Metaphors of the Spiritual in Music Education: A Perennialist Interpretation of Musical Improvisation. (original) (raw)

The educational context for the reflections that follow is my teaching of group-based acoustic free improvisation in UK HE institutions and, more recently, its digital equivalent. Furthermore, they are informed by my experiences as an improviser, both digitally and acoustically, in class and professionally. The paper also develops work I have published exploring the psychological characteristics of improvisation and their significance. (Sansom 2007). Applying post-Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, it considered aspects of musical meaning that serve in the construction and representation of identity. From a series of studies using qualitative research methods, a particular kind of experience came to the fore in the most heightened and meaningful experiences, and provided empirical evidence for what is often associated with experiences of music’s ‘spiritual’ dimension: where more objectively perceived states of consciousness fluctuate and give way to a loss of self. (Sansom 2007: 10). Descriptions of similar experiences across a range musical activity are relatively well documented. Staying with improvised music, David Borgo, for example, recounts musicians’ descriptions of ecstatic and trancelike performance states, the annihilation of critical and rational faculties, and quotes the bassist Willam Parker’s explanation of free music as an “emptying [of] oneself and being.” (Borgo 2007: 25). Stephen Nachmanovitch, significantly describing it as ‘common experience’, writes: The intensity of your focused concentration and involvement maintains and augments itself, your physical needs decrease, your gaze narrows, your sense of time stops. You feel alert and alive; effort becomes effortless. […] you forget time and place and who you are. The noun of self becomes a verb. (1990: 51-52) June Boyce-Tillman in her phenomenography of spirituality in experience defines such encounters as “the[ir] ability to transport the experiencer to a different time/space dimension – to move them from everyday reality to a world other than the commonplace.” (Boyce-Tillman 2007: 1410-1411). This, and her related work on the liminal space in musicking (Boyce-Tillman 2009), broadens and contexualises the understanding of trance states and loss of self via a range of sources taking in psychology, anthropology, mysticism, consciousness studies, and the likes of Buber, Maslow, Dewey, and Derrida along the way. And there are many other disciplines and approaches that have a contribution to make. Two notable examples are Richard Elfyn Jones’ Music and the Numinous (2007), which draws on Alfred North Whitehead’s Process Philosophy, and Judith Becker’s Deep Listeners (2004) with its deft synthesis of science, philosophy, psychology, and sociology. This paper brings to the discussion a Traditionalist or Perennial Philosophical approach. Although paradigmatically at odds with the secular humanism of academia, in relation to this topic it offers a highly relevant and specialist body of knowledge, which – if one has to argue its validity – has a historical and cultural legacy far beyond material rationalism.