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- Neil Douglas-Klotz,
author of Prayers of the Cosmos & Desert Wisdom]]> http://akbarsmusic.com/news.html#2 Tue, 10 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0700 Akbar - AkbarsMusic.com - - Articles http://akbarsmusic.com/news.html#1 by Ellen Johnson, Ph.D.

The Aramaic Prayer is the words attributed to Jesus that we know as "The Lord’s Prayer" as they would have been spoken in his own language. Akbar Eric Manolson has just released a CD of piano music based on this prayer. Akbar is a specialist in music and expressive arts for the State of Georgia psychiatric hospital system who lives in Decatur, Georgia. He is known locally and all along the East Coast and beyond as a spiritual leader who has inspired many people through his work with movement and sound. Here he discusses the prayer, the music, and his life’s work.

Ellen: What do the words of Jesus in Aramaic have to do with the music you play on the CD?
Akbar: They relate on a number of levels. Neil Douglas-Klotz (or Saadi) is a scholar who has written a number of books and who has taught this Aramaic Prayer as a form of moving meditation and deepening experiential dance for the last fifteen years. He asked me to do a piano version of the prayer after hearing some healing piano work that I had recorded. He wanted me to develop a piano instrumental version for listening to, for meditation, for background while we are going about our life, doing our dishes, or talking with our friends. From his melodies, I took my themes and variations and developed this whole piece.
These melodies came to him as an inspiration during a long retreat, and they have been sung on probably every continent of the world now as a part of this participatory movement and meditation practice. The melodies have made the Aramaic prayer accessible to a large group of people, and the Aramaic pronunciation of the prayer and the melodies have become very closely wedded together for those people. Because the Aramaic prayer has been sung thousands of times to these melodies, the melodies actually carry a certain kind of impression; they’ve been impregnated by the power of the Aramaic words. Consider Beethoven’s 9th symphony and the words, "Joyful, joyful we adore thee." Those words and that melody have a certain relationship now for those who know those words, so that when they hear the melody, the words, the meaning and feeling of the words, are there for them. In the same way, the Aramaic Prayer has been allied with these melodies.
In my own personal practice, I’ve worked intensely with the prayer, writing it out, walking it, dancing it, singing and playing it and turning the melodies inside out and around in different formations to discover the relationship between the notes. This work is always within the context of the quality of the sacredness and depth of my own exploration, my own experience of the prayer. So all of this work that I’ve done on this piece of music has actually unfolded within the lovingness of this prayer, not only as a prayer, but actually the vibration of it, what is behind the prayer.
Say we go to church and we pray, "Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name," and we all say that together, and then we’re done and move on to whatever the next thing is. What if instead we decided we’re going to have a retreat for 40 days, and all we’ll do in the retreat is eat in silence and say this prayer and find melodies to it and sing them, concentrating on the deepest meanings the prayer has for us? This is what I mean when I speak of feeling the quality of the prayer. It’s a different way of experiencing it than what we often experience with prayers we know well by heart. And of course there’s a large monastic tradition in Christianity and other cultures, other traditions, where that’s what people would do. Jesus and Moses themselves took 40-day retreats.
Ellen: You’ve said that some of the qualities of the prayer are lovingness and a sense of oneness and a sense that it is very organic, open, flowing. Are these the qualities that come out in the music, then?
Akbar: I believe the music carries those very qualities: that quality of organicness, that quality of connection to the earth, that quality of life renewing itself, that quality of movement, that quality of the inner movement inside our own hearts and our own depths being somehow resonant with the outer movement. Sometimes it’s soft and sometimes it’s louder, and yet, within it, there’s this whole quality of peace, and it’s that quality of peacefulness or wholeness, I’d say, even more than the quality of oneness you mentioned, that is there for me. And that is the intention for people to experience through this piece of music, that it will bring you back to all of those qualities inside your own self.
Ellen: And this is what makes it healing.
Akbar: That’s what we are really discovering. And that’s what we will discover more and more, not only with this piece of music, but with other works of art and work and play that have this intention. That’s how some of this can, God willing, be connected to things like peace in the Middle East, because there’s something in creating an intention like this that can be healing to us and that can then, with some of that same kind of flowing, washing, forgiving manner, be of benefit to situations that are appearing otherwise.
Ellen: I wanted to ask about your background and how you came to do this work.
Akbar: I was born in Montreal, Canada, in 1953 to two very wonderful Jewish parents. My grandparents came from Eastern Europe and other places; I think somewhere I have some of what we call Sephardic Jewish background because I’ve always been very attracted to that kind of Middle Eastern side of Judaism, that Spanish side.
I began learning meditation when I was in high school, when I was 16, an Indian style of meditation, and then I was presented in my life with teachings on sound and the mysticism of sound from Hazrat Inayat Khan, a Sufi sage who came from India about 1910 to share his music and his wisdom. This particular form of Sufism is a form that honors all the different traditions, from Native American to Buddhist to Jewish to Zoroastrian, etc., and I pursued a course of study over many years, including travelling to Turkey, to Israel, a number of times to India, to South Africa, and to Europe to meet with people who had this kind of wisdom and who also had some knowledge of the mysticism of sound. My children are also interested in these things; they’re in their twenties right now.
In the last ten years of my life, I’ve really combined this work with music and sound in healing with my professional background in music and applied social sciences. I work as a program specialist in music and expressive arts (working with sound and music and meditation and movement) at a large psychiatric facility and with other mental health organizations.
Ellen: Do you think, then, that these teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan on sound and music have affected the way you play music?
Akbar: Absolutely. I’d say that is the way I play music. Before I came across the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan, I was very good at music, and I was also very good at poetry, and I was very good at art, and yet, I never had enough discipline in any of those things to really produce much. From the teachings of Hazrat Inayat Khan and my teachers in the Sufi order, somehow, not even consciously, my quality of musicianship developed until it became very refined. I go to many kinds of environments where I am asked to play music or to share the Dances, and it’s almost like magic that the little bit that I do can have such an effect. I really feel that’s been some of the blessing of Inayat Khan and his whole lineage, which, without me thinking about it or making a fuss about it, has enabled me to be able to create this kind of music and attunement.
Ellen: Why did you record this particular piece of music?
Akbar: What actually happened was that a good friend of mine from Vermont was diagnosed with breast cancer, and she had to undergo some surgery and radiation therapy. She asked me if I could record some music for her to play while she was undergoing her operation and her recovery; she had arranged it with the hospital that while she was in surgery, this music could be played. So I recorded about forty minutes of piano music of different songs and chants for her. Saadi Neil Douglas Klotz heard that music, and called me to ask if I could do a piano version of the Aramaic Prayer. So I started developing it, working with the melodies and so on.
In the summer of 1999, I went to Vermont, where we were having a ten-day teacher training course in the Dances of Universal Peace, as a kind of artist-in-residence, and that’s when I recorded the music. When I got to the town, Montpelier, I didn’t know where I was going to practice or anything. Within two or three days, I had the key to the Unitarian Church to go practice on their grand piano, and I had three other grand pianos around town I could practice on. The churches where I would practice then invited me to their Sunday services to present and play, and so it was very rich in a lot of ways. The piano I liked the most was in the Unitarian Church,and I had a studio engineer come in with some very high quality microphones.
I recorded eight hours of playing because, although I had been working a lot with these themes, I still have an improvisational style, so that every time I would play, new nuances and new overlays would keep coming out. I brought it to Write Side Studio in Conyers, Georgia, and we edited it to create the one-hour CD.
I would encourage people to listen to it a number of times and see how it affects you in your different centers, in your heart center, in different areas of your life. I think it’s very accessible music because it’s easy to have on in the background while you’re doing something else. It’s lovely to listen to closely, but it’s very non-obtrusive, though the dynamics change in it. It’s not all one kind of tempo and one range of volume; it’s louder in some places, and softer and quicker and lower, so it’s different from what is called New Age music because of its dynamic range. It’s really one long continuous piece, with a part toward the end where the Aramaic Prayer is spoken.
Ellen: Some people might think it odd that you mix a sacred melody with secular tunes.
Akbar: That’s part of the whole idea, the whole experience, both in the earthiness and holistic nature of the prayer itself and also of the power of music to transform, that there is an enlivening surprisingness to it. All of these words, as we said before, like Abwoon and Allaha, have this connotation of including all. As a matter of fact, one translation for these words for God, Allaha and so forth, is that they meant "everything", and so in that sense, there’s a consistency.]]> http://akbarsmusic.com/news.html#1 Fri, 04 Jan 2002 00:00:00 -0800 Akbar - AkbarsMusic.com - - Articles