Hello! Welcome to Notes from Ashes by me, Anjeline de Dios. I am a singer and teacher at the intersection of academic research, artistic/musical performance, and contemporary contemplative practices of meditation and healing. (You can check out my academic stuff and music at my personal website.)
If it sounds like a lot of stuff, it is—I often have trouble defining what I’m about! But common to all my doings is an abiding interest in, and commitment to, the act of listening. Because of its seeming passivity or non-productivity (it doesn’t ‘produce’ anything), listening is so often taken for granted and misunderstood. Yet we all know how vital, creative, and complex it is—how endlessly fascinating it can be, if we would only shift gears and listen to listening for a change.
In this newsletter I plan to do exactly that, inviting you along to listen with me. I’ll keep you in the loop with my listening projects, which range from auto-ethnographic research into the pedagogies of vocal performance (as a student of different styles and languages of singing) to reflections on my experience as a facilitator of sound baths, wherein participants listen to and through my chants to arrive at a deeper inward awareness of self. I’ll also share stuff I’ve been reading on the cultural geographies of sound and music, which I hope will pique your interest in the question of how space structures our capacity and desire to listen.
In these times of heightened pain, listening heals, plain and simple. Spaces and practices of listening enable us to find ourselves and each other—to find our voice again. Hence ‘notes from ashes’: I mean to honor the potency and simplicity of expression (what comes out of us) after the unthinkable stuns us into silence.
This, really, is at the core of my tiny attempt to listen to listening: to tend to what needs to be truly heard.
Take care, take it easy, and talk to you soon.
In the meantime, tell your friends!