JCS: Hello, Professor Jay, it’s really a pleasure to be here across from you. We’d like to organizethis interview in terms of past, present, and future. I’d like to begin by asking you a bit about your background. How did your life lead you to your contemplative practice? And, in this series we’re especially interested in how technology interacts with this practice in your life.
JA: When I hit a certain age in life, I started to reflect a lot more and think about my past and ask that question: How did I get here? And with that question, I began to self-actualize and really understand myself. I remember being a little girl who was inquisitive about things, which I think I got from both my parents. My mom would read every day. Every day our job was to go to the store to get her newspaper. My dad was the tech person, though. He was the engineer brain, the designer, the artist. He would fix everything in the house, fix everything outside. I got to see thatfrom both angles, where my dad was the hands-on skilled worker and my mom was the reader. She was full of all of this knowledge; and I would spend time with my dad while he fixed things, the radio or the cassette player, or even when the cassette tapes would break, he showed me how to slice the tape and put the tape back together. I remember he fabricated a gasket for the car or some part of the engine. I think a part of it is just that he grew up poor and we didn’t have a lot of money.
I think my contemplative mindset came from the fact that I grew up in a religious household full of seven people. At any given moment of the day or night, my dad is hammering away at something with his drills. We were in Detroit, so it was sometimes too cold outside and he would sometimes sit car parts on the kitchen table and work from there. As for my mom, she wasalways vacuuming or running water for dishes, and then there was my brother who always had the TV blasted while my sisters were making their noise. I don’t want to paint the picture that it was chaos in the house; it was just seven people living their life and growing up. I did, though, end up wanting a peace of mind. I wanted my own thoughts. I desperately wanted to think on my own. I heard the things my mom and dad said, and while I honor the things they taught me, I had this desperate need to be able to think on my own and be able to figure things out on my own. I’ve always had mentors, but I just always needed to question things in life, like, why are things the way they are? And, in order to think in that way, I think you need quiet time. I think you need to get out of these spaces where there’s a lot of noise. Again, it’s not a bad thing to be around noise, but I think there’s a need to slow things down. Life as a musician is very busy. If you’re not practicing, you’re rehearsing or you’re recording, you’re on a flight, you’re trying to manage other people, you’re booking the room, or the building where you’re going to rehearse. There’s a lot of anxiety to deal with. It’s hard to be a deep thinker if you’re constantly surrounded with noise and things to do. I began to desire a type of introspection and curiosity to the point that it has helped me make decisions in my life where I could slow things down just to think.
I think you need to get out of these spaces where there’s a lot of noise. Again, it’s not a bad thing to be around noise, but I think there’s a need to slow things down.
JCS: Your answer really brought me towards what I’d like to ask in the second question, which is how this intersection of contemplation and music and use of technology in that music has helped you make sense of the world? It sounds like it was a sort of solace or way of drawing into yourself, but as an artistic practice, it’s also so outward facing. How is this dynamic helping you bring meaning into the world or understand it better?
JA: I’m learning and thinking a lot about music these days. Growing up, you’re taught your scales and you’re fingering on your instruments and how to hold your sticks and that’s all fundamental things to know, but it just scratches the surface. It’s like the shell of music. The learning of an instrument is a very shallow place to start. And I think the shallow place is probably a good place to start for kids, as opposed to my dad who was teaching me about subliminal messages at the age of seven. As a kid, though, I saw that music could get me into these other spaces across the world, so I pursued the shallow end because I wanted to get out of Detroit. I wanted that freedom, that sense of discovery and curiosity. I’m going to say something really silly, but this is one of those questions that sparked this curiosity. When I was a kid, I remember asking this question: If you take a dog or a sheep or a cow out of the US, would it understand the other cows, sheep, and dogs out in the world? So, as a kid, I was already thinking about: What would it be like outside of Detroit, outside of the US? I was already wondering about the relationship between people, what we do here, and what we do there. What are the similarities? What are the differences? And music plays a huge role in that question. We all have access to music all over the world, but we do it differently. There are all these different techniques to play all these different instruments.
Technology has allowed us to put to test theories that philosophy has talked about for centuries.
As I got deeper into my musical studies, I started to think about musical frequencies, spaces, reverb and delays and also who determines what the rock mix is? Why does this person get a Grammy for mixing this record as opposed to this person? Who determines what the proper way to mix is? And why are we listening to that guy? I don’t know why people trust this person, who is indeed probably a man, but everybody just follows suit. So, in my brain, I’m thinking, well, that’s not what I want to hear, that’s not how I want to mix my music, that’s not the space that I want listeners to feel that they’re in. Technology is what has allowed me to pull music apart. It allows us to take a deeper dive into frequencies, into moods. It allows us to see what the frequencies are doing to our bodies, what itdoes to our organs versus to the neurons that are traveling in our head that influence the way we think. I’m talking about music, but ultimately, it is about frequencies. We are learning how to manipulate frequencies, moving into these other spaces of medicine; medicine is starting to trust music. Technology has allowed us to put to test theories that philosophy has talked about for centuries.
JCS: How do you see your contemplative artistic practice helping or affecting the world on a larger scale?
JA: My dissertation tried to understand almost in a reverse engineering way how music affects the body. There’s a lot of researchers who are working on this topic—how music affects the body, how it affects the mind and the function of memory. My idea has been: How can I take their research and apply it to composition so that I am intentionally writing melodies and harmonies and rhythms that will bring about what they were doing research on. When you’re listening to music through a streaming service and you put in the search bar, “meditative” or “contemplative” music, you generally hear the same thing. It bothers me that everybody is playing this drone that doesn’t change for three minutes and we’re all saying this is what contemplative music is. My thought was that there has to be other sounds, other ways to bring about a contemplative state. In India, you hear different types of meditative music, but there’s still this repeated drone. Is it possible, though, to attain this contemplative state through song form?
This is what I’m getting into now: writing music that directly reflects the research people are doing right now. And so far, so good. I’m starting to use frequencies and different things within what would sound like a normal jazz piece, but there’s all this thought that goes into it. People are coming up to me after shows saying that they teared up, that it was beautiful, that they had this overwhelming sense of something they didn’t understand. There’s another woman wholistened to a song I wrote years ago, called “Fly.” I wrote it after I had a bad flight leaving LA to go home to Detroit. She told me that her anxiety flared up listening to it. When people respond to you after shows, or listen to your music and respond, you start understanding how music affects us in particular ways. I want to write contemplative music in a way where people will think about the time signatures or the chord changes or the melodies—not just say, here’s a drone and I’m going to sit in it and contemplate right now. I think we all know that music has a deeper meaning, but how can I get people to listen to it intentionally?
JCS: It’s fascinating to see how theory has informed your practice of music composition. I suppose it is truly a kind of praxis, right? You’re bringing theory into practice and then you aspire to have your practice bring other people into the theory.
JA: Yes. I think it’s about intention, right? Some people have argued that all music is therapeutic. But what if it was intentionally composed that way? What kinds of contemplative states could we achieve? If someone does it unintentionally, will that be a shallower listening experience versus someone intentionally bringing them in? I have a lot of questions and, as I tell my students, while I have every question in the world, I don’t have any of the answers.
I think it’s about intention, right? Some people have argued that all music is therapeutic. But what if it was intentionally composed that way?
JCS: Would you say that that is what’s in mind when prayer and gospel is written? The intention to bring people to a contemplative place? Would you say, then, that you’re using technology to bring people to a similar contemplative place but through a more secular or perhaps post-secularway?
JA: This reminds me of the talk I did at the symposium in October. Architects of religious spaces aim to foster the same sorts of reverb that we find inside, the same sorts of caves our ancestors used to live in. It makes you wonder: What is it about reverb that drives people to go into that space to pray? We keep making reverberous places, and I’m sitting here wondering, well, why? What is its function and how can we better use it?
