Yuval Ron: Music as a Path to Wisdom
An Interview with Yuval Ron: Music as a Path to Wisdom
by Miriam Knight
Yuval Ron is a peace activist and an educator. He’s lectured at Yale and Johns Hopkins and UCLA and MIT. His book is just the tip of the iceberg of everything that he does; Divine Attunement and Music as a Path to Wisdom. Yuval Ron, he has collaborated with neuroscientists to explore the connection between sound and the brain and his healing music is used in clinics and treatment centers.
Exclusive Interview with Yuval Ron by Miriam Knight of New Consciousness Review
To listen to the audio of the interview of Yuval Ron on New Consciousness Review on OMTimes Radio, click the player below.
Miriam Knight: How did you embark on that path, on music as a path to connecting people?
Yuval Ron: Well, it started, when I was very young, in Israel when I was in high school, I think early days. I played guitar back then, and I noticed that whenever I would bring my guitar to a field trip or to a party, people would gather around me and it would create a circle. People would leave their differences behind.
For teenagers, those are the common dynamics everywhere. I noticed that when I strummed the guitar and I played a song that everybody knew, everybody was singing. And people that were on the fringes were accepted. Everybody was on the same footing, singing along. In Israel, they love to sing along. It’s something about Israel that is very big, sing-alongs.
I didn’t make a big mental mark of it at the time, but then it went on to an experience I had with the Bedouins in the Sinai Desert. When I was 17, I traveled with my guitar and friends from my high school to the Sinai Desert and we met the Bedouins, the nomads. And that’s where I saw the oud, the ancient Middle Eastern lute that I play now and I’ve been playing for more than 30 years.
But, I saw the oud and I saw the Bedouins sitting around the fire at night playing the oud. And I brought my guitar, and I just tried to imitate what they were doing on the oud on my guitar. And again, a circle of people that were traveling in the desert suddenly came and sat around the fire. There were tourists who were walking by foot in the desert, people from Scandinavia, from England, from the United States, some people from Jordan, people from Israel. And they were all coming to the fire and to the sound from a very far distance because in the desert there were no buildings, no roads, no factories, no electricity, so the sound in the desert in such a desert, the sound travels for miles and miles. So, people came from far; people from different countries who I never met before, some people who I couldn’t even communicate with because they didn’t know English or Hebrew or Arabic. But, they were there, people from Germany, Sweden, and we befriended because of the music.
I came to Boston to study music for films. That’s what I specialized in, composing music for films. And that led me to Los Angeles to compose music for television and films. And I put my instruments aside. I focused on being a composer for 15 years.
Before college, back in Israel when I was 19, I think, I became interested in mystical teachings. First, it was Kabbalah, the Jewish mysticism. I started studying in Israel when I was 19, I came to Boston and I studied with a Chabad rabbi in Boston about Kabbalah. And then in college, I became interested in Buddhism and in Zen, and so then later it led to Sufism.
So, I started exploring wisdom traditions, and I found that they were all from the East. You know, Judaism and Buddhism and Zen, and Hinduism, it’s all from the East. It’s all where I came from. I came to this, to the United States from Israel. And so, I explored mysticism and the wisdom traditions in parallel to my musical exploration as a composer, and gradually I start combining the two.
And in 2000, I was inspired to create an ensemble of musicians from the Middle East from different countries, Palestinians, Syrians, Turks, Armenians, Israelis, and I brought them together to become what later became the Yuval Ron Ensemble.
Again, just like in the desert, the same thing happened in Los Angeles in parties, in backyards of houses of people. Suddenly there was a Persian drummer sitting next to me and also was a Palestinian singer singing, a player, a kanoon player from Jordan. I saw all these people from different countries of the Middle East who come from opposing camps, opposing nationalities, opposing religions, opposing ethnic backgrounds, and I saw that we sit and we create harmony together. And we have a perfect understanding beyond languages, beyond borders, and we have a love for the harmony that we create. We all appreciated it.
