Long Tone Choir: Music as Meditation
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." - Buckminster Fuller
The Long Tone Choir is a manifold project, based on the cornerstones of listening, breathing, mindfulness, and responsive sounding. Founded by Rae Diamond in 2013, the Long Tone Choir is a path of personal and communal exploration, consisting of local and national communities of singers, and a growing body of composition-meditations that are easy to learn, yet result in complex, organic evolutions of sound-art.
Repertoire:
Our repertoire creates biotic and centripetal developments of sound, time and perception by using the inherently irregular tempo of breath as the musical pulse, playing within the harmonic series with specific pitches, vowels and vocal manipulations, and traversing the ragged edges of harmonic adventure through aleatory methods. Performing this material trains the ear and builds the voice and breath capacity of seasoned musicians and non-musicians alike, calms and focuses the mind, increases body awareness, transforms the experience of time, and builds a sense of community. All Long Tone Choir material is composed by Rae Diamond.
Direction:
The Long Tone Choir is gently facilitated by Rae, whose composition-meditations are designed to develop organically, and thus require only subtle direction. Rae received a degree in music composition - with a focus in experimental voice - from The Evergreen State College in 2010, and has worked with long tone singing as both a music and a meditation practice since 2002.
"I know what the greatest cure is: it is to give up, to relinquish, to surrender, so that our little hearts may beat in unison with the great heart of the world." - Henry Miller