Music to soothe the heart, soul and mind

MICHELE MARR

On the last weekend in June, I sat in the hot summer sun on a

sweeping lawn beside Swan Lake on the grounds of Soka University in

Calabasas, listening to Linda Brockinton fingerpick traditional and

original Christian hymns on a McSpadden mountain dulcimer.

She had taken her first-ever plane trip to get herself there from

her home in Arkansas to teach workshops and to play in concert at the

California Traditional Music Society’s Summer Solstice Festival.

I watched the fingers on Brockinton’s left hand glide up and down

the frets of her lap-held instrument while the fingers on her right

hand danced, picking out the heavenly melodies.

If only my own McSpadden sounded as celestial in my hands.

I don’t know how the parcel of land that is now the Soka campus

came to be the venue for the 22-year-old music festival, but it is,

perhaps, a natural site for soulful music. It’s an uncommon expanse

of green turf, punctuated by flower beds, rose gardens, a great

scattering of native trees, a tiled fountain, a handful of

unobtrusive white buildings and a lake graced with swans -- an oasis

in a stretch of parched, straw-colored hills not far from Malibu.

To sit on its grounds is like sitting in the parlor of paradise.

One of the property’s early owners, King Camp Gillette -- the

razorblade baron -- intended it to be paradise, or at least a

“paradise on Earth.” That’s how he described what he envisioned to

Wallace Neff, his architect, whose mansion is now the university’s

Central Hall.

Perhaps it’s no wonder that seven religious institutions over the

last 22 years have owned or leased the earthly paradise once

inhabited by Chumash Indians scarcely more than 150 years ago.

Gillette didn’t live to take pleasure in it for long. After his

death, a Hollywood film director owned it for some years before

selling it to the Congregation of Sons of the Immaculate Heart of

Mary, which soon transferred the property to the Dominican Seminary.

The Claretian Theological Seminary purchased the campus two years

later and added dormitories and two buildings of classrooms.

Claretian stayed on the site for 26 years, then leased it to Thomas

Aquinas College for six more.

When the college moved its campus to Santa Paula in 1978, the

Church Universal and Triumphant bought the Calabasas property. The

religious movement led by Mark Prophet, whose religious philosophy

pulled together bits of Christianity, Judaism and Eastern religious

ideas, turned it into its Summit Lighthouse, which came to be known

as Summit University.

Soka University of America acquired and occupied the site in 1986.

The university was founded by Daisaku Ikeda, president of Soka

Gakkai International, an American Buddhist association that promotes

world peace and individual happiness through the teachings of

Nichiren Buddhism, a 13th century priest whose own teachings

developed from those of Siddhartha Gautama, the first recognized

Buddha.

There I sat in that patch of grounded paradise, with a sprawl of

musicians and wannabe musicians like me, listening to a national

mountain dulcimer champion playing timeless Christian hymns, her eyes

closed as if she were receiving each note from heaven.

The music buoyed our souls with the same ease as the breeze

blowing across Swan Lake, soothing our sun-baked skin.

Brockinton believes that music feeds the soul, that it can heal

the soul and sometimes even the body.

She has a precedent in the Old Testament’s king and psalmist

David. When God rejected Saul as the king of Israel, he was consumed

with anguish and fear. A “distressing spirit,” the Bible says,

troubled him. So he sent his servants to find a skilled musician, and

they brought him David.

As the story goes, when Saul felt plagued by the distressing

spirit, David played the harp for him and “Saul would become

refreshed and well.” When David himself followed Saul as king, he

organized 280 musicians, trained in “the songs of the Lord” to play

on “harps, stringed instruments and cymbals.”

Brockinton takes her fretted dulcimer with its sweet melodies to

play for the sick at hospitals and hospices.

At the end of her performances, she engages each audience with her

boundless smile and her radiant eyes as she counsels, “Play some

music, or listen to some music every day.”

For the soul it’s food; it’s balm. It’s medicine from heaven.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at michele@soulfoodfiles.com.