We, the Guardians

Wolfs and Whales

As I am working on my set of multi-media dances about caring for the Earth I have been reviewing different animal calls.  Check out this wonderful wolf song at 7′ 01″.  

Try matching the pitch, you will have to use the pitch bend wheel on your synthesizer to even get close.  Can you sing like this?  What a fantastic performance of what to a human is one of the most primal and sophisticated calls of the wild.  Whales, dolphins and porpoises also sing songs and play percussion (click patterns). Try one of these whale songs out.  

So then, what is music of the Earth?  If music gives rise to empathy, love and transcendent life, then it is time we reawaken to this music before it disappears.  Surrounded by concrete buildings and the eternal 4/4 of our culture we have gone deaf to the bigger musical realm.  The Vaquita Porpoise is now down to about thirty! living animals on this Earth.  Listen now! because if you don’t, its  performance in the percussion section might never come again.  

In my dances I will sing their songs. The orca whales of the Pacific Northwest Ocean off of Washington State are approaching unattainable numbers, only 75 left now, and are living in a polluted and salmon deprived ocean (New York Times). Listen to orca whale calls, they are an inspiration to every musician.

 We need music that will lift us up and into the wolf call, we need a song more eternal than the whale call, we need a percussion section more detailed than the porpoise click and yes we need to amplify the orca whales’ calls for survival.  Our times call musicians to deliver us up into a new sphere, this is our work, our province and our mission.  Yes, the Earth and its living community will survive in a new form, but will we be here to hear it? or will we follow the Vaquita Porpoise and Orca Whale of the Northwest into the silenced song of extinction?  As musicians, we take the music of their hearts and sing their songs in our ways so that we come to know their hearts in our hearts. Go and make the music that awakens us to beauty and create pulsing beats joined to our Earth, our shared home. We are the guardians.