New York’s Collective Om
It took sidestepping a drum circle, a pro-pot rally, a dozen venders hawking greens (garlic scapes: four dollars a bunch), and a psychic on her cell phone, near Union Square, to reach the extreme quiet of the Om Lab, a recording studio on the sixth floor of the Rubin Museum. Once inside, with the foam-insulated door firmly shut, a visitor could revel in the blissful non-sound. Then, from an iPad, a recorded trio of monks intoned the word “om.”
Two weeks after Donald Trump’s Inauguration, the Rubin quietly began collecting the oms of stressed-out New Yorkers. Visitors were invited to take a seat in a small booth, put on headphones, and om along with the monks. “The idea was to bring the voices of everyone who came into the lab together, by first recording them individually, and then merging them into this larger collective chant,” the curator Risha Lee said, the other day. “It’s the largest recorded chant of om that we know of.”
This thundering om snowball, accumulated during three months of anxiety-producing headlines, has absorbed just over ten thousand discrete oms. The collective version was recently unveiled as part of the museum’s show “The World Is Sound,” played through a dozen speakers for visitors seated on benches. (The Rubin’s om, as far as the curators know, does not include one from Ivanka Trump, who claims to meditate twice a day.)
On a recent Friday, Cheri Dannels left her job at 5:30 p.m. and headed downtown. “I had some train-signal problems, so I was late getting to the Rubin, which was annoying, and I was not able to calm myself very well,” she said. Dannels is a receptionist at a financial company, and although she once kept a yoga journal, her practice has fallen off. But after her first om, she said, “I felt an almost vibrational peace, is the best way I can describe it.”
Unbeknownst to Dannels, the om she recorded was the museum’s ten-thousandth. (She found this out from the curators later, by e-mail.) Trump’s election, she said, “has created tension in the street. You never know what you’re going to overhear on a street corner, or in a subway car or a bus. I work on the East Side, so I’m always coming across town, past Trump Tower.”
The om’s three-thousand-year history, integral to the Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist traditions, would seem to transcend the squabbles of our two-party system. It has variously represented cosmic balance, the root of all music, and the key to immortality. “We have people trying to enunciate very important political issues these days, and it’s equally important to listen,” Lee said, standing by the Om Lab, holding a marigold. “I hope that all New Yorkers are able to try to find a way to listen to each other. No one is an independent actor in all of this.” (Not everyone was so moved. A security guard, observing a line of prospective omers, shrugged when asked if he’d participated. “Not my thing,” he said.)
The oms recorded at the Rubin were uploaded via Dropbox and sent to former interns turned om-cutters in Connecticut and Ohio, who weeded out unusable chants. Some oms were just “background noise, or people screaming into the microphone,” Lee said, from inside the booth. “You can’t really roughhouse in here. Though I have seen five or six people in here together, oming.”
The passable oms were then sent to a sound mixer in lower Manhattan, for editing. The museum’s Jamie Lawyer had just been down to preview the finished product. “There’s this incredible sort of buzz or thread that really goes through,” she said. “It’s like this really beautiful connective tissue.”
A visitor asked if there is a right way to say “om.” “You can start out by doing ‘auuuummm,’ ” Lee said. “It goes from the back of your throat to the top of your mouth, and comes out nasal.” She demonstrated: “Nnnnnn.” “But everyone’s om is different. There’s a practice of saying ‘om’ over and over again, like ‘omomomom.’ One saying is, ‘Just as all leaves are held together by a stem, so all speech is held together by om.’ ”
The Om Lab was dismantled and placed in storage shortly after a jazz vocalist visiting from Atlanta chanted its final note. But the Rubin hopes to open the project in a new iteration elsewhere. “The way the piece works, it’s not a fixed composition—it’s a piece of software,” Lee said. “So, theoretically, you could drag in an infinite number of oms.” ♦
