Tibetan Buddhism -Theremin connexion ?

omhoge wrote:

.....the real training and practice was silent after hearing Trungpa Rimpoche...

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Trungpa!

He was wonderful! The "bad boy" of the Tibetan tulkus!

A very good friend of mine in Toronto (this was in the late 1960's) came home unexpectedly from the office one afternoon and found his wife in bed with Trungpa. No kidding! He promptly threw both her and the rimpoche bodily into the street.

My friend divorced his wife and later remarried. The wife went on to become Trungpa's "secretary". LOL

Yagotta luvit.

I once asked Trungpa if it was possible to be an enlightened tulku AND an alcoholic. The answer was "yes". Trungpa died in the late 1980's from chronic liver disease after years of heavy drinking. I think his reincarnation has been recognized.

Trungpa was what I call a "Renaissance rimpoche" because he was brilliant, interested in everything and he attracted a wide variety of equally brilliant and accomplished people.

That is a great story, thanks! So there must be hope to be to be an enlightened person AND a thereminist too!

Tibetan music is of two types - there is a folk tradition of songs and stringed instruments which is much like the music of the Mongolian plateau to the east of Tibet, and there is the religious music which is dominated by chanting, percussion and various types of trumpets.

The religious music is intended to summon or invoke various deities which manifest themselves as states of consciousness. The folk music has no musical notation, but the religious music does and the "scores" that the monks use are marvelous to behold - filled with curved lines and squiggles to guide the rhythms and inflections of the music. The only musical notation that I have seen that compares with these lamaist scores are the scores written specifically for theremins (I have seen some of the ones that belong to Lydia Kavina). I actually found a jpeg of a Tibetan score on the internet.

Tibetan Musical Score (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tibetanmusicalscore.jpg)

The religious music seems to have a lot of Bonist (pre-buddhist animist) influence in it and has nothing at all in common with the musical traditions of the indian subcontinent where Buddhism originally came from.

good stuff - thanks!

From which of those lineages do you think the overtone chanting evolved? I suspect it came through the Mongolian and Bon path. (human overtone singing can sound whistle or thermemin-like so we're still on topic, plus it's related to thereminst-throat)

Overtone singing definitely came from the Mongolian cultures of central Asia but the overtones you hear in Tibetan Buddhist chants are produced in an entirely different way from the "sygyt" of the Tuvans. (I have studied both with Tuvan and Tibetan masters of the art although I can't claim to excel at either.)