The Beauty of Vipassana

Last night's Vipassana CD release concert was a great success, thank you to all who attended the show. In Numinous, I'm very happy and lucky to have not only such incredible musicians perform my music so beautifully but some of the best people to be around too. Last night was a fun celebration of the journey to Vipassana. It was wonderful to see so many old and new friends at the performance. Of course this isn't the end of Vipassana, with plans to perform again in the fall here in NYC as well as a Numinous tour (look out for the Vipassana Express coming to a city near you in 2010-2011!), but it does culminate the two years from recording to CD.

Here's my essay entitled Beauty from the program notes from last night's concert:

Albert Camus said “beauty is unbearable, driving us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.”Like Camus, I think of beauty as a tantalizing glimpse or hint of the Truth and like truth, beauty does not always mean something pleasing or pretty in the classic sense. Rather it is an intimation of an underlying “wholeness” or “rightness” of things. For many people, this wholeness is the province of religion. But for me, other fields speak the language of beauty just as clearly and eloquently: physics (the quest for the “theory of everything”), mathematics (set theory, which is the study of infinity), linguistics (Noam Chomsky’s and Joseph Greenberg’s study of universal structures in languages), sports (the perfect game; “being in the zone”) and of course, art. Naturally not everything resonates with everyone—one person’sCitizen Kane is another’s Showgirls, however when in those moments we do feel, sense, or experience that wholeness, however brief, we are truly “seeing things as they are.”

In many ways Vipassana is a musical essay on beauty. It is my humble attempt at reflecting something larger, something beyond notes and sounds. What that is or whether it truly does, is up to the listener. Perhaps it means something else entirely or even nothing at all, but I do hope you enjoy listening. John Coltrane once said, “the main thing a musician would like to do is to give the listener a picture of the wonderful things he senses in the universe.” I can’t think of a more worthy goal for Vipassana than that.

ORIGINALLY POSTED BY NUMINOUS AT 5:48 PM