Yuval Ron: Sound is the Future Medicine
Yuval Ron is an internationally renowned World Music artist, composer, educator, peace activist, and record producer. Yuval’s book, Divine Attunement: Music as a Path to Wisdom, won the Gold Medal Award for Best Spirituality Book at the Indie Book Awards 2015. Yuval Ron has collaborated with neuroscientists Mark Waldman, Andrew Newburg, and others to explore the connection between sound and the brain and has created music for medical and healing use in clinics and treatments centers with Metta Mindfulness Music, sound is the future medicine.
An Interview with Yuval Ron: Sound is the Future Medicine
Interview by Kara Johnstad
To listen to the full interview of Yuval Ron by Kara Johnstad on her show, Voice Rising on OMTimes Radio, click the player below.
I have with me in the studio the world-renowned musician, composer, educator, producer, and peace activist Yuval Ron and we are going to talk about divine attunement and sound consciousness. Yuval Ron began composing professionally for theater and contemporary dance in Israel in the early 1980s. In the late 80s-early 90s, he worked as a composer for promotional videos, theater, television, and dance in Boston and New York. He scored his first feature film, “Urban Jungle,” produced in New York, in 1990. In the mid-late 90s, Yuval Ron was a composer for the Fox Kids network in Los Angeles, CA. In 2006, he composed music for the short film “West Bank Story,” a musical spoof of “West Side Story” that features two rival gangs of fast food employees – the Israeli “Kosher King” vs. the Palestinian “Hummus Hut.” “West Bank Story” won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film in 2007. Other notable scores include scores for PBS Nova (“Breaking the Maya Code”), Proteus, Oliver Twist, The Spiral Staircase, Golda’s Balcony and Road to Victory. Among Yuval’s many honors, Yuval was invited to perform for the Dalai Lama, has collaborated with the Sufi leader Pir Zia Inayat Khan and the master musician Omar Faruk Tekbilek.
Kara Johnstad: Yuval, your first book, Divine Attunement, Music as a Path to Wisdom, won the gold medal for the best book in the spirituality category at the Indie book awards. I feel blessed having You are here with me.
Yuval Ron: Thank you. It’s wonderful to talk to you, Kara, as always, because we have a conversation from the inside, as you are a musician, and you know what I’m experiencing and what I’m talking about so it’s great to have this exchange of ideas.
Kara Johnstad: I love your music, and I know you have many fans in Europe. Now I think you have even more fans because I’ve been listening to your music over the last months and there such a healing quality and it’s not only serene, there’s a rhythmic pulsation, they are such diverse woven tapestry. You know there’s a tapestry. I wanted to start in a different place today, the interview.
A dream seems so ethereal and yet a dream if it’s remembered and manifested it creates millions of opportunities. So today I would like to start with your dream. Can you name the dream that you carry within you for our world where your music is in that dream for our humanity?
Yuval Ron: Yes. I used to say too many of my friends that I feel very fortunate person because I realized all my dreams have been very lucky and very fortunate. Dreams that I have since a teenager I managed to realize in this lifetime.
I am in my mid-50s, and I felt that when I was 40, and one great dream still is on my list, so I’ve left with one dream which is not about my personal life but it’s about the life of humanity, it’s about the world, it’s about humanity, and it’s about peace. So that’s the one dream that is on my lap, and that’s what I’m focusing on, and I’m trying to address that not just in my work as a peace activist.
I created an ensemble called Yuval Ron Ensemble that has musicians and dancers from the Muslim and Jewish and Christian faith. We have been working for 20 years together and touring the world and teaching and performing ensuring that together we can create more harmony and more beauty, when we work together and when we respect each other and our musical tradition and our sacred traditions, poetry and music and sacred dance.
So, I’ve been doing this work which is specifically addressing peace in the world and encouraging dialogue, and I’ve done that not just in the Middle East. I went to Korea, and I’ve done peace projects with the Koreans governments on the border between South Korea and North Korea. I have done the same in India, and Cuba. It was about bringing people together.
I became involved in music healing- healing sounds, and that is for me is working on this same dream. It is about bringing peace to this world, through healing the mind and the body. We are doing that through contemplative music, meditative music that is rooted in the medical traditions of China and India and neuroscience. Music therapy studies that come mostly from the West, and so it’s based on East and West wisdom traditions, science and ancient shamanic wisdom and the wisdom that I composed from these sources are meant to create inner peace in each listener, and through that, I hope to achieve peace.
One more element in my work to try to promote that one last dream that I have is that I started three years ago I started a charitable foundation called Inspired Sound initiative.
The Foundation has its base in Los Angeles, but it’s working all over the world. It’s about bringing education through music, and dance and storytelling two very difficult neighborhoods to schools that have no arts, schools that the communities are struggling, and the youth are at risk, and we are trying to inspire those communities to rise above the difficult reality, like a lotus flower that grows out of the mud. So that is the dream.
Kara Johnstad: A dream that I think it is feasible and it is doable. I think that it takes the courage to speak that, to give it a word, to say I believe and live world peace. You have been studying, you’re talking about the East and the West, so you had many experiences with different mystery schools, and we have the shamans in South America shamans, you know the Sufis, we have many different schools that work with sound. Would you like to share a little bit more about what it’s like to gain that wisdom from ancient practices?
Yuval Ron: Yes. The Sufi tradition from India is a very rich tradition. It’s a very interesting lineage. I’ve been involved with an order of a saint that lived in India 100 years ago, and he is buried in Rajasthan India, and I have been in touch with that lineage which in Europe and of America it’s called the Inyati order. It started about 100 years ago a great teacher who was a master musician. Until very recently this great teacher who was a master musician came from India to America and Europe, and he had many followers all over the world. His grandson is the leader of the order right now. He became a friend of mine and a collaborator back in 2004, and since then I’ve been involved with their teaching and with their work, and I have studied some of the information from the books of his grandfather who wrote a classic book called the mysticism of sound and music or the mysticism of music.
The Book influenced John Coltrane and Carlos Santana, many jazz musicians in the 60s. It was a cult classic in the 60s and in a way my book Divine Attunement, music is a path to wisdom, I see it as a continuation of his book about the mysticism of music. Sufism that developed for hundreds of years in India finally came to the west. So that is one of the traditions.
Continue to Page 2 of the Interview with Yuval Ron – Sound is the Future Medicine
