Rising Stars: Meet Paul Rudy of Perry and Mid-town

Today we’d like to introduce you to Paul Rudy.

Hi Paul, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I’ve lived a charmed life with lots of adventure and experiences. I have a doctorate in music composition and teach at the UMKC Conservatory. Equally significant in my experiential journey was climbing all of Colorado’s 14-foot peaks in the 80’s and 90’s. One of my most life-changing experiences was a three-day vision quest without food and water in Taos, New Mexico 2010. My brain has a voracious capacity for thought, and my body and spirit deeply long for experiences. I’ve pursued both equally in my time during this life. My experiences have been to both poles of the human condition. After college, I spent a week in Nicaragua with Witness for Peace during the war there that was so devastating to that country. Immediately following that, I flew straight from there to join a semi-professional band called “Festival of Praise” out of Orlando, Florida as their trumpet player. I went from picking corn by hand and sleeping on dirt floors in the Nicaraguan countryside to staying in fancy homes of the wealthy throughout the bible belt. The culture shock was almost unbearable, and witnessing and experiencing these opposites side-by-side left a huge impression on me. These experiences of opposite polarities authenticate my neutrality in the universal struggle between light and dark. My training as a musician has led me to an international career as a composer and researcher. Combined with my experiences, that musicianship has morphed into a sound-healing and meditation practice and into working with my sacred land to hold space for people to visit on their journey to find their most authentic selves.

I fell in love with the trumpet in the 7th grade when I got to play the solo on In the Mood. Then I started improvising, and almost 50 years later, I understand that improvisation is a way of life for me. I also grew up singing hymns in the Mennonite Church, so I deeply love human voices’ simple, apparent harmony. The complexity of jazz and the simplicity of hymns are two more expressions of opposite polarities that attract me in my life. My favorite things are simple yet sophisticated because of some nuance that transcends the sum of their parts. After college, I quit music altogether, and as I pursued the summits of Colorado’s highest mountains with passion, I supported myself by working with my hands as a carpenter. I loved that physical work and reaching summits. Climbing a hill is about reaching deep inside to find a little more strength to get there and, more importantly, return home safely. On the tundra slopes in the Rockies, I learned that reaching a summit is a religious and profoundly spiritual accomplishment but that the summit is only half of the journey. The most dangerous part is coming back down, a task that leads to most mountaineering deaths. I learned that the things most worth doing for me were those things that challenged me mentally, physically, and emotionally. After a long day of climbing, with a spent physical body, I found my emotions were raw and on the surface, with my heart wide open. A century day on the bicycle would create the same open-hearted condition.

After my Rome Prize Fellowship in 2010/11, I moved to 70 acres in NE Kansas. At this place, where I cultivate harmony with a little melody and rhythm, I have honored the energies and ancestors of this land. I articulate those energies by creating sacred space: a Dragonfly Labyrinth, a Moon Temple, a Sun Temple, and the Harmony Medicine Wheel in the woods. I have made a sanctuary where people can walk and integrate their most full selves after a sound-healing session in my healing cave. This place has saved my life. After the Winter Solstice of 2012, I did not want to be here anymore. The quality was dwindling, and I desired to stay. On Halloween night, I did a walkabout looking for orb photographs. And what came down from the stars were magical images that revealed that there is a galaxy in every breath! The universe showed me more profound mysteries that I had yet to explore. That curiosity brought a return of my desire to stay here and experience life more deeply and in greater nuance and subtlety.

When I was building my 42-stone standing circle, my Sun Temple, on my property near Oskaloosa, Kansas, I remembered that I’d been working with stones since I was a kid. While playing in our stream in Ohio in the early 1970s, I dropped a heavy stone on two of my fingers and had to get stitches! Stones have been a part of my life, and I learned to communicate freely with them. “Crazy,” you say? From my experience, life takes imagination to live! Life, creativity, creation, imagination, intuition, inspiration, science, curiosity, magic, great mystery, neural networks, insight, synchronicity, nature, wisdom all of these “things” are partial ways of describing or understanding “god” (or goddess). None of these are mutually exclusive and valuable tools in pursuing a great understanding of our existence. To explore any of these things is to be human. PS: this is the tip of a vast iceberg.

We all face challenges, but looking back, would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
One night, as a seven or eight-year-old, my sister was watching a horror movie, and when I heard the sounds of the movie, I was drawn into watching it! Those sounds were powerfully terrifying, and I went to bed that night with so much tension in my body and a deep fear of the night. It wasn’t until age 45 that I could clear that fear in a healing session with a fantastic energy worker in Taos, New Mexico. I lived with that trauma for decades, and when it was cleared from my body, I realized that it was that experience that taught me the power of sound. We’ve all experienced sound as a weapon that causes us drama and trauma, whether harsh words or those of the battlefield. And sound can also be as powerful as medicine! I think the things that we often think have shaped us the most in hard, negative ways end up leading us to our superpowers!

I advise all my students that whatever you feel your liabilities are as a person or a musician, they are most likely the opposite: your superpowers! Another example of that is my melody deafness. I was having lunch with the portrait artist Chuck Close during the year I was a fellow at the American Academy in Rome. I had heard he was “face-blind,” i.e., can’t remember faces. He would always greet me at the Academy café in the morning by saying my name. So I asked him how he knew it was me when I would come in if he couldn’t remember faces, and he said he knew me by the sound of my voice! What a magnificent thing for a composer to hear. And it was at that time that I realized I was “melody deaf!” I am trying to remember the melodies! I have struggled with this my whole life. It’s why I made a horrible jazz player. I always needed to read the music. I remember a few jazz tunes after years of practicing, but only a few. I have done ceremonial dances, and after singing a small handful of songs for three days, even a day or two later, I can’t remember those simple songs. For years, I thought this made me a fake musician, and I suffered from imposter syndrome my whole musical life. It didn’t matter how many awards I won or how “big” they were; I still felt like a fake. But something clicked in the conversation with Chuck Close, and I realized that being unable to remember melodies makes me free in a way many composers aren’t! I am free to invent new sounds and ways of making music and follow my unique sense of sound and how to put it together. My mind is not encumbered by Bach’s, Beethoven’s, and Brahms’s music. And for the first time, I realized that my melody-deafness was my musical superpower!

Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am a composer, professor, sound artist, sound healer, land artist, harmonizer, authenticity coach, transformer, journeyer, and Earth Whisperer. I am an internationally awarded composer specializing in electronic music, but I also compose for instruments, film, dance, and theater. I have a sound healing practice and work with yoga, craniosacral, massage, and osteopathic practitioners. I recently started composing Musical Mantras and Personalized Musical Meditations for people. These are targeted little pieces of music designed to support specific mind and energy hacks using music and sound. Examples can be heard on my YouTube channel. In some circles, I am known as a shaman, others as a priest or a master teacher, and yet others as a neighbor always willing to help cut and split firewood to stay warm in the winter.

I love making things, and my 70 acres have become my field of dreams, the canvas I create. The modality of creation is less important than fulfilling the urge to create. I am most proud of continuing to develop even when I did not want to live this life anymore. I have felt like an imposter my whole life, yet it never stopped me from making things. “I am a genius,” says my inner village idiot. There is no one like me on this planet, which is true. “I am no different from anyone else and will be forgotten within 50 years.” A paradox exists, a truth all creatives must embrace, whether consciously or not. I dance to my drummer more and more every day. The more I withdraw from the world, the more the world comes to me in my field of dreams, requesting my unique gifts. And I share them more freely and gladly with the passing of every new day. Despite being a Curators’ Distinguished Professor of Composition at UMKC, where I’ve taught since 1998, I am a recovering academic. Life is more than thought, proof, and probabilities.

I love to think, but it’s only one side of my human experience. My aural life has expanded from an early love of music when I got my first cornet to composing and a sound healing practice where I feel and experience physically, mentally, and spiritually sound. In 2012, I moved onto 70 acres in northeast Kansas. I harmonize with everything physical and metaphysical in this land of woods and prairie. I honor the energies and ancestors as I nurture feminine energies to rebalance in harmony with the masculine. I play in mind, body, and spirit and have built land art and a labyrinth where the laws of physics sometimes feel suspended. In 2014, I saw “The Universe in a Single Breath” through a photograph I took on Halloween night. For more information: https://www.paulrudy.net/about-paul-rudy

My latest fascination is with collective consciousness, and creating shared experiences around sound. I was commissioned by the UMKC Conservatory to write a piece that can be played by anyone, anywhere and with any number of participants. The result was From one drop, an ocean! It’s a meditative immersive audience participation sound installation for any number of cell phones! Try it at your next family gathering, party or staff meeting! From One Drop, An Ocean — Dr. Paul Rudy I’m working on another piece like a word puzzle also using the cell phone as an instrument that anyone can play!

Do you have any advice for those looking to network or find a mentor?
I discovered my Human Design type a few years back, which changed my life. We are taught to hustle, sell ourselves, and make things happen to get ahead. The assumption is that we are all manifers and generators, but we aren’t. For emotional projector human design types like me, it is the opposite. We are the idea people who invent new ways of being and seeing and creating, and those ideas end up changing the world after others manifest and generate them into existence on a larger scale. My strategy in life is no longer to pursue, pursue, pursue, but rather, put my ideas into the world and sit back and wait for invitations to engage. Now that I understand this, reflecting on my life and seeing the times when living authentically advanced my prosperity is easy. In the mid-2000s, I realized that ambition was the most prominent thing in my life that created discontent and unhappiness. Shortly after letting go of that ambition and deciding that I never wanted to be too busy again, I won a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize Fellowship. After deciding to pull back from the world’s ways and live my truth, I received massive recognition. The world needs each of us to be authentic right now. So, pursue your most profound desires no matter how contrary they may seem. You are exactly what the world needs, less because of what you do and more because of who you are!

My most excellent mentor has been Mother Earth. During my vision quest in 2010, I learned much about understanding the language of nature. A pair of skinks taught me their love language. He would run up to her and whack her with his tail, and then they would chase each other around. That same skink whacked me in the head when I was lethargically sweltering on my back in the sun after three days. He told me to get up and that it was soon time to go. Shortly after, the support community got me off the mountain. During that quest, I lay my chest on a boulder and asked the stone why it was so hard. The next breath I took felt like it sank into the stone as if the stone were a pillow. And a little voice in my head said: “Are you sure it is me that is hard?” That is when I learned that everything is living and that we all have our unique speeds at which we live. It takes a massive slow-down for humans to commune with stones and trees truly.

From this experience, I was compelled to live in nature, so I purchased 70 acres in NE Kansas that I know caretake. I have witnessed much magic here. It is never the same at any two moments. Everything changes constantly: the light, the temperature, the landscape, the trees, plants and animals, the birds and bees. Witnessing this place 24/7 for over a decade taught me much about authenticity. A red-shouldered hawk has no dilemma about wondering who or what it is. The coyote does not question its existence or desires. And that leads to a balance. Everything supports everything else as part of a complete story where everything plays its part because all things are authentic and are themselves entirely. I have learned the patience of water and the grounded flexibility of trees. I have known to be more myself living here, where each day demonstrates authenticity everywhere my senses land. Gravitate towards those people, places, things, and experiences that make you feel more like yourself.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://paulrudy.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hugntheearth/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Gonetothesky
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulrudyprofessor/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@innersoundworlds
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/rudyp

Image Credits
Portrait photo by Susan Wolfe. All others are by Paul Rudy