The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #2475   Message #10264
Posted By: Peter Timmerman
09-Aug-97 - 02:19 PM
Thread Name: Why live music?
Subject: RE: Why live music?
Another take on this from another angle comes from an interesting Time Management book (I procrastinate by reading Time Management Books) called Time Management For UnManageable People (Ann McGee-Cooper). In it she attacks all standard time management books as being good for people who have absorbed industrial monochronic time, and who are therefore obsessed with saving bits of time, priorizing, and endless to-do lists. She argues that creative people need to be a bit organized, but they need a more playful, less linear process -- including messy desks (as long as they help). There are also other kinds of time, like polychronic time (multiple things going on at once) and kairological time (moments of ecstasy), and a kind of existential time ("flow" time). One section of her book is on how people in pre-industrial cultures have quite different work and play rituals, of which singing together is exemplary. While this singing is often rhythmic, it tends to change the physical and emotional relationship of everyone to the passing of time -- one is being as well as doing. You enter time or create it as you go. It stops being purely external and imposed: which I guess is why the pain of such harsh work as went into work songs (chain gangs, etc.) is assuaged somewhat. I think Kiwi is right to stress the energy passing through the physical body when you sing or play. You reinhabit the world differently. Imagine the people in office cubicles suddenly breaking into common work songs, and you get the strangeness of the idea.Another reason why people procrastinate by tuning in to DT? Now where was I? Oh yes, Priority A tasks -- Important but not Urgent... Yours, Peter