The 'One Sound' of Music

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Two Tibetan pieces on the CD are the most musically dramatic and will be familiar to anyone who has heard Tibetan monks sampled on everything from film scores to TV commericals. Tibetan Buddhist music uses a panoply of instruments--thigh-bone horns, cymbals, pellet-filled drums, and extremely long, straight horns called

that stretch out on the ground before the player--to create a wall of sound that alternately drones and blasts the mind into one-pointed attention. Ethno-musicologist David Lewiston's recording of

or "mandala offering prayer," by the monks of the Drepung Monastery is an extraordinary example of chordal chanting, where each singer produces as many as three notes at a time. And Lewiston's essay about the first time he ever recorded Tibetan monks in a Himalayan monastery in the 1970s gives a thrilling window onto what it's like to be in the midst of that kind of musical energy.

As an introduction to all things Buddhist, "One Sound" misses a couple of beats. While the trajectory of Buddhism's spread across Asia is well told in the booklet, the actual history of Buddhist music is sketchy, and some of the explanatory notes to tracks seem incomplete. In the notes to a

chant, an exquisite solo vocal paean of unknown Chinese denomination, the term "fan-pai" is defined as "sacred declamation, the term applied to all Buddhist vocal music." But in reference material on Chinese and Buddhist music I searched, the phrase "fan-pai" does not appear. Lastly, the choice of the Sri Lankan

("protection") chanting, while representative of the form, is disappointingly lackluster compared with other Theravadin chant I have heard. It may be entirely "utilitarian" as a spiritual tool, but it can also be beautiful depending on the chanter and the oral style of the lineage.

Master Seung Sahn opens "One Sound" with "Morning Bell Chant," a pre-dawn ritual recited by hundreds of Kwan Um Zen students around the world before the first morning meditation. Seung Sahn chants as only a sincere practitioner can--nothing added, nothing taken away: just pure, sonorous intonation. It is that quality that brings the listener into the monastery, into the music, into its infinite possibility for "wisdom mind," and "One Sound" delivers the possibility over and over.