The Unlikely Musician

As a present for my 30th birthday, my roommate bought me The Mysticism of Sound and Music by Hazrat Inayat Khan, which has quickly become one of my favorite books I’ve ever read. Not only has this book already begun to fundamentally shift my view on my relationship to music, but has reaffirmed the importance of understanding, listening to, and tuning one’s soul.

Khan was a Sufi teacher and musician of the early 20th century. He is credited with being the first spiritual teacher to bring Sufism (the Islamic mystical tradition) to the West and used his experience as an accomplished international musician to tell his message. As I am making my way through Khan’s book, I often marvel that it’s as if all my questions (or at least the really big ones) were the outline for this book. Page after page offers insights and lessons, and whenever the author writes something that makes me ask a question, it’s as if he knew what I would ask and answers it in the next paragraph. Khan offers exposition of music’s divine nature, and as a musician and mystic enthusiast, this speaks deeply to me. My path to music was far from obvious or easy and is riddled with shortcomings.

As most of you know, I am a musician by profession and that was both by no accident and by no talent of my own.

You see, growing up, music wasn’t my forte.

Just the opposite, in fact.

I took piano lessons around the 4th grade, but didn’t show much promise, so when my piano teacher (I think her name was Cloud) moved away, it was no trouble to explore something else. My mother put me in acting classes at Market House Theatre, and every Saturday morning she would drive me to class, and we usually got a McDonald’s breakfast sandwich as part of the treat.

(That was a memory I’d forgotten I had, but am very glad to have revisited!)

There was nothing about me that would indicate I would, or could, do something professionally with music. I joined choir with Mrs. Elaine Shurley and was all but hopeless. I could barely match pitch and whispered most of the time when I sang. I couldn’t read music, didn’t know a thing about singing, and was probably the kid that the other students thought, “Why is he even in here?”

My next choir teacher, Mr. Brant Veal, was apathetic at best towards me and I don’t really blame him. By this point I’d at least learned how to make a bad sound loudly.

Very bad.

Very loudly.

I started taking voice lessons on the side at the neighboring college to try and improve my voice, and it was my voice teacher who encouraged me to apply for a music program. If you’d asked me in February of my senior year in high school, I would have confidently told you I wanted to go to the University of Southern California and study petroleum engineering.

At Ms. Erb’s encouragement, I applied to one music program at the University of Tampa because it had the least strenuous audition process. I just had to submit a video of me singing two songs, which I already had, and that was it. My voice teacher and I recorded in the practice room at Murray State University, which had the most hideous fluorescent lights, playing the accompaniment through a little boombox speaker.

This is where things get interesting.

By some miracle or divine intervention, not only did the University of Tampa accept me into both their school and music program, but they also offered me the highest academic scholarship (it was not a music scholarship).

I remember the puzzled look on people’s faces when I told them I was going to study music. Rightfully so because this was a complete 180 and very different from my friends, most of whom were planning to study some form of medicine, engineering, or law. My best friend in high school even went on to get a dual degree in Political Science and Physics.

Whether a result of an undeveloped frontal lobe or an unintentional act of surrendering to the Universe, to Tampa I went. Even though I didn’t know it at the time, this was the first instance of listening to my spirit and allowing it to guide me where I needed to go. I remember not knowing exactly what that next step would look like, but something was pulling me to Tampa, to music. It may have been the allure of escaping my hometown, but I made the choice to listen and let me soul have what it wanted.

At first, I felt pressured to come up with some “money-making” career that involved music. I shifted between doing vocal anesthesia (a job I basically made up), opening a school, and was briefly a double major between music and international business.

One of my professors and choir director at the time, Dr. Ryan Hebert, became my advisor and through a series of conversations, pointed me towards music education and again, the Universe willed me to listen.

I’ve always wondered why I went into music. Really.

I wasn’t very talented, no one was pushing me to go for it (I even had several people try to talk me out of it), and across the board it didn’t make sense.

But my journey was not about talent. It was about listening to the quiet voice within, even when it defied logic and expectations.

(Sounds eerily similar to where I am at right now in life...)

One of the central claims of Mysticism of Sound and Music is that, “Music is the miniature of the whole harmony of the universe, for the harmony of the universe is music itself, and man, being the miniature of the universe, must show the same harmony.”

This is a bit wordy the language is a bit outdated, but to put it another way, music offers a snapshot into the entirety of the Universe because the Universe itself is music.

This is certainly an interesting proposition, and one of the reasons I am starting to believe that music chose me whether I liked it or not. The Universe, or you can call it God if you prefer, wants to reveal Itself to us.

When most people speak about their religion, they often talk about their “relationship” with God. Christians make it a point to talk about their relationship to Jesus, and many metaphors about this relationship are drawn both in holy scripture and idioms. When we pray, we tell ourselves we are “talking to God,” and we often define the strength of our beliefs by the depth of our relationship to whichever god we happen to choose.

The thing about a “relationship,” though, is that it requires two entities. Our relationship with “god” is me (the individual), and whatever I call God (the other that is different from me or outside myself). Even a relationship to oneself is simply the level of agreement between our heads and our hearts.

The point made by Khan’s statement is that the same properties that govern the whole of Nature are the same properties that exist within you and me. The Universe is the combination of rhythm and tone, as are we, and we are therefore one and the same with the Universe.

Spiritual teachers and mystics across time have made this point. You can find quotes from every major religion — Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Taoism, Sufism, and Indigenous mysticism — that lead us to the same end. One of my favorite expressions of this idea comes from Rumi:

Carl Sagan, an American scientist and philosopher has another great one.
“We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”

The Universe, God, Allah, Jesus, the Buddha, they all want to reveal themselves to you but they don’t do that from a place of division or separation.

Revelation comes through you.

The nature of Jesus is revealed in us when we live by his teachings. The enlightenment of Buddha is revealed not by asking the Buddha for it, but when you realize that “your mind and the Buddha’s mind are not different.” The same eye with which you see God is the same eye with which God sees you.

Experience is the currency of the soul. It is how we exchange and move energy, and it is what we take with us into our next stage in life.

I plan on digging deeper into The Mysticism of Sound and Music over the next few weeks and sharing more of my thoughts. A few topics that might come up include music as an expression of life itself, the healing power of music, and the psychological influence of music.

For now, I want to leave you with a few thoughts to ruminate upon in your own life. I encourage you to sit down and at least think about some of these questions, maybe jot down your thoughts.

When was the last time my soul spoke to me and I heard it?
When was the last time I heard my soul speak to me, to my intuition, and I listened to it, without hesitation?
In what areas of my life am I experiencing resistance? Where do I feel like stone is grinding against stone, and could it be a sign I am ignoring a deeper message?

Music teaches us how to listen to the soul, and I believe that the reason music chose me was to reveal this truth.

I want to leave you with one more quote from Mysticism of Sound and Music:

“Music touches our innermost being, and in that way produces new life, a life that gives exaltation to the whole being, raising it to that perfection in which lies the fulfillment of man’s life.”

Until next time, live uninterrupted.

~ Coleman