Mindful Pause

This is a recording of Lynette Lancini’s “Invocation of the Whole Living Body”, featuring:

Jodie Rottle, flute

Elizabeth Welsh, violin

Vanessa Tomlinson, vibraphone

Lynette Lancini, piano

Ethan Greaves, recording engineer

Says Lynette:
“This piece is an experiment in making music from direct experiencing. It was devised as a response to an invitation to provide a piece for a women’s music concert at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music’s Amazing Women 2015 concert series. It was performed by three professional musicians who had no prior experience of Focusing, and myself (piano). The rehearsal times were as much about Focusing as music-making.
“I was inspired by the idea of musically rendering a movement practice I have devised called Elemental Focusing Wheel. In this practice, the medicine wheel and elements (Water, Fire, Air, Earth) are used as a movement-based pathway into experiencing the kind of embodiment I have learned through my Wholebody Focusing training.
“Each musician was assigned the following Sufi breath pattern that connected to their element, and a pitch set (allocated from my own felt sense about which pitches belonged with each element):

flute – Air (inhale and exhale through mouth)

violin – Water (inhale through nose, exhale through mouth)

vibraphone – Fire (inhale through mouth, exhale through nose)

piano – Earth (inhale and exhale through nose).
“Phase One invites the musicians to use their element’s breath pattern as a recurring touchstone to pause, notice and acknowledge what is happening inside their own field of awareness. Then, drawing on their element’s pitch set, to invite a bodily impulse to form that symbolizes itself through sounding their instrument. The main instructions are: PAUSE and INVITE / LET COME / FOLLOW IMPULSE / LET IT DEVELOP / REPEAT.

During a transitional section, the one common note between all pitch sets (B) is played. Performers are invited to use the note to grow their awareness from ME HERE to WE HERE (ensemble) to ALL OF US HERE (musicians and audience and whole situation/location), and to dwell in this section while a sense of a dynamic inter-relational space stabilises.
“Phase Two: Each musician has a slightly different idiomatic instruction for how this section begins, and is invited to ‘EMANATE freely and wholeheartedly’ from there, using a C major scale, ‘allowing the resultant music to complete itself through you from your body’s own knowing’.
“What next? In a performance situation, the information from which direct experiencing is forming, is exponentially more complex than a rehearsal situation. Audience, social expectations, being onstage, recording etc all add up to a very different place to play from. I would like to work more directly with the performance situation, and to invite the performer/audience interaction to become even more consciously co-participatory.”

Lynette Lancini is a certified Wholebody Focusing Trainer and community facilitator of creative co-emergence, based in Brisbane, Australia. Her music compositions have been performed, toured, recorded and broadcast nationally and internationally. Through Focusing, movement and music, Lynette’s art and training practice unfold through her practice Wholebody Creative Change. Lynette’s creative life has taken her from writing abstract concert music to more experimental approaches where Focusing process is instrumental to both composition and performance. Her inner-directed movement practice Elemental Focusing Wheel uses the medicine wheel as a template, and is a sequenced exploration of the interactive body spaces of Wholebody Focusing. Engaging with both poetry and TAE,