The Love Ensemble: An Invitation
This is the letter of invitation I sent to potential members of The Love Ensemble.
March 10, 2009
The Love Ensemble
An Invitation
Without our bodies, what is our consciousness?
As artists - as humans - we are the instruments of consciousness. The more facility we have with our instruments, the more authentic and powerful our communications can be.
I am founding The Love Ensemble as a garden environment for intuitive musical improvisers, where we can cultivate and develop our instruments with more precision, care, intelligence and integration. And of course, and most importantly, love.
Most improvisers I know have experienced channeling states of some kind. I’m interested in getting to know these landscapes of expanded states better, and visiting them more often with more consciousness.
I also believe that musical practice will benefit from a fuller exploration and integration of all of our senses, and of all that our physical and emotional bodies have to teach and communicate.
In a world which prioritizes “results”, this will be a group dedicated to process and flow. As we work, we will also regularly perform and record - but from the understanding that our inner and outer explorations are truly inseparable and of equal value.
The power of listening is our foundation. Much of our work will be opening up more pathways for listening to our inspiration and intuition, through techniques including meditations, full-body physical gesture work, dream explorations, and interactions with image, text, space, and narrative contexts. We will bring these rich journeys into our sounds and musical structures to create expressive worlds.
To the group I invite you not just as “musicians” in the conventional sense but as complete artists, with all of your expressive capabilities. Together we will discover and create the poetry and narrative of evolving musical speech.
We will meet every week for three hours, and it’s important for members of the group to agree to a weekly engagement. With this work, it’s actually not that much time - and what we learn will build and flower from week to week. That said, obviously things come up and there will be times when you can’t make it to a rehearsal.
I hope you will join me in this effort to create a group space where music can come through in new and unexpected ways.
Love,
Ronit