Symphonic Ancient Mantra Dances
Previously titled: Ancient Dances of Life and Joyfulness,
and originally, Mandala Dances For Padmasambhava
for two 4-part choirs and orchestra
Listen on YouTube…
Surely unsurpassed anywhere as a profoundly joyful utterance…
In July 1997 I obtained a cassette recording of the late Chagdud Tulku, at that time regarded by Tibetan Buddhists as one of their great 'masters' of the present time*, delivering two chants of the mantra, om ah hum vajra guru padma siddhi hum. I produced transcriptions that crudely reproduced the original chants, and also produced 'sanitized' Westernized versions that placed the words more logically and clearly and were simpler, which could make clearer polyphonic textures.
* Nowadays I recognise him, along with other Tibetan Buddhist 'masters', as having been a proficient 'dark' practitioner in all but name, and thus I wouldn't have had anything to do with his work nor indeed Tibetan Buddhism (nor indeed Buddhism) if I'd known back then what was really going on.
I understand that the Tibetan pronunciation of the mantra is approximately om ah hung benza guru pema siddhi hung; I have no strong feelings about whether it's pronounced as spelt or in Tibetan mode, though I do have a preference nowadays for the Tibetan pronunciation to be used only by singers who have some specific significant reason for making that choice, such as being Tibetan Buddhists themselves. In either case the letter 'u' in hum or hung is pronounced as in the vowel of 'book', not buck (in standard southern English). Incidentally, I noticed that Chagdud Tulku pronounced vajra as approximately 'baja', with the soft 'j' as in the French language.
The two short chant melodies are the sole material of the piece, though both are often used upside-down, which effectively produces a different melody, and also half-speed versions of either form appear. Also, I use the two versions of each chant from my original transcriptions. However, I do something interesting and important with the way the mantras are used.
In various Eastern traditions seemingly endless repetition of mantras is considered a highly desirable thing to do, as it functions like very intensive use of meditation in stilling the mind and opening up what people generally regard as high spiritual connections. However, as I now understand, such practices used regularly are highly problematical, and what are believed to be 'high spiritual connections' are really a matter of opening more to the astral non-reality and thus to the garbage.
What I do with the mantras is very different, in that I treat their repetition as fundamentally a creative force instead of a quietening and stilling one. This repetition has nothing material in common with the fashionable musical style called minimalism. Here the repetitions are like the bricks that make up a building, and through multi-layering into large canonic structures they convey a sense of the great scale and intricacy of Nature itself.
In this context in which I use mantras, I regard the mantras as being sung, not chanted, except in specific cases (particularly my 7th and 9th Symphonies) where their semblance of a religious chant seems to represent an initial straitjacket of human unawareness out of which the creative life force (with singing of the mantra) emerges.
Since I composed this work I distanced myself totally from Buddhism and indeed all religion and 'spirituality', now seeing these as vehicles of the garbage to turn us away from genuine self-actualization, and I recognise religious chanting of mantras as actually being insidiously and seriously harmful. I therefore seriously recommend nowadays that people who perform or listen to this and other mantra based works of mine set aside from their mind any religious of 'spirituality' connotations of any mantra and regard the mantra repetitions as just being musical building blocks. Then they would be more or less harmless.
The orchestration is mostly very sparing, the choir getting most of the attention. The work is in three sections, which are played without a break.
The first uses solely what I think of as the 'galloping' chant, in its simpler, Westernized version. It's so fast that the choir will have some difficulty in articulating the first three syllables, OM AH HUNG, but that truly is the speed of the work and of the original chant; any attempt to slow it down will destroy its dance character. Priority needs to be given to articulating the dotted rhythm correctly, even if that precludes the AH being heard clearly. The basses of the second choir get a lot more work than the rest, because for much of the time they sing the mantra at the low pitch of the original chant to form the foundation of the various soaring and vaulted structures of sound that unfold from the rest of the choir.
The middle section brings in the slower and more plainsong-like melody, with a crude imitation of the melismata (ornaments) of Chagdud Tulku's chant; however, the simpler version of the melody without the melismata is used in the denser polyphonic passages for the choir, to avoid undue confusion of sound. This melody is soon worked together with the galloping one. The speed of this section is that of the original plainsong-like chant, which requires the galloping melody to be rendered a little more slowly than previously in order to fit properly (sighs of relief from choir!).
The final section is a somewhat expanded and more intense repeat of the first section, using the original, non-Westernized version of the 'galloping' chant, in which the words are placed illogically, in such a way that choirs singing the work will need a fair amount of practice to articulate at the required speed. The singing of the mantra (note that I continue to avoid the word 'chanting') builds up into a rapturous intensity that has about it an air of cosmic craziness in its sometimes divergent tonalities — throwing to the winds the humdrum limitations of unenlightened existence. The work finishes on the joyful cry 'Emaho!', which is a Tibetan exclamation meaning approximately 'Wonderful!'.