The Willow Glen Resident

Photograph by Skye Dunlap

Play Time: Students in Curtis Cooper's Healing Drum class learn rhythm-assisted meditation--and how to keep a steady beat.

Local drummer uses rhythm method to teach WG students stress reduction

Curtis Cooper's drum circle classes create relaxed atmosphere

By John Pancharian

Willow Glen resident Curtis Cooper is using musical methods to cure modern woes. Every Saturday morning approximately eight people arrive at his Willow Glen home to sit in a circle and drum away the stress of the work week.

Cooper, a longtime drum teacher and performer, leads a class he calls the Healing Drum, which involves a rhythm-assisted meditation to calm and center his students. While the method is nontraditional, the 43-year-old drum instructor says it really works, allowing people to have fun, relax and escape from the stresses of life.

"Music can make you get up and dance," he said. "It can make you cry. It's a very powerful medium." In his classes, Cooper claims, music can also help alleviate depression.

Cooper first became involved with drums in the third grade, when he saw the Beatles perform on the Ed Sullivan show and became enamored with the rhythms of their music. He began taking lessons and playing in school bands until he landed his first professional drumming job at the age of 15, playing with a dance band called Liberty. He has taught and performed almost every imaginable style of percussion since then, and he now plays in a folk-rock trio called Blue House.

Cooper, who makes his living primarily through teaching private drum lessons, has also turned himself into an accomplished mystic. He said he currently takes classes at the Barclay Psychic Institute and studied for eight years with the Rosicrucian Order.

According to Cooper's former student Lisa Araquistian, this preparation paid off.

"When I was feeling anxious or had a headache, I would use the tools he gave me, and it would go away immediately," she said. "The class helps you get in touch with your body and spirit, and that helps with healing." Araquistian said Cooper's class distinguished itself from other healing workshops she's attended by offering physical healing rather than just intellectual learning.

Cooper explains that this "vibrational healing" is a rhythm-assisted meditation.

"It is hard to meditate with all these external distractions," he said. "Having a drum or rhythm helps create a bubble around us to help bring us into our space."

Students in the class play a simple rhythm and meditate while Cooper plays variations of the basic beat. He prefers to use hand drums such as congas, ashikos--a goat-skinned West African drum--or tars, a north African drum like a large tambourine.

"Everything in the universe is vibrations," Cooper explained in his placid tenor. "We are vibrations. Sickness and illness is what happens when those vibrations fall out of harmony, so we use the drum to help create new, harmonious vibrations."

Cooper's theories are based on observations he has made in his long association with drumming. Though some may be skeptical of his techniques, Cooper does have the weight of cultural history--and even some hard science--behind him. Ethnomusicologists have long recognized the usefulness of drums to healers of numerous cultures, who use them to achieve trance states. And psychologists have generally accepted the practice of meditation as a valid way to improve mental focus and decrease stress in daily life.

Though Cooper describes most of his students as those on "a spiritual path," non-New Agers have also sought his services. He said he has been hired by various companies to play in drum circles with employees for fun and relaxation and to generate a spirit of teamwork.

Cooper said centering and empowerment are the real goals of his course, and hopes students learn to heal themselves. "I don't want to be some guru and have people come back to me," he said, "I want to empower them."

Cooper's six-week class begins on July 25, meets Saturdays from 9:30 to 11 a.m. and costs $150. For more information, call 971-7179.

[ Back to Contents Page | Willow Glen Resident Home Page | Archives ]