About Garunaga's Music

About Garunaga's Music

I compose music because its a big part of myself. If I don't put something on paper and play an instrument everyday, I will get cranky. Now, when I'm composing music, I start with the big picture and I mean really big.

In talking about it, it quickly veers into politics, sociology and the philosophy of religion. I ask what I'm trying to communicate. I'm usually trying to communicate something mystical, transcendant, infinite, communal and/or abundant.

I try to recreate a feeling of the mystical, transcendant and infinite through the use of drones, chimes, gongs and finger cymbals, and through the use of rhythmic cycles. I also try to create a sense of transcendence by including techniques and instrumental timbres foreign to my own roots of rock, jazz, classical, guitar, sax, violin and piano.

As far as the music communicating or, better yet, actually building and strengthening ties between community members, I try to write music with at least a few easy parts so that anyone, even children, can also participate and I try to have a high tolerance for change and diversity based on the needs of other people playing with me. However, even I have limits. I would like to create music for people's daily activities or at least tied to utility somehow such as when two people make love, exchange massage or good conversation.

I'd like to explore more dance and rave music. Sometimes, I try to mix quartal jazz piano voicings (because its good for minor and pentatonic music) with pop bass ostinatos (because popular styles are the authentic voice of the individual), rhythms from around the world (because I would like to think that I could love all kinds of people), reggae guitar parts (because it is the most widely spoken musical dialect),

I usually write modal pieces at a medium fast tempo which is heterophonic. Solely playing the singular melodic lines of monophonic or homophonic music generally implies a philosophical foundation that does not have or want a relationship with the neighbors.

The independant lines of Classical counterpoint recreates the feeling of too much western individualism. The heterophonic line of two melodies playing the exact same thing, similar to the steps of some ballroom dancing, comes from a philosophical position that two people should come together. In the case of ballroom dancing, it's a man and a woman no more than 5 years apart usually.

It's never 2 women or 2 men and its REALLy never 1 woman and 4 men etc... It is nonverbally communicating the culture's expectations for sexual and other kinds of relationships and marriage. The man leads.

The woman follows. There are certain steps to follow too. It means there is a right and a wrong way to live your life.

In order to be accepted you must becomne a dependable cliche' like everyone else or be outcast.

I want to make abundant music because we can all look forward or open ourselves now to the good things that life has to offer us. However, there is a limit. Creative people like complexity but too much will alienate the audience.

Popular styles almost never have more than 5 parts occuring simultaneously so I try to keep my music just under or at that limit. Well formed rhythms, as well, are defined as between 2 and 6 rhythmic events about every 5 seconds. So, I usually keep my parts near the high end or at that parameter.

These are just 2 of the ways I accomplish a feeling of abundance.

Building and strengthening ties between community members is a delicate balancing act because too many times if someone wants to appeal to blacks for example then the fact of the matter is that many whites, Irish, Scottish and what have you will, unfortunately, not identify or want to be associated with it. Or if you try to appeal to Asian Americans, you alienate regular Asians, blacks, whites, Scottish, Irish etc... In trying to appeal to too many people you lose everyone.

Many if not most traditionalists and conservatives won't like my music. I didn't make it for them. I'm affirming a completely different set of values that they're not ready to appreciate or understand.

I've thrown them a bone by not being ignorant of their concerns but I really don't share them at all. That's about 2/3rds of America, Europe, Australia and NewZealand right there who I will probably never reach.

I know why the rural bible belt identifies with country/western and Christian music in the U.S. and understand why conservatives identify with 19th centuy classical music. However, to be very blunt, in my opinion Country and Christian music comes from a biased philosophical position that they are the chosen people by God to be better than everyone else. And If they have money, then they believe this proves that a God favors them.

Perhaps, in a few short years when America is no longer a global super power cowering under big Asian players and American whites are in the minority in their own country, hopefully the arguments presupposing their innate superiority will be seen for exactly what they are, a bunch of nonsense thrown together by pseudo-intellectuals bolstered and supported by the uninformed, mentally lazy and/or the willfully ignorant.

Joseph Campbell said that Christianity is the overinterpreted parochial history and manufactured geneology of a single sub-race of a south-west Asian-semitic people by no means what its own version of the history of the world makes it out to be. What seems reasonable to Christians is nothing more than the sum total of all their prejudices and myopic views. Today there can be no central point on which to concentrate.

Elsewhere, he says, "though empty barrels make the most noise, they are required for new wine and noth the uncritically accepted and/or enforced customs of the old wine. Conformity is not now a necessity.

I once read a criticism by a classical music lover's/conservative's criticism of popular music. He said that pop styles were simplistic because they used pentatonic scales whereas classical music had followed a progression to 7 note scales, then to the use of chromaticism in the romatic era and dodecaphony in the postmodern era and used large orchestras of the most difficult to construct instruemnts that could only be played properly by virtuosos.

I submit that a music's worth (or a person's ) is not determined by where it (or they) are placed in a Darwinian evolutionary scale of complexity or by the expense of the instruments but by the philosophical/ spiritual ground from where it grows and therefore by it's usefullness to living people as opposed to meeting the entertainment needs of dead kings and popes as Frank Zappa has said or by carving out an identity for those who are empty and shallow among the rich by attempting to emulate the wealthy aristocracy of a Europe in ages past.

Some of my acquaintances will not like to hear it but the quickest way to make everyone, except the most arrogant of the filthy rich or their wannabe's, feel alienated is to play opera.

If Sufi mystics can use the names Buddha, Jesus and Mohamed in the same sentence then I want to be a part of that. If that's and affront to your identity as a cowboy or a Christian then come back when you're ready to see the larger world just outside your hometown which is literally surrounding your tiny little cultural pocket.

For your information, half the internet is in Chinese. How many Chinese characters do you know? How many Chinese characters would you be willing to learn?

I don't need traditionalists to lose the identity they grew up with. It's fine really and can be fun too. To be fair, they're certainly not the only one's guilty of arrogance combined with being uniformed.

It's the self righteousness that has traditionally come with those identities which alienates the entire world that me and the rest of humanity could do without. We also would like traditionalists to join uis in a larger space. If not now, then sometime in the future. Better sooner than later though.

They had to believe in that culture in order to integrate with it because that is where they found themselves. However, such an attitude has outlived it's usefulness. In saying these things, I feel like Salmon Rushdee writing the Satanic Verses.

Traditionalists looking at Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus see only irreconcilable differences which are quite real. We and the other 1/3rd of America see more of the similarities which are also just as real and want to see how Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism will inform western spirituality and how western spirituality can inform the Eastern. And how a relationship with actual Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus can enrich our lives.

I want a musical form that carries the message of open minded dialogue between cultures, faiths and real people which is why I'm attracted to Indochina and Indonesia. India was, of course, Hindu and China has a long history of Buddhism. Indochina has absorbed the best and worst from both of these immensely important cultures.

So, the dialogue between China and India/ Buddhism and Hinduism has been taking place most intensely in Indochina. Also, from a Buddhist perspective, and while standing in Asia, Christianity and Islam look almost identical. This is the kind of perspective required to move forward now and in the future.

Joseph Campbell said that now, the only appropriae in-group is as a world citizen. I believe this is correct.

My music sometimes uses Middle Eastern rhythms because I want to include Middle Eastern peoples in my world and be included by them in theirs not because of a European feeling of exoticism that doesn't know who the musicians that they're appropriating music from are or their histories. I don't want the styles of electronica either that are empty of context and content.

About 1/4th of America, if you believe some estimates, are the cultural creatives. They're not perfect either. Much of the New age faction seems to think that you can toss logic completely out the wind and buy spirituality.

Maybe that's good for my business but I blieve that real spirituality comes from relationships with other peole and with nature. So I'm very serious about having a relationship with people who visit my site whether or not they buy anything. What they seem to want to buy is sometimes Hindu iconography and either Hindu or Buddhist ideas.

In the case of hinu mythology, westerners who adopt it are fooling themselves if they think they can graft an alien religion onto themselves, plagued by all the same problems as our own, while cutting off their own root.

Budhism is a special case from most cultural creative's viewpoint. Buddhism has a lot to recommend it. My mother Nichiren Daishonen Buddhist for a time and later, I considered myself a Buddhist for a significant period of my life.

More Americans seem to be attracted to Japanese Zen Buddhism than other forms because it is sometimes teaching an artistic and philsophical orientation which can see or wants to see each second of life as beatuiful and perfect. However, what Buddhism IS teaching and what Americans want to believe about it are sometimes two different things. Americans want to try to accept, at least theorhetically, the good with the bad and avoid the misuse of drugs, alcohol and coffee, the abuse of children and women and killing more than one needs to in order to live well. It embraces the part of feminism that believes people should let women in positions of leadership.

American Buddhists and other cultural creatives want to improve social injustice and damage to the environment and have seemd to only be willing to do that peacefully. Ideologically at least, it rejects sexist and racist viewpoints and challenges the notion of Western superiority. Bad that happen to others ultimately affects us also.

In order to be thought of as a bonafide participant in the present in-group of world citizenry, you have to be aware of all the different cultural experiences; ethnic, religious and gender.

Intuitively understood but unbeknownst to most people, music is intimately bound up in all of these considerations of political, cultural and religious identity. At least, thats my position. Joseph Campbell has also said that all ways, already found, known and proven are wrong since they are not discovered by personal inquiry. People must be moved to ends proper to themselves.

In the Buddhist liturgy it says Truth is the essence of life because only truth continues to live after the death of the body. Truth is eternal and will still remain even though heaven and earth shall pass away. By understanding this you are Chakravarti.

In the Buddhist canon, the Abhidharma says that the only thing that can be said to be inherent is truth which is not conditioned.

On what should everyone in the world concentrate? There are as many answers as there are people. Joseph Campbell and I would have everyone concentrate on what truthfully heals you and makes you happy. Besides an experience of nature and other people, ambassadorship, medicine, literature, music, art, gardening etc... are possible foci.

Concerning relationships with other people, western traditionalists and some conservatives are well networked. They may meet every Sunday in Church, in the board room or at power lunches. Cultural creatives think they're alone and there's nowhere to meet. The Unitarian Universalist church is trying to be everything but they wind up alienating just about everyone.

Many Buddhists and Hindu's want to eliminate all desire for happiness. This is one of the problems of cultural creatives. But if the truth is that gardening makes you happy now, no amount of Buddhist philosophical gynmnastics about it ULTIMATELY not making you happy since it's not eternal is nonsense in my opinion.

What is eternal is this moment we have now which is all there ever is. If what makes you happy changes over time then change. It's not that difficult to do, in fact, its inevitable. Anyway, we don't need to be copying Jesus or Buddha, we just need to live up to our divine nature.