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 The beginning of Wisdom of the World came about through
a series of events that inspired award-winning composer
Gary Malkin to create media to heal the spirit and
strengthen the soul. Tragic life events changed his view
of what he should do with his music and his life. His
wife and newborn daughter almost died during childbirth.
Only six months prior to that time, he had lost his
father. It changed his life.
A few years later, he was approached by his dear friend,
Michael Stillwater, a pioneer in healing music, who
asked him to produce a project he was envisioning. "I
am at the bedside of people who are dying," Stillwater
told him. "I would love to bring music to them."
They spent a day together, and it became clear that
songs, for these circumstances, did not seem to go in
deep enough. So Malkin invited Stillwater to step up to
the microphone and "speak from your heart to someone who
might have just received a terminal diagnosis". Malkin
went to the keyboard and started 'scoring' Stillwater's
voice with a digital string orchestra, as if it were a
film. After it was complete, Malkin and Stillwater felt
like the moment was filled with Grace. Malkin was so
moved, he felt goosebumps all over his body. And then he
said, 'Has anyone ever asked the humanitarian leaders of
our world, the true mentors of the world, to speak from
this place? Not that typical radio/TV voice of
self-promotion, but the intimate voice of authenticity
and depth. And has anyone ever scored these voices as if
it were a film?"
It was unprecedented territory, As a result of this
experiment, Malkin and Stillwater embraced the
opportunity to embark on a new project that they hoped
would result in a healing and life-affirming experience
for people facing loss of any kind, using authentic
spoken word and music. This new contemplative listening
resource, delivering authentic spoken messages in a
completely new way, is a remarkable testament to the
power of music itself. "The film scoring language,
harmonically, is incredibly rich and diverse," Malkin
said. "The broad range of emotional color that can be
expressed with timbre, texture and harmony is vast. I
had been doing it for 25 years, scoring the range of
human emotion in media, and there I was, using the art
of film scoring to someone speaking from the depths of
their heart. Then and there, we decided to explore this
new approach to delivering wisdom with great
fascination and passion."
Stillwater knew many 'wisdom keepers' - people such as
Ram Dass, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Zalman Schacter-Shalomi
- and other well-known people of great presence. Malkin
and Stillwater started to record these interviews, inviting
them to speak from their hearts. All the speakers who
were invited to participate spoke extemporaneously,
resulting in recordings which they then edited to
prepare for the music scoring process. "The thing we
insisted upon," he said, "was that the speakers could
not write anything in advance of the re-cording. We
simply asked them to come from a place of sincerity and
intimacy. With the proper coaxing, each of the wisdom
keepers dropped into an astonishing tenderness, a deeper
place than they had been accustomed to speaking in
public forums. Listening to these remarkable people
speak from this place was an unforgettable experience,
pure gold. When people drop into their humanity, no
matter who they are, it makes us realize that we are all
human beings who need tenderness and intimacy. These
qualities are the essence of the healing process. The
power of music is a big part of this healing media, but
it's also the intimacy itself that is healing."
These recordings became the internationally acclaimed
book and CD set, Graceful Passages: A Companion For
Living and Dying, setting a new benchmark in healing
audio. The astonishing alchemy that resulted from
merging spoken authenticity with a resonant musical
score formed the foundation of Wisdom of the World's
vision for a new kind of media, creating an innovative
way that people could experience the world's wisdom for
life-enhancement, emotional intelligence (EQ) and
personal awakening.
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