There is considerable suffering in the world. We live in unprecedented times of rapidly changing environment, technology, and social fabric. Our youth and those who care for them are particularly affected by these changes. Most school children are subject to active shooter drills in their schools, predatory marketing on most media. Children also frequently lack the opportunity to be outdoors, climb trees, swim, and run freely. This can be stressful or lack of stress-relieving.
Many are subject to achievement testing that is not necessarily relevant to their interests or abilities. This is stressful.
Many children don't have enough kind faces smiling at them. Their worlds are full of adults, classmates, and who are in stress. These classmates and teachers express stress physiology- flat unresponsive faces, cold stares, fight oriented vocal tones.
Making music is a time-honored tradition of ... touching, expressing and bringing forth what is deep, good true and beautiful.
Music-making has been relegated to the few and held up largely as a competitive, race to the top by a few superstars often seeking fame and fortune leaving behind those who could most use its' healing salves.
Many methods of teaching and playing come from a very narrow western European tradition which fails to access and develop the full range of what is possible. Though the western European classical tradition is high in sensitivity, it requires extremely high levels of skill to participate. Other traditions are equally high if not higher in sensitivity but can require far less skill.
Within our American public school system, much of the music-making -band and orchestra- involve music instruments which are rather expensive and inaccessible. This system is open to those willing to make a very large commitment to extended hours of practice and rehearsal and tends to exclude others.
The western European classical system relies intensively on a written music system which is highly complex and far from user-friendly. The nature of this visual system and its requirement to translate from visual to motor, to audio, will alienate many from comprehending how to use it and tend to isolate many players from deeper listening and interacting.
My intent in offering this work is: to teach people, particularly teachers, therapists, parents and group leaders how to access and impart the use of music-making to enrich the lives of students and their community.
This method helps to foster high sensitivity even with low skill. Instruments which can be homemade or are fairly inexpensive. A written system that is intuitive, learned through movement and can easily be translated into our dominant music writing system.
People experience times of isolation, disconnection, alienation or chaos. People also have experiences to celebrate, honor and share. This curriculum provides a method to help people move to create and experiencing the nurturing, affirming, fertile, fruitfulness of being in a positive relationship with themselves and each other. Making music together is the means to partake in an ongoing enlivening interrelationship of soul to soul contact. [ It is being in love.]
Music is Love made Audible!
Group Drumming is written to show how to use music for social and emotional enrichment. Music is a vehicle for more deeply connecting and realizing oneself and for taking once place in the community of others.
So here, music-making is the medium that is not the goal. The goal is embodied in caring, loving relationships. Playing the drum is relatively easy to do and requires limited physical or musical skills. One can make deeply vibrant and alive music with relatively little training.
Because drumming is fundamentally nonverbal and offers the possibility of expression and reception, it is a great modality to learn and practice the process of meeting. Certainly, group drumming can devolve into Beating and Dead Fish. One or more people can take over, get too loud or too dominating, while others withdraw. Artful facilitation helps attune the persons in the group to express, to listen, to join to meet.
So this book will give not just an accessible sequence of games, exercises, and rhythms but an attitude to engage and embrace each moment as a possible entry into the heart of music. With each of these games exercises and rhythms, I offer an explanation of there use in personal and group development and additionally some of the neuroscience and psychophysiology behind them.
Dis-Ease Suffering--We are in an age of high levels of stress and emotional disease which also breeds psycho-somatic disease. Making music can resolve much of that stress and distress. The sound and vibration of a drum directly affect the nervous system. Drums can be activating, calming and stabilizing.
There are many fine music method books on the market with intelligent sequences from simple rudiments through increasingly complex patterns. Group Drumming is written to show how to use music for social and emotional enrichment. Music is a vehicle for more deeply connecting and realizing oneself and for taking once place in the community of others.
Playing the drum is relatively easy to do and requires limited physical or musical skills. One can make deeply vibrant and alive music with very little training.
Music can be wonderful and powerful- my aim to work to bring people into the process and experience of making music.