mix of classical and modern jazz themes that | called “How High the Moonlight

mix of classical and modern jazz themes that | called “How High the Moonlight Sonata,” she laughed lasciviously as though tickled by this sensual violation of musical canon. A boogie-woogie Bach two and three-part invention brought more excited disapproval. Mysterious are the conditions of attentive (preoccupied) and none attentive, (fugued out) disappearing time. | found a musical way for it to happen when improvising: continue to shuffle a small set of notes that stay within the melodic field of the tonal center of an unchanging tonic chord. In contrast, most melodies and their chords leave the tonal center to which they return in harmonic and melodic progression. We can call these conventional tonal centers unstable fixed points. They are attractive repellers of melodic and harmonic expectation. It has been mathematically proven that these hyperbolic systems are globally stable. In contrast, a melody that remains stuck in the tonic chord, a purely contracting stable fixed point, is technically a chant. Paradoxically, it can be shown that this kind of fixed point is globally unstable. Rigid things can more easily fracture. The rich, altered states of consciousness that emerge while hearing the beat of Tibetan monks meditating, the Sufi chant-dances of Rumi and the John Coltrane and McCoy Tyner’s endless, single chord, tenor/piano dialogues exemplify the bifurcation to hallucinatory new stuff arising spontaneously from the experience of unchanging repetition. Constant repetition of the conditioned (expected) stimulus drove Pavlov’s dogs, especially those with “nervous temperaments,” into frozen, catatonic states. Abulafia’s 1280 book on ecstatic techniques, Hayyei Ha’Olam HaBa, recommended the recitative rearranging of a finite set of Hebrew letters, frontward and backward, many times, using prayer melodies, until “...the heart will suddenly become aware of the intellectual, divine and prophetic...” and hitbodedut will rest upon him. The instructions were “...combine letters (and associated musical notes)... reversing and rolling them around rapidly until one’s heart begins to feel warm.” It was in my freshman year at Stanford University when | met Michael Murphy, later to co-found Esalon, the California center for mystical pursuits and naked mud bathing. He is the author of Golf in the Magic Kingdom and with George HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013509