In an outdoor piano performance called a MindTravel Experience, like the one this Sunday at Lake Eola, composer Murray Hidary plays music out in nature, like on a beach or in a park, and the audience hears the music through headphones. He calls it an experience that “brings music and nature together in community.”
“So we get to have the expansiveness of being out in nature and then have the music with us, very intimately,” said Hidary. “It also gives people the freedom to experience it however they want. When you come to a MindTravel, you'll see some folks lying down, it's very family friendly – kids with the headphones on can run around the grass or run around the beach – and the music becomes, in many ways, a soundtrack to their imagination.”
Hidary composes the music for the performance on the spot, in the moment, as part of the experience.
“Each one is different, and that’s because each time we’re at whatever location, the breeze is different, the clouds are different, the light is different, and each of us are different, aren’t we, moment to moment? So, the music kind of holds that ever-changing nature of everything.”
Hidary said the concept of the MindTravel experience was in many ways, a lifetime in the making.
“I played since I was a small child and was a music major,” he explained. “Then I found meditation as a teenager, and over time, those two worlds came together – Western classical music and Eastern mindfulness. And sitting at the piano soon became my own form of meditation. It allowed me to connect more deeply to my own emotions, my own healing, and also to everything around me. So that kind of ‘music as ritual’ soon became something that I wanted to share with the world.”
At the end of each MindTravel concert, Hidary opens up the microphone for members of the audience to step forward and share their experiences. He said many people take the opportunity to describe their feelings.
"I can remember a small child coming up and they shared such profound wisdom and such maturity, such earnestness,” he said. “I remember one time somebody came up and they were there with three generations of their family, and they heard their life story in the music, years and decades of their life experienced through the music. And actually, we've had many proposals happen at the piano at the end of the concert, where somebody will get down on one knee. It's just so heartwarming to see the full panoply of the human experience right there in the music.”
