As a vocalist, Sertso has always been an integral part of the CMS process. She explains how her lyrics brought the couple to meet Tibetan spiritual master Chogyam Trungpa at Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in 1975.
“My father died,” says Sertso. “I loved my parents so much, but my mother discouraged me from going back to Europe when he died. I opened up Trungpa’s book, where he said, you confront stuff, you deal with it, you let it go, over and over.” She was so inspired by his words that she used the text in an album she recorded. Trungpa could have sued, but when he heard the record, he invited Berger and Sertso to Naropa.
Berger, at that point, was developing the Music Mind system, based on “GaMaLa Taki”, which starts with three-beat (Ga-Ma-La) and two-beat (Ta-Ki) rhythms to build up musical ideas. “Trungpa used almost the same terminology as I was using in Music Mind,” recalls Berger. “It all fit. It’s attention training, a kind of meditation, only I would never call it that, because meditation has a strange connotation for people — it’s spacy, weird, going into a trance — but in fact it’s about focus.”
Buddhist concepts help him further refine the principles of listening that became part of the Music Mind process, such as understanding the tone as sound rather than pitch. “A tone can never be repeated exactly the same way,” he says. “There are thousands of partials in each tone. You develop a feel, and improvisation becomes a different matter — it’s not about choosing tones, it’s feeling the harmony of two tones. Everything becomes new every time you play. A folk musician or a rock musician can gain by deepening the experience of sound.”
Berger has taught at college music departments, but he says Music Mind does not fit into standard curricula, which include rigid requirements to prepare students for their chosen stylistic field. However, he has plans to bring GaMaLa Taki to schools as part of short-term artist-in-residence programs. For students who are intrigued enough to follow up with further study, he hopes to offer a small-scale version of CMS in his and Sertso’s Woodstock home, with its recording studio in the basement.
He is also teaching a course in GaMaLa Taki for non-musicians at Photosensualis Gallery on Rock City Road, beginning September 18. Harvey Sorgen has been curating bi-weekly “Sketches of Sound in the Gallery” sessions that have proven rewarding for artists who come to paint or draw while Berger plays piano, along with Sorgen on drums, Sertso’s voice, and a rotating assortment of musicians from the city. “People have said, ‘I’m skiing,’ or ‘My painting has changed,’” he reports. “It’s an unconscious reorienting process. It will also change the way you listen to music.”
Meanwhile, funds must be raised for the remaining 20 percent of the cost of digitization of tapes for the archive. Woodstock-based arts consultant Rob Saffer, who met Berger at a previous GaMaLa Taki workshop, is helping to strategize the fundraising process, which may include an online Kickstarter campaign, a documentary film, and a series of events next year celebrating the 40th anniversary of CMS.
Saffer expresses reverence for the artists that Orr is now listening to as he re-masters the tapes. “Many of them said CMS was a seminal experience for them in their professional careers,” Saffer points out. “John Cage, Cecil Taylor, George Lewis, John Zorn, and Ornette all won McArthur ‘genius grants’ later on.” He smiles at Berger and Sertso as he adds, “They look at you as their musical parents — the love, the respect, the gratitude are overwhelming.”
