The Rhythm Divine

Wisdom of the Gong Master
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With his long grey hair and weathered face, Don Conreaux looks a lot like Willie Nelson. But he's no country singer. Don Conreaux is the Gong Master. "The Gong Master of Ceremonies", he adds. "Most everything that we do is a ceremony." Don is Artistic Director of the Mysterious Tremendum Sacred Tone Ensemble which travels the world providing social rites of passage. These events which might take place in a concert hall, in a desert or at Stonehenge combine sacred conch playing, overtone chanting, Himalayan Singing Bowl improvisations and gong performances. But these are no ordinary gongs. They are massive disc-shaped Tam Tams, one metre wide, made of copper, tin and nickel and struck with a felt-covered mallet. According to Don, the gong is directly descended from the Bronze Age 5000 years ago when they were used as a spiritual technology for healing by shamans. It's a lineage he happily accepts.

Don has been following the gong for more than 40 years and this week he shares the wisdom of a Gong Master.

Transcript

Don Conreaux: My name is Don Conreaux. I have a title. It's Gong Master. Well actually it's Gong Master of Ceremonies. The gong player usually ends up being a master of ceremonies. Most everything that we do is a ceremony. Gong mastery is like having a pair of shoes when you're young, and that title you have to grow into. I have called all of my students around the world Gong masters in order for them to live up to something. It doesn't mean that we're masters like... I know that they've used the word master for Reiki Masters and all of that but really it's something that, your goal is to master the gong of life, and this is more than just striking the gong.

Well, the gong that we use is really a Tam Tam. That means it's a flat disc-shaped gong. Usually they are un-tuned to any specific frequencies although we do have Tam tams now that are tuned to the orbits of the planets, and they're called Planetary Gongs.

I'm going to strike the gong now. You'll be able to hear it. This is a particularly beautiful 38 inch Paiste gong.

STRIKES GONG

Although these gongs are used in symphonic orchestras all over the world and sometimes they have special music written for them, however they have not been used the way they were intended to be used 6000 years ago when the first bronze gong appeared.

They were used for psychological support. The amount of energy that comes through one gong is so tremendous that all the cells of the body begin to resonate and we call it Holistic Resonance. And what this does is sort of shakes up anything that's stuck in the body. There are certain feelings that occur that are super-sensory feelings in the person being gonged. They lose their sense of ego. They seem to be brought back to a certain innocence or peace. Not a passive peace but a dynamic peace of vital force, of energy in them. They're totally relaxed. And this gives them a sense of timelessness, of being taken out of time and suspended by the long tones of the gong. This is part of the secret of its healing process with the human being.

Geoff Wood: Yes, the gong with you is not simply a musical instrument. It's more of a spiritual technology we could almost say.

Don Conreaux: Well it is and I think that science and spirituality these days are starting to come together in a union that doesn't have to be weighted down by dogmas or religion or different contexts like that, that it's really a science, and the idea is that the gong, even though it has a mystical past, still as a practical instrument for holistic healing, it stands alone.

Geoff Wood: Tell me about the way the vibrations resonate in terms of brain waves. I know you've done some work with that

Don Conreaux: The brain waves. Of course, this is the latest research now that's going on, mainly with changing the memory tracks. The neuron circuitry in the brain is usually attached to things that are painful - memories of fear , memories of anger, memories of loss, all of these things - so these things that obstruct the natural healing process of the innate consciousness, the 24 hour consciousness that rejuvenates us when we go to sleep at night. And so the 'gong bath', I call it, simulates that 8 or 10 hours of sleep in just a short maybe 45 minutes, and the body goes into the same cycles that you would have during sleep where its able to rejuvenate itself. Really creating new neuron passageways that are not based upon the past but are based on peace and love, all the good things that make up human beings.

Excerpt from Gong Sutra

Geoff Wood: Don, the gongs behind you, there are two. There's a sun and a moon. The sun has Chinese characters. Can you explain the characters, and also why one is sun and one is moon.

Don Conreaux: This is not necessarily the sun gong. It's a symphonic gong, same size 38 inch, but the sun gong itself has been tuned to the gravitational frequency of our sun, of our solar system, which happens to be 126.22 hertz which is right between a B and a C on the piano. But the gong underneath it is a little 26 inch gong which is the moon gong. Now this gong has got a specific frequency. It's the G# frequency and it's used a lot by women because a lot of women now have women's circles and this moon really relates to the emotions and to the water and the body. That's the moon gong

STRIKES MOON GONG

It has a very deep tone much like the larger gong. Not that much difference in the tones, but the difference really is if I keep hitting the big gong it's going to maintain that low slow wave whereas if I kept hitting the moon gong the frequencies would raise higher and higher and it would lose that lower tone. This is just the way nature made it.

Geoff Wood: Don, do you ever get called a shaman?

Don Conreaux: Well, it's a nice title isn't it? But I think what a shaman is, is not somebody who takes hallucinogenic drugs necessarily but someone who looks at life as a healing ceremony. And we do. There are mantras you put into the gong, affirmations, good intentions. You know we approach the gong with reverence as we would an elder, so all of those shamanistic ideas are present when we play. Certainly it's not a musical instrument.

Geoff Wood: How did you get involved with the gong? Can you tell me your story?

Don Conreaux: In the 1960s I was an actor in Hollywood and I was doing a film in Griffith Park and it was right in the middle of those days of the flower children. And I noticed there were some gongs hanging in a tree and I found out they were Big Sur gongs brought down by some of the people from Big Sur. I didn't hear them, I didn't know what they were, but they just struck me.

Well then a few days later a friend came up and said there's a yogi town - this is in 69 - why don't you come and take a class in Kundalini Yoga and I said yes, of course I will. And this yoga teacher from India had a gong, a 28 inch symphonic gong, and after a strong Kundalini Kriya class he hit the gong and he hit it so hard we, actually we came out of our bodies and we found ourselves looking down on our bodies, and I thought well this...because I'd been meditating with Yogananda since 1952 and I said, this has got to be an instrument I have to have. So I immediately got a gong.

Geoff Wood: That's Yogananda from the Self-Realisation Fellowship?

Don Conreaux: That's right. He was my Kriya Initiation back in the early 50s.

Because I'd been doing yoga for many years he asked me if I would teach people Kundalini Yoga. I went to open an ashram, I took my gong, and from that time on I've been teaching people how to play the gong, and not necessarily connected to yoga, but as a healing modality by itself.

Excerpt from Gong Sutra

Geoff Wood: Well you've also described the gong as 'an engine of musical power'. I love that phrase. What does it mean?

Don Conreaux: Well I think Dane Rudhyar was the one who I quoted on that. He was my mentor in this. Way back in the early 1900s, 1924, he wrote many books in which he used the gong as the symbol of this and it's more like an engine or a motor. It sends out so much cosmic life force through its metallic elementals that it's almost like being in the presence of a great person that sends out this charismatic energy to people. The gong has no personality of course so its called a transpersonal guru insofar as you can't get attached to it, it just sends out this 'giving-ness', this wave after wave of what we feel is shakti power or pranic power and they used it in the past to rejuvenate people when their health is failing, and more many different reasons. It just transfers its power of holistic resonance over to the person listening to it.

Geoff Wood: Just staying briefly with Dane Rudhyar, Don, you said he was your mentor. Not too many people know very much about Dane Rudhyar. He also has many theories about sound vibration, relevant of course to the gong. He says that the greatest power and the greatest vibration comes from dissonance. I would have though that was unusual because you're dealing with harmonies. What's he mean by that?

Don Conreaux: Well I think sometimes we have a limited viewpoint of what harmonies are. There's Consonant Harmony. This is harmony that is sort of like is here but doesn't move you anywhere. It's not a moving harmony.

Dissonant Harmony is when things are not quite the same. They act like sparks in an engine and they send energy back and forth and this is usually in terms of the 'difference tones' that are occurring in the sound field.

For instance if you take a singing bowl, which is a gong, and another one exactly like it and you sound them together they're not in consonant harmony at all. There's no natural harmonics here. They each are tones that are individual like you and I are individuals but still we are able to communicate with a functional harmony between us. The difference tones usually are brain waves. They go anywhere from under, even 30 high beta frequencies down to low delta which might be 1.5 cycles per second, deep deep deep sleep. Or deep deep meditation, however you look at it.

So they create this resonance that entrains the brain into this sort of rhythm and this rhythm then is the rhythm of what we call' higher consciousness' perhaps as people achieve this through their meditations. But there's also another tone that's created when you take two tones and combine them together - called Combination Tone Theory - and that's the Summation Tone. So actually what you're getting is a lower tone, a difference tone, and then another resultant tone which is a Summation Tone, a higher tone. These are called Progeny or Children Tones.

This is different from our natural harmonies. Natural harmonies, if I hit a tonic, like a C, the next overtone that you would hear would be a C1 or the next octave up and then you hear a perfect fifth, and then you hear a perfect fourth etc and it goes up that way. This is part of the natural process.

However this type of music, this functional harmony music, works upon Tone Cell Mitosis. Just as though when we are growing we have our cell mitosis, natural growth of the body, that's the type of music that it is. It creates rejuvenation, a rejuvenating energy, and they call it 'space-filling music', and whereas the natural harmonics through friction they finally burn up and you don't hear it anymore, this is also the way that all things die. As you get older you burn up your cells. However, what we call the immortal sound, the sound of the universe that is spreading out, still expanding space-filling sound and that's the type of AUM or the cosmic sound that the gong produces. And it usually results in a feeling of regeneration.

Geoff Wood: Don Conreaux, the Gong master. A remarkable man who follows the great bronze gong as a way of life, and as a modality of healing. A former disciple of the great Indian yogi Yogananada, Don has been following the gong for more than 40 years, most recently with his Mysterious Tremendum Sacred Tone Ensemble leading workshops and retreats all over the world. Don has two Chinese characters inscribed on his gongs that read, 'When Happiness Arrives, True Healing Begins''.

The music we heard came from Don Conreaux's CD Gong Sutra. If you have any questions, you can also send me an email while you're there or post a letter to me care of Radio National, GPO Box 9994 in your capital city.

And that's about it for this week. Thanks for you company. Hope you enjoyed the wisdom of the gong master.

And thanks to sound master this week, Jennifer Parsonage.

Stay tuned for Music Deli after the news with Clare Bowditch and the Feeding Set performing her original songs from the 2007 Queenscliff Music Festival.

I hope you can get by your radio next week for more rhythmic sounds, as we head to Wales and those magnificent Welsh male choirs, with tunes old and new. It's real celebration of the voice, right here on ABC Radio National with me Geoff Wood.

Until then take care, and that's the rhythm divine.

Guests

Don Conreaux
For the past 40 years, Don Conreaux has brought the mystical and entertaining sounds of the ancient bronze gong (tam tam), bells, bell bowls, shofar and the spiral sea horn (conch) to millions of listeners around the world. He has appeared on numerous television and radio programs as performing artist and talk show guest, holds 2 degrees in Theatre Arts. He has has worked throughout his career in theatre, in both film and television in Hollywood as an actor, writer, and director before arriving in 1984 to NYC. He is the artistic director of The Mysterious Tremendum Consort and School of Sacred Sound. Previously he performed as an original member of One Hand Clapping, the Tibetan Singing Bowl Ensemble.

Further Information

The International Center for Holistic Resonance
A website for those wanting to follow the Way of the Gong. Includes information about Don Conreaux and his work.

Gong Consciousness workshops
An evening of Sacred Sound and Meditation, Saturday 21 June at Bronte Public School. Information at soundinfo@optusnet.com.au

Don Conreaux - My Space site

The Himalayan Singing Bowls, with Aidan McIntyre
Aidan McIntyre is a practitioner and teacher of the Himalayan Singing Bowls and the Symphonic Gong. He has been a student of Don Conreaux, and featured on The Rhythm Divine, 2 May 2008.

Publications

Title: Magnum Opus of the Gong: Selected Essays
Author: Gong Master Don Conreaux
Publisher: Mysterious Tremendum, 1994

Music

CD title: Gong Sutra: Beyond the Wheel of Time
Artist: Gong Master Don Conreaux with the Mysterious Tremendum Sacred Tone Ensemble
CD details: Mysterious Tremendum 2005

Presenter

Geoff Wood

Producer

Geoff Wood