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After having dealt with their need to survive basically, vocational musicians will have to discover a new way to measure their value outside of currency. In the fallout of Covid-19 related lockdowns there will be a recession like none this generation has known. Professional musicians are and will continue to be among the hard hit (because they are "not essential" you see?). Their livelihood had already been cornered more and more for decades. Technology made the production and distribution of music available virtually to all. In a supply and demand economy this necessarily reduces the value of music. What is the supply/demand value for an infinite resource available for free? Many musicians were making a living off of the fact that a live experience is finite, ephemeral and can not be downloaded. The live concert served as a producer of religious experiences to a secular society starved for connecting to the sacred dimension. Now venues for this experience are closed by force of law and will be slow to reopen. Humans will take too long to return to their once sacred places for fear of catching death from their neighbors. For those of you awaiting a return to normal, spoiler alert, it ain't happening. When this virus is declared to be beaten, discussion of perpetual vigilance will immediately follow, indefinitely sustaining the rationale for future lockdowns. Policies will be implemented to allow governments to indiscriminately adjust the level of freedom of movement and assembly to the level they desire their citizens to have. What this means for musicians is that we will need to completely and fully rediscover what value we offer to our communities and how that value can be delivered in a post-Covid world.
A bleak picture? No doubt. However, I move that herein lies an opportunity to deepen the relationship we have to our sacred craft. To define a better "why" for ourselves. This blog, book (whatever it is or will be) has had from the beginning a central Quest to answer the question: Why make music at all? Below I will continue to explore the possibility that our ancestors's understanding of music's value is a wisdom worth elevating in our time. I invite you to explore the back catalog of articles for more discussion on this topic and to subscribe at the top right for monthly articles.
Drum: In the article from March 2 2020 I presented a poetic exploration of the usage of the drum and song as a sacred instrument. The shaman's* drum occupies an incredibly important and complex inter-relationship within his cosmology. The drum features some meaning-rich designs in some cultures. Complex in that they pack a large amount of meaning in few lines. Some of the designs can represent the axis mundi, the various strata of the world (heaven, world, underworld), the cardinal directions (note how all these images point to a cosmic center). Some drums will feature a rainbow which associates the drum with the bridge to the celestial realm and the hunting bow which is meant to send a projectile across an arc in such a manner as to defy human ability. That is to say, the bow allows for inhuman travel in the same manner that the rainbow allows for travel to inhuman realms. Further still, drums can feature images of the horse in Tengrism where it is even nicknamed the "shaman's steed". In other places, the drum is associated with a canoe. Further indicating the drum as an instrument of greater than human travel. In the canoe's case, it is even more directly associated with travel to the underworld due to the canoe specifically being an instrument of travel on the waters. A tree** may also be discovered depicted on the drum, entangling the instrument with associations of axis mundi and the bridge between the underworld (roots) and the celestial realm (branches). Always we return to the center.
Conclusion: The drum then is an instrument for travel to places humans can not travel otherwise. It is also the target marking the cosmic center of the world. How is this valuable? We will define this more bluntly a bit further.
Song: Now we know the shaman uses the drum to travel to another realm. But what is the use for the (typically) wordless song which is accompanied by the drum? The shaman doesn't simply travel to inhuman realms for a joyride. His purpose is specific. Though the shaman can steward a number of different functions within his social unit, the primary role of the shaman is that of healing. In his worldview, ailments are caused by a class of malevolent spirits whose role is to cause illness.The illness' causal explanation is simple: the soul has been thieved away to a malevolent place.
Now before the materialist reader mistakes this as a simplistic or "primitive" understanding of illness, note that this is not the only healing mode of these cultures. Deep knowledge of plant use and general wildlife lore allowed these peoples to survive for staggeringly long time periods despite essentially being naked in the forest. For instance, proto salish human lifeways can be traced back roughly 10 000 years! How long has allopathic medicine been around? For all of its wonders and miracles, it has not yet been tested on a geological timescale. And further still, despite the wonders and miracles of this medicine we still have criminally high rates of depression, opioid addiction, alcoholism and suicide (which kills around 1 million people every year globally and 50 000 in the U.S alone) to name just a few. Our materialist values have placed extension of human life as the medical priority. Hospitals keep detailed records of death rates but try and find in these records any information on the quality of the patient's death (or life for that matter) and you'll come up empty. A life well lived has much less to do with the molecules in your body than the strength of your soul. Value re-examination is in urgent order. We know that mental health has a direct co-relation with physical health (neuroplasticity proves the mind-body connection, end of debate) to such a degree as to make the two systems (mental and physical) inextricably inter-related. This is where the understanding of health issues as "soul ailments" begins to show its value (see the effectiveness of psylocibin in curing end of life anxiety and depression). Faced with this sort of reality the shaman's prescription for illness is to restore wholeness via soul retrieval. The shaman, with song guides the soul back "home", back to the cosmic center.
Though song has many other uses, its soul retrieval ability is of paramount importance for the musician if he is to understand his role within the community. Because the soul is lost in a strange land, it is unable find its way home, to familiar ground, to center. But it can follow the song as it would a trail guide. In addition to this, the shaman helps alleviate the fear of death and the weight of grief by acting as a guide for the soul of the dead so that they may find a good place in the afterlife. Whether it be towards life or towards the afterlife, song has the same function: to guide the soul home. The use of drumming and music in general for this purpose is universally disseminated. This is a natural and fundamentally human fact. And you are a human musician. This is your lineage and your tradition to keep alive. You have been called to stewardship. The world is ill. The soul is lost. You are a guide and a healer. What else do you need? A sign? This is it! I am calling you home so that you may apply yourself to your sacred quest.
As for all who are reading this now that are not musicians: if you are reasonably certain you can survive this crisis, now is the time to recognize the profoundly important value of music. Now is the time to voluntarily and generously demonstrate that value by putting your money where your heart is. Make a list of the professional musicians in your network and go shopping on their bandcamp page or whatever it is they have. Buy some songs, some albums, some merch, get singing lessons, whatever you can do. If you don't have money, use your voice. Figure out for yourself nice and deep why the musician's societal role matters and then tell them. So many musicians' lives have just been utterly destroyed. Their dreams have been postponed indefinitely. If they thought there was no hope before, they just had that despair confirmed. Because their government told them musicians are "non-essential". Figure out and articulate just exactly why that is a lie! The soul of the world lies in the balance.
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*The challenges in defining shamanism are well documented in various works of history and anthropology. In this article I have used the word as short cut term to designate an individual existing within an archaic culture whose function is to act as the intercessor between the sacred and the profane condition. Or more literally, the intercessor of the world of men and the world of the spirits. A shaman thus performs functions primarily associated with matters of the soul and fundamentally acts as the bridge between man and the location where the soul goes to after death or where the soul is stolen away to in the case of illness. In either case the shaman guides the souls to where they belong. The shaman is a scout guiding the soul to its home. For more information on the problems associated with the definition of shamanism see: Shamanism: archaic techniques of ecstasy by Mircea Eliade.
**Note that Yggdrasil the world tree in Norse mythology means "steed".
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