as C. Lavender.
Her book, “Transcendent Waves: How Listening
Shapes Our Creative Lives,” is a compact and powerful read, and you can now
borrow it from Polley. In its way, this is a health and wellness book, as well
as an extension of Deep Listening concepts, and I think it’s a fantastic book
for both musicians and music lovers to consider as a potential path toward even
deeper enjoyment of music, not to mention other aspects of life. While
listening provides this path, music isn’t necessarily the only outcome one
might be looking for through this material. Instead, Suarez suggests in her
introduction that this kind of listening can enrich your creativity more
generally, and help you to be more thoughtful and present. These all seem like
especially great goals after several years of pandemic uncertainty.
The book is divided into three main sections
by color-coding the pages. Suarez starts with mind and body issues, first
looking at the physics of sound and how it travels into the body. Then she
delves into more complex relationships between music and memory, and how the rhythms
of music mirror many cyclical functions of our bodies. Occasionally the
narrative is broken up by pages that ask questions to get you thinking—or more
appropriately, to get you actively listening. Questions like, “What are the
sounds above you?” or “What is a sound that you miss hearing that is no longer
in your life?” help you to think about the book’s content in a living,
functional way, so that you can start incorporating the concepts immediately.
The next section focuses on creation and
expression. The book presumes that readers already have some kind of regular
creative practice, and maybe a space set aside for working on that practice. I
think in context this could be anything: music, certainly, but writing,
painting, knitting, or scrapbooking would all be examples of other kinds of
creative acts that would still benefit from taking these auditory
considerations into account. In fact, non-musical practices might benefit even
more, as sound isn’t normally a focal point. Every sense can contribute to the
creative act, and getting some practice in the senses that aren’t always the
focus of your work can help you to look at things in new and creative ways.
Many of the general processes brought up here are quite applicable to all kinds
of creativity: the act of improvisation, responding to your surroundings, the
catharsis of deeply experiencing your own feelings, examining your work at
different levels of complexity, and so on. This section helps readers to find a
creative groove, which Suarez refers to as a “flow state,” and to benefit from
staying in that groove.
The final section is a little more abstract on
the surface, titled “Internal/external.” It jumps around a bit more in terms of
topics than the preceding sections, starting with some observations about the
auditory opposites of noise and silence. This expands out in so many
directions, from keeping your hearing healthy to finding your own peaceful
spaces, your “sonic sanctuary,” amidst all the hustle and bustle and noise of
modern day life. Toward the end, there is a little bit of writing about music,
both as a motivational force and a device to help focus self-identity, and
considerations about different ways of consuming music in terms of physical
media versus streaming.
For a short book, there are tons of practical
and inspirational ideas collected here. The feel overall is like an updated
take on Deep Listening concepts, and this feels like the perfect time to read a
book like this and apply its concepts.
(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Deep Listening: A
Composer’s Sound Practice by Pauline Oliveros, Healing Songs by
Ted Giola or Music Therapy: An Art
Beyond Words by Leslie Bunt and Brynjulf Stige.)
( official Transcendent
Waves page on the official Lavender Suarez
– Sound Therapy web site )
Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library
Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?
New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!
Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!
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