Don Robertson is a composer and writer who lives in Nashville, Tennessee

Diego: Hello Don. Thank you for taking time to answer a few questions that I have had after reviewing your writings about positive music on the dovesong.com web site. Although you don’t say that positive music is happy music, I would like to know what is happiness for you, and what is the role of music in your idea of a happy life?

Don: The term positive doesn’t just apply to happy music. Sad music is positive too, if you think about it. Sadness, happiness, joy, love, peace, these are all positive emotions, and positive music conveys these emotions. Negative music, however, is music that coveys negative emotions, such as hatred and anger. Positive music uplifts, promotes healing, is heartfelt, or spiritual. Negative music has an opposite effect, supporting confusion, anger, stress and nervousness.

Life isn’t always happy, nor is it meant to be, but when one observes the genuine happiness of children at play, one realizes how natural this state really is. This happiness of a child is genuine, unlike the strained “smiley faces” that people in the business world sometimes wear. What has caused so many adults to loose this natural state of happiness? The answer is that blocks, created in the mind and emotions, hold back the natural flow of love, joy and happiness. As life deals out obstacles along the way, emotional scars result. And as people educate themselves in the standard operating procedures of worldly society, they accept very limiting mental concepts that hold back the flow of spontaneous ideas, such as a young child always has. If a person hasn’t managed to preserve or recover a state of childlike innocence, then happiness becomes a concept, and one tends to try to attain it through outward means, or by taking substances that give some seeming relief from troubling mental patterns and painful emotional scars.

Happy music won’t help a person much if he or she has filled himself with doubt, anger, hatred, guilt, and such things. But music does help provide a lift for people who are open to it. I don’t know how it is in your country of Argentina, but during the 1950s when I was growing up in the USA, many people used to stroll along the streets whistling happy tunes. Beside the fact that not many people walk along our streets any more, I rarely hear people whistling. Of course, many of the popular songs today do not have melodies that would lend themselves to whistling, and hip hop, which is very popular here, has abandoned melody altogether. But only particular types of melodies invoke that instant happy emotion…melodies such as Oh, What a Beautiful Morning by Richard Rogers, featured in the musical Oklahoma. I don’t know if you are familiar with that song. It has that kind of melody that people liked to whistle during the early fifties. Zippity Do Da from the Walt Disney motion picture Song of the South, filmed during the 1940s, even featured a whistled solo, where Uncle Remus walked along the path near his home as animated bluebirds landed on his shoulder. My, what a difference between a masterpiece like this from the late 1940s--no longer available in the United States--and most of the standard product released by the Hollywood studios today! Have we lost our virginity? In our current jaded society, many people do not believe happiness is even an option. That is just not true.

Diego: Do you think that it is possible to live without angry feelings? I ask you because I’ve read an article where Brian Eno talks about some new age music, and it seemed to him that the music wasn’t real, because it didn’t have any evil in it. Do you think that a life without angry or evil feelings is unreal or not possible to live?

Don: Some people feel that art should reflect real life and therefore have some degree of darkness in it. But why do they consider that a necessary component of music? Should we add a few discords to an Ave Maria to make it more genuine?

People listen to music for different reasons. Some want to gain knowledge or envision an experience by relating to the words. Others enjoy the physical reaction from the beat, from the groove. Some appreciate music for intellection stimulation, or for entertainment, while others like to connect with music emotionally, or even deeper, with their feelings. We can use music to help us connect with what is real inside of us. If we are looking for the very same elements in music that we encounter in our (perhaps tired, stressed out and troubled) lives, then we are probably not using music to help us connect with our true inner natures.

Music can offer something that adds to our daily lives, something to lift us beyond the mundane world, but how we appreciate it? Is it our emotional, physical, mental, and/or spiritual natures that we allow to absorb the vibrations of music? If it is our spiritual nature, then only a certain kind of music is really effective. I am not talking about some of the contemporary gospel and Christian music that is only that same, tired superficial music from pop radio with quasi-spiritual lyrics added. I am talking about good, get-down-inside-and-feel-it spiritual music. God knows that this kind of medicine is desperately needed today, at least for those who are ready for it. That is why I so strongly recommend Renaissance sacred and North Indian classical music, two very, very great traditions of spiritually uplifting music.

Please take note, however, that I am not talking about escaping from reality here; I am talking about attuning ourselves to a higher sound vibration. If we lift ourselves high enough, we will no longer be concerned with “evil” anymore (laughs). Each of us has a choice of how we want to live our lives. If we want to feel angry and frustrated, there are lots of CDs that we will feel compatible with. But then there is music of light and love too. It is all there to choose from. We are not talking about denying evil, or denying anger, nor are we talking about living a life without anger. It is not about manipulating how we feel. It is about growing spiritually and discovering the great hidden treasure that is YOU and ME…allowing it unfold, like a flower, its pedals gradually opening.

Diego: You have studied the relations between music and spirituality, what did you find out about our society, since there is such a preponderance of negative music?

Don: Society is generally very troubled and happiness, joy and love cannot be forced on a troubled society. Young people have created much of the music that is popular around the world, as you know, and it often expresses their alienation and resentment. I have received emails from young people going through puberty who consider their omnipresent anger and hatred as a normal part of the puberty process. However, the fact is that they are angry because they are growing up in a troubled environment, one where they are unable to relate to their parents--who have lost their own spark of youth, becoming afraid instead; where they are told that sex and their own bodies are unnatural and should be hidden and forbidden; and where they grow up eating the worst possible commercially prepared food, heated in microwaves, or picked up at the drive-up window at junk-food restaurants. Then they are given preposterous goals to attain, little concerned with their own feelings, likes and dislikes. Add to this the hours and hours they spend watching television programming filled with platitude and violence. Finally, with all the discouragement that surrounds them, they are given very little hope from those around them. With little expression of love in their lives, many young people are confused and have taken to drugs. One of the results from all of this is their music…the hip-hop, the punk, the industrial and heavy metal records, their music of anger and frustration. And we have heard it for so long that it has become the background music for our society, a society grown dispirited and troubled. It is there in the background at restaurants, on the radios, in the TV commercials, at dances. I would like to comment, however, that I did not mean to infer that dysfunctional family problems are present in every family…there are still many very stable families and homes, but what I have described has become the dominant theme in current society in the Western world, and much of the music that this society produces, and many of the motion pictures, are based on these problems. The resultant media continue to influence the other cultures of the world.

Diego: When you were involved in new age music, what were the elements in it that made you feel unsatisfied? What artists in that area you respect and what of them not and why?

Don: When I started out in 1969 with my first album, Dawn, new age music was something conceptual that I read about in books. I felt that with the psychedelic movement of the 1960s underfoot, definite positive changes were taking place in society, because a new, healing, spiritual music was being introduced. The force behind all of this at that time was North Indian classical music, brought to the Western world by people like Ravi Shankar, and this influence was responsible for very positive changes in popular music, classical music and jazz. During the 1960s, we had some of the greatest pop music ever, created by groups like the Beatles, but soon popular music changed course. Back in 1969, I had hoped that music would become more uplifting and positive, and this is what I envisioned new age music to be. But instead I realized that it was becoming more negative. At the end of the 1970s, a separate genre of music started to become established in the San Francisco Bay area. Called new age music, it was produced by a handful of musicians with the aim of creating a spiritual and relaxing music. The genre grew each year until finally in the mid 1980s, the new age genre became internationally recognized. When the major labels and the radio stations got involved, the genre changed completely. Today, it seems to be dominated by music that has no relationship to the original conception of new age music. I will have a lot more to say about this topic in my forthcoming book on positive music.

Diego: Do you feel yourself to be a member of what Marilyn Ferguson called the Aquarian Conspiracy?

Don: When I left California and moved to Colorado in 1984, I was making a definite break with the new age community in and around San Francisco, including the musicians. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the term new age music meant to me something entirely different than an association with a kind of movement, as I explained. My feeling about the new age movement and the so-called Aquarian conspiracy is that I question the validity of the idea of a new age now taking place. Therefore, I don’t see a reason for a new age movement. The idea of our planetary culture shifting into a different age, one of peace, prosperity and spirituality, comes from astrology and Plato’s Great Year of 25,920 years that represents the number of years that it takes for the equinox to pass through the twelve signs of the zodiac, with each sign becoming a strong influence on society for 2,160 years. The preceding age was the Piscean, and the one we are now moving into is the Aquarian. Since these periods are each 2,160 years in length, and we are only in the last 100 years entering the sign of Aquarius, I do not believe that we need to get too excited about a whole new age of enlightenment just yet. What I noticed when I lived in California, and the concept of a new age movement was spreading, was that people, high on pot and LSD, were living in their own little worlds, surrounded by new age music, visuals and like-minded friends. They were living a fantasy life, as if the transformation into a new age had already occurred. The rest of the world was living in darkness and therefore their personal tragedies were the result of their own thinking, they told me. I cannot deny the power of thought, but it was because of their own thinking that people were starving in Bangladesh, for example, so therefore, there was no need to regard them. It also appeared that for every sincere person who attended new age events, there were at least five people who were in it for the money and the glamour. I began to see that so many of the people in new age circles in California, where the whole thing started, were mired in selfishness, even though they may have acquired some degree of spiritual attainment, and I was very troubled by what I saw taking place. For this reason and others, I left California, where I had first been attracted by the psychedelic movement of the 1960s.

The so-called new age movement has become a religion in the eyes of many, and I do not feel that this is productive. We don’t need another religion. There are too many as it is! Religions create separation. For every religion, there are other religions that arm themselves against that religion, and this, as we well know, ends up in war and disagreement. The new age movement has already spawned a whole movement against it among the right-wing Christian fundamentalists who have become influenced by a plethora of books filled with misinformation, books that claim to explain to Christians what the so-called new age movement is all about. We need to learn to understand each other instead of constantly looking for things we think we disagree about. But this is the way of the world, and it has been this way for thousands of years. I don’t see the situation changing anytime soon. Is it that much different now than during the time of the crusades, or during the inquisition? We still kill each other because of religion. When are we all going to realize that religion is man-made and that truth is God-made and it is the truth we are looking for, not religion?

Diego: What was the cause of your leaving all negative music in your life? Has what causes you to be angry disappeared in your life? Was it a necessity of being part of the “positive vibrations”, as spiritual feelings were called in sixties?

Don: I made a decision to leave negative music when I realized what it was. In 1968, I was composing music that was stripped of consonance, and at the same time I was playing rock music that crescendoed into a frenzy of terrifying noise. It was difficult at first to stop conceiving of this music because I had gotten so heavily involved in it. After the release of my first album Dawn in 1969, my ex-wife and I went to Mexico where we lived for about six months. There, on the sands in front of our beachfront Mayan hut on the Yucatan Peninsula, I allowed myself to become purified from the extremely negative music that I had been involved in during the previous years. As I became more spiritually awakened in the following years, the negative music that I had formerly embraced became painful for me to experience.

As far as getting angry, I used to get upset really easily, but I don’t get angry much any more. Once in a while somebody says something that I will get upset about. But if I allow myself to get upset, then I end up paying the price for it, because I have to work to get back out of the state that I have gotten myself into. What I do is deal with the cause of the anger by getting down inside and looking at it. Usually it ends up being some emotional scar that I have not yet worked out, perhaps something from my childhood.

Diego: What do you like about psychedelic music in sixties? Which part of that story do you consider positive and which do you not? You can talk about drugs if want. But I would like to know what records of that time you consider healthy experiences and what carried negative vibrations and the worst, pulsing of death. In the same matter why so many musicians opened the hell doors instead of heavens doors at that time?

Don: In the mid-1960s, there were group psychedelic experiences that took place at concerts in the Fillmore Auditorium and the Family Dog in San Francisco, and these were awesome. I don’t think anyone could put these experiences into words, and so they will probably die without a history. Based on psychedelic experiences, the inappropriately named hippie era was short-lived. These days of love and flowers were fleeting, a kind of omen, and that is all. They awakened a few, but also took a lot of casualties. I believe that those who tried to cling to psychedelics, after their initial impact in the sixties, realized only a shadow of what they had originally experienced, if that even. One cannot take heaven by storm.

The most amazing band that played during the flower power era in San Francisco was, in my opinion, the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, but they burned out extremely fast on account of the psychedelics, and their lead singer was soon confined to a mental institution. The song Slip Inside this House embodies the mystery teachings in the lyric, and I have never heard another song like it. The Grateful Dead could create an amazing atmosphere with their music that would become transforming while under the influence of psychedelics, but then they would suddenly plunge into the depths of hell, pure chaos and discord.

The Haight District in San Francisco became inundated with outsiders from all over the continent during the summer of 1969, and the more mellow hippies left the city in droves for counties further north, and to Mexico. The outsiders brought drugs like heroin and speed with them. When I returned to San Francisco from my six-month hiatus in Mexico in late 1969, I found people who had previously been on a spiritual path using LSD and mushrooms now were addicted to heroin and speed. They nervously talked about devils and satin and were listening to hard-edged music like Hendrix, the Stones and Led Zeppelin instead of Ravi Shankar and the Beatles. Why did the musicians open the doors to hell? They were connecting with the psychic world using drugs, a very dangerous thing. It is really just that simple. Few of them knew what they were doing. People who considered themselves flower children became angry and dark. That is what happened. I was there. There is no door to nirvana through drugs. It is up to each of us to find the way on our own. And we are always shown the way when we really ask, and we are truly sincere.

The band that I acknowledge from that era, and that I will always recommend, is the Moody Blues from England. They embodied the “light side of the force” during the period when psychedelic drugs mixed with other drugs were opening the door for all kinds of other energies to enter rock music. I believe I have listened to most all of the groups, and the Moodies were the only ones that really embraced the light. The five or six albums starting with Days of Future Passed are clean and positive, without the negativity that the drugs brought into so much music and are really great musically and spiritually. And if you understand the lyrics, the story of the light side of the era is described in the words of the songs.

Yes, the rock musicians were playing with fire. When I recognized this and understood the nature of what was being unleashed, the dark side, you could say, I left San Francisco and moved to a farmhouse in Southern Colorado where I wrote about my experiences and predicted that a period of negative rock music lay just ahead. That was 1970. It turned out that my prediction was correct.

Diego: How did you come to the idea of working for positive music and how did you get the idea of creating dovesong.com and the DoveSong Foundation? How is the site doing and what reactions have you received.

Don: I have been promoting positive music since 1968, the year that I discovered the difference between music that was uplifting and music that was not. I started the DoveSong website (www.dovesong.com) in January 1997 when I began to realize that the web was the ultimate vehicle for what I had to say. Since the inception of the website, we have been receiving tremendous response from all over the world, and thousands of site visitors every day. In 2002, my wife, Mary Ellen Bickford, and I created the DoveSong Foundation, Inc. to oversee the work of enabling positive music, and then, in April 2004, we launched the Positive Music Movement, a select group of composers, musicians and educators joined together for the promotion, creation and performance of positive music. We have a page on the website dedicated to the movement

Diego: How many people do you think understand the concept of positive music, and how many people really want to be happy and consume only positive music?

Don: In the beginning, 35 years ago, not many people understood what I was talking about when I talked about positive music, but during the past five or six years things have changed. Many people, however, still understand the term positive music to refer to song lyrics, and that is not what is intended. Positive, in terms of music, refers to the feelings induced by the music itself, regardless of the words. Music has a wonderful ability to uplift, contribute to healing, express the feelings of the heart, and help awaken one to his or her own spirituality.

Diego: Don, you don’t express negative feelings in your art as a kind of public therapy as a lot of artists do. Is the reason that you feel yourself free of negative feelings? Do you have any work (therapy, religion, mediation) that helps you keep happy and positive?

Don: When I close my eyes and take a deep breath, I normally feel joy and love, and when I create music, it is these feelings that I express. If I am troubled, instead of pouring troubled feelings into music, I deal with them in meditation, a practice that I have been doing for over thirty years. Quieting my body and mind allows me to get in touch with who I really am, my inner core being, the source of life, light, and love. In that space I can deal with situations in my life. Once you have found that pure essence of who you really are, you are on your way. Like Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues said: “I’m just beginning to see/Now I’m on my way.” The truth is so simple that it can be expressed in a few words, yet words can never really express the truth, nor can they bind you to it.