Special Section: In Memory of Clive Robbins 1927-2011

Clive's Adventure

By Gary Ansdell

I happened to be in New York City during the last months of Clive's life. This meant that I could go and visit him in the hospital wards and rehab places that were clearly a horrible trial for him at this time. At one level these were sad visits—Clive's body was finally letting him down, and he was beginning to lose his dignity. He wanted to die. Other friends and colleagues brought live music to him, but they reported that this wasn't very successful as Clive then tried to help facilitate the music for his fellow residents, and he didn't really have the strength! But there was also another dimension to my visits that was absolutely no different from any conversation we'd had over the last twenty years. Where we were and what condition he or I was in was irrelevant. Clive still had stuff he wanted to make sure I understood!

After the first visit I stopped asking Clive how he was. He didn't want to talk about this topic. He wanted to talk about The Work (the capitals indicate not just music therapy gossip, but the heart of It!). I feel slightly badly that Clive was under a misapprehension about me and my particular enthusiasms, but by then it was too late to confess! Clive would take me to the corner of the rehab ward lounge where a TV blared old films and other residents coughed and sometimes shouted. He gathered his concentration and gave me a short lecture on some arcane bit of anthroposophic philosophy, laced with stories of how some of this had been central to the shared motivation he and Paul found in anthroposophy for the spiritual core of The Work. It's not that I wasn't interested, but I was largely ignorant of what he was talking about in terms of the metaphysics of anthroposophy (all the stuff about the "Pre-Saturnian world"). But if Clive knew I was faking understanding he was gracious enough not to comment!

What I had always been interested in, however, was how Clive had managed to infuse his teaching and writing with what I'd call the core substrate of the anthroposophic worldview (coming originally from Goethe's scientific work as interpreted by Rudolf Steiner). This was the "delicate empiricism" of the phenomenological tradition that is preserved so carefully in the practice and theory of Nordoff and Robbins (albeit “secretly” and discretely). Mercédès Pavlicevic and I gave a talk on this at a lovely event at NYU in 2008 to mark Clive's 80th birthday[1]. The important thing about this unconventional philosophical heritage that Clive faithfully kept true to has actually very little to do with philosophy or theory as conventionally understood. It is however everything to do with the core meaning of philosophy as the search for, and love of, wisdom. It is about the key values that Clive incarnated and exemplified in his work all the way through his life—and which he was still impressing on me in those last weeks of his life. These were the spiritual and deeply human values that music and musicking (as facilitated through the Nordoff-Robbins approach) performs and casts in the wider role of parable for those who have ears to hear: freedom, possibility, play, creativity, beauty, hope, trust, attention, courage, and love.

After Clive died I went back to an interview I'd taped with him about ten years earlier for a book. Typically Clive had ranged widely and to speak frankly in conventional terms, he'd rambled! But somehow, as ever, Clive had worked his way unerringly to the core message he wanted me to go away with, a beautiful insight that came right at the end of the interview:

Clive: Music's such an adventure! Every session should be an adventure…every course of therapy is an adventure. By this I don't mean the everyday sense of "going on a journey", but of the real meaning, as in "advent" - it's an arrival, a becoming, something coming to pass. Whenever music is here something is possible…Everyday is an adventure…and you have to be a bit reckless…if music's alive it's following its own adventure…it's adventing!

Clive was also of course talking about himself here too—he was a great adventurer in many senses, sometimes a bit reckless, always following the crest of his beloved "Creative Now." Most of all Clive was an adventurer of the human spirit, and spent his life dedicated to showing how music afforded this path of the heart so well.

The music anthropologist John Blacking (1973) wrote about how for the Venda that he studied for so many years "music is not an escape from reality; it is an adventure into reality, the reality of the world of the spirit" (p. 28). He twinned this with the important observation that for the Venda (and for us) “the hard task is to love, and music is a skill that prepares man for this most difficult task” (p. 103).

Clive was also a lover: of people, of music, of music and people. He was alert (and vulnerable) to the lure of any of these possible combinations! The unique alchemy of people, music and wellbeing is the true legacy of the Nordoff-Robbins tradition, the flame of gnosis which Clive kept alive and faithfully quickened for nearly sixty years.

Perhaps more than most of us, Clive was many things to many people. He called out of people the various (and sometimes contradictory) parts of his own complex personality. I've sketched here just the small flame that ignited between us. Multiply this probably by thousands and you have a sense of the human and spiritual legacy of this unique man.

Notes

[1] A version of this is published as: Ansdell, G. & Pavlicevic, M. (2010) Practising "gentle empiricism": The Nordoff-Robbins research heritage. Music Therapy Perspectives, 28(2).

Reference

Blacking, J. (1973). How musical is man? Seattle: University of Washington Press.