In my fifteenth year of making contemplative instrumental music, I’m still asking the same question I’ve always asked: what am I doing? There’s nothing I’m more passionate about, yet when I look back and try to discern what guides my decision-making, the answer is clear: I don’t know.

From my teens through my forties, I wrote and performed rock music. Rock can be transcendent and cathartic, but its transcendence often comes through the discovery, assertion, or liberation of the self rather than its disappearance. My own goals were transparent: they were rooted in ego.

My primary motivation was to be seen and admired. I wanted driving rhythms, lighter-held-aloft ballads, melodic hooks, loud, aggressive sounds, and lyrics about losing love, wanting love, trouble in love, crazy love, frustrating love, personal empowerment, or the anger and frustration of not being loved or understood. Both the target and the tools it required were clear. I never wondered what I was doing back then.

Contemplative instrumental music is quite different. It has less to do with expressing personal ego than with creating a flexible, evocative kind of weather, or architecture: something that can relax the mind, or inspire thought, spark the imagination, or tint one’s experience; it can exert its influence from the background while merely sensed, or invite more active contemplation.

Its inspiration is not teenage or early-adult angst but the natural world, whose purity, gravitas, nuance, timelessness, and mystery it aspires to render in sound. That such music can adapt to the biography of the listener and provide a springboard to personal meaning is a consequence of this pursuit, not its motive. Making the listener’s response the aim would engage ambition, while pursuing truth and beauty is an act of philosophy.

In 2011, when I began making contemplative instrumental music, I jumped in blindly, without knowing what the music was about. I knew I wanted slow, soft music with room for listeners to complete the picture. My goal was to make compositions that sounded complete but still preserved a little space for a listener’s thoughts, longings, and troubles to serve as a kind of “top-line” melody. I felt I had achieved that effect, but I hadn’t thought consciously about how.

As the years passed and I began to see parallels between this music and the natural world, I spent more time there: on the paths, in the fields and forests, among the living things, teeming and cohabiting. I soon understood that to truly see nature, to hear it and commune with it in its subtle and inscrutable glory, you had to practice attentiveness.

You needed to drop your ego, learn to let the self temporarily disappear, and cultivate the humility to trust that this world is much older and wiser than you. You had to recognize that your thoughts, opinions, and self-importance were no match for its presence, and that the less you imposed them, the more of its truths you could absorb.

Contemplative music attempts, I think, to share something of the natural world’s mysteries and cycles, and of the natural world’s character as a unified body composed of countless smaller, nuanced details. Nature feels timeless and infinite, yet strangely local and specific. It’s never boring nor trite. The natural world is neither sentimental nor nostalgic, and though it can be beautiful, even placid, it’s never merely pretty. Its gravitas and dignity, its almost philosophical undertone, give it superiority over the merely decorative. Could this mystery, this subtlety, be conveyed in music?

More and more, the impediments were my own intrusions. I began to work on my faithfulness: my faith in the world, my belief that it warranted attentiveness, and my willingness to quiet myself, even to remove myself. 

One early fall day, I walked a winding trail from an open, sunlit field into a forest beneath a canopy of trees. The temperature dropped noticeably. Sparse leaves fell vertically, helicoptering down into the soft bed of grass. Horizontally, the Yadkin River flowed beside me, its current seeming to match the speed and direction of my stride. The space felt intensely three-dimensional, stretching in every direction like a vast, reverberant cathedral.

Later that night, I reviewed my mixes. The pieces mimicked the natural world’s architecture and varied design: the sunny, open intros darkened as the verse’s main motifs began; piano, guitar, and synth sounds cascaded downward while a slow tempo flowed forward; details of texture and melody quietly entered and exited; reverb and panning moved elements around the sound field. Everything seemed to share a subject, though it spoke in a quiet, only half-heard language between small talk and metaphysical discourse.

I understood that my best chance of offering a listener something lasting, natural, and attuned—something that might convey the shape of this world and, through it, a sense of home, companionship, respite, and meaning—lay in rendering the world as truly as I could in sound, with as little interference as possible from my ego, personal history, ambitions, or desires.

Some of what one senses in nature cannot be consciously absorbed, much less recreated in music by the rational mind. When those qualities reappear in sound, they emerge partly from the internalized patterns of the natural world. Compositionally, those patterns become phrases whose meaning accumulates with repetition, much as endlessly recurring forms in nature’s flora accumulate into immersive grandeur.

They also emerge from imperceptible shifts in rhythm and texture first sensed there, as well as from its naturally occurring flaws and imperfections, which are not flaws at all but expressions of a flawless process.

Such subtleties are internalized by the body and reproduced in performance through minute adjustments of the hands, none of which the rational mind could identify or direct. These lessons also instruct one’s taste, cultivating it through trial and error and shaping it through the sediment of personality laid down over years of experience. What is absorbed amounts to lessons in the physics of creation, taken in at the level of flesh, bone, and blood, unnoticed as they occur, and eventually translated into tangible, practical, and applicable intuitions.

Attention to nature becomes bodily knowledge, held in synapses, nerves, muscles, and blood; bodily knowledge enters performance through variations too subtle to direct; and the music arrives most purely when the directing self recedes.

Passion is a prerequisite for receptivity to this passage from nature into the body. A predisposition toward a deep, longing, even desperate love of the world and the ways it expresses itself seems necessary if one is to receive what it has to teach. Disappearance becomes possible not because the self lacks passion, but because its passion has turned outward toward the world.

Reaching the creative flow state in which these qualities become music requires attentiveness, faithfulness, humility, trust, and disappearance. There is only one way to let them into the music: get out of the way.

I’m fifteen years into making this music, and it’s deeply rewarding, endlessly challenging, always exciting. I still don’t know what I’m doing, but I think I know why I don’t: in the moments when the conditions are right for the magic stuff to arrive—I’m not there.