Christina Tourin Interview-The Final On Vinyl Podcast

I had a fantastic conversation with Harp artist Christina Tourin! She has an amazing story to tell and has used her music to heal people in hospices and hospitals worldwide.

Keith "MuzikMan" Hannaleck

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Transcript

Speaker 1 0:14

Hello everybody, this is Keith MuzikMan Hannaleck with the Final on Vinyl Podcast. And our guest today is Christina Tourin. And she is going to be releasing from the Angelic Harp Realm, the best Christina Tourin, on the 17th of this month. And I had the pleasure to listen to that and review it. And uh it's two CDs and covers quite a diverse array of music with the harp and different instruments that are included. And uh welcome aboard, Christina. Thank you for showing up on time, and it'll be great to talk to you.

Speaker 0:52

Wonderful, thank you.

Speaker 1 0:55

Appreciate that. So there was quite a lot to cover on that, and um from what I understand, what you had told me it's uh sixteen albums you had drawn these tracks from and used your um your fan base to pick those tracks, is that right?

Speaker 1:15

Yes, it's been amazing. Uh I have the 16 albums that started back in 1990. And uh for a period of time I was doing an album each year, and I just couldn't I of course back then I didn't know anything about the music business. So I would do one album and have a great time in the studio with the engineers and and the friends that I have in the music world. And then before I knew it, I was on to the next one before the last one got out there, and it was sort of like I had 14 albums, you know, one each year type thing. And then of course I had things in my life that came up uh starting a couple well, I started a school at that point, and the school ended up becoming internationally based. Um we have uh people that have graduated from this school in thirty-two countries now, and they're working in hospitals and hospices, taking therapeutic harp music to patients and clients on five continents. So that all of a sudden took all my energy. And then finally I got to the point where I was like, Am I going to do this the rest of my life? Which I've done now for thirty years, and so I decided I got music inside of me. But what I wanted to tell you, Keith, is that something happened to me and it was in 1989, and all I can say is that I grew up in a home where my mother was a harpist, and she had gone to Juilliard and studied the conservatory, and that in itself is a amazing story. She actually was in New York and she was in love with the po uh Prince of Poland, and they were together for four years while she was at Juilliard, and then all of a sudden he found out that his dead wife actually was alive in concentration camp, and he picked up and he went back. So my mother went to their summer home in Maine, and she was oh just brokenhearted. But my dad, a country boy from a little town called Buckfield, Maine, he ended up coming with his girlfriend to get cucumbers that she was growing in a cucumber patch to earn enough money to go back to Juilliard. Well, her parents said, You're 23 years old and you do not want to do this. You need to settle down. This is this is crazy. And so, next thing she knew, this nice little baseboy, baseball boy, decided that he was going to take her out to a game that night, took her out to the game, said, if you're not gonna be serious with me, I'm not gonna drive over here to see you. And the long story short was that they were engaged one month later, they got married one month later. I was born ten months later, and we lived in a little cottage in the backwoods of Maine where with there was no running water and there was no electricity, but there was a big, beautiful gold Worlitzer harp. And my mother would sit there and play debuting Ravel and all the things that she had worked on, and I would in my cradle, and then as the time went on, she'd put my high chair behind the harp, and I would start plucking the strings, and that was the beginning of how I got into the harp.

Speaker 1 5:31

Oh wow, and that was a great story.

Speaker 5:34

It was an amazing story when you stop and think of it, you know. So anyway, my my background was uh definitely my mother played the harp, I did ballet, and then of course I started playing the harp, and it was just kind of second net nature to me. It was like I was playing before I was walking. But uh over the years um I I decided that I would uh finally go into music. I always wanted to be a teacher, and I ended up going to the conservatory in McGill, in McGill University, and then I had the opportunity to go to the Mozartum in Salzburg, which was wonderful, but very, very demanding. Any, any harpist that plays in an orchestra, you have to give them the absolutely best accolades. Uh it's so hard, so hard. And so for a while I played in the Vermont Symphony and I played in the New Haven, Connecticut Symphony, and some Broadway shows, uh off Broadway shows uh in New Haven, Connecticut. And then I, you know, went on and I became a uh public school teacher, and then I had this experience in 1989. I kind of go around in circles when I uh talk about what happened, but it was an amazing experience where I was in California in a little town called Philo, which is right in the middle of the Redwood Forest, and it was a group of professional uh folk harp players. By that time I had already started the Scottish Harp Society of America, which is a off-branch of the Clarsock Society in Scotland, and my background is Scottish, uh English Scottish. And so I was at this retreat that we had in California, and my dear friend Kim Robertson and I, we were sharing a room, and all of a sudden, I just woke up, I had jet lag, and I went down to the river, and as I sat by the river, I had definitely what you would call an out-of-body experience, and that's a story in itself, but the result of it was that I had my small harp, a little harp next to me, and it was the first time in my life that I ever picked up the harp, and I was playing it without reading music or memorizing. I had been so taught to do repertoire, repertoire, repertoire. And all of a sudden I had this first song come to me, which is on the new album, White Rose. And it's only two chords, really. And all of a sudden it just lifted me up to you know, you hear people talk about near-death experiences. That was what was happening to me. And so from that day onward, it was as if from the stars, from the heavens, whatever, these tunes would keep dropping down. And the best time for me was to be exhausted, like stay up all night long, and just be exhausted and kind of almost be half asleep, and then this music would come through my fingers, and luckily I got pretty savvy as far as uh putting a uh recorder on so I could remember what it was after when I r came out of my kind of sleepiness, and to this day that's what happens. So with the title of From the Angelic Harp Realm, I really, really give credit to what people might call angels or guides or whatever it is, it just happens. And there's another song on this album called As Above So Below, and I have a wonderful uh uh friend who plays guitar in synth, and I said, Could you just give me a little um music here based on this chord progression? And he sent it to me, and I had spent two days and two nights awake trying to figure out what in the world I was going to play with that. And I finally went into the studio the next morning and I said to Peter Sprake, I said, Peter, I said, I I just can't do this today. I've been I've just been totally out of it. He goes, Oh, look, why don't you just sit down? Let's listen to it in the background. Okay, I'll I'll just roll it and let's see what happens. And all of a sudden I was just like, Oh gosh, oh please help me And all of a sudden, eight minutes later, he goes, That's a rap And I said, What? He says, That's a rap and he says, Come on in, let's listen to it. And all the way through the eight minutes I have no idea except from my fingers, played the harp and came up with all of those sounds of shooting stars and going from above what it sound would sound like in the heavens, which in my uh education that I teach people, it really is the music of the spheres based on the fourth octave overtones. And all of a sudden I had this music kind of coming down from above, down to the earth, and you hear, you know, like the ocean, you he I mean, there's no ocean sound except that there is a a little um dolphin sound in there in the end. But it was just unreal, and I started realizing, you know, this is what's happened all these years, the past thirty thirty years, is that if I get super, super tired, and believe me folks, I don't don't do any drugs of any kind. I think I tried marijuana once in my life, and I said that's not for me. All I know is that stuff really happens.

Speaker 1 12:38

Well, that's interesting. Uh um you know do you know who Peter Sterling is?

Speaker 12:44

Yes, I know Peter.

Speaker 1 12:46

Well, he has a very similar story when he was out in the desert and he had the harp and he started playing and he had no idea what it was coming from. So you know once again, I didn't know that. Yeah, and once again, I mean in my reviews when I read about the harp, I always connect head the heavens with the harp. I mean, that's it's a pictorial thing too throughout the our our times on this planet. You see different pictures of angels with harps and so forth, as you know. And uh to me it's always sounded so heavenly. And and listening to your music, I was just blown away by the the variations that you came up with. I never would have expected that. And I've been listening to harp music off and on over the years, but nothing like this that your music just turned a light on and made me realize that this is a very eclectic instrument, and I imagine very difficult to play. It's not like just picking up a bass or or or playing a piano or picking up a guitar, none of those are easy, but this is like a different level of musicianship and a totally different sound, and it just it really hit home with me.

Speaker 14:03

Wow, uh that my heart is full when I hear that because you know, one of the things that we do uh in my work is that we take the music into these places, to hospitals and hospices, and I cannot begin to tell you how many I think people would call them miracles happen, and what happens to people when when they hear that sound, when they hear that sound, and if you can make that sound even with just two chords, like in the white rose, um it's it's amazing. It is eclectic, it is it's like um it's almost like an organ in a way, because you've got all of those strings, but you also have those eight places for your um your seven plaven places for your feet to be. Um you've got it and not only seven places, but you've got twenty-one places. It's like driving a big Mac truck.

Speaker 1 15:12

Well but uh it's I needed your I needed your validation on a point with that. Now that you brought that up about the sounds like an organ, I for the first time I heard it and it sounded like a piano to me.

unknown 15:25

Yes.

Speaker 1 15:26

Does that make sense? Did that make sense to you, me saying that, or was I like off base with that?

Speaker 15:31

No, that's very, very, very similar because in the piano you have a a a little hammer there, and that's what's hitting the string and going all the way down and coming back up with vibration, and with the harp, you're plucking it with your finger, and it just it m actually very interesting. It doesn't go all the way down and come back. You pluck it in the middle, and if you look at an oscilloscope, then what you have is a perfect figure eight with that octave overtone when you pluck the harp in the middle, and that is the reason why they say, Why is the harp so pure? Um, there's no such thing as absolutely pure music, it doesn't exist, or it would be a big circle on the oscilloscope. But when you pluck it in the middle, you get that that octave overtone, and then if you divide it into three and you play up to more toward the third, up to the top, or down at the bottom, then you get the fifth overtone. So you get these really pure sounds, and what we do when we play for people is we play to their resonance. Each person has a resonant tone, and we find that resonant tone. It's called resonant kinesiology. And from that we can create a song for a person based on their resonant tone, their breathing cycle, the tempo of their breathing, the type of music that they like, and then how we put all those together in different intervals. And that is where the magic happens. The magic absolutely happens where people open up and they're singing people from their past, or one woman said, Oh, she says, My husband and I sang in the Metropolitan Opera Company. And I thought to myself, oh my goodness, I'll play my opera music for her. And oh no, no, no, please, we have a favorite song. Could you play the unchained melody? And so I started playing it, and she's singing for him and looking into his eyes, into the bed in the hospice, and he looks up at her, and she looks down, and she's singing this beautiful, Oh my love. And all of a sudden I fit this tear going down the side of my face, thinking nobody would ever believe this at all. And at the very end, she just smiled at him and he smiled at her and he passed away. Wow. I just have so many stories like this. Uh, something greater. There's something greater in this realm of sound healing and sound coming in a very pure, pure way.

Speaker 1 18:42

Have you thought about writing a book or have you any books out there on all this?

Speaker 18:46

I do. I have a over 600 page book called The Cradle of Sound.

Speaker 1 18:53

Oh my Lord. Okay.

Speaker 18:56

Uh The Cradle of Sound, the Harp Therapy Manual.

Speaker 1 19:01

Wow. How long has that been out?

Speaker 19:04

Uh probably now for um, I think it was 2003, 2004. I've uh run out of printed copies and they're out there as downloadables at playharp.com. But it's um time for me to take the research that we're finding on how music heals people. And right now I've been very busy with the school and I'm in the process of turning it over to all these wonderful leaders around the world, and been making these uh couple CDs that came out last year and this year, and I'm ready to kind of step back a little bit and I'll probably update the book.

Speaker 1 19:57

That sounds great, Christina. You definitely are touching the world, literally, and I had no idea you had all that going on uh right from the beginning, Mr. Bao. And uh it's an absolute pleasure to speak with you, and I hope you'll stay in touch and let me know if you have any new music coming out. Definitely would love to hear it, and certainly appreciate all of your time and your insight today.

Speaker 20:19

Oh, you're welcome. I do have something that uh is very, very um uh pulling me these days, and it's about creating music from all of the different places on the St. Michael ley line, from Ireland down through Cornwall, down through France, down through Italy, down through Greece, and then ending up in Jerusalem. There's a ley line. So I have now done the first tour, and I went to the St. Michael's Sakra uh temple in Italy uh just a few weeks ago to create music. So I'll keep doing that. And I guess the other thing I wanted to mention to you was my music is very eclectic. It's been very hard to say what kind of music I do because I love jazz, and one of the albums that I I love, Heartbeat, ne didn't get into this particular uh angelic realm, even though the angels did compose one beautiful song on there called Sueños, uh, that's in dreams in Spanish, but it wasn't the right feel for the whole album. And so I like jazz, and of course I was classically trained, and I love all the wonderful composers. Uh we have so much to give to them. And and then there's lifestyle, and I just am so fortunate and so blessed to be able to let go. I think let go was the big lesson in my life and just let it happen.

Speaker 1 22:06

Well thank you so much. Well, thank you, and all those influences are very apparent in your music on this uh compilation and just to tell people once again on January 17th look for From the Angelic Harp Realm The Best of Christina Turin and I will be posting the interview and the review and the Spotify uh playlist for that and on that day and thank you we look forward to that you have a great new year and I hope to hear from you again.

Speaker 22:38

Oh we I hope so too. Thank you so much Keith.

Speaker 1 22:42

Thank you Christina take care bye bye bye bye