The Healing Power of Music

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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.

Healing Piano: The Aramaic Prayer, by Akbar Eric Manolson, can be ordered from his website, http://www.AkbarsHealingMusic.com, or the website Abwoon.com. [Akbar will be leading the full cycle of the chant and movement of the Aramaic Prayer on Wed., May 16, and Wed., June 13, at the Friends Meeting House in Decatur from 7:30-9:30 p.m. This is the same location as the weekly Dances of Universal Peace.

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