I was only able to attend the first of two week-long workshops at the Summerfield Waldorf School in Sebastopol, California, with German musician, composer, and instrument-maker Manfred Bleffert. The five days (July 26-31) were surprisingly packed with challenging ideas, new experiences of intense listening and feeling, and group bonding through playing music and constructing instruments together.

These 2009 workshops were designed to build on the previous summer’s work (and included a number of repeat attendees), but also to welcome newcomers like myself. Among the twelve or so of us, there were several Waldorf school music teachers, a music therapist, a eurythmist, and a teacher of Werbeck singing. Participants came from up and down the west coast, from Canada, Midwestern states, Texas, and, farthest of all, Nepal. Last summer’s larger groups worked over eighteen days to construct primarily xylophone-type instruments in iron and wood as well as pairs of iron rods hanging by fishline (a new kind of instrument) and gongs. The unique instruments, their tuning, and the processes of making them have all been worked out over more than thirty years by Bleffert.

As during the previous summer, this year’s workshops featured lectures, improvisation exercises in new tonal awareness with the group of twelve playing and listening to both new and traditional instruments, and much hands-on experience constructing the instruments. There were also a of couple drawing exercises and, particularly during the second week, exercises with the visual arts as a way to develop a new form of musical graphic notation and compositions. Many bits of advice for the Waldorf music teachers were also scattered throughout the course. The real depth of what Manfred was bringing crept up on me only slowly. By the end, I felt I had acquired a grand new vision not only of the rich future possibilities for music but also for the future of humanity.

The first evening Manfred expressed his hope that our work together might be able to translate something of the being and destiny of America into music. He referred to both the traditions of the Native Americans and to the more modern musical innovations of Edgar Varese, John Cage, Steve Reich, and others. Today humanity has crossed a threshold, and the European tradition of music-making must change. In contrast to Europe and Asia, in America we must look to go into the (musical) future out of will impulses, which can also manifest in music as mathematical or somewhat mechanical rhythms. That first evening and again later Manfred played a small concert consisting of a compressed history of western music played mostly on three glockenspiels composed of alternating iron and copper bars (combining and linking selections from Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Debussy, Bartok, and Stravinsky).

We engaged in numerous, ever-changing group-improvisation exercises that would mark the beginning of each morning and each afternoon, culminating in a final evening concert attended by local friends. Fortunately, we were able to use for our exercises the many Bleffert-designed instruments constructed during last year’s workshop, particularly the uniquely resonant twelve iron xylophones, each tuned to a single diatonic (planetary) tone over its multiple, varied-width bars (to give variation and “breathing” to the sounding of each pitch). After a couple of exercises with 4 players creating individual rhythmic ostinato patterns in concert on the carved wooden xylophones, we briefly began working on bronze finger cymbals with the descending sequence of four tones (BAED) that Rudolf Steiner called the “TAO” and gave as “an esoteric exercise” for eurythmists (see the end of lecture 5 of Eurythmy as Visible Music) –- although we gradually sounded all four tones together. Steiner says it is necessary to go back to the ancient civilization of China to understand this “eurythmy meditation.” In this sequence, said Manfred, we can experience something through which our human being finds or comes to itself in a healthy way as well as something of the original incarnation process of music as a gift of the gods to humanity (echoing a November 16,1905, statement by Steiner).

Manfred repeatedly worked with an ancient Chinese legend describing how the heavenly order of the twelve tones originally was given to human beings through the singing of two heavenly phoenixes (or firebirds, male and female). Manfred explained the generation of the twelve ancient Chinese pentatonic scales using a diagram of sequential alternating falling fifths (from female to male) and rising fourths (from male to female). Manfred stated that in the alternating pattern of singing of the male and female phoenixes was an alternation of types of tones, equivalent to the differentiation between the qualities of male and female, yin and yang, and, in substances, iron and copper – the very materials we would be working with. (The Chinese name for the phoenix, a heavenly messenger who is different from the phoenix of Middle Eastern and Greek lore, is the compound term FèngHuáng, with Fèng meaning male, yang, and solar and Huáng meaning female, yin, and lunar.)

We engaged in a number of experiential observations of the varying natures of iron and copper (metals of Mars and Venus), including improvisation exercises contrasting playing of copper gongs and finger cymbals in an inner circle with an outer circle playing iron glockenspiels as well as concentrated listening exercises comparing the fading tonal resonance of struck copper and iron bars. In the latter we noticed that the “harder” tone from the iron bar seemed to continue straight outward, while the “softer” copper tone seemed more rounded and warm in its tonal radiance. The natural musical interval between an iron and copper bar of the same size turned out to be a fourth – “the interval that lives between men and women,” commented Manfred. Manfred also related this duality to the major and minor scales, to the black and white keys of the piano, and to a similar kind of division of the twelve tones in the music of Debussy and Bartok.

Historically, everyone eventually came to be making his or her own music, but with the end of Kali Yuga in 1899 we must now find the way to lift music again up to the heavenly sphere. Each people of the world has carried over a musical tradition from this ancient time, and today many musicians are experimenting multiculturally with combining aspects of these traditions (e.g, playing a digeradoo with a violin and saxophone) to attempt to create a new direction forward in music. However, today we are coming to the end of these ancient inspirations for humanity, and something really new is needed.

In between Manfred’s short talks on more theoretical and historical aspects and our various musical improvisation exercises, we spent many hours each day in diligent and sometimes tiring labor constructing our copper and iron glockenspiels, copper gongs, and, in my case, a large wooden xylophone. This involved cutting the various metals to shape and seemingly endless hammering on anvils to temper and form them. We could clearly hear the difference in quality between the rounded, warmly resonant tone of a metal bar that had been hammered and the flat, rapidly fading tone of one that had not. Then there was the final process of tuning the instruments. Manfred trained us to listen to the full range of the sounding of a tone: how it arises, how it fades away, and what it leaves behind in the silence. Most of the learning we engaged in during the workshop was of an experiential or phenomenological nature. We learned that our very hearing activity affects the tones and can open them up for something new. We learned that we Americans must divide our will forces into a part that acts and experiences as well as a part that consciously observes.

One of our often repeated exercises during the first half of the week involved playing (“incarnating from above”) the four descending tones of the TAO, normally on the iron glockenspiels arranged in a large circle. The first tone continued sounding, even as each additional tones was added to the continuously sounding mix. Then we tried adding to that a fifth, lower note that had to be found spontaneously by a group of more traditional instruments: a cello, bass flute, guitar, and xylophone. This established a kind of ground or lowest incarnation point. Then we played the same tones as a rising sequence and this time the traditional instruments had to find a new tone (or tone cluster) above the final note of the TAO, a note of the future. Although these additional tones above and below were often a dissonant sounding of multiple instruments, in this context they were full of “future feeling” and often quite beautiful or moving in an unfamiliar way.

Soon we expanded these TAO exercises to several variations of playing on the iron glockenspiels the seven tones of the diatonic (planetary) scale, both descending and ascending, but adding the “extra” improvised or “discovered” tones/tone clusters above and below. Repeatedly, we used different sequences of tones, improvised each time, not to create a linear melody but to build up a “community” or “tower” of tones as the seven “voices” (some doubled) felt the way to sound together. As each tone arose with its own “sonic gesture” on the uniquely resonant Bleffert instruments, it was as if a new spiritual presence had joined the tonal community, each of which changed the quality of the whole. Then gradually the tones faded out into silence, one by one. All of these mostly simple exercises were both fun music-making and concentrated group spiritual research.

Manfred encouraged us to try to feel the future coming toward the present silence, the silence that composer John Cage wrote about and also spotlighted in his famous 1952 piece “4’33,” in which the pianist simply sat at the piano for that length of time. The real tonal system we have today is the silence of the earth. The earth itself was created out of the heavenly “harmony of the spheres,” and it can be the prototype for a future development of the arts (as we had heard with iron and copper). At this point I want to simply quote Manfred’s eloquent description:

“In the future we will learn from the earth – but not directly, which is materialism. Rather, human beings must change the material being of the earth into their own creations. . . . We are the beings of silence, and out of this silence bring music into this world. If not, we would be mere imitators, like the animals. Music is dying in us, and we have to resurrect every tone in us, to take them out of the great silence and make them living. . . . Feel the joy of the eternal creation of music coming originally from the heavens. Feel how the “birth” of each tone changes the world, like the birth of each new child.”

When I heard Manfred speak this way, it occurred to me that these words could just as well have been spoken by the late German artist Joseph Beuys (1921-1986). The second-last night I contributed an evening slide talk as an introduction to the varied and unusual creative work of Beuys, mostly inspired by his studies of Rudolf Steiner. Beuys, too, phenomenologically explored the qualities of different substances of the earth, but more within an avant-garde visual-arts context than a musical one. He also was aware that the past traditions in culture are coming to an end and new ways must be found. This is one explanation for his unusual work exploring the qualities and expressive potentials of such mostly untraditional art materials as honey, fat, beeswax, blood, felt, chocolate, and, yes, also iron and copper – as well as new forms of visual art arising in the 1960s including performance art, earth art, and installations. It turned out that Manfred had been a friend and sometime collaborator with Beuys. Manfred played a couple of unusual Beuys-related pieces, one from 1963 on a Cagean prepared piano. I began to realize that just as Beuys sought new visual images and actions to represent supersensible realities, so Manfred sought for new aural processes and improvisations (and the instruments to support them) to represent those same supersensible realities. And both men especially focused on attentiveness to the qualities of the substances used.

In addition to a Beuysian turn to the rest of the workshop, there were numerous other surprises. For example, the final morning Manfred announced that we were going to gather wood, build fires, and put the copper and iron bars and gongs we were making into the fire. After about twenty minutes, we would then put both the heated metals and the glowing embers into holes we dug in the earth, leaving them there for three hours before digging them up. This was part of the “curing” process of making these instruments, and this giving our work over to fire and earth needed to be accompanied by a wakeful consciousness. When this was done, the gongs and bars often emerged from the earth with marvelously multicolored surfaces in striated, marble-like patterns (see photograph). After this process yet more hammering was required to brighten a somewhat dulled but also deepened sound the metals had acquired. Manfred spoke of our entering into the substances we used and compared all of our work in hammering, playing, listening, and tuning the metals to different healing “skins” of warmth we were placing around them (related to the way Beuys used felt and fat and other means to accentuate the warmth element that he felt our coldly intellectual society much needed for balance). With our world growing ever-more electrified and digitalized, it was refreshing to connect directly with the qualities of specific natural substances. Manfred’s intensive process of working, transforming, and “warming” the metals helps to free the tone sounding from them from its heavier, more material aspects.

A week after this workshop, on Sunday, August 9, Manfred presented a concert on the pipe-organ in Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. I was able to go to this concert, where Manfred played three sections based on quotations from Cage, Beuys, and Steiner that I had sent him and adding a fourth section (“movement”) based on Bartok. Grace Cathedral is a huge, stone, Gothic-style structure filled with stained glass windows and having its organ pipes on four different walls. In his concert Manfred made full use of the spatial potentials of tones arising from one end or the other of the cathedral and moving, crossing, or weaving with tones arising from pipes on the other walls. Throughout the concert mighty organ tones would rise and radiate outward, grow ever more internally varied, be joined by new tones, and then gradually fade away. As had previously occurred to me during some of our improvisation exercises, I imagined each new tone rising up as a forceful spiritual presence, joining other lofty spirits at the original creation. Yet at both the organ concert and the exercises this did not feel like a “flashback” view into the ancient past but rather an improvised new birthing, tone by tone, out of the self-conscious human spirits assembled together.

I realized that, unlike traditional music, one does not experience Manfred’s music so much in time as in space. Tones build up personality-like structures and presences and even relationships and then fade away. This strong spatial, visual quality reminded me of Steiner’s statements about how in the future music will become more like the visual arts (and the visual arts become more like music). With so much emphasis in Manfred’s approach on the richness and presence of the single tone (almost to that future stage of music Steiner mentioned as being able to hear a melody within a single tone), I also wonder a bit whether the essential experience of the interval between the tones becomes a bit too lost. Yet this is also still there in a different way in the “community” of tones sounding together.

I find that the musical work of Manfred Bleffert represents a new step forward in musical research arising out of anthroposophy and, moreover, is a work that others are welcome to join. For more information about future workshopz, consult www.manfred-bleffert.net.

The annual conference of the Lyre Association of North America held in southeast Pennsylvania. Twenty-one women met at a Swedenborgian Church retreat center called Temenos, which means "sacred space" in Greek. The music created by the lyre players was blessed by the beauty of the surrounding forested area, by the aesthetics of the building where all accommodations and activities of the conference took place, and by the many other groups who left behind their heartfelt striving for the spiritual. [It should be noted that it was through a personal connection of Jean Anderberg that we were able to use this space.]

The LANA Annual General Meeting was held on Wednesday afternoon, just before the official start of the conference, with most conference attendees present. We elected board members and shared reports about lyre activity across the country. A resolution was agreed on to dedicate all of our efforts during the conference towards sending healing lyre tones to encircle the whole world that is currently undergoing such uncertainty and anxiety because of global economic and political conditions.

I have attended lyre conferences in the U.S. since 1992. This year's conference was the first one I have attended where the conference facilities provided rooms for everyone with private bath plus direct access to the outdoors from the bedroom—a tremendous help in keeping up with the full and demanding schedule.

For me, the best part of the conference was that every time we assembled we had our lyres in hand and only played music! This was a conference entirely devoted to practical work on the lyre. Our ears practiced listening and our limbs learned technique under the thoroughly competent and graceful direction of Anna Prokhovnik Cooper, who had traveled from Northern Ireland to be with us. We were immersed in the actual sounding of the lyre tone, necessitating our having to be fully present for it.

On the last morning I was asked on the spot to jump in and help another lyrist with improvising on the tone of the day for the whole group. All that could be relied on was what immediately spoke inside me.

The extemporaneous quality of the conference extended into the memorial evening for Jean Anderberg on Friday. One by one participants shared stories and memories of Jean who had served for many years on the LANA Board of Directors. Music was interspersed. Though there was a general outline of the program, it had not been rehearsed and grew organically, reaching a crescendo of gratitude and joy and prayer for Jean to remain united with us. A wish was expressed that when Jean goes through her life review that she will feel even in her supposedly most insignificant deeds how far reaching they are. I, for one, owe Jean a huge debt of gratitude because she gave me the name of the lyre maker who made my combined soprano-alto lyre.

Again, in an unscripted way, during the concluding Sunday morning, everyone shared their experience of the conference and performed one last time music each group had worked on throughout the week.

In some ways the conference did not end for me that Sunday, but has continued in the days since. What I brought home from the conference was not a ream of notes that more than likely would not be looked at for a long time. Instead, I have experienced an ongoing revelation of how to play the lyre better. As soon as I returned home, a stranger called asking if I would give an introductory lesson on the lyre. She had heard the lyre in 2006 and the tone stayed with her so much that she wanted to explore learning the lyre herself so she could incorporate it into her counseling profession. Looking for ideas of how to present the lyre to a beginner, I found a publication I had purchased at the 2003 International Lyre Conference. This primer was How to Play the Lyre written by Anna Prokhovnik Cooper. While reading her description of the lyre stroke, it suddenly dawned on me: "My hand position all these years has been flawed! Keep the fingers straight and spread, parallel to the strings! That is how to increase speed, accuracy, full tone!" A heightened level of musicianship was automatically achieved and I felt as though Anna was still showing me the way. The second experience as an outgrowth of the conference was that a participant who had heard my report during the LANA Board meeting called me to ask if I would let her and another music therapy student observe my music practitioner work. They drove from Pennsylvania to spend a day shadowing me in my therapeutic rounds in the Medicine Intensive Care Unit in the UNC Hospital. This was the first time anyone in the lyre movement has seen me at work in a clinical setting with the lyre. Our collegial exchange was the highlight of my development with the lyre and a further benefit from having attended the conference. —Suzanne Mays, Chapel Hill, NC

From an e-mail from Laura Langford-Schnur (Chester, NY) to the LANA board: A Big Thank You to all of you for carrying the many facets of the lyre work. I know how much work it is all year long, yet you appear to work together well and always seem joyous and fulfilled in doing so.

In the conference, it was truly a joy to have such a potent dose of lyre music and singing in an atmosphere of harmony, clarity and freedom.

Thanks for allowing us to give the tuning workshop and presentation.

The organization was superb. The music choices were absolutely delightful. I love the way you each take your turn at announcements and leading, giving buoyancy to the experience. Anna and Sarah were absolutely the right choice for this conference this time.

The second conference focusing on the tuning principles developed by Maria Renold was held at the Christian Community in Spring Valley on May 8-11. The following are abridged versions of two reports.

The principal presenter was Bevis Stevens, a eurythmist living in Switzerland, who gave us two very artistically prepared presentations following the development of consciousness and of tuning over the centuries. Several pianos and a few lyres were tuned differently. Pieces were played in several tunings—Greek, meantone, well-tempered, standard 440 equal-tempered and our 432 Renold II—giving quite a taste of the differences in experiencing music over time as tunings changed. In his presentation on"the Birth of the Third Out of the Mood of the Fifth," he demonstrated, by means of a slide show and live samples of music played on the differently tuned instruments, the parallel developments in sculpture, music and the evolving consciousness of man.

Daniel Hafner took us on an in-depth excursion through all 12 keys in both their major and minor forms, with Graham Jackson at the piano playing through most of the Bach and Chopin Preludes written expressly to experience the color and character of each key and mode. We understood firsthand that, through the Renold II tuning, we can once again enjoy the living and colorful musical experiences that engage the heart, after nearly a century of being locked into the lifeless, lackluster, deadened musical experience of equal temperament.

As most of our conferees were returnees from last year, we had the added confirmation that what we had learned from last conference had not been lost, rather had grown, deepened, taken root and consolidated into a firmer foundation into which the new ones could enter with us.
We joined the Lighting Workshop in the auditorium on Saturday morning and saw that pitch and tuning can even change the quality and gestures done in eurythmy. And in the evening we watched the magnificent performance of "The Eternal Fire of Prometheus" by the Light Eurythmy Ensemble from Dornach, Switzerland, a most rewarding experience to cap off a rewarding weekend tuning conference. —Laura Langford-Schnur

The conference was very successful and an extraordinary experience for me. Having attended the tuning conference last year and having begun to hear the intervals more clearly, I was ripe for the abundant opportunities for listening and tuning with the guidance of others this year. Being able to hear the differently sized thirds, the pulses between tones, the formed fifths and the wider fifths was very encouraging. And to listen to a piece played on three different pianos, each in a different tuning, was also an "ear-opener." All of this experience, rounded out with the concepts brought by Bevis Stevens and Daniel Hafner, was a perfect balance. —Diane Ingraham

This past summer, 21 people—ranging from complete novices to real "old-timers"—came together in Ann Arbor, MI, for one of the Lyre Association's most special conferences, as indicated in the preceding article.

The opening evening featured a performance by the board and guests of Julius Knierem's After 40 Days and inspiring recollections by Channa Seidenberg and Christof-Andreas Lindenberg of the first 25 years of the Lyre Association, to mark the 25th anniversary of its founding. The three full days included a morning "talklet" by Christof-Andreas, group conversation about a reading that had been distributed the previous evening, listening work, improvisation with various instruments, Spacial Dynamics®, and playing the lyre in small groups. Central to the work of the large ensemble was Christof-Andreas's new work "Summer's Call of Thunder" and Colin Tanser's Everyman. On the final morning, Christof-Andreas presented a longer talk on "Melody in the Single Tone" and we shared with friends and family the music that both the small and large ensembles had worked on.
On the afternoon of July 17, we held our Annual General Meeting, in which we re-elected Jean Anderberg and Samantha Embrey two three-years terms on the Board and heard membership, financial, and regional reports.

On May 10-12, 2007, a conference on tuning according to the principles developed by Maria Renold took place at the Christian Community Church in the Spring Valley, NY area. At least 50 people attended the lecture on the opening evening and most stayed for the entire weekend. Participants had a wide range of background (not all lyrists!) and came from as far as California, Texas, Toronto and Virginia.

A trained musician, Maria Renold took a few indications by Rudolf Steiner as a starting point for her own phenomenological research, out of which she devised a system of tuning the intervals of the scale. Now deceased, Mrs. Renold published her pioneering findings in a book, Intervals, Scales, Tones and the Concert Pitch C=128 Hz (Temple Lodge Press, 2004; originally published in German), from the Sunbridge College Bookstore (845-425-0983) as well as www.waldorfbooks.com.

With Mrs. Renold’s method, not only is the tone A tuned to 432 Hz, lower than today’s norm, but most of the fourths and fifths of the scale are tuned either slightly larger or smaller than pure fifths, which differs from today’s standard tuning. Of course, there is much more to it—which is why we needed a conference!

There were three principal presenters. Bevis Stevens, a eurythmist from New Zealand, residing in Switzerland, translated Maria Renold’s book into English, teaches eurythmy at the Goetheanum, works with the Lichteurythmie Ensemble, and gives seminars and demonstrations on this tuning. He guided us through comparisons between pianos and lyres tuned with the Renolds and other tunings. He also gave practical instruction in the tuning. Paul Davis, a string player and former math and physics teacher at a Waldorf school, possesses an uncanny understanding of music, tone and intervals, and was able to reproduce the Renold tuning after hearing it only once, and he eventually came to the conclusion that its intervals were uniquely relevant for our time. His fairly technical presentation included a fascinating explanation and demonstration of the "difference tone." Finally, Daniel Hafner, a Christian Community priest and trained musician, spoke about the special characteristics of each of the major and minor keys, which are enhanced with the Renold's tuning. His talks were interspersed with amultitude of wonderful musical examples, valiantly performed with virtually no preparation by three extremely skilled pianists in our midst, Graham Jackson, Sheila Johns, and Helvi McClelland.

For the third international lyre conference that took place on July 27-August 1, 2006 in Belfast, the organizers in Northern Ireland created a rich program and an especially warm, welcoming atmosphere. The Arion Association, our counter-part in the British Isles, produced a special publication on the gathering, which we republished for our members. Therefore, here we will relate a few aspects of the conferencethat may be of special interest to those in North America. First, we were very well represented. Of the approximately 200 participants, 27 were from the USA and 4 from Canada. Among these, 3 were people with special needs and 6 participated in the youth program.

We also played a large role in the conference. Diane Ingraham Barnes, Veronica Jackson, Sheila Johns, Kerry Lee, Christof-Andreas Lindenberg and Channa Seidenberg led workshops or lyre groups; Joanna Carey helped lead the youth program, and Samantha Embrey was the registrar. Moreover, Sheila and Samantha had contributed a great deal to the planning and organization of the conference, even making trips to Northern Ireland in the fall before the conference.

In addition, we should report that, on July 29, in the midst of a noisy lunch hour in a beautiful Tudor-style dining hall (“Out of Harry Potter,” someone said), we held our Annual General Meeting. Our principal organizational business was to re-elect Debra Barford, Sheila Johns and Catherine Read as members of the board. Joining us at this meeting were friends from Brazil with whom we discussed the possibility of a collaboration among lyrists on our two continents. As a first step, we have given complimentary memberships to Flávia Betti, Ines Nigro Campos, and Meca Vargas, all very accomplished and active musicians in Brazil.

It is also noteworthy that two important new initiatives grew out of this the conference, the formation of an international organization of lyre teachers and a plan to create a fund to support lyre builders.

All in all, this third international gathering of lyrists and lyre builders strengthened the connections among members of the world lyre community and provided lots of inspiration and new ideas to take back home.