Conference hydra::dejavu

    Hi Bruce,
    
    How was the concert?  A friend and I will be attending Sunday night's
    performance and we're anxious to hear your thoughts.
    
    Ro
    

the concert was really great....  miles is sick and didn't show, so kitaro
played in his place...  he and philip glass and mickey hart played a
spacey-cosmic kind of intro (sort of channelling musical deities created by
the monks' meditation).  then the monks began their chanting prayer,
creating an aura in which those who were tuned in to their vibrations can
let go of fear, anger, pain,  and then begin to love... meanwhile another
monk created a sand mandala...  which was to be on display Sunday, and then
dispersed into the Atlantic on Monday... 

i was sitting pretty far back and couldn't see a lot, so i just
tried to get into a quiet state and absorb the sound.  the acoustics
in the cathedral are incredible!  it was an awesome experience
to _feel_ the prayer of the monks  (there's finally an appropriate
use of "awesome").

I don't think that there is an "opening act" for the monks in Boston;
at least I haven't seen any advertised.  But I highly recommend the
experience to anyone who can get to hear the monks.

btw, they are selling records and tapes and sweatshirts...
I thought that a little odd, but then again, this is a benefit tour,
with proceeds going to support [gyuto monk university]

/bruce
    

    
    Thanks to Bruce's message and my response, I was able to drive down
    to New York with him and experience the event. 
    
    The introductory music set the scene, as it were, for what was to
    come - it was an 'accessible' entry into the space created by the
    chanting of the monks. And for me, that was the overriding feeling
    - that their voices created a structure of sound that was palpable,
    that I sensed in the center of my self. Indeed, although I was distant
    from the altar and could see only certain movements, the sound was
    all. 
    
    Like Bruce, I was somewhat taken aback by the T-shirts, and as a
    marketing person I'm thinking of offering some free consulting time
    to Tibet House to suggest gentle but very effective ways to help
    get the monks the resources they need.
    
    I'm going again on Sunday in Boston - the positive energy I gained
    from the event kept me on high until Monday. When I spoke with a
    friend of mine in Italy on Sunday, he said that to hear them at
    their monastery in Dharamsala was a highpoint in his own life.
    
    Gloria 

    Where and what time in Boston? Also does anyone have an
    address to send to, to get tapes? If so please post it
    here.
    
    
    Russ
    EW

    7:30  pm  at the Berklee Performance Center.
    
    I think they will be selling records, tapes, and cds
    at the benefit.

If anyone has one extra ticket or knows where I might get one, I would be 
extremely grateful.  My modem is unhealthy at home so if you can help me out
you can call me collect at (617)643-2461.  Or at work my DTN is 881-2451.


OM MANI PAD NE OM

    I attended the Gyuto Monk Choir at the Berklee Performance Center,
    and I tell ya they warmed my soul up, on a cold Fall night in 
    Boston. I was particularily attracted to the resonating sound
    that seemed to vibrate my skull, from the sound of the chants
    the monks sang. From the heart to all sentient beings, the
    Terrific Goodness evoked from the chants, was a blessing and
    a healing to all, even to Dukakis, I'm sure.
    
    -Arthur

    Since I missed the concert, does anyone know an address to
    send to for tapes? Catalog? Thanks,
    
    
    Russ
    EW

        [from The New Yorker, 12/12/88 - quoted w/o permission]
 
Vibration
 
    It takes a leap of the imagination to describe the chanting of the Gyuto
monks as song, or even as music.  Its predominant sound is a sort of deep,
pebbly growling, a note and a half below the bottom of most bass ranges,
approaching the frequencies of garbage disposals and earthmoving machinery.
For almost five hundred years, in ceremonies in Lhasa that sometimes lasted for
days the monks visualized deities like Mahakala, a six-armed demonic protector
who carried a rosary of human skulls and danced in a sea of fire.  It was
prayer, not performance.  After the Chinese suppressed the Tibetan rebellion,
in 1959, most of the Gyuto monks were imprisoned or executed, and the others
scattered.  Roughly ninety escaped through the mountains to northern India.
There, shortly before dawn one day in the fall of 1964, Huston Smith, a
philosophy professor on sabbatical from the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, discovered that each monk was capable of singing three-part harmony
by himself--a deep bass B, a well-amplified, overtonal D-sharp near middle C,
and a barely audible, whirring F-sharp nearly two octaves higher.
    "They began with low, guttural, monotonous chanting of a type that I'd
heard before," Dr. Smith told us recently.  "After about an hour, I dozed off,
frankly.  I came to with a start and I was surrounded with heavenly choirs.  I
thought, This is strange--they're singing in chords.  Chords are a Western
invention, of course.  Then the choir blanked out and the cantor sang alone.
He was singing a full chord--a first, a third, and a barely audible fifth.  My
scalp began to tingle.  My first thought was that Klaus Liepman--he was the
musical director at M.I.T.--would never believe me."
    Early last month, twenty-one Gyuto monks flew into San Francisco from their
monastery-in-exile, in Bomdila, India, to begin a small national tour (they
were at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on December 3rd), and a friend of
ours, a Buddhist priest named Yvonne, invited us to hear them chant in a
recording studio, behind a cement plant in San Rafael, north of San Francisco.
It would not be a formal performance, she explained.  They were testing new
microphones, and Mickey Hart, the drummer for the Grateful Dead, was going to
help.  "I'd always thought of Deadheads as sybarites," Yvonne said. "But this
has turned out to be a meeting of sweethearts."
    So late one Friday afternoon we found ourself in a van filled with monks
and rolling into the studio parking lot.  The monks all wore maroon sarongs and
robes.  One had added a watch with an expandable band; another wore
bright-red-and-orange striped socks; and a third wore an "I (heart) Tibet"
button.  Mickey Hart, a handsome man in his mid-forties with pointed, foxlike
features and a wide grin, met us at the door.  He was wearing Nikes, jeans, and
a tie-dyed T-shirt of the type sold in parking lots before Dead concerts, and
he seemed a little nonplussed when the abbot of the Gyuto monastery came up to
him and draped a ceremonial white scarf around his neck.  The abbot gave
another scarf to the sound engineer, Dan Healy, who was tending the electronic
equipment with his own kind of devotion.
    "Just let the monks vibrate for a while and get used to it in here," Mr.
Hart said to Mr. Healy as the two men went over to the mixing board.  Someone
had thoughtfully wedged a stick of burning incense behind a length of conduit.
    The monks, surrounded by speaker boxes, sat down on rugs on the concrete
floor and unpacked their instruments.  They screwed big barrel drums into red
carved stands, and pulled out jointed brass trumpets that expanded like
telescopes to a length of five feet.  They laid out curved yellow bamboo
drumsticks that looked like giant carpetbeaters.
    "Matrix out, one and two," Mr. Healy said. "Set patterns to omni."
    "Figure eight?" asked an assistant with long blond hair.
    "Circle and no pad, no roll-off," Mr. Healy said.
    Below the mixing board, a tall monk with big biceps was unwrapping cymbals
from an Indian newspaper. "We will actually do our religious practice, not just
for the microphone," he said, and then introduced himself as Tubten Jigme. "We
will visualize Mahakala in front of us.  When we go to touch him, there's
nothing, but we can see him."
    Tubten Jigme sat down cross-legged and put his cymbals in front of him.
The monks formed two rows, facing inward.  The monk with the "I (heart) Tibet"
button handed around a tin of Ricola cough drops.
    "This is the hardest thing in the world to deal with acoustically," said
Mr. Healy, behind the mixing board. "Compared to a rock concert?  No
comparison. An electric guitar is so much louder than anything around it that
you just have to be somewhere in the ballpark and you're O.K.  But, with the
monks, their loud sounds are very loud, and their softest sounds are very soft.
The air-conditioning in the hall and the rustling of their robes may be louder
than some of the sounds they're making."
    "I'm throwing in my rig for the tour," Mr. Hart said, indicating the mixing
board, a thirty-two-track affair bristling with dials and switches, which he
uses for his drums at Grateful Dead concerts. "This is space-age.  This could
take the monks into the twenty-first century.  We want the music to sound to
the audience the way it sounds to the monks.  It should shake your insides and
vibrate your inner core.  Every day, they wipe their slates clean.  They chant
at seventy cycles per second--the lowest range of the human voice.  They're
used to resonating in a courtyard, but at St. John's there will be five
thousand people. So we found these special microphones that hook over the
ears."  He picked up a headset that looked as though it belonged on a bomber
pilot. "I just want to make sure they'll be comfortable with them.  I've tried
one myself, but I'm not a monk."  Then Mr. Hart excused himself, saying, "I
want to dig the monks.  I want to hang out with the monks."
    All the monks put on headsets.  They looked like a double line of medieval
telephone operators.  "All right," Mr. Hart said. "Are we ready to rock 'n'
roll?"
    The chant master, Sonam Thargyal, closed his eyes and pushed his head
forward until the sinews stood out on his neck.  He let out a low
"oooooooh,uuuuuuuaaaaaaa."
    The other monks pushed their heads forward, and an avalanche of deep,
guttural chanting began.  Then the words stopped, and we heard drawn-out
vowels, a bass woodwind note married to a high sound like whirring mosquitoes.
Cymbals clattered like waves breaking on a beach, and horns wailed like
trumpeting elephants.  The monks swayed back and forth with their eyes closed.
    When the monks put down their instruments, two hours later, nobody spoke.
The blond-haired sound engineer simply stood with his eyes shut.  Mickey Hart
nodded twice.  The monk with the "I (heart) Tibet" button handed around cans of
soda. Sonam Thargyal had a Classic Coke, and Tubten Jigme had a Sprite.
    "It's good, it's good," said Mickey Hart. "See how loud it sounds? No
feedback."

    

 
From a press release about the tour:
 
To encounter the chants of the Dalai Lama's personal choir, the Gyuto
Monks, is to confront a ritual beyond music, beyond ceremony or
conventional religion -- it is to experience something at the innermost 
core of what it means to be human.  Contrary to our every-day assumptions
that a single voice cannot sing a multi-note chord, each Gyuto Monk
does so.  And when 20 monks sing these chords in unison, the result
is a transcendental mix of melody, rhythms, and overtones that is quite
literally unearthly.  The monks' 1988 visit represents a unique opportunity
for Americans to witness a world imaginably far from what we know....
Producer Mickey Hart once described his own band as being in the 
transportation rather than the entertainment business -- 'we move
minds.'  The Gyuto Monks are the ultimate model for this point of
view.  Their sound will indeed move you to an authentically new place.
It is not entertainment but a prayer for the salvation of all mankind,
and an experience that should not be missed.
 
The monks last toured the United States in 1985.  During this tour,
Mickey Hart met the monks and produced an album of their chanting.
He is helping to promote the upcoming fall tour.  Twelve monks
were involved on the 1985 tour - eleven monks who chanted and the
abbott.  The abbott is a spiritual leader for the monks and
plays the dhamaru, a drum made out of two human skulls joined
at the cranium.
 
This recording, The Gyuto Monks: Tibetan Tantric Choir, is available on
the Windham Hill label, WT-2001.  (Windham Hill, P.O. Box 9388, Stanford,
CA 94305).  It consists of two prayers, each about 28 minutes long.  
About side 1, Bob Thurmond says "It is a doorway in sound into the Mandala
realm of the ESOTERIC COMMUNION of the GUHVASAMAJA.  The listener can 
imagine it as a heavenly realm of the great bliss of selfless ecstasy,
a realm of the "Esoteric Communion" between all enlightened beings
of the multiverse.  It is an architechture of exaltation, a royal
environment forged from the love and joy enfolded right here in matter,
as "strong force" of the atoms of this world.....''  You get the idea.
Side 2 is an invocation  for Mahakala, a fierce angel who carries
things such as a rosary of skulls and a flaming dagger.  The liner notes
for this recording are excellent, and give more background about the
monks and the music.
 
The proceeds from this tour, as with the proceeds from the recording,
go to Tibetan refugees and the Gyuto Monastery in Bomdila, India.
The monks are trying to raise funds to build a monastery in Nepal, so
that they can move out of the restricted area that they're at in India.
 
    

    
    After last night's concert, I was able to purchase a tape entitled
    "Chants Secrets des Lamas Tibetains", which consists of the following
    chants (my translations)
    
    Donje Jigjed - chant for the initiation of the Yamantaka mandala
    
    Sangwa Dupai Tsagyud - the Sri Guhyasamaja Mahatantra Raja, chant
                           of all sources of richness, encompassing
                           the very essence of all Tantra
    
    Zambu Chuwo - chant of offering to the Universe
    
    Tenching Drelchen - chant of offering to Mahakala
    
    
    The recording consists simply of voices of the monks, without
    instruments.  It is outstanding. 
    
    The address of the production company: 
    
    La Boutique Tibetaine du Marais
    15/17 rue de Turenne
    75004 Paris
    Tel (1)42-78-05-04
    
    I include the latter information for those European Dejavu readers
    who may want to discover what we're raving about...
    
    Gloria
      

    The "The Gyuto Monks: Tibetan Tantric Choir" album is available
    from the producer, Windam Hill by calling 800-888-8544 from 8-6
    weekdays Pacific time.
    
    	- Bill  
        

I do not have the number at hand, but I have a record of the Gyoto monks for
about 15 years now. It was released in the "Explorer" series. I don't know how
well-known this series is, but it is a collection of music from all over the
world. One of the other records of the series that will appeal to the Dejavu
community is one from Bali, containing the "Ketjak" ("ape dance").

Don't know whether the "Explorer" series is still available, but since
everything that has been previously released on LP is now beginning to appear on
CD, I expect a CD of it any moment now ;-)

Arie

         re:  all
    
         Thanks for the provocative descriptions.   As a result of all
    this dialog (and a brief view of the monks on television) I will
    be going to their concert in Marin County tomorrow night.  My
    girlfriend and I will be taking (as Christmas presents to them)
    some friends who spent several years in India who were neighbors
    of the monks during their time there.  Sounds fairly intriguing.

    
        (I am now prepared to purchase an album or tape, too!  Thanks
    for the notices.)
        
    Frederick
    (who isn't going to get by with lots of sleep this week..."poor
    me")
    

    Tibet: Musiques Sacr�es
    
    OCORA C559011 (dist by Harmonia Mundi)
    
    Yet another CD of sacred Tibetan music.  Excerpts from several
    different ceremonies, recorded in North-East Nepal.
    
    This is a French CD.  I think I got it at Briggs&Briggs,
    in Harvard Square.
             
    /bruce

    
    Popculture note:
    
    The December 19 issue of People (!) includes a photograph of the
    Gyuto monks with the performers from the New York event. The caption
    reads:
    
    "Richard Gere, doing his Tibetan thing, joined bearded musician
    Kitaro, composer Philip Glass, and monks at a Tibet House benefit.
    The skeleton belongs to Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart, who also
    performed."
    
    Gloria 

         I attended their showing last night at the Marin Community
    Center (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright) with about 2,000 others
    and truly enjoyed the performed ceremonies.  I don't think it's
    something I would want to spend my lifetime doing, but it really
    is amazing to hear the multi-leveled sounds these guys make.
    I especially like the deep bass (sort of reminds me of Sen.
    Inouye or the Indian chief in the Peter Pan cartoon movie.)
    Incidentally, my friend John, who spent a decade living virtually
    next door to these monks, can also chant in multi-level sounds
    (he demonstrated it last night.)  He has just turned over a 
    documentary film he made to the Smithsonian Institution which
    will be touring the country with it (a film about Tibetan
    monks in India, which I saw earlier this year.)  Anyway, he
    says that Gyoto is pronounced "Jue-tu" with the "tu" pronounced
    sharply.  This isn't how the music professor from the University
    of Santa Cruz who introduced them pronounced the name...but
    I'd put my money on John's pronounciation.
        I purchased a tape (mentioned in someone's earlier note)
    but haven't listened to it yet.  They didn't have any tee-shirts
    at this concert.  (Darn!  ;-) )  
        John said that being amplified as these guys were makes the
    experience more overt and he thought that that was a pretty neat
    idea.  
        At the end (I was surprised at the subdued applause) they
    took something from the 'Dead guy, put it around the "head" monk's
    neck, took it off and put it back on his neck...while the other monks
    applauded along with the crowd.  
        Anyway, I'm glad I went, even if I only got four hours sleep
    last night.  I recommend the experience, at least once, to virtually
    everyone.                                              
    
    
    Frederick
    

        Yesterday a couple of Tibetan lamas came over to my girlfriend's
    house in Sonoma and we spent most of the day with them (they are
    brothers and their brother, who died last year, was married to
    a French friend of my girlfriend.) Anyway, we played the tape we
    bought last week of the Gyuto monks (they knew they were here but
    didn't go to see them) and they really seemed to enjoy them.  The
    oldest brother chanted along with one of the prayers on the tape,
    so apparently it's a fairly common one.  They indicated that very
    few Tibetans can chant the way the Gyutos do (my understanding is
    that there are only two Tibetan monastic groups that do.)  
          It was a fun day for us...the younger brother lives in Berkeley
    and the oldest lives in Switzerland and was just here for a visit
    (his first time in the U.S.)  It was nice to show him the beautiful
    side of Sonoma (up in the cool hills/mountains)...they are all
    (the Tibetan community) very happy that Americans have finally
    seemingly recognized them and their plights.  Letitia (the Frenchwoman)
    mentioned that Richard Gere had recently contacted her in an effort
    to purchase some mandalas that her deceased spouse/lama had painted.
    She said she turned him down, to instead sometime give them to her
    Tibetan/French daughter.  They are a gentle people, troubled mostly
    by their problems with the Chinese.
    
    Frederick