The Healing Power of Music

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. Manolson 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 lives, 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 forty 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 forty-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 organicity, 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.