Heather Buchman

Earlier this month musicologist Suzanne Cusick gave a compelling lecture at Hamilton College on Music and Torture, based on her article published in the January 2008 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society which has received a great deal of attention in musicological circles.  The subject was indisputably dark and disturbing; but ever since the lecture I have been wanting to post about a theoretical framework which Cusick has used since the publication of the original article.  She termed this framework the “Vibrational Model,” which I understand as follows: that each one of us is in effect a vibration, or pattern of energy – and that we are constantly picking up the vibrations of others, influencing and being influenced by each other at a subtle energetic level.  This model provides a framework for understanding the world, the way in which individuals sense and respond to one another and to our environments, as well as how these vibrations in aggregate form a pattern of larger groups, a collective vibration so to speak.

Cusick attributed this Vibrational Model to contemporary philosophers, though I haven’t yet been able to locate the source.  The idea has much deeper roots as well; the Hindu expression “Nada Brahma” – meaning “The World Is Sound” (also the title of a book by Joachim-Ernst Berendt) is thousands of years old.  The books of scholar Joscelyn Godwin, particularly Harmonies of Heaven and Earth and The Harmony of the Spheres, survey the wealth of philosophical thought over millennia, in both West and East, on the deeper significance of sound.  And quantum physics has demonstrated that matter at the sub-atomic level is itself vibration. Continue Reading »

Tags: Craft, Environment, Listening, Practice, Suzanne Cusick, Zen