Tribal Traditions Inspire Modern Community ...2

Is it a fantasy to endow music with healing or transformative properties? Today people bemoan the rending of the fabric of values, (which are, in their genesis, tribal values,) at the same time they prefer entertaining manna to artistic culture. Much of the musical 'product' we crave is a repository for our projections. (We identify our urge for the eternal child in the puerile Michael Jackson and for the omni-available feminine in anima-woman Madonna.) Why are many musicians and facilitators no longer interested in art's community-building function based upon its healing and transformative powers? Supporting the musician's commitment to his or her career and artistic path without banalizing its tribal foundation (i.e. the community-oriented value system) is crucial if their artistry is to be concerned with a positive solidarity with a community. Is it even realistic to speak of community-building as opposed to audience development? These are not particularly relevent concerns for those musicians who hunger for awesome celebrity and huge material rewards. But the means to fulfillment of those exclusively self-centered objectives stand in contrast to the means necessary to protect both artistic integrity and art's tribal foundation. To avoid the seductive dangers of the entertainment industry requires the dedicated artist to sort out a developmental path that respects the community (or audience) instead of cynically plays on its potential lack of discrimination. Some may call any invocation of values and integrity naive, yet, what is at stake is music's very power to be a positive emanation of the tribe's life force. Its preservation and sustenance is worth the hard work required to do so without the corrupt and cynical support of the entertainment business cartel. Musicians and facilitators should thoroughly study the workings of the music business, its history, and observe the way the game is played. The picture thus drawn is ugly, tarnishing quite irrevocably the commonly accepted holy grail. One might however very quickly arrive at an alternative field of study: the tribal values at music's core, the responsibility to one's own talent, and the value system already optimized to nurture musical expression, the tribe/community/audience, and maybe, even the world-at-large. Alternately, there is the perennial concept of music's integrity: that it literally works as a vibrational communication and so transmits via the vehicle of musical intention and artistry potentially transformative 'data' able to penetrate at the deep level of psyche and the chakra system. The lessons for the facilitator follow accordingly: to lose the integrity at the core of your work, is to lose everything. Likewise, to make music one's calling is to integrate its powerful potential with your creative intentions and aspirations. It follows from this that the responsibilities of being a messenger of powerful music extend to the total environment that encompasses the community of listeners, the business, and all the ways music may be 'transmitted'.

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