Archive News
Ex-rocker discovers secrets of tranquility
Date Published: {J}
Most of us who feel the need to relax at the end of a stressful day or week will probably open a bottle of wine or head to the pub for a beer. On those nights we find it difficult to sleep, there are always little pills to help us.
These short-term measures, however, don’t tackle the underlying problems of stress or insomnia. But Australian composer and musician, John B Levine, who is coming to Galway next month, promises that he has a better solution – one that doesn’t involve taking chemicals. Instead, it’s about listening to a certain type of music known as Alphamusic, which alters our brainwaves to create a calmer, more relaxed state. It’s like meditation, he says, but it’s easier to fit it into your life.
John, who now lives in England, originally trained as an electronic engineer, but always had a passion for music.
“I loved music since aged six when I got a plastic saxophone,” he says. “I wanted to make music and to make people happy.”
John also loved science and electronics and, to satisfy his parents’ wishes, he did an electronics degree, although he subsequently fulfilled his desire to have “music as a profession and electronics as a hobby”, when he trained in classical music composition at the University of Sydney. He then spent several successful years working in commercial music, playing with bands like INXS and Midnight Oil and writing jingles for advertising agents Saatchi and Saatchi and Coca-Cola.
Then his life changed.
“My father started dying slowly of stress-related illness. He had diverticulitis, diabetes, a couple of heart attacks and a stroke and he died at the age of 58. The doctors said it was stress related, but nothing we did or gave him could help.”
John had studied meditation and was taught how people’s brain waves slow down as they go into a deeper meditative state.
“With my science background that made sense,” he says. “I used try to explain it to my father, who was in Intensive Care but by then it was too late.”
His father’s death led him towards wondering whether the techniques used for meditation could be adapted for music. And by that he doesn’t mean what passes for the ‘relaxation music’ you hear in many spas and massage parlours. In fact, he is scathing about it.
“I heard New Age ‘relaxation’ music and it made me cry, it was so bad! It made me angry.”
He singles out CDs that contain whale and dolphin ‘music’ for special ire. He finds it unbelievable that these can be regarded as the basis for ‘relaxation’.
“Whales talk to whales and dolphins talk to dolphins. Their communication is not for relaxing people.”
As part of his music degree, John had studied the psychology of music and the physiology of hearing. With this expertise in analysing music, he listened to ‘new age music’ with a technical ear.
“I analysed why it didn’t work, melodically, rhythmically and production wise . . . and bored my friends about it. They told me to stop talking and do something.”
So he did – with caution – he didn’t want to add to what he describes as ‘noise pollution’ by producing bland CDs.
John had a recording studio in Australia where he wrote his music for TV commercials. It was there he conducted experiments to see what relaxing music should sound like.
“As a composer, you don’t start writing music before you know what your aim is, so I had to choose my aim.
“In my head I saw images of a PowerPoint presentation I’d had at meditation classes of brain waves slowing down. I wanted to do that.”
After experimentation, John established patterns of musical sound that invited the brain to settle into an Alpha state.
Alpha waves were discovered by German neurologist Hans Berger in the early 1900s and John explains that they occur when our brain is in a relaxed state.
The Alpha state is calmer than the Beta state, which occurs when we are awake and involves excitable peaks and troughs. If we continually emit Beta brainwaves, then we cannot unwind.
Brainwaves change a person’s hormonal balance, he explains, and different hormones affect the body in various ways. For instance when you are continually in the Beta state, you get stressed and your immune system goes down.
Beta waves in the brain cause the release of cortisol in response to stress. This diverts blood away from the parts of the body that aren’t required for ‘fight or flight’. And since the stomach and many parts of the brain are not required for this, their energy supply is diminished, leading to other problems – everything from digestion to concentration.
John claims that’s where his music can help. He says the unique sound pictures he paints, bring listeners to alpha state of relaxation within four minutes. As a Westerner, he opted to use instruments his listeners would be familiar with. So for his CDs, he plays a Steinway concert grand.
In the past 25 years, he has recorded nearly 30 albums, some designed to aid sleep and some to help people concentrate.
For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.
People’s living conditions less than 100 years ago were frightening. We have come a long way. We talk about water charges today, but back then the local District Councils were erecting pumps for local communities and the lovely town of Mountbellew, according to Council minutes, had open sewers,” says Galway County Council archivist Patria McWalter.
Patria believes we “need to take pride in our history, and we should take the same pride in our historical records as we do in our built heritage”. When you see the wealth of material in her care, this belief makes sense.
She is in charge of caring for the rich collection of administrative records owned by Galway County Council and says “these records are as much part of our history as the Rock of Cashel is. They document our lives and our ancestors’ lives. And nobody can plan for the future unless you learn from the past, what worked and what didn’t”.
Archivists and librarians are often unfairly regarded as being dry, academic types, but that’s certainly not true of Patria. Her enthusiasm is infectious as she turns the pages of several minute books from Galway’s Rural District Councils, all of them at least 100 years old.
Part of her role involved cataloguing all the records of the Councils – Ballinasloe, Clifden, Galway, Gort, Loughrea, Mountbellew, Portumna and Tuam. These records mostly consisted of minutes of various meetings.
When she was cataloguing them she realised their worth to local historians and researchers, so she decided to compile a guide to their content. The result is For the Record: The Archives of Galway’s Rural District Councils, which will be a valuable asset to anybody with an interest in history.
Many representatives on these Councils were local personalities and several were arrested during the political upheaval of the era, she explains.
And, ushering in a new era in history, women were allowed to sit on these Rural District Councils – at the time they were not allowed to sit on County Councils.
All of this information is included in Patria’s introductory essay to the attractively produced A4 size guide, which gives a glimpse into how these Rural Councils operated and the way political thinking changed in Ireland during a short 26-year period. In the early 1900s, these Councils supported Home Rule, but by 1920, they were calling for full independence and refusing to recognise the British administration.
“I love the tone,” says Patria of the minutes from meetings. “The language was very emotive.”
That was certainly true of the Gort Rural District Council. At a meeting in 1907, following riots in Dublin at the premiere of JM Synge’s play, The Playboy of the Western World the councillors’ response was vehement. They recorded their decision to “protest most emphatically against the libellous comedy, The Playboy of the Western World, that was belched forth during the past week in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, under the fostering care of Lady Gregory and Mr Yeats. We congratulate the good people of Dublin in howling down the gross buffoonery and immoral suggestions that are scattered throughout this scandalous performance.
For more from the archives see this week’s Tribunes here
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
SLIGO 0-9
GALWAY 1-4
FRANK FARRAGHER IN ENNISCRONE
GALWAY’S first serious examination of the 2013 season rather disturbingly ended with a rating well below the 40% pass mark at the idyllic, if rather Siberian, seaside setting of Enniscrone on Sunday last.
The defeat cost Galway a place in the FBD League Final against Leitrim and also put a fair dent on their confidence shield for the bigger tests that lie ahead in February.
There was no fluke element in this success by an understrength Sligo side and by the time Leitrim referee, Frank Flynn, sounded the final whistle, there wasn’t a perished soul in the crowd of about 500 who could question the justice of the outcome.
It is only pre-season and last Sunday’s blast of dry polar winds did remind everyone that this is far from summer football, but make no mistake about it, the match did lay down some very worrying markers for Galway following a couple of victories over below par third level college teams.
Galway did start the game quite positively, leading by four points at the end of a first quarter when they missed as much more, but when Sligo stepped up the tempo of the game in the 10 minutes before half-time, the maroon resistance crumbled with frightening rapidity.
Some of the statistics of the match make for grim perusal. Over the course of the hour, Galway only scored two points from play and they went through a 52 minute period of the match, without raising a white flag – admittedly a late rally did bring them close to a draw but that would have been very rough justice on Sligo.
Sligo were backable at 9/4 coming into this match, the odds being stretched with the ‘missing list’ on Kevin Walsh’s team sheet – Adrian Marren, Stephen Coen, Tony Taylor, Ross Donovan, David Kelly, David Maye, Johnny Davey and Eamon O’Hara, were all marked absent for a variety of reasons.
Walsh has his Sligo side well schooled in the high intensity, close quarters type of football, and the harder Galway tried to go through the short game channels, the more the home side bottled them up.
Galway badly needed to find some variety in their attacking strategy and maybe there is a lot to be said for the traditional Meath style of giving long, quick ball to a full forward line with a big target man on the edge of the square – given Paul Conroy’s prowess close to goal last season, maybe it is time to ‘settle’ on a few basics.
Defensively, Galway were reasonably solid with Gary Sice at centre back probably their best player – he was one of the few men in maroon to deliver decent long ball deep into the attacking zone – while Finian Hanley, Conor Costello and Gary O’Donnell also kept things tight.
For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.
Date Published: 23-Jan-2013
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