Music, Grief and the Perception of Time
Live music embodies a separate, quasi-independent concept of time. A parallel temporal world in which we are prone to lose ourselves.
Music is a catalyst for helping mourners feel unstuck in time, allowing them to synchronize with the world around them. Importantly, it can also hold a container of provocative repetition which forces one to lean deeper into the uncomfortable chasms of time that are opened by such profoundly painful loss. When that pain is held on repeat, within the container of song, in a room full of many people, it urges everyone present to sit and stay a while longer. The whole room holds tight through the unbearable weight of sadness so that the music may lull the crowd through the wailing cries. It serves to cross the void between the relative time experience of the living and the world of the dead.
Humans have developed mechanisms for measuring time for millennia. Water clocks, sand clocks, mercury clocks and pendulum clocks preceded modern clocks, but none of these functioned quite the same way as the mechanical clocks and digital clocks of the past 200 years. Prior to the industrial era, human beings perceived time in relation to the varying biological cycles of celestial bodies and seasons in nature. The seasonal definition of an “hour” varied in different lengths from day to night as the astronomical position of the planets changed throughout the year1.
Al Jazari’s Castle Clock in the 12th Century is a well known example, “It was possible to reprogram the measurement of time in order to account for the changing lengths of day and night throughout the year, and it also featured five musician automata who automatically play music when moved by levers operated by a hidden camshaft attached to a water wheel”2. Changes in light, the rate at which plants grew or the ebb and flow of the moon’s gravitational pull on water were some of the most distinct markers of time by which these machines were programmed. It’s no wonder that musicians were depicted as being intrinsically linked to this flow of such organic time. It wasn’t until the mid 19th century that time became calculated in a regimented way that was uniform and largely independent of biological flow. This coincided with the invention of regimented musical metronomes, and so, music adapted as our perception of time adapted3.
Music composition, notation and performance exist universally and many academic studies have posited various reasons why humans make music. What is music’s functional purpose to the survival of our species that keeps the practice alive? It's clear that one of those purposes is to keep track of time. Humans, in general, rely on an innate sense of timing and rhythm to perform ordinary activities such as walking, breathing, washing or speaking. There is a flow that emerges within human life and musicians have developed an especially keen ability to harness this rhythm. When audiences experience live music, musicians have many tools at their disposal to respond to organic timing such as consonance/dissonance, tension/release to have substantial influence over emotions such as sadness, excitement, fear and happiness.
Music has always been an essential device not just for feeling time but for marking significant moments and transitions throughout the day. In fact, the word clock actually comes from the latin word clocca for bell. Bells are still rung to signify various phases of the day. Historically, poems and songs were included in cooking recipes. “Using the rhythm of words to time recipes is something that has gone on for centuries. In the Middle Ages, psalms were used to time cooking and brewing. Medieval cookery books frequently state that a sauce should be simmered for the time it takes to recite two Ave’s or a fish should be boiled for three pater nosters”4. Even today doctors advise us to “sing our ABC’s while washing our hands to ensure we get a good 20 second scrub5.
So how does grief affect a person’s experience of time and how can musicians, as time keepers, both ease and support the grieving process? What value does live music bring today to the pacing of memorial services and communal experiences of loss?
After losing her grandson, mourner Patricia Mealer describes her experience of time in an interview, “Although everyone around me kept moving, I felt everything and everyone should have just frozen in time”6. There is a sense of disorientation and disconnectedness that creates a pretext for loneliness and isolation. Psychologist Thomas Fuchs says, “the mourner lives in two worlds; one might be inclined to say, in the present and in the past. …The temporality of grief may be described as a separation of two forms of time, one flowing, one arrested, which become more and more desynchronized”7.
Live musicians, unlike sound recordings, respond in real time to the emotions in a room. They offer a flexibility that exists outside the mechanical ticking of modern life. They may quicken or slow their pacing. They may lean into repetition or adjust their volume according to the activity of the room. “Live music embodies a separate, quasi-independent concept of time, able to distort or negate modern “clock-time.” This other time creates a parallel temporal world in which we are prone to lose ourselves, or at least to lose all semblance of objective time.8
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/who-invented-the-measurement-of-time/
https://muslimheritage.com/al-jazaris-castle-water-clock/
Devices such as mechanical metronomes which contemporary musicians use to measure equal increments of beats per minute were also not invented in the 19th century. Tempo markings in musical scores are a fairly recent phenomenon when one considers the entire history of humans making music. External markers in nature have historically had to serve as inspiration for pacing music such as the warble of bird calls, the rush of wind and many artists would agree that these organic rhythms are the foundation of inspiration for their sound.
https://the-history-girls.blogspot.com/2017/08/cooking-on-prayer-by-karen-maitland.html0
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/03/17/814221111/my-hand-washing-song-readers-offer-lyrics-for-a-20-second-scrub
https://themighty.com/topic/grief/how-grief-changed-my-perception-time/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9465734/
https://nautil.us/how-music-hijacks-our-perception-of-time-234738/
If you haven’t listened to my new album LAMINARIA a folk horror chamber suite yet you can listen at these links below AND purchase a copy of a limited edition LAMINARIA candle 🕯️ designed by artist WaterBruja. These candles come with a digital download of the complete album and album artwork. They make wonderful gifts for the holidays and the winter solstice.
