An Interview

Beating on the Womb:
The Mythmaker Interview
Kenneth Guentert interviews Bruce Silverman

Bruce Silverman has a double occupation: therapist and drummer. Sometimes the two roles cross directly, as they do a day and a half a week when he works as a music therapist with autistic children. More often the connection is subtler as when he says he got into drumming "out of fear or when he tries to help a male client get in touch with whatever is "low and deep and masculine," the qualities of his favorite drum.

As a therapist, Silverman is drawn to trans personal psychology and is in the business of helping clients, two thirds of whom now are men, go through their personal material to a more spiritual place." Men, he says, feel "unempowered in their lives. They feel like they are missing some thing energetic that has to do with manliness and masculinity."

Although he does not usually haul out the drums for an individual counseling session, his group drumming activities - whether at a men's weekend at Westerbeke Ranch in Sonoma, California, or with his own samba bateria, "The Sons of Orpheus" - are clearly intended to help men get in touch with their identities as men.

And he does it by turning men into drummers. It's not so hard, he says. "Every man and boy I know can walk up to a drum and say, 'This touches something basic in me."' Drumming, he says, is "encoded in our genes.

To contact him, write Bruce Silverman, 2980 College Ave, no. 6, Berkeley, CA 94705 (Defunct address).

How would you get a non-rhythmical person like me involved in drumming?
Well, I'd have you stand in a circle as part of the group. We'd start doing something simple. All of these musical skills can be taught and broken down and made very easy. Each individual part in a really complicated African drumming ensemble is really very simple. And therein lies the beauty. The complication comes from the community.

But there's a lot of fear here. How do you overcome it - beyond giving everybody a small part?
Well, working with fear is an important part of my therapeutic work. Most of us are driven by fear all of our lives and don't even realize it. That's the fishbowl we swim in. It's a new and liberating experience for men to honor fear. Sometimes when I m doing a men s conference I'll say, "How many of you were afraid when you walked in this room?" You'll see a few shy hands go up, and I'll say, "Well, we've got three honest people." I try to honor someone being courageous enough to admit they have fear. One of the first places we go is to talk about how we as men are all afraid - both in relationship to other men, which is called homophobia, and in relationship to women, which is another whole dance that I work with.

Does that relate to drumming in any way?
Very much so. A lot of the spiritual work I do, in terms of teaching, is with our relationship to what I call "the Great Mother." We are surrounded by the waters of the womb. We are constantly negotiating with something that surrounds us and protects us and is greater than us -be it the womb, mother earth, our own biological mothers, or other structures in our lives. And the way you relate to one has a lot to do with what happened to you in the womb or your experience of growing up. Often I talk about "working on the mother womb."

Think about the act of drumming. It is coming up against the womb. The drum itself is a womb. It's a concave, very sensual, physical, curved object with a skin stretched across it. We take our hands and pound on it.

On the outside of it.
Right. It's a different relationship. A woman has a womb and is able to give birth to a baby, an experience that I can't have. So in a way, we men have to express ourselves with our arms, and we come up against the Great Mother when we pound on the drum - we experience our relationship with our mothers, with the planet, with the earth itself.

I don't have my conga drum here, but if you can imagine a drum that size between my legs. I'm embracing it, almost like I'm holding onto a tree, and I'm connected to the earth. I'm grounding myself. I'm connecting myself to the planet. It's very different from playing an electronic synthesizer. So I see a man's fear of drums as connected to his fear of the earth and his fear of his mother.

Of course that's probably why I have a hard time with the drum. (laughter). Your explanation of drumming as a confrontation with the planet works for me, but does it work subconsciously or do you have to tell men they're beating on the womb before it has an impact?
Men are very cut off from nature. There are some men who live competitive lives with other men, who are in office buildings eight hours a day, and who go home at night and watch TV. The idea of drumming as a way of relating to the earth might seem ludicrous to them. So usually they have to show up before I can work with that. Maybe we can answer that question by talking about people for whom drumming seems ridiculous. In our culture, what I come up against a lot is, Well, what does drumming have to do with therapy?"

What do drums have to do with festivals?
When we are coming up against the Great Mother, we are in relationship with something greater than ourselves. And the drum is a very tangible experience of that cosmic vibration. Perhaps it’s the oldest instrument, one that every culture except western scientific culture has a relationship with. So rather than asking what drumming and festivals have to do with each other, I would have to ask why is it that only in the last 100 years have they come to have nothing to do with each other, at least in our cul-ture? A Brazilian festival without a drum would be unheard of. Carnivale in Brazil, which would be the equivalent of Mardi Gras in New Orleans, would be unheard of without a drum. It would be unheard of to have Trinadian Carnival Festival without a steel drum.

MeLuhan called the radio the "tribal drum." I take it that is not as good as playing the drum yourself.
There's nothing wrong with that. But there are certain experiences that happen when one is around a drum for a long period of time, which some cultures call religious experiences. There is a shamanic element to drumming, if you will. There are physiological changes that take place in the brain that depend on the tempo and the frequency of the sound - even if you use an electronic mechanism to create that frequency, which is around 8 to 12 hertz or 8 to 12 cycles per second. So physiological changes happen in the brain that open people up to experiences we might call trance or possession-trance in certain cultures.

And it doesn't matter whether that's a recording or live?
Well, it's more likely to happen with certain drums because they're bigger. That sounds very simple, but it's also true. This small drum, for instance, will not resonate below 60 or 70 hertz. A bass drum would be around 15. The undertones that happen around a drum will actually impact a human being in a certain way so that certain phenomena take place psychically. Now depending on cultural context, some people might say, "this person is being visited by the eagle god." In our western culture, we might say, "this person had a psychotic break." Or we might say, "the devil had something to do with it." Even an epileptic seizure can be triggered by those same vibrations. I'm not an expert on that, but I have done some research and I know that there is something that happens physiological with drumming because of the repetition. Three beats per second, combined with a low frequency, seems to be the amount where this happens. You put those two together in a cultural context that gives you permission to have a spiritual experience and you have the makings of openings for people to make some breakthroughs.

I guess what I'm getting at is, how important is it to be the drummer instead of to just listen to the drummer?
I was relating to your question from the acoustics of the experience. If you play a radio, you're not going to get anything like the low frequency you need for the experience, nor will you have the cultural context of being in a place where you're participating in something that's sacred. Although, you might go to an ecstatic place listening to Frank Sinatra or Michael Jackson - and I certainly wouldn't invalidate that experience.

It seems to me the nature of what you do - and what we're trying to do at Festivals - is to get people to immerse themselves in their own celebrations.
I imagine it was always like this. I imagine that at a certain point in prehistory, it might have been unheard of for anyone not to participate. My guess is that there was a time where people started being spectators and stopped participating in the religious process.

Certainly in the drumming tradition that I've studied - both musically and energetically - everyone participates in the music. Everyone has a simple part that creates the complex whole. You don't have a master organist who sits up there and who does it and you listen. So I resonate toward what you're saying. Yes, it is a participatory thing musically. And also African culture had a little gift to give European culture because of the commonality of it. Everyone participates. Even an observer will be moving, even if he or she is 85 years old.

You mentioned how drumming helps men relate to the Earth Mother. How does drumming help men relate to men?
Well, there's something very unconscious going on when men drum together. Again I think you have to go back to pre-history. Men used to go out to hunt together - this living in a city in high-rises is very recent. When men drum together they unconsciously go to a place where they are working, cooperatively, with the other men in the community. We're doing something that is so old it is almost encoded in our genetic makeup.

Men coming together and doing something with other men just really brings men into themselves to a depth of feeling that they don't really have in their normal life. They need to keep their guard up when they want to be an executive vice president and the guy at the next desk also wants to be an executive vice president. You don't have much of a sense of how you're going to relate to this guy. Your survival depends on competing with him, whereas when we were all hunters our survival depended upon cooperating with this guy. I depend on the guy I'm drumming with for the beat. I can't play my rhythm on top of his unless he holds his. We learn to be together in an intimate space. We are actually creating an intimate space musically.

And when you talk about an intimate space musically, you're talking about something that is right at the center of the soul. So drumming together may be the most intimate thing a man has done with another man in his whole life. He's looked at another man in the eye and drummed with that man and they got on the same wavelength. Maybe he's never hugged another man, maybe he's never articulated his feelings to another man, maybe that's not necessary. With the drums there's a lot of telepathic communication and unconscious camaraderie. It's even done in the form of a circle. There's not one man up front and other people watching.

It helps defeat the homophobia that men have because it feels like such a masculine thing to do. Right. The women s movement has given us many gifts, but one place where we may need to depart is on this idea of intimacy. For women, the verbal and the face-to-face mode seems to work wonderfully. That's wonderful, too, for men at certain times, but there are other ways where men want to be intimate with men that is not face-to-face and verbal. So drumming is perfect. We may never even look at the other person, but we can be totally connected. Isn't that wonderful? Drumming is a very masculine way to be intimate.

Your drumming group is called "The Sons of Orpheus." Why?
Part of my work is to help men, especially, see their lives as a myth that's unfolding. When we start thinking of our lives in mythological terms, there are the great stories of the gods and spirits to draw upon. The stories of the Iliad and the Odyssey and Homer and the Greeks and the Romans. The Orpheus myth has something to say about our journey as men. Orpheus loses his wife; she's taken to the underworld, and he sings his grief very deeply. So I have found that by being with my grief, I have gone to the other world. I have come back, even though sometimes I feel like I've been dismembered, just as Orpheus was. Letting go of our ego, if you will, as we must do when we go to spiritual dimensions, in order to return in one piece.
You can start to outline the difference between a spiritual dimension and a psychotic break. Someone with no boundaries can enter a spiritual dimension and go to pieces, literally, and not be able to return.

Is the drum a kind of boundary then?
I think so. It's a very grounding thing. It's a safe thing. It's a circle. And we're not there by ourselves. Maybe that's the most important boundary.

That communal element is important. But doesn't the safety of the group prevent a man from taking any risks?
Oh, but men do. I find that men take a lot more risks in the group of 20 men. There's an atmosphere in the room that's very secure, very nourishing, just like our mother. I can compare a circle of drummers to the womb. When I'm inside the circle, I can say or do anything. If I want to cry or let go of an angry yell, I have more permission to do that than if I were walking down the street with a good friend. So there's a certain safe, closed, protective spiritual quality to a gathering of drummers.

How does your Jewish background connect to your drumwork?
As far as I know, modern Judaism is disconnected with a drumming tradition but not with a vibratory tradition. The Jewish tradition is very rich in sound. There is the cantor in the Orthodox tradition and someone who is always singing. The word "Amen" connects to the word "Om" in the Sanskrit tradition, which is one sound connected to the great whole. I feel very much at home in my own tradition and at a Yom Kippur service, with perhaps the most common Jewish prayer, Sh'ma, Yisrael, Adonoi Elohenu Adonoi Echad. The Sh'ma means "listen," so it's the act of being with sound and listening that is liberating, whether you're saying sacred Hebrew sounds or Iemajá, which happens to come from the West African Yoruba tradition. The words themselves have certain properties that do the same things the drums do. Judaism is very specific about sounds being more important than visual images of the divine.

I use the Sh'ma as a mantra and I've found that I have to say it out loud.
I think it is more beneficial to say it out loud unless you're in an advanced state of higher consciousness. This gets back to your idea of participation. When we say Sh'ma, we are actively doing something. We are opening our hearts and resonating sound. When we say Sh'ma or Iemaja', which happen to sound a lot like each other-

That sort of makes us the drum, because the sound resonates within us.
As within, so without.

Can we talk a little bit about the kinds of drums and different kinds of drumming and what they have to say?
I like drums that are big and deep and masculine and low. When a big Brazilian surdo starts to play, it's the essence of drums. Something takes me inside myself and down. Now we dress up the big drum with other things -the African bells, the shakers, and the instruments with a different timbre. Metal, skin, wood. But the drum with that low, deep, sound is always underneath, like a heartbeat. Dum-Dum. Dum-Dum.

Samba, as I hear it, is a musical reproduction of a human heartbeat. Dum-Dum. Dum-Dum. Perhaps the rhythm that everyone in the world knows the best is samba. Dum-Dum. Europe and Asia have latched onto that Brazilian form and know it. It's so familiar, We all had it in quadrophonic sound for nine months. Those are the drums that speak the most to my own body.

Maybe that's what men need the most - if we feel disempowered.
I think it must be the case. In the last 10 years, I've been active in the Bay Area. Now I know at least 10 samba drum batteries or "baterias" that formed out of beginners.

Beginners?
Yes, people who weren't professional musicians but just wanted to belong to a music group. And samba seems to be the form that's most readily accessible. That's why I chose that form for my men's group. I could have concentrated on conga drumming, which is a more difficult technique, first of all. It takes more time and training. Also, the Brazilian drums are moveable. That's important for a festival - you can carry music into the streets and dance as you play.

Oh, they're not the same drums.
No, you see, conga drumming is from the African tradition. Brazilians, for their festivals, took the same general kinds of sound, the skins, and they put them on lightweight metallic drums that they could carry and hit with a stick. You can't carry African heavy hardwood drums around the streets - at least not for very long. So Samba drums were born for festival work, whereas other drums are more rooted to stage performance.

So do you still do tabla drumming for yourself?
I like to participate in various forms. If there's a flute player or a raga singer, I like to have the appropriate drum sounds be with that form. It would be a little inappropriate to play Brazilian drums along with a sitar player. So there's an appropriateness and there's room for everything in this world. There's a time and a place for everything –

- under the sun. Isn't Native American drumming a communal form?
I don't know a great deal about Native American drumming. I don't think there are parts, the way an African system has. But there is a shamanic quality to Native American drumming. Getting to that spiritual experience is what it's all about. They work with that low drum, again, and those three beats per second and by doing that it would impact you in some way. Maybe the animal spirit, the buffalo god, will come and do something.

The samba drum is plain fun, then.
Right. It grew out of an African spiritual tradition, but right now it is an incredible amount of fun. It's a real high.