Bio
Owen Vaughan Hanner
Multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, composer
As a child I dreamt of the golden age as existing right now within us, and I still feel the nearness of that summer world when I play music, as if all melody its echo, and the means to twine our worlds again.
Music for me is such a full-bodied and loving experience that I don’t mean this abstractly. I find myself in a wider reality when I play: a world more alive, more true, more beautiful and strange than before. I feel music’s power as Dream, to enact truly positive change in this world even in the practical and rational layers of life that seem far removed from the Arts.
Let’s say water doesn’t know its effects where it falls. It just is and flows where it may. But if it stirs awake a seed, whole biomes of beauty can appear — never imagined by water yet innately part of water’s process: part of its dream.
And, as rain on a desert meadow, so is beauty’s effect on human potential. A truly felt song stirs the heard-seeds. The waters of player & listener meet in a timeless moment, and something blooms. All change begins as inspiration, such as music gives us. Those tender revelations at the touch of beauty are the precise points where dreaming begins and action later follows. So music is not just anodyne, but a raw electric power: water, fire and gold together, earthed in the listener.
The power of beauty to spark our dreaming remains in spite of everything against it. It will always be a force for positive change. It contains the golden age within it.
But listeners will need to sponsor players who can reach that beauty. Life-changing music cannot be made from a place of exhaustion, or as an afterthought. It mainly comes to a relaxed, receptive mind, just as reflection comes to a still lake.
If you know that beauty is medicine, support it as best you can, and don’t settle for less. We live surrounded by utilitarian music to induce trance states or autopilot. Each time we listen to that, we lose touch with the magic in our present moment. Also beware the music pushing bonsai identities, banality and small horizons, or glamourising negativity.
At its purest, music is a medicine to repattern reality back into harmony, like a tuning fork we adjust to. It reconnects us to our source and origin, and with the ground of being.
It’s in the hands of the harper, their weaving gestures, loosening heart-knots in the hearer, slipping us free from old pains and heartbreaks. It’s in the bodyworker gestures of the drummer, shaking out the stagnancy in our spiritual bodies. Music as medicine, as a true mirror – showing the wholeness never lost.
The ancients told how birdsong makes the sun rise. Likewise, our songs can show new horizons. Even when all speak of darkness, one song is enough to bring the returning light. And it’s for this that I dedicate my life to music.
——
Mini Q&A:
Where are you from? What do you play?
I was born in England in the 90s. I had my first keyboard very young and have never stopped playing or exploring. My parents showed me that music was fun — that was enough. I have no formal education in music. I just play whatever I can, whenever & however I can.
Currently I play Celtic harp, piano, guitar, flutes & whistles, violin, world zithers and percussion. I sing, compose and write songs.
For better or worse I’m a chronic aesthete, a Eulippian. I exist to make joy through music, and I’m open to what form that will take in each moment. Things never feel right if I move away from that and try to live a sensible life.
What kind of music do you play?
I look for the spark beyond genre, that fleeting glow in all styles and places, usually at the edges. I’ve been enraptured by jazz, classical, folk, ragam, maqam, qawwali, gospel, samba, electronic, rock, ambient, music from all around the world and recorded time. But the magic’s not in the genre. That to me is a footprint beauty left behind – it quickly bakes rigid. The magic is a fleeting thing.
I like to integrate all the music I love naturally, without thought to genre. So there may be a vocal gamaka from India here, an Irish crann there, a samba syncopation, a jazz chord, an African call & response, a tape-effect, a pure bell, silence. It’s subconscious, not intentional fusionwork. I lived in some genres for so long that they’re just part of me.
My lyrics often start as a reply to someone close to me. Many early songs were encouraging me to keep going when my life was a long grey waiting to live. The consolation in those lyrics came from a deeper, wiser place than my daily mind. Many songwriters speak of this. Their songs know more than they do. My songs can even help me see deeper truths and trajectories of my life well in advance – and I only realise later!
So, in that case – who writes the song? I still feel that it is us, just not the identity-body-self. We are more than we appear to be, and wiser.
What keeps you playing in times like these?
People need beauty and authenticity more than ever. Nevermind that it doesn’t pay or nobody listens yet. Beautiful music has been such a balm to me that I will repay in music as best as I can, to give refuge to those who come after me. This is how I honour those who came before me, too.
I would like to explore beyond the 12-note scale, if my fantasy benefactor would send me the hardware (right now, please!). Hearing music of 31 notes can be an amazing palate-cleanser at least, and at most, it’s the future for a richer, more nuanced musical expression – something a lot of us are yearning for. Or maybe there are subtler innovations to come, beyond our comprehension yet. Either way, I’d like to be involved.
What do you feel when you play?
To play well, I must dissolve into music. My whole being is felt as music and muscle-memory, the highs and lows of the song itself, and there’s nothing left over for the mind to hook onto. I become the flow-state, the caudal of an endless cascade, more alive than any personhood it flows through.
When I led songs in an ashram with hundreds of singers behind me, it was like flying. Live group singing or improv is one of the most exhilitaring, clean joys that can be felt. It builds community too. I’d love to do this again, with a less ideological set of songs. I haven’t found them yet!
How do you support yourself as an undiscovered musician?
I reduce my consumption and expenses and live very simply so as to still have time for art. I make all the sacrifices, and still it can be hard to find time these days. This is why your donations help so much: the money doesn’t go to a contracted musician with label support. It goes to someone with gifts and vision only. Every cent makes my dream more possible. You are as the rain, and you can choose which seeds you’d like to see flourish.
How do you mesh your dreams with reality? Aren’t they poles apart?
Lovers of beauty are sometimes bestowed the chance to pluck a little more of it out of the aether. These are lucky moments and a gift worth rising for. Personally I’ve wished to make myself as available to those moments as possible – devoting my life to it, just for those gossamer seconds of lift-off. Is that a sound business plan? The material rewards are few, but the spiritual compensation of having fulfilled my life’s work is what keeps me playing and learning, making music for maybe just one true listener, maybe none.
Such is devotion: you keep going, beyond any choice, until it’s dark and late and the rational long-since took the last train home, and there you are in the empty station, nowhere, and – right there, the night sky unfolds its nebula before you, and there is only this. A moment of eternity. The path of beauty is not rational or linear, but it is rich with life, surprise and, I dare believe, its due compensation.
Society constantly suggests negative outcomes to artists for following your art. But so far, by following my gifts and joy at every turning, instruments were given to me, literal keys were made and doors were opened to me, kindred ears and connections were found, homes materialised, even my beloved and devoted partner came, all because I just followed my gift into the unknown and *never* chose the easy route back into the familiar. As long as life supports my choosing of music, I will keep choosing it. May you do the same with your passion!
It is true I am living very simply, awaiting more support for my art. Survival does eventually get in the way of art somehow. But abundance can only come out of what is. I must first make the music if it is to succeed at all. So music always comes first. Pursuing another career with hopes to squeeze in a few seconds for music here and there – that doesn’t work. You are what you spend your time doing. That’s the anxiety of being an artist in our time. We just want the chance to give what we’re capable of.
I play for events,
write soundtracks and backing music,
teach intuitively to all ages,
record as a session musician
play for personal sessions.
I welcome you to get in touch with me via the contact page!
Bio
Owen Vaughan Hanner
Multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, composer
As a child I dreamt of the golden age as existing right now within us, and I still feel the nearness of that summer world when I play music, as if all melody its echo, and the means to twine our worlds again.
Music for me is such a full-bodied and loving experience that I don’t mean this abstractly. I find myself in a wider reality when I play: a world more alive, more true, more beautiful and strange than before. I feel music’s power as Dream, to enact truly positive change in this world even in the practical and rational layers of life that seem far removed from the Arts.
Let’s say water doesn’t know its effects where it falls. It just is and flows where it may. But if it stirs awake a seed, whole biomes of beauty can appear — never imagined by water yet innately part of water’s process: part of its dream.
And, as rain on a desert meadow, so is beauty’s effect on human potential. A truly felt song stirs the heard-seeds. The waters of player & listener meet in a timeless moment, and something blooms. All change begins as inspiration, such as music gives us. Those tender revelations at the touch of beauty are the precise points where dreaming begins and action later follows. So music is not just anodyne, but a raw electric power: water, fire and gold together, earthed in the listener.
The power of beauty to spark our dreaming remains in spite of everything against it. It will always be a force for positive change. It contains the golden age within it.
But listeners will need to sponsor players who can reach that beauty. Life-changing music cannot be made from a place of exhaustion, or as an afterthought. It mainly comes to a relaxed, receptive mind, just as reflection comes to a still lake.
If you know that beauty is medicine, support it as best you can, and don’t settle for less. We live surrounded by utilitarian music to induce trance states or autopilot. Each time we listen to that, we lose touch with the magic in our present moment. Also beware the music pushing bonsai identities, banality and small horizons, or glamourising negativity.
At its purest, music is a medicine to repattern reality back into harmony, like a tuning fork we adjust to. It reconnects us to our source and origin, and with the ground of being.
It’s in the hands of the harper, their weaving gestures, loosening heart-knots in the hearer, slipping us free from old pains and heartbreaks. It’s in the bodyworker gestures of the drummer, shaking out the stagnancy in our spiritual bodies. Music as medicine, as a true mirror – showing the wholeness never lost.
The ancients told how birdsong makes the sun rise. Likewise, our songs can show new horizons. Even when all speak of darkness, one song is enough to bring the returning light. And it’s for this that I dedicate my life to music.
——
Mini Q&A:
Where are you from? What do you play?
I was born in England in the 90s. I had my first keyboard very young and have never stopped playing or exploring. My parents showed me that music was fun — that was enough. I have no formal education in music. I just play whatever I can, whenever & however I can.
Currently I play Celtic harp, piano, guitar, flutes & whistles, violin, world zithers and percussion. I sing, compose and write songs.
For better or worse I’m a chronic aesthete, a Eulippian. I exist to make joy through music, and I’m open to what form that will take in each moment. Things never feel right if I move away from that and try to live a sensible life.
What kind of music do you play?
I look for the spark beyond genre, that fleeting glow in all styles and places, usually at the edges. I’ve been enraptured by jazz, classical, folk, ragam, maqam, qawwali, gospel, samba, electronic, rock, ambient, music from all around the world and recorded time. But the magic’s not in the genre. That to me is a footprint beauty left behind – it quickly bakes rigid. The magic is a fleeting thing.
I like to integrate all the music I love naturally, without thought to genre. So there may be a vocal gamaka from India here, an Irish crann there, a samba syncopation, a jazz chord, an African call & response, a tape-effect, a pure bell, silence. It’s subconscious, not intentional fusionwork. I lived in some genres for so long that they’re just part of me.
My lyrics often start as a reply to someone close to me. Many early songs were encouraging me to keep going when my life was a long grey waiting to live. The consolation in those lyrics came from a deeper, wiser place than my daily mind. Many songwriters speak of this. Their songs know more than they do. My songs can even help me see deeper truths and trajectories of my life well in advance – and I only realise later!
So, in that case – who writes the song? I still feel that it is us, just not the identity-body-self. We are more than we appear to be, and wiser.
What keeps you playing in times like these?
People need beauty and authenticity more than ever. Nevermind that it doesn’t pay or nobody listens yet. Beautiful music has been such a balm to me that I will repay in music as best as I can, to give refuge to those who come after me. This is how I honour those who came before me, too.
I would like to explore beyond the 12-note scale, if my fantasy benefactor would send me the hardware (right now, please!). Hearing music of 31 notes can be an amazing palate-cleanser at least, and at most, it’s the future for a richer, more nuanced musical expression – something a lot of us are yearning for. Or maybe there are subtler innovations to come, beyond our comprehension yet. Either way, I’d like to be involved.
What do you feel when you play?
To play well, I must dissolve into music. My whole being is felt as music and muscle-memory, the highs and lows of the song itself, and there’s nothing left over for the mind to hook onto. I become the flow-state, the caudal of an endless cascade, more alive than any personhood it flows through.
When I led songs in an ashram with hundreds of singers behind me, it was like flying. Live group singing or improv is one of the most exhilitaring, clean joys that can be felt. It builds community too. I’d love to do this again, with a less ideological set of songs. I haven’t found them yet!
How do you support yourself as an undiscovered musician?
I reduce my consumption and expenses and live very simply so as to still have time for art. I make all the sacrifices, and still it can be hard to find time these days. This is why your donations help so much: the money doesn’t go to a contracted musician with label support. It goes to someone with gifts and vision only. Every cent makes my dream more possible. You are as the rain, and you can choose which seeds you’d like to see flourish.
How do you mesh your dreams with reality? Aren’t they poles apart?
Lovers of beauty are sometimes bestowed the chance to pluck a little more of it out of the aether. These are lucky moments and a gift worth rising for. Personally I’ve wished to make myself as available to those moments as possible – devoting my life to it, just for those gossamer seconds of lift-off. Is that a sound business plan? The material rewards are few, but the spiritual compensation of having fulfilled my life’s work is what keeps me playing and learning, making music for maybe just one true listener, maybe none.
Such is devotion: you keep going, beyond any choice, until it’s dark and late and the rational long-since took the last train home, and there you are in the empty station, nowhere, and – right there, the night sky unfolds its nebula before you, and there is only this. A moment of eternity. The path of beauty is not rational or linear, but it is rich with life, surprise and, I dare believe, its due compensation.
Society constantly suggests negative outcomes to artists for following your art. But so far, by following my gifts and joy at every turning, instruments were given to me, literal keys were made and doors were opened to me, kindred ears and connections were found, homes materialised, even my beloved and devoted partner came, all because I just followed my gift into the unknown and *never* chose the easy route back into the familiar. As long as life supports my choosing of music, I will keep choosing it. May you do the same with your passion!
It is true I am living very simply, awaiting more support for my art. Survival does eventually get in the way of art somehow. But abundance can only come out of what is. I must first make the music if it is to succeed at all. So music always comes first. Pursuing another career with hopes to squeeze in a few seconds for music here and there – that doesn’t work. You are what you spend your time doing. That’s the anxiety of being an artist in our time. We just want the chance to give what we’re capable of.
I play for events,
write soundtracks and backing music,
teach intuitively to all ages,
record as a session musician
play for personal sessions.
I welcome you to get in touch with me via the contact page!
Bio
Owen Vaughan Hanner
Celtic Harp, Piano, Guitars, Flutes, Zithers, Voice, Percussion
Music has called me all my life, as has all beauty, for it speaks a truth beyond telling, amidst all else so fleeting. How unreal our stories seem to me when beauty fills my moment with its eternity.
Being partially blind since birth would suggest an affinity for sound, but that’s not why it calls me. Music outspans the sensory, it belongs to the essential.
Listening to music is a mirror that harmonises its subject: transforming the listener as it shows life more beautiful, wild and intact than we knew.
A burst of vibrancy to restore the lifeline, retwine the surface with the source, where nothing was ever lost and all is still pristine.
I feel vast currents of energy flow through my fingers, as my hands make their gestures on the harp. Strings in the right hands will unweave heartknots in the hearer, dissolving the tension of ages, lightening the load.
Or hands that strike on drum and keys, shaking out the stagnancy. For music stirs what needs to move, and stills what needs to calm.
Musical hands form spontaneous mudras, coding subtle weather into the air that will awaken heartseeds in the ready (as per the player’s subtlety and skill).
The breath learns depth (& heights) in flute-playing, to say nothing of the alchemical fire when I sing and let go. Singing uses my whole being and makes of me a vessel of transformation.
Whether making or hearing it, it’s a sea dissolving stone: wave on wave of music’s fluidity eroding fixed identity. Leaving you free.
At first glance, it seems music is everywhere. But at first listen, we know the synthetic everywhere and the real almost nowhere. Even many live musicians only aspire to replicate, rather than open themselves to the infinite cascade of living melody, harmony, rhythm that life is.
It’s that cascade I seek: and I play most for those moments when flight is possible. I know how healing and transformative it can be for many. I only know because it is happening to me too.
When the music is truly alive, it becomes:
A bridge to silence, as needed as silence itself.
The replenisher of compassion and wisdom.
Stillness speaking, silence singing.
The human expression of the unsayable (as everything is, but especially music is).
Or better still, the human expressed by the unsayable.
A lovesong from time to eternity — whose fragile fleeting expression is itself the eternity to which it sings.
Echoes of the first day.
Reflecting beauty’s own form, unrippled by the winds of mind.
A fire in which hearts ignite, and the human dream burns brighter.
Every music-induced revelation expands the human dream as tendrils expand the forest.
For music shapes imagination, which shapes the paths of action and to where our world inclines.
When a sapling is bathed in light, we can imagine its joy and affirmation — for we are the same when touched by Beauty.
May beauty and purity water us, so that we unfold our full potential.
May music’s essence reveal to all. Life’s secret: naked beauty.
As birdsong sings the dawn awake, so human song steers light to break on as-yet-unseen horizons.
There’s no greater time to support your kindred Artists. Through what we play, the world may learn to dream again & our notes may speed the healing so sorely needed in this world.
At any rate, that aim I give myself to.
At so many crisis points in history, at the edge of despair, a song breaks through the dark like first rays of morning light.
Whilst we are open to song, darkness will never engulf this world.
May real music now outshine the synthetic haze of artificially darkened days. Song is the essence of this planet, free, wild & beautiful — unreplicable — and the music will break through.
I play for events,
write soundtracks and backing music,
teach intuitively to all ages,
record as a session musician
play for personal sessions.
I welcome you to get in touch with me via the contact page!
