Lifemusic: Connecting People to Time

Lifemusic: Connecting People to Time

Author: Rod Paton

This book is about time and how we connect to it. Time is the unconditional and inevitable process through which life grows and decays and music not only measures time, delineating in a purely abstract but palpable way its passage but it also infuses time with emotional significance, with meaning: it creates out of time a hermeneutic canvas. So the connection to time, through music, becomes also a connection to our inner lives and feelings, to the emotions, events and rituals which measure our passage through life: music not only makes us conscious of time but it simultaneously deepens our awareness of time’s significance. We therefore use music not merely as an accompaniment to life (although we may sometimes think that that is all it is doing) but as a barometer of the inner patterns which make life more than a set of random events that somehow take place between birth and death. Music connects us to time and in so doing it deepens our connection to life itself. The concept and the practice of Lifemusic grows out of this epistemology.

Rod Paton is a composer, horn player specializing in jazz and improvisation, and senior lecturer at the University of Chichester. He is also a community musician and tireless defender of everyone’s right to music regardless of training or background. In Lifemusic: Connecting people to time, Paton describes the philosophy and practice of his concept based on creative improvisation and a participatory ideal. Following Christopher Small’s clarion call (in Stevens, 1985) to “give back to people the music that belongs to them”, Paton makes a case against what he describes as hegemonies that are dependent on experts who create, control and mediate musical activity, reducing others to passive consumers. He agrees fully with Small about the problematic social implications of musicianship and music education under these circumstances, notably cultural imperialism and the way practices intimidate the uninitiated by demanding normative perfection. However, Paton’s point of departure is not primarily sociological but poetic, mythological and spiritual. In the first part of Lifemusic, he outlines a vision inspired partly by Neoplatonist thinkers (Ficino, Steiner, Hillman), partly by Nietzsche, and above all, archetypal psychology and symbolism as represented by Carl Gustav Jung. Music is seen as a natural reflection of life and time. Chapter 1 deals specifically with notions of time and transition and the meanings we give to them, arguing that the “kairos” (the unique moment in history) has come for radical musical renewal. Connecting people to time in this context means, among other things, a hands-on approach: getting involved and creating music together in the real, living, present here-and-now, instead of “fetishising” absent historical composers and their works. Chapter 2 builds on mythological stories and images such as the tragedy of Orpheus, which is interpreted as an example of how “soul” is lost when music becomes too rational, theoretical and technical. In Chapter 3, Paton defines improvisation as “the primary act of music” and points to the curious ambivalence surrounding its history in Europe, contrasting this with practices in other cultures. Chapter 4 gives an overview of the therapeutic potential of group improvisation, drawing on Winnicott’s (1971) observations about transitional space but also on poetic sources; references to clinical and neuroscientific research on music therapy are more rare. The second part of the book, Chapters 5-8, is devoted to the practice and uses of Lifemusic, laying out the precepts of this form of music-making: (1) it is natural, everyone can do it, (2) there are no wrong notes, (3) every sound is meaningful and revelatory, (4) it serves wellbeing and health for individuals and communities. According to Paton, experiences of close connections between life and music happen in states of deepened awareness, but these are made possible through quite down-to-earth musical activities that are detailed in the last chapter.

• Pages: 288 with illustrations and CD of examples attached.
  
• Dimensions: 235 x 155 x 24 mm portrait
  
• Weight: 0.500 kg