Living Music by Rod Paton
Improvisation Guidelines for Teachers and Community Musicians
What this book offers:
For Teachers…
A set of practical ideas for the classroom which will also enhance knowledge and understanding of the requirements of the National Curriculum in the areas of Composing and Performing at all key stages.
For Community Musicians…
A resource of workshop activities which can be used in virtually any kind of community music situation and with a wide range of age and ability.
For Allcomers…
The book aims to contribute to a growing resource which reflects a perceptible shift in public attitudes towards the functions of music: a shift away from the monopoly of composers and recording companies and towards autonomy, participation and social inclusion. Music is increasingly being understood as a medium for self growth and social bonding. Being part of an improvising group can increase self esteem, build confidence, relieve stress and integrate body, mind and spirit. Making music, being a creator rather than a consumer, is a birthright, a natural and organic element of life; reclaiming this birthright is what Living Music is about.
Extract from Part 1 of ‘Living Music’
The enormous diversity of musics to which we have access at this point in our history has created an equally diverse set of assumptions concerning the meaning and value of musical culture. We have unprecedented access to a broad arc of musical experience, represented by everything from Grand Opera and the Classical Concert all the way across the cultural spectrum to Rock Music, Chart Toppers and Rap. This wide-ranging landscape is framed within an equally wide variety of mediating channels; in addition to live venues of every description, from concert halls to karaoke night in the local pub, we can also include broadcasting institutions such as Classic FM and the BBC, freewheeling commercial radio stations, car stereos, live gigs and an endlessly seductive range of hi-fi equipment on which to play our CDs, cassettes and mini-discs. This constant availability and instant access to musical experience means that not only are people more familiar than ever with a very wide range of musical styles and forms but are likely to have well-defined opinions, likes and dislikes and well-formed and well informed attitudes about musical qualities, good, bad or indifferent. (How might a twelfth century monk have reacted to the idea that, 800 years on, his devotional chants would be listened to on a stereophonic machine tucked into the dashboard of a motorised vehicle by someone sitting in a traffic jam on the M25?)
Yet, for many, a true sense of participation in and ownership of their musical experience is severely limited. Recorded and broadcast music, the stuff that comes through speaker cones, forms the bulk of most people’s experience but is largely controlled by the music industry, a vast, diverse, global network motivated more by profit and economic realities than aesthetic or community values. The economist and cultural analyst Jacques Attali has calculated that, globally, we spend more on music than on clothing ourselves or on keeping warm. This simple and surprising fact points both to the extraordinary value we place on musical experience and to the gap that exists between production and consumption. Direct ownership of musical production is somewhat rare: we seem to prefer to pay others, in the first place to make it and then to make it available. This is certainly the case with art music: the world of concert halls, opera houses, highly trained solo artists, lowly paid orchestral musicians and exorbitantly paid opera stars and conductors; it is also the case with the fast-food world of popular music, ‘the sound of money singing’ (as Abba was once described); and it is equally true of the diverse world of rock, jazz, world musics, ethnic, folk, roots, blues, and so on. In each case, music is treated as commodity, packaged, labelled and purchased, along with clothing, lipstick and shaving lotion.
Yet, there is a strong tide of feeling running against this phenomenon. Christopher Small has written of ‘giving back to the people the music that belongs to them’. And composer Judith Weir has written,
‘There is a new musical philosophy around today which comes from worldwide sources and is to do with participation. It’s so new, nobody has put it on paper yet - until Marion Molteno (in the novel If you can walk you can dance). Anyone interested in a new way of thinking about music should read it.’
The major theme which runs like a bright stream through Molteno’s novel is participation, to which we might add related themes of ownership, empowerment, autonomy and identity. We have become so used to consuming music that we are in danger of losing the capacity to create it. Yet, this capacity is there in everyone, just below the surface, and we are beginning to witness a series of developments which appear to be set to widen participation and restore ownership.