Photos by Rommel deLeon

THE MANIFEST: Have you ever had any mystical, transpersonal, or spiritual experiences?

MATTHEW DALLMAN: I have had experiences that have completely undone me, have increased my awe and reverence for life to a continually unfolding degree, have filled me with light that cried out of my pores. Some of these experiences have centered around my ongoing relationship with music, which consistently rips me apart and resonates as a deep glow and mystery. Many have centered around my relationship with Hannah, who killed me from the moment I saw her, and who reincarnated me from the moment we first touched. And some hit me as I'm taking the train, or walking down the street looking for a decent slice of pizza. Lately it's been more about a zesty falafel sandwich, though....


TM: How do such experiences inform your work?

MD: I can't avoid my experiences through the course of my music and writing even if I wanted to. I guess one way to say that each experience alters my own boundaries, massages my own sense of aesthetic, raises the stakes, re-determines "good", kills my ego, arouses me fully, and increases my own feeling to create music that transmits authentic experience to others. My experiences are like gifts given to me, and the gifts do no good just sitting around in my closet, unused and forgotten. I pass on experience through the little aural waves pictures I create and irrigate, and I try my best to get out of the way, because none of this is ultimately about just me. I'm involved, as are the musicians who perform my works, as are the people who listen, but this is all about something way WAY more fundamental. Just exactly what IT is, well, we know it when we feel it....


TM: This might have much to do with the music I typically listen to (indie rock and hip-hop), but do you ever think that music is something that HINDERS and DISTRACTS us? Do people spend entirely too much time listening, buying, categorizing, and critiquing music at the expense of more important things? (I am thinking here of all my music geek friends back home who take their Wire or Guided By Voices collections very seriously, yet all but sneer when the subject of "meditation" is raised).

MD: Any kind of attachment can be a hindrance. That is not to say I am not excited that the new Living Colour album just came out. All of this has to do with the reasons and motivations behind listening to music. Are you listening because you like sound? Because certain textures of sound get you high? Out of social rebellion of some sort? Most every reason to listen to music has some value to it. It is not a question of whether you are addicted to music or not. Most people are in some way or another, even if it just addicted to listening to the radio music to and from work in their car.

One of the trends in contemporary art music in the last 50 years in the West is the intended inclusion of more silence. Silence not as an absence of music, but as part of the musical experience, part of the same fabric. People have explored this to extremes, to be sure, such as writing a piece of music that had no intended sounds at all! But one way to listen to music that I often find quite inspiring is to listen not for the pitches and rhythms, but to listen for the points of silence, of sonic rest, of space. Just as their isn't just ONE form of music, there isn't just ONE way to listen to music. Creative approaches such as this can help re-juice ears that have perhaps been listening in just one way for too long.


TM: Related to that: not a day goes by that I don't have some simple chord progression and inane chorus plaguing my weary brain-- why do we get songs stuck in our heads? Did this provide some sort of evolutionary advantage to archaic humans? Is there transformative potential within this seemingly unique human capacity, or is it just a useless aberration? IS there a way to prevent it?

MD: Well there are many reasons that I can see that music gets in one's head. Sometimes, frankly, music production companies design their music to do just that. There is no one formula to create "catchy music", but it can be done with some regularity if you want to.

Another reason music gets in your head is the same reason that any kind of thought gets in your head. It just happens. Music, like thoughts and ideas, are like clouds that pass by in awareness. Learning how to turn that off uses the same techniques that meditation traditions use to turn off incessant mental chatter. You can learn to reach inner silence from music as well as thought. Though it may sound otherwise, learning how to do this for myself has actually helped my music composition. Why? Because if I'm able to turn off the faucet, so to speak, with increased intentionality, in at least my case that helps me turn on the faucet with more intentionality and purpose. And when I turn on the faucet with purpose, I am better able to receive and translate the music that flows every which way as silent energy.

And let's not forget this last point, namely that often your body retains music because it needs to. The idea that music gives a person the means towards greater harmony, balance, inner stability goes back to at least Plato and Aristotle. The soul needs music, the mind needs music, and also the body needs music. The aspects of music that stick around through history and development, those aspects stick around because it needs to for the sake of the health of human life. One way, in that sense, to deal with the music you hear in your head is to first accept and honor the mystery of why it is there at all. If you think about it, it's a true miracle that you can hear what we call music in your head, without any kind of sound audible to anyone but you. Yet it is still music! Why? Because it moves us, that's why! You can accept the music you hear as a gift from some unseen stranger, given to you to ponder, reflect upon, and allow into the deepest corner of your being. Music is pure energy that reaches you with little to no filter.


TM: Turning now to your own life as a musician, at what age did you know you wanted to be a musician? What are some early experiences that led you to this path?

MD: My life has been filled with experiences to which I have reacted and (hopefully) grown from. I tend to need to grow a bit before I can say a piece of music I've composed is finished. I noticed this from my very first composition. Why that is, I don't know, but I have taken it as my own karma, I guess.

My earliest musical experience was listening at a very young age to my paternal grandmother Gertrude improvising warm chords and simple melodies on her piano and organ. Wow, I just soaked in the warm oceans, and the feeling of the carpet I say upon for hours. I could feel her searching as she played, I could feel her reaching for a sound, finding it, and then relaxing into it. It was her that suggested to my parents that my brother Christopher and I take piano lessons. I began those at age 10. I eventually played violin, alto saxophone, drums, and guitar, and had a rock band in high school. My experience with piano informs my experience will all of my instruments, and I'm very thankful Grandma Gert saw to this.

Coltane's "My Favorite Things" hit me hard at the end of high school, as did the rock band Living Colour. I saw them a bunch in high school. A friend recently told me he thought they were always the most dangerous rock band, because of their potential at any moment to go from rock to jazz to hardcore metal to R&B.

In college, I mostly put playing music aside. Though I remained an addict. The band Phish became my college obsession. This is just around the time the internet was being born at colleges, and I was there trading Phish bootlegs over the net at all hours of the day, participating in the Phish newsgroup, going to over 20 concerts during college. That band is wild, their depth is startling, their creativity unending, and their energy blinding. I went to their second Halloween concert in Chicago, where's they played Quadrophenia by the Who during their second set. It was their first set, however, when the music, environment, and energy for me was unbelievably raw and potent. That's when light bled through the pores of my skin. I died. Even as I think of it now, I die.

I choose music for my path after I graduated college. Not sure how, but it just felt right through and through. I moved to the Twin Cities in MN to be in a rock band with my friend Andrew Carlson. On the way to Minnesota, I fell in love with Hannah. We were engaged four months later. The rock band ambition eventually fell away, and I realized that what really got me off about music was composing it, making it from scratch, even if others play it. Hannah and I married two years later and by then I had committed to being a composer, and everything I've done since then as been geared towards learning more about composition. So I have Hannah to thank for my direction.

I started intense education in traditional and classical composition approaches about four years ago. First in private one on one instruction for 3 years, then to classical music school for one semester. That semester was heaven, literally. But I left it at the right time and haven't looked back. The community and colleagues at Queens College are great. But in terms of learning music, I simply do it better in more intimate, one-on-one environments. I have too many ideas, if you know what I mean.

Dallman presides over the November IU art gathering.
(Mirror suit by LA-based sculptor David Hollen)

TM: Moving away from the negative, what do you hope to achieve with your own music? Are you doing what you want to be doing with it?

MD: My deepest goal is to manifest music in every way, shape, form, and texture that the music requires, and therefore allow the music to lead the way. One of the ways I have consciously decided to tackle this effort is by making sure that I can compose for a variety of musical settings. On my website, I arrange my music according to three divisions: Social music, serious music, and sacred music. The boundaries between the three are loose, essentially arbitrary, and not worth a single argument. Yet for myself as a composer, I want to be hitting in at least those three areas of architecture on a regular basis. As I write a choral work that uses sacred or mystical poetry as the text, at the next turn I want to be able to write a pop song for my jamband whose basic function is to get your booty scooty. When I was in classical music school in New York City, a persistent thought was "this intellectual stuff can be very valuable, but am I truly a composer if I can't write a simple bluegrass tune?" At some point, I think composers ought to be able to write simple stuff that connects with people in straightforward ways. Doing so, I've found, actually makes it easier to explore more ambiguous music and not completely lose your audience.

Direct ambitions I have? I want to help to reinstall the power of counterpoint and singable melodies into the choral literature. I want to continue to explore the form I used for the Spiral Suite for Alto Saxophone, namely using Spiral Dynamics as a very broad architecture. I want to approach sonic construction the way fRank Gehry approaches his wild architecture (he's by far my favorite). I want to find a mix between the familiar and the unknown in each of my works. I want to earn the right to explore the strange and unfamiliar.

In general, I want to get my own ego out of the way and allow music to shine through unfiltered into my little aural wave pictures. I am an irrigation engineer of a flow that only manifests as audible sound.


TM: Have you attempted to get your contemporaries in the music field to adopt a more integral approach? Do they see the need for it?

MD: That's been tough since there has been little to nothing solid about what integral art is. I have shown people the amazing work of Alex Grey, for example, and generally the reactions are "ooohs and ahhs", very positive if sometimes initially hesitant. My own experience tells me that I have to live within an integral approach to art for an extended amount of time before I can authentically talk about it to other people and actually share a true conversation. I created my own integral program in music school, and it was very difficult. The curriculum and philosophy behind it is just not conducive. I don't blame anyone. We are all doing our best, and there are some truly brilliant teachers at the Aaron Copland School of Music. When people ask me about integral art, we can start to have a conversation. But when I try to shove towards someone, even a little, the results have been at best mixed and at worst non-existant. We don't want this to appear as some sort of cult, because as anyone who spends any time in integral culture learns quick, being part of a cult is about the last thing we want to do with our time. So we forge forward, Lewis and Clarking an authentic enough integral approach to art so that we can start the conversation for others and future generations. We all are doing our best. some of us just do so in relative silence.


TM: What do you think of the state of contemporary music? Do you listen to Britney Spears and Linkin Park? Do you stick more to the classics and contemporary composers? Somewhere in between?

MD: Well, it's a wild and diverse musical world we live in. 1% of my time goes to listening to radio music. Most of it I devote to a directed exploration of music from around the world (music of the Shona people in Zimbabwe is my current fascination), and of course I find plenty of time to listen to good old pop stuff, though of course pop with a certain integrity that resonates with me. I listen to a good amount of electronic -- drum'n'bass and trance. I have a lingering passion for 50s and 60s jazz, especially Thelonious Monk and Miles, even his electric phase. We love Ben Folds, solo and with the other four, love Joni Mitchell, lots of American bluegrass/old time western, Phish, Zuco 103, the soundtrack for Amelie and O Brother. Dig Macy Gray, Leo Kottke, Groove Collective, The Pixies. Marley. And then there's my love of medieval chant, especially the chants of Hildegard von Bingen. God, that stuff kills me. And let us not forget Dylan and Willie Nelson. Tribe Called Quest. Also Medeski Martin and Wood -- I got on their train early in their career. And the first couple Dave Matthews Band records are amazing. I could go on and on here. I'm a music nut...have you heard the music of the Bulgarian State Women's Choirs!? WOW!


TM: Where do you think punk rock and the entire punk/DIY (Do-It-Yourself) aesthetic fits into the field of music? Is music created by untrained musicians, using three chords and a whole lot of nager, still somehow "valid"? Is punk, and with that the entire realm of rock-n-roll, an aberation from the history and evolution of music? Do you listen to punk?

MD: Hannah loves certain punk bands, such as the Pixies, and I dig it when she puts them on. I am not a terribly angry guy, but sometimes I am surprised when punk music really hits me, and answers something that I wasn't even aware I was feeling. All music arises because it has to, and because people want it to. Punk music can unleash energy in ways other music just can't.

If we were going to invalidate music using only three chords, we would have to invalidate most music ever created. For me, as I've studied more and more music from other countries, past and present, you realize that the West, to speak generally, has ways of employing simple chords, but so does the East, North, and South. What the simple chords (such as I, IV, V chords) represent is actually energy that is constituent of life itself. This can turn into a very long discussion, but I will say that this is one of the major focuses of my work and perspective. Namely the exploration of musical color through the same means each every musician alive uses -- namely, rhythm, tone, and color, in singular and plural forms of each. People who are tired of those basic 3 chords are tired of music. It is just that simple. Those chords endure because they constitute the fabric of something every deep.

I think the DIY aesthetic .. It is people resurrecting something beautiful using basic raw materials, whatever they have around. Humanity has been doing this forever, and DIY is in great company. My own process of recording my music, for example, is entirely DIY. I prefer to "field record" my works, with a simple recording device, and one omnidirectional microphone called a PZM. And in general I take a DIY approach in most everything. I start with DIY and then if I need to call upon the wisdom of more experienced people, I do. But I take the DIY approach to first develop the voices that then need answering by those who have come before me.

TM: What do you think of the Chicago music scene? (I am thinking specifically of bands like Tortoise, The Sea and Cake, US Maple, The Flying Luttenbackers, Brokeback, Isotope 217... jazz-influenced musicians who have come out of the punk scene) Are you involved with it? Local composers-- any faves?

MD: Too early to say, since I have checked out any of them yet. This gives me a great list to start with, though. If the Chicago music scene reflects in any way my experience of Chicago as a city, I imagine it will be challenging, down to earth, nonpretentious, and with lots of integrity. Chicago as a town pretty much rocks. It is central to the entire Midwest, and has a kicking downtown architecture. The city is building a new outdoor bandshell right on the lake, and it is designed by Frank Gehry. Yes!


TM: Philip Glass: integral or "not"?

MD: For some people, undoubtedly. In many ways that is an interpretation either way. I happen to love most of Philip's music, and I think a large portion of it is starkly beautiful. His music takes my breath away. When Hannah and I lived in Boston, we took in a showing of that movie Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance. It was a special show with Philip and his touring emsemble accompanying the movie live in the moment, performing the soundtrack music he composed. Utterly amazing. And the string quartets of his that the Kronos Quartet recorded have as much effect upon me as Haydn's string quartets.

But I do want to point out one thing. The decision whether a certain art or artist is integral or not is a discussion we are choosing to bypass for the time being. The reason is that such a determination can be a large obstacle that gets in the way of perhaps more important areas. Those areas can be summarized as questions: "how integrally informed can I be in my approach to art-making?" and "how integral is my interpretation of art?" In either case, we want to stress that there are actual frameworks that we exist now and can be developed further that can immediately inform, perhaps transform, your approach to art creation and art interpretation. Exploring whether a certain artist or artwork is integral can be an interesting discussion, and its one we can explore in great detail in the integral community. But as sustainable and authentic means to push forward into further human development as far as is reasonable, we focus on how our approach to creation and interpretation can be informed by legitimate integral theory. From that informed integral experience, perhaps we can start to create art that through its existance, creates entirely new kinds of experience that we can transmit to an audience. We want to hit the audience with an experience not where they go "wow, I knew that was coming" but instead, "wow, what in the name of sam hell was that?!" We tend to think the latter has more staying power.