Music as Spiritual Practice: James Falzone at Wistariahurst Museum

Music can be used to uplift us spiritually and to sell products. It can be used to urge us to make love and to make war. This malleability is what makes music so ubiquitous and such a powerful force in our lives. James Falzone, who gave a solo concert at Holyoke’s Wistariahurst Museum on March 20, understands the power of sound to transform us. Playing clarinet, flutes, shruti box and piano, Falzone filled the marble Music Room with vibrations both beautiful and troubling. On March 23 at Amherst College, he gave a superb lecture on the critical role the arts play in a liberal arts education. Together, these two events painted a compelling case for the importance of music in our lives.

Falzone is Associate Dean and Professor of Music at Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle University. His appearance in the Valley was part of his solo barnstorm through the Midwest and northeast United States. The 54-year old musician and scholar is no stranger to western Massachusetts. Jazz Shares has presented his clarinet septet (The Renga Ensemble), his world music quartet (Allos Musica Ensemble), his duo with bassist/vocalist Katie Ernst (Wayfaring), and his quartet for three clarinets and voice (Pneuma). Taken together, they paint a portrait of a consummate musician and an evolved human being.

Falzone began Friday’s program from the back of the room, and made his way to the stage playing a wooden flute from the indigenous Paiute people of the Great Basin (western U.S.). This sacred wind instrument slowed our breath and put us in a spiritual frame of mind. Throughout the evening, he produced the loveliest sound from his custom-made Backun clarinet, and when combined with drones from his shruti box, a traditional Indian bellows-driven instrument, the room - and the 35 bodies in it - were bathed in mellifluous vibrations of wood and reeds. Given the system collapse around us, we were grateful for the respite. Linda Tumbarello, who at one point had stood up and to watch from the side, reported that 90% of the audience had their eyes closed.

These moments of harmony were juxtaposed with unusual clusters of tones, untethered floating meters, and sounds best described as screeching and scrapping. Falzone rubbed elephant bells on the piano strings to produce a whirling buzz. With clarinet in hand, he walked the aisles, repeatedly returning to a shrieked note at the end of each melodic phrase. His penny whistle work referenced Indian music and mournful Celtic refrains alongside some piercing overblowing. Taken together, the concert’s alternating periods of tension and release produced a kind of yoga high, the feeling of having been on a journey.

Like a worship service, Falzone’s recital took you someplace. He became a Christian in high school, and served as music director at Grace Chicago Church for 16 years. Since moving to Seattle, he has offered monthly improvised, contemplative solo clarinet music at Saint Mark’s Cathedral.

“I think of improvisation as an embodied spiritual practice, not unlike prayer or yoga or tai chi,” Falzone said in an interview with the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship in 2016. "In any improvised practice you’re constantly reacting to the present by making sense of the past. That’s exactly what I do on the bandstand: I play a gesture, a note, a phrase—and that becomes my past. Then I stand in a new now. I play a few more notes, and that becomes the past. There is a new now, and the process continues. Embedded in the whole process is the acceptance, even the celebration, of risk and imperfection.

"The sense of learning and growing in the midst of decision making is, to me, a beautiful metaphor for the spiritual life. The continuous cycle of moment-by-moment living resembles the life of faith. Improvisation is infused with freedom—openness to what is possible in any given moment. The freedom of improvisation can also happen in a worship service, when there’s a sense that the pastor, musicians, liturgists and worshipers are fully present, ready to listen and react to whatever God has brought to that moment.”