Welcome to the home of Balanced American Music, an exploratory project by Randy and Marianne Sutin, which started in 2007 with our CD "Meditations for Flute and Percussion".

We do not think about a particular style when we created this music.  Our intent was to create balanced music overall.  We wanted it to represent the diversity of culture in America and in our lives, drawing from the many forms of music and spirituality in which we participate.

We have decided to call it Balanced American Music because it doesn’t fit neatly into any existing categories.  It is heavily influenced by jazz, but one could only expect that since jazz is the only entirely American musical artform.  It also has elements of the many other musical traditions which make up our pluralistic society.  There are elements from classical European music (a nod to Eric Satie, Steve Reich, and Maurice Ravel).   You may notice elements of rock and commercial pop music as well as R&B or blues.  There are elements from many folkloric traditions as well, spanning the range from African, through South American and even sacred Tibetan music.  Please know that we do not claim to be masters of any of these forms, but rather that we simply borrow from them to create this style of our own. 

We wanted it to be balanced in terms of the five elements (wood, earth, fire, water, and air).   The choice of instrumentation intentionally varies to move from one element to the other with grace (hopefully) while preventing focus on one particular element.

We wanted it to reflect balanced spirituality with no real emphasis on one tradition or another; along those lines our first recording contains a traditional Hindu invocation, a Jewish prayer, a Christian spiritual, a piece that evokes much of feel of Native American spiritual music and a hint of traditional Buddhist chant.

Given the fact that yoga is a moving meditation, it was a natural subject  for our first recording.   It lends itself to many moving rhythms spanning techno beats, Latin beats, marches and anything else we could come up with.  The pieces (or perhaps you could refer to them as movements) are arranged to be musically analogous to a cycle of one day which is also a common way to practice yoga and/or tai chi.   It starts with a traditional invocation, Om Namah Shivaya, and progresses in movements that represent a day, from sunrise to sunset, then a final prayer, Amazing Grace.

Our future recordings will explore other settings for balanced energy in the world of music.   Meditation/yoga was a good place to start because it is inherently a balanced state itself.