Nidra for chamber orchestra

Abstract

I believe in music as spiritual conveyor. My musical goal is to enhance this function. The current thesis is an attempt, of which the principle is to reach the spiritual through the corporeal, to resonate the mutual through the personal. The yoga practice of sleep-like meditation (yoga nidra), as well as the situation of sleep in general, have been my interest. In yoga nidra, the practitioner's attention is focused successively on each part of their own body in an effort to achieve a state of wakeful sleep. In the current thesis, musical materials are derived from the sounds, gestalts or other mental representations of the bodily self during the situation of sleep, including interoception (sensual information about our physiological condition such as gravity, pain or 'qi'), proprioception (feedback information about our movements), somatic motor control (voluntary muscular movement), habituation (desenisitization of repeating stimuli) and attentional focus, in an attempt to come closer to the personal realm through self-identification via the function of 'mirror neurons'. These elements are however abstracted and deviated in their forms of presentation, and are situated in various contexts in relation to other elements, serving to gear progressively toward the ritualistic goal of achieving a collective but qualitatively distinctive state of heightened private selfconsciousness shared among audience.