Article about Silvia Nakkach

Facing each other across the Bay are two colleges that offer music classes that you just can’t find anywhere else. Both have low profiles, incredibly devoted students, and an esteemed faculty that provides master classes in supportive and inspiring environ- ments. One is the renowned Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael. Founded by the late Maestro Ali Akbar Khan — also known as Khansab — this has been a place for profound study of North Indian classical music, that continues to thrive, now headed up by Khansab’s wife Mary and their sons. The other is Silvia Nakkach’s Vox Mundi Project and School of the Voice in Emeryville, with schools around the world.

Nakkach has been connected to Khansab since she began studying with him in 1982, and now she is at the center of the evolving Bay Area music healing scene. Founded in 1988, the Project is based in the Bay Area, with centers and schools in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Benares, India. Programs such as «Medicine Melodies: Welcome the Music Healer Within You,» occur once a year, moving from New York to Rio de Janeiro, and back to the Bay Area. The course offers four powerful forms of chanting and clearing the mind through the use of the voice; pacifying with Lullabies, protecting with Mantras, inspiring with Indian Ragas, and liberating with Icaros from the Peruvian Amazon — spontaneous musical transmissions from the spirit world that «sing into» each person. Since 1998, Silvia has also hosted a 7-day summer retreat on music improvisation in the Santa Cruz Mountains called «Sacred Music Meets Sacred Nature». The next local public program will start September 21, followed by a weekend with Nakkach and cellist David Darling exploring the art of improvisation.

In addition to her sound school, Nakkach created the Sound, Voice, and Music Healing certificate program at CIIS in San Francisco in 2006. 40 to 50 students attend the program each year, exploring the voice as a vehicle for the transformation of consciousness. Drawing on her experience as one of the earliest pio- neers in the field of sound healing, Nakkach designed a professional training curriculum thatsynthesizes ancient sound wisdom from the East, scientific discoveries from the West, and traditional South and North American indigenous sound and shamanic healing.

What occurs over the 200-hour, study is the true experience of «sangha,» learning through community building, where yearlong period of all become teachers, resulting in a transformative journey into music, consciousness, and discovery (or inner exploration). Master teachers from around the world share their wisdom and inspiration with a diverse student body representing 20 different cultures, including David Darling, Evelyn Glennie, Linda Tillery, John Beaulieu, Clive Robbins, Pat Mof- fitt Cook, Glen Velez, and Anam Thubten Rinpoche, among others.

Nakkach is at the very core of the course and, with her ever-expanding vision, she refines the flow of information and experiential learning, finding new ways to re-enchant the world. «The value of an ongoing, evolving practice is needed to develop what is being birthed,» Nakkach explains. «I end up attending almost every class, trying to find the place where the core teachings emanate from, and how to be the „energetic fountain“ at the center.» She introduces each presenter, oversees the needs of the students, interacts regularly with the class, in small-group and individual sessions, and hosts gatherings to sing and make music together. As a sound healing midwife for transformation, she assists each person’s journey to find what he or she has come into this world to feel and express.

For Nakkach, the connection between music and healing is simply art, and does not need to be formalized, which risks losing the outrageousness and beauty of discovering new modalities within this most ancient field. Just like the devotional quality of music as yoga, sound and movement are at the core of all of the teachings, regardless of form or style. The basis of the course is joy, equanimity, compassion, and loving kindness, integrating the base (lineage), the path (methods, techniques, evolving practice), and the signs (the fruits, manifestation, direction). Along the way, studies move through four areas: the shamanic, drawing from 35,000 years of the flute, the calling of the drum, and a thread longer than we can collectively imagine; the scientist, examining the cosmology of sound, especially as it relates frequency and consciousness, sacred sound, voice, rhythm and music. the healer-therapist, with application, sound therapies, integrative medicine, and study of wellness; and finally, the creative/artistic, where improvisation and spontaneity become mechanisms of healing.

In addition to her educational programs, Nakkach is also working on an eagerly anticipated album with David Darling. Spanning eight recordings, her CDs represent the essen tial nature of sound healing: layered, textural music woven intricately with her voice in all its expressions. Other superb musicians such as Paul McCandless, Jack Gates and Michael Knapp are regular contributors.

Nakkach is also completing a book project titled: «Who is Singing? A Musical Path to Practical Spirituality» with co-author Valerie Carpenter. The book describes the merging of Shiva and Shakti in music, with the key word being practical. In her life and work, music is Nakkach’s spiritual practice — the yoga of the voice! More than anything, what she brings to her work and those around her is a wildness of free expression, the creation of sacredness through attention and awareness, and a high degree of appreciation. Ever evolving, always high-spirited and with an unpredictable element of fun and joy, she is a «sacred music artist» of the highest order.