WHEN YOU DIE TO YOURSELF

'Transfigurations' is a choral setting of a suite of poems by celebrated poet Charles Anthony Silvestri, centered around the idea of change. It's our first collaboration, and it was inspired by the musings of its commissioner, Dan Peterson, on behalf of the Chromatica Chorale in Northern California. It's a sister piece to 'Song Offerings'--however, whereas 'Song Offerings' is more of a genre-fluid gospel/rock piece, 'Transfigurations' is approached as a much more traditional choral work.

Early in the process, Tony and I hashed out various ideas for the suite, all connected by the idea of transformation from one shape to another. Two of the poems were grounded in religion and mythology, such as the Transfiguration of Christ; or the story of Iphis from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which tells of a young girl who prays to be transformed into a man so that she may wed her female lover. Others are rooted in the works of other great poets, such as 'Ozymandias', a reimagining of Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous sonnet about a collapsed empire. Still others embrace a more metaphysical exploration of the universe, such as the opening pair of movements ‘Fire Prelude' and 'Photon', that rhapsodize on the harmonious connection between the stars and our own selves. And as a mirror to those opening poems, the concluding movement 'Tat Tvam Asi' (Sanskrit for “Thou art that”) explores the famous phrase in Hinduism that states that the individual is the Absolute--that each of us is in fact the very universe itself.

NOT ME, BUT YOURSELF

It was the process of composing that final movement ‘Tat Tvam Asi’, in fact, that turned out to be very personally transformative of my own creative process. To give some back story, ever since I was a teenager, I tended to split the creative world into two categories: art and entertainment. Both types of works had different goals: broadly speaking, artistic works existed to expand the frontiers of their art form, and expected a level of intellectual engagement from the audience, which would in turn reward them with some profound and deeper understanding of themselves or the world around them. Works of entertainment sought to elicit a sentiment or two—happiness, nostalgia, inspiration—all without asking the audience to work too hard to enjoy the work. Of course, artistic works can be entertaining, and works of entertainment can have a high level of artistry to them. But for much of my life, I swam back and forth in the murky waters where these two ideas collided, always trying to reconcile the two in a state of perpetual misery and unfulfillment.

But what if this duality is false? What if the entire premise of my creative energies, whereby one must delicately balance composing music for the brain against writing music for the heart, is meaningless?

I started to question myself when I discovered the phrase ‘Tat tvam asi’. To give a little context to the phrase, it is most famously posted at the Sabarimala Temple, a famous pilgrimage site in the Kerala region of India. People travel there to find enlightenment—but to get there, these pilgrims need to undergo a series of rituals that last 41 days, where through a combination of fasting, good deeds, and removal of the sense of a corporeal self, they attempt to achieve a state of purity and devotion. After undergoing these rituals, the pilgrims are finally allowed to ascend the mountain, in search of the answers they seek. And once they reach the temple, after many weeks of cleansing the mind, body, and spirit, they are finally presented with the answer to their questions:

Tat tvam asi

These words, printed on the facade of the temple, express perhaps the most enlightened concept in all of theology: “Thou art that.” In other words, “You are it.” You yourself are the person you are searching for. You yourself are the answer to all your questions, and the solution to all your problems. You are the essence of the universe, and the essence of the universe is in you. There is, in fact, no duality—there is only oneness.

If this sounds a little bit cosmic to the Western reader, perhaps it’s because we’re generally more comfortable discussing issues of the mind and the heart, more than we are discussing issues of the soul. I myself, to this point, had certainly never engaged with a spiritual text beyond a superficial understanding of it. And while I had certainly composed many pieces from sacred texts before (e.g. “The Drop That Contained the Sea” is based on the Sufi concept that the essence of the entire universe is contained in each individual, in the same way that a single drop of water contains the essence of the ocean), I always kept their metaphysical aspects at arms length—preferring to engage with spirituality on a more academic and impersonal level than actually embracing it myself.

But perhaps owing to the state of my life that I’m currently in (which I jokingly refer to as 50% artistic rebirth, 50% mid-life crisis), for the first time I let myself be impacted personally by the wisdom of the words that I was setting to music. In my case, “Tat tvam asi” signaled a fundamental re-examination of the very bedrock of my creative world view.

What if this duality between these opposing creative forces—-art and entertainment—-was in fact, false? What if I had predicated my entire creative life on navigating a friction between these two worlds that in fact, doesn’t need to exist? What if the hours of artistic self-flagellation—vacillating between questioning if something I wrote was cerebral enough, vs. whether it was accessible enough—were in fact, completely unnecessary? What if this duality with which I saw the creative world was inflated to such an ungainly proportion, that I lost sight of all that was pure and meaningful about the simple act of making music?

Like any good piece of cosmic wisdom, “Tat tvam asi” made me reconsider my world view. And I found by rejecting the duality with which I had framed it, I was able to find a new path of happiness in composing.

As such, I’m now entering the ‘joyous’ period of my life, where I’m once again making music from a place of innocent exuberance. As it turns out, the happiness that I had always been searching for was there all along. It was me.