{"id":1195,"date":"2011-10-12T14:04:22","date_gmt":"2011-10-12T14:04:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/katybutler.com\/site\/?p=1"},"modified":"2011-10-12T14:04:22","modified_gmt":"2011-10-12T14:04:22","slug":"thegyutomonks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.katybutler.com\/author\/articles\/thegyutomonks\/","title":{"rendered":"Vibration"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New Yorker<\/em>
\nTalk of the Town<\/em>
\n Vibration<\/em>
\n1988, Dec 12
\nBy Katy Butler<\/p>\n

The Gyuto Monks<\/p>\n

IT TAKES A LEAP of the imagination to describe the chanting of the Gyuto monks as song, or even as music. Its predominant sound is a sort of deep, pebbly\u00a0 growling, a note\u00a0 and\u00a0 a half below the bottom of most bass ranges, approaching the frequencies of garbage disposals and earthmoving machinery. For almost five hundred years, in ceremonies in Lhasa that sometimes lasted for days the monks visualized deities like Mahakala, a six-armed demonic protector who carried\u00a0 a rosary\u00a0 of human skulls and danced in a sea of fire. It was prayer, not performance. After the Chinese suppressed the Tibetan rebellion, in 1959, most of the Gyuto monks were imprisoned or executed, and\u00a0\u00a0 the others scattered. Roughly ninety escaped through the mountains to northern India. There, shortly before dawn one day in the fall of 1964, Huston Smith, a philosophy professor on sabbatical from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, discovered\u00a0 that each\u00a0 monk was capable of singing three-part harmony by himself\u2014a\u00a0deep bass B, a well-amplified, overtonal D-sharp near middle C, and a barely audible, whirring\u00a0 F-sharp nearly two octaves higher.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey began with low, guttural, monotonous chanting of a type that I\u2019d heard before,\u201d Dr. Smith told us recently. \u201cAfter about an hour, I dozed off, frankly. I came to with a start and I was surrounded with heavenly choirs. I thought, \u2018This is strange\u2014they\u2019re singing in chords.\u2019 Chords are a Western invention, of course. Then the choir blanked out and the cantor sang alone. He was singing a full chord\u2014a first, a third, and a barely audible fifth. My scalp began to tingle. My first thought was that Klaus Licpman\u2014he was the musical director at M. I. T. \u2014 would never believe me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Early last month, twenty-one Gyuto monks flew into San Francisco from their monastery-in-exile, in Bomdila, India, to begin a small national tour (they were at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on December 3rd<\/sup>), and a friend of ours, a Buddhist priest named Yvonne, invited us to hear them chant in a recording studio, behind a cement plant in San Rafael, north of San Francisco. It would not be a formal performance, she explained. They were testing new microphones, and Mickey Hart, the drummer for the Grateful Dead, was going to help. \u201cI\u2019d always thought of Deadheads as sybarites,\u201d Yvonne said. \u201cBut this has turned out to be a meeting of sweethearts. \u201c<\/p>\n

So late one Friday afternoon we found ourselves in a van filled with monks and rolling into the studio parking lot. The monks all wore maroon sarongs and robes. One had added a watch with an expandable band; another wore bright-red-and-orange striped socks; and a third wore an \u201cIV Tibet\u201d<\/sup>\u00a0button. Mickey Hart, a handsome man in his mid-forties with pointed, fox-like features and a wide grin, met us at the door, He was wearing Nikes, jeans, and a tie-dyed T-shirt of the type sold in parking lots before Dead concerts, and he seemed a little nonplussed when the abbot of the Gyuto monastery came up to him and draped a ceremonial white silk scarf around his neck. The abbot gave another scarf to the sound engineer, Dan Healy, who was tending the electronic equipment with his own kind of devotion.<\/p>\n

\u201cJust let the monks vibrate for a while and get used to it in here,\u201d Mr. Hart said to Mr. Healy as the two men went over to the mixing Hoard. Someone had thoughtfully wedged a stick of burning incense behind a length of conduit.<\/p>\n

The monks, surrounded by speaker boxes, sat down on rugs\u00a0on\u00a0the concrete floor and unpacked their instruments. They screwed big barrel drums into red carved stands, and pulled out jointed brass trumpets that expanded like telescopes to a length of five feet. They laid out curved yellow bamboo drumsticks that looked like giant carpet-beaters.<\/p>\n

\u201cMatrix out, one and two,\u201d Mr. Healy said. \u201cSet patterns to omni. \u201c<\/p>\n

\u201cFigure eight?\u201d asked an assistant with long blond hair.<\/p>\n

\u201cCircle and no pad, no roll-off,\u201d Mr. Healy said.<\/p>\n

Below the mixing board, a tall monk with big biceps was unwrapping cymbals from an Indian newspaper. \u201cWe will actually do our real religious practice, not just for the microphone,\u201d he said, and then introduced himself as Tubten Jigme. \u201cWe will visualize Mahakala in front of us. When we go to touch him, there\u2019s nothing, but we can see him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Tubten Jigme sat down cross-legged and put his cymbals in front of him. The monks formed two rows, facing inward. The monk with the \u201cI\u00a0(heart)\u00a0Tibet\u201d button handed around a yellow tin of Ricola cough drops.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the hardest thing in the world to deal with acoustically,\u201d said Mr. Healy, behind the mixing board. \u201cCompared to a rock concert? No comparison. An electric guitar is so much louder than anything around it that you just have to be somewhere in the ballpark and you\u2019re O. K. But, with the monks, their loud sounds are very loud, and their softest sounds are very soft. The air-conditioning in the hall and the rustling of their robes may be louder than some of the sounds they\u2019re making,\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m throwing in my rig for the tour,\u201d Mr. Hart said, indicating the mixing board, a thirty-two-track affair bristling with dials and switches, which he uses for his drums at Grateful Dead concerts. \u201cThis is space-age. This could take the monks into the twenty-first century. We want the music to sound to the audience the way it sounds to the monks. It should shake your insides and vibrate your inner core. Every day, they wipe their slates clean. They chant at seventy\u00a0 cycles\u00a0 per second\u2014the lowest range of the human voice. They\u2019re used to resonating in a courtyard, but at St. John\u2019s there will be five thousand people. So we found these special microphones that hook over the ears.\u201d He picked up a headset that looked as though it belonged on a bomber pilot. \u201cI just want to make sure they\u2019ll be comfortable with them. I\u2019ve tried one myself, but I\u2019m not a monk.\u201d Then, Mr. Hart excused himself, saying, \u201cI want to dig the monks. I want to hang out with the monks.\u201d All the monks put on headsets. They looked like a double line of medieval telephone operators, \u201cAll right, \u201c Mr. Hart said. \u201cAre we ready to rock \u2018n\u2019 roll?\u201d<\/p>\n

The chant master, Sonam Thargyal, closed his eyes and pushed his head forward until the sinews stood out on his neck. He let out a low\u00a0\u201coooooooh, uuuuuuuaaaaaaa.\u201d<\/p>\n

The other monks pushed their heads forward, and an avalanche of deep, guttural chanting began. Then the words stopped, and we heard drawn-out vowels, a bass woodwind note married to a high sound like whirring mosquitoes. Cymbals clattered like waves breaking on a beach, and horns wailed like trumpeting elephants. The monks swayed back and forth with their eyes closed.<\/p>\n

When the monks put down their instruments, two hours later, nobody spoke. The blond-haired sound engineer simply stood with his eyes shut. Mickey Hart nodded twice. The monk with the \u201cI\u00a0(heart)\u00a0Tibet\u201d button handed around cans of soda. Sonam Thargyal had a Classic Coke, and Tubten Jigme had a Sprite.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s good, it\u2019s good,\u201d said Mickey Hart. \u201cSee how loud it sounds? No feedback.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a91988 Katy Butler. All Rights Reserved. Not to be reprinted without permission.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":""},"categories":[3,15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.katybutler.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.katybutler.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.katybutler.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.katybutler.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.katybutler.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1195"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.katybutler.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1195\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.katybutler.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1195"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.katybutler.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1195"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.katybutler.com\/author\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1195"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}