SVARAM – A Sound Journey of Creativity and Collaboration
Svaram – A Sound Journey of Creativity and Collaboration.pdf
While a journey always starts with the first steps, we forget about the many preparations, often over many months, that have to be accomplished before we can actually set out on the adventure. Sometimes it all starts off with a dream, an idea, an inspiration before it translates into a plan and needed strategies to get all ready.
For the Auroville Journey The Mother had received The Dream and shared it generously, inviting all those who were ready for the ‘great adventure of consciousness and joy’. But she also reminded us that there was no predetermined given track, no chartered route on the path of transformation, for building the new creation, a gnostic community, a conscious society and the model city, which had been envisioned and laid out in the shape of a spiral galaxy.
The stories of ‘a sample of all the impossibilities of humanity’ coming together on this red soil, being called to offer and consecrate themselves, their skills and aspirations for participating in this ‘laboratory of evolution’, through the process of co-creating a new society through the building of a City of Dawn, span a colourful spectrum of human and cultural diversity woven together in a visionary tapestry and imagination of a potential human unity and its promise for a more harmonious future.
From the outset of the Auroville adventure, creative endeavours and activities were present, explored and shared among the early settlers, expressing themselves through the work with nature, handicrafts and varied artistic explorations. Already very early on, the inherent talent, curiosity and readiness to participate in the experiment by the younger local and surrounding Tamil population was recognized and welcomed.
It seemed that the seed of the new creation was planted into an apparently barren and poor yet also rich soil of an ancient culture to be discovered and fathomed for the nutrients and support it could offer to the fragile sprouting of an unheard of, almost utopian project.
Already in the first shared restorative works with the land, and then the excavations for the Matrimandir it became clear that only in a fruitful meeting ground of the cultures of the past and the future was the key to be found and utilized for a successful collaboration in the manifestation of Auroville. As also it had been stated in the charter: “Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.”
SVARAM’s Journey had been prepared over years in having being involved with Auroville Village Action and its outreach work and educational activities in over 40 villages of the AV bioregion. Having been active in cultural organisation and performing arts, Aurelio was inspired by the UNESCO cultural approach of development work and its work in preserving, supporting and enhancing intangible heritage.
He initiated AVAArts in the later 1990s, surveyed the surrounding villages for their cultural heritage, the unique expressions and special skills, and launched a Primary Education Project, created a weekend Art School in Isai Ambalam with the help of the first batch of Tamil Aurovilian teachers and their artistic skills.
Recognizing the great talent and creativity in the local children he founded the Mohanam Cultural Center in an authentic old house with inner courtyard and garden in Sanjeevinagar, with a group of drop-out students and engaged volunteers, fostering original village culture and practices through inviting elder folk exponents and experts to teach the growing number of enthusiastic children.
Reviving cultural practices, raising awareness about health and social issues, introducing dance and music classes, teaching crafts and life skills, creating festivals for traditional games and organizing exchange programs with other villages and Auroville, all brought an invigoration of local youth culture and a rich multicultural meeting ground and mutual exchange. Realising the challenging living condition with unemployment of 60 % in the young population, domestic and alcohol abuse and the at the time escalating gang violence, the group initiated a pilot project on musical instrument craft for 3 months in a tiny four square-meter room with a bit of a verandah. The seed was planted and found a truly fertile soil!
Journeys are usually interesting adventures, open new horizons, bring surprises, tease with the unexpected, deepen our experience, often reveal new insights into nature and our human civilization, and let us participate more consciously in the constant change of the evolutionary movement.
We feel blessed that our shared travelling with the SVARAM project is under the auspices of one of the most precious gifts of human culture – music and all its expressions in community, the folk, popular, classical and the healing arts and its harmony-fostering capacity.
While the musical instrument craft vocational training workshop had been initially sponsored by well-wishers and a long-time donor and encouraged by a SAIIER research project on “Instruments for a New Music Pedagogy” we soon had to look for a sustainable base to support the primary need of the ‘youth at risk’ for employment and income generation. With no real skills in business development, marketing and management, the initial journey felt more like a caravanserai through deserted regions, often disorienting, or allured by a Fata Morgana, some delusional ideas, but luckily at the core of it all was a dedicated team, ready to take up all the challenges, geared for the trip through unknown trials and difficult trails, tracking the hard terrain, scouting for some new well-springs of energy, for greener pastures.
All this was certainly helped by the different skills that were brought together by the youth with background in mechanical, electricity, painting and carpentry work, assisted by the able guidance of our craft master Jan, the former director of Decauram carpentry, who guided the keen young learners with their talented hands and open minds to pick up on anything needed for the task of the growing adventure.
At the same time Aurelio was studying all the maps and charts, equipped with his musical sextant – learnings and explorations since his childhood in listening, music, dance, classical guitar, Pythagorean studies in Vienna, and extended travels of ethno-musicological experiences with original indigenous people around the world – to be able to chart a clear route ahead in the stormy seas of human and organisational challenges.
This metaphor of a ‘ship journey’ and its set-up was often used and became like a symbol for the necessity of close collaboration and care for each other, the materials, the field, the neighbourhood, the environment, the take off dock from the village culture and the compass and direction of Auroville as a true ‘town-ship’, as the fulcrum and measure for the scale of our process and progress – a veritable expedition through the diversity of individuals, learning about helpful coherence of the group, the larger collective, to be able to stay on track, overcome obstacles and steer clear and always forward into the next unfolding stage.
This all created a good community base and was the reason SVARAM was adopted as one of the first 50 projects worldwide by the UN initiative ‘Music as a Natural Resource’ which was created as a cultural enhancement to the Sustainable Development Goals and brought together various projects from around the globe which applied the community, culture and health fostering gifts of music.
In between, the SVARAM crew managed to find the long awaited saving lone islands for fresh supplies, respites from emotional draughts and conflicts, often on the point of mutinies, not to mention the occasional thread through pirating, and then again fresh winds in the sails, course ahead, promising new dawns and unknown lands in sight, or deeper home-comings, return to the roots of this experiment in human unity.
Astounding, that from the very launch of the unforeseeable journey, SVARAM was successfully affected by “constant progress and a youth that never ages”, is constantly growing, expanding, in numbers, activities, products, customers, clients, programs and activities, broadening the horizon from the initial local outlet with a small corner in the Visitors Center Boutique, into the national arena of strongly growing and enterprising India, with interesting projects on the international horizon in the Middle East, Europe, the US and a global outreach, now exporting the musical instruments in more than 36 countries. Arriving at this important anchoring station now docking on once again in a safe harbour, the original home grounds, between all the busy engagements, looking back and ahead, we, the captain and officers, the team on board, having journeyed more then 2 decades together, this year spent some time in evaluation of the long journey through deep seas and wavy oceans, needing to re-imagine the course ahead, and possibly can offer our reflections, some of our experiences on the unknown routes to the promised land of human unity.
From the beginning there was an emphasis on collaboration, really working and solving problems together, putting our minds and hearts in our hands and being pragmatic about the tasks and challenges on the table, in the group and between individuals, in this constant shifting landscape of the unfolding project work. Foremost was and is the focus on craft, working with diverse materials, shaping, morphing matter and tease out its vibrational quality.
Once the key to a right resonance is found, then it is about tuning, bringing order, the right proportion and relationship, creating musical structures, scales, modes, and their finer nuances of overtones, timbre and textures of sound. This work on musical harmony reflects then into the environment, it can transform situations, harmonize circumstances and relationships.
Auroville provides a rich field of potent exchanges between aspirants, colleagues, peers, artisans, students, learners, the constant shifting scene of travellers and volunteers – all in a forward, coevolutionary movement, embracing all factors of the diverse involvements and participations, each contributing their own gifts, cultural conditionings, social baggage and hang-ups into the equation of the human unity experiment.
We went through a big fire catastrophe in 2009 where most of our facilities were burned down by arson, which heavily brought us down on our knees. But this alarming and certainly humbling disaster that pushed us to the brink of almost giving up, eventually made us doubly strong, transforming the grave challenge into an opportunity for more discipline, better organization, rationalising our production and improving greatly the work capacity of all involved. That incident also brought a greater out-and in-reach, entailed a saving first larger international order and helped SVARAM to establish a stringent quality control and management, altogether transforming the rural development project into a communal enterprise run on principles of co-management.
The still remaining group of the original trainees, Karthik, Shankar, Magesh, Parasuraman, now constitute the core team and have become in their seniority mentors and guides in their own right for the younger generation. With a capable and trained team, they fully run the increased production and services occupying all together a work force of more than 80 people.
Interesting to see that the creative process is very important to each one, new ideas are always welcome, discoveries and instrument innovations churn the imagination, bring fresh enthusiasm and the joy in the work. In this process of actual creation everything is open, all are invited to share and give input through their gifts and skills, there are no hard boundaries of language and culture. Students interns, visiting artists, young professionals – all are immersed in creating the new, uncover the hidden, reveal the unknown, reshape the inspiration, transform not only the thing in front, but deeply ourselves.
It is always a special joy to observe the visiting expert there on a workbench together with young, local artisans fully engrossed in the process of attempting the impossible, finding a solution, a way out or in, a deep dive into the mystery of manifestation, evoking sound out of material nature, bringing spirit into matter.
From an initial need of giving each of the original batch of artisans their own work domain, according to their preference and material skills, working with wood, metals, glass, clay, leather and natural materials or recycled ones, we formed departments according to the age-old classifications of musical instruments into percussion-, membrane-, wind- and string instruments and today manufacture a versatile range of all of these instruments, still maintaining separate work teams each with their specialized skills.
A happy development also is that over all these years a strong team of very skilful young woman have joined in and now even run their own section for all kinds of small handheld percussion instruments made from natural materials, seeds, pods, shells, bamboo and coconut shells. Aurelio’s passion and years of studies and explorations in organology, the science of musical instruments, are at the foundation of the rich portfolio of more than a hundred different elementary musical instruments. Some are inspired by original sources and archetypes of primal music-making of humanity, like the bullroarer, clap-sticks, frog caller, seed rattles and shakers, shaman frame-drums, conch-shells and horns; others imitate sounds of nature like the storm- and ocean-drums, the breath-wind and whistles. While the bamboo and wooden flutes bring traditional models form Indian or Native American roots, the ocarinas and clay flutes are seemingly universal and appeared in many cultures around the globe.
The whole series of xylophone-like bar-instruments of different sound materials like wood, diverse metals, stone and glass which follow traditional models from Africa and south-east Asia have a similar universal appeal and had been created already in the popular music pedagogical Orff-Instruments as an initiative after the second world-war to stimulate international understanding and create a culture of peace through educational elementary musical play.
String instruments like the Svaraveena, Psaltery, Tanpura-Santoor and the Monochord follow models of a more sophisticated folk culture and take a bit more of practice and know-how to be played, especially with the skill of tuning as a pre-requisite to be able to produce meaningful music.
While all these fit in the category of ‘World Music Instruments’ and follow SVARAM’s motto of “Bringing the joy of music and the magic touch of sound into everyone’s heart and hands”, offering an immediate access and easy spontaneous play, the real and unique contribution of this Auroville project to the world of music are creations emerging from deeper acoustic and material studies, explorations and some of our international collaborations, like the Sound-stones, the Plate-bells and many of the specially invented and created sound sources of the “New Waves” series.
These are mostly very resonant, bell-like metal instruments, in all shapes and sizes of rods, tubes, plates and bars used in installations and specifically for the growing popularity of sound healing modalities and practices.
The signature of these novel ‘sound sources’ is that they are, in contrast to the international standard of Equal Temperament, mostly tuned in just intonation, natural, harmonic tunings, as for instance described in the Classical Indian 22 Shruti system of ancient lore and contemporary practice. Others of this make, as for instance the Orbits Planetary Frequencies are utilizing calculated mean-periods of the planet’s solar circumnavigations and their traditional symbolism, or like the ‘Sonic Chi Circle’ are tuned in the age old pentatonic mode of Chinese music and its references to and applications in the healing arts. The new ‘Sonic Pyramids’ on the other hand are rather based on sacred geometry measures and the resulting surprisingly rich sonic textures.
All of these novel ‘sound sources’ find application in the presently spreading wave of vibrational healing work with sound frequencies, utilizing the universal building blocks of music, like pulse and rhythm, tone and textures, patterns and cycles for the harmonization of the being and its physical, emotional and mental layers and constitution.
A presentation at the World Conference for Music Therapy 2014 in Austria of our SONORIUM Sound Healing Space marked a milestone in this work on ‘Music and Medicine’. We are in exchange with the Indian Music Therapy Association and are in the process of signing an agreement with the Institute of Salutogenetic and Complementary Medicine Center of Yoga and Music Therapy in SBVP, Puducherry. Our seminars, workshops, online courses and residential trainings in “Integral Sound Studies and Practices”, and the applications of sound and music for well-being and preventive health care bring together students from around the world and proves the uniqueness of the learning environment of the Universe-City Campus of Auroville and its great potential for manifesting its ‘raison d’etre’ as a place for inner discovery, consciousness studies and individual as well as collective transformation.
Another breakthrough in larger project work came through the involvement in the realization of a Sound Garden for India’s first interactive music museum, the IME Bangalore, but also the large, oversized Wind Chime installation spanning 16 meters and carrying thousand kilos of tuned tubular bells, operated mechanically and electronically timed, now mounted in Mumbai’s T2, housing one of the world’s largest public art installations in its international airport.
Both these project works were spanning over a few years of learning, exploring, experimentation and final production and could be completed in 2017/18. The global impact of the lockdown years and its ensuing crises of mental health actually increased the demand for the harmonizing power of music, its instruments and applications, and SVARAM once more grew stronger through the crises, reaching out with its unique products and services, as well as further entering the new domain of outdoor installations and sound gardens, with a key project in an awarded retreat and well-being island in the Maldives accomplished in 2022.
So it appears that our crafted ship has reached its dream island, is sailing safely in blue waters, is still travelling strong under the Auroville flag, supporting the community’s income generation, activities in the industrial zone and cultural life, while at the same time the universal ‘town-ship’ itself is going through turbulent, stormy and unsettling crises. Or is all just reflecting holographically the contemporary situation on this our planet in an evolutionary crisis?
The need for harmony and peace amidst the brutality of international war-zones is pressing, the burden of a mentality groping with its own limitations, unable to provide solutions for the problems it created, is crushing, the vision of a place ‘the earth needs’ with its struggles, failures, its small victories and accomplishments are real, as is its dream, its enormous task and unquestionable relevance in a world of strife, egoism and consequent social and environmental destruction.
In its 56 years of history, Auroville has often proven its resilience and perseverance in times of crises, overcoming adverse circumstances and outgrowing phases of systemic chaos and challenges, and through all the travails it’s comforting to know that its founder, The Mother assured its eventual success.
SVARAM is well on its way and certainly continuing its adventurous journey through the seas of change, discovering new shores of opportunities in the opening global arena of sonic explorations.
With a team of presently 12 Aurovilians and a large network of international associates and resource people and students, we are foreseeing a crucial next step in our as well as Auroville’s growth.
We have created a new Atelier study, program and therapy space in the collective UTSAV Building on the Verite radial, are presently replacing the old make-shift work-sheds with new production facilities …
and have recently opened a model public Sound Garden in the dedicated plot for our extension.
The envisioned ‘Center for the Craft, Art and Science of Sound’ there is fully designed and planned by well-known architect and Pritzker price winner, the late BV Doshi and awaits support and funds for its manifestation as an international hub of sonic studies and practices, applied research and development for more, yet undiscovered instrumentations of the essential force of progressive Harmony.
As a veritable field post and experimental station of this ‘laboratory of evolution’, Svaram is contributing in many ways – and what it can – to the manifestation of Auroville and its aim of an actual human unity.
“This remedy – it’s good for all earth life
– is to attain and open up to the consciousness of Harmony –
not mental or vital harmony,
but the ‘essential’ harmony, the ‘principle’ of harmony.”
The Mother, Agenda, 6 May 1967
