musiciens neophytes – Louise Campbell

Droning on…

Circle games come out sounding very different depending on group dynamic. Some groups tend towards close imitation, leading to gradual evolution over time, playing with one or two of musical elements at a time. For example, if a group fixes pitch and focuses on changes in duration and dynamic, the group sound can become very drone-based, with gradually shifting timbres based on instrumentation. This is when droning on is definitely a good thing.

Campbell: Circle Game variations. Players play a fixed pitch (e.g. concert G) with a crescendo-decrescendo note shape. Overlap notes and breathe as necessary.

A different dynamic shape will create a very different sound. You can lead a different dynamic shape either by playing it or by suggesting it in words or images.

Campbell, Circle Game variations. Players play a fixed pitch (e.g. concert G) with the dynamic shape of a crescendo. Overlap notes and breathe as necessary.

We can flip the paradigm and fix a different element. Let’s fix the dynamic shape as a crescendo-decrescendo and leave pitch open. It’s a simple change, and sounds totally different. What happens when pitch and dynamic shape is fixed, and rhythm is open? Your drone might gradually start to groove. Open up pitch or dynamic shape, and we start to have more variety. Keep this up and your group will start to develop opinions about what is more musically effective, and you will be well on your way to creating a group composition. Here is one group’s score resulting from this process:

Co-composition based on Circles Games by Lindsay Place High School Etude students, facilitated by Louise Campbell in Culture in Schools workshop

This group tended towards close imitation when playing circle games. Other groups tend towards radical changes in sound, jumping from one musical element to another, creating surprise and contrast even as the pitch is stable. Both are interesting strategies and useful in their own right. It’s up to you to read the dynamic of the group and build on the strengths of the people and group you are working with. Every group will come up with something totally unique to that group! That’s the beauty of circle games.

One Note Wonder

‘Hello… helloo… hellooo…ellooo…llooooo….’ Circle games are beautiful, concrete examples of how individuals contribute to form a group. Change one person in a circle and the group sound changes. Send a ‘hello’ around the circle in one group sounds like a chorus of wolves, while another group erupts into a polyphony of greetings in various languages. It all depends on where you and your group take it.

The last post described a circle game based in repetition and variation. The task is to make a sound similar to the previous, rather than exact imitation. Sometimes this is easier said than done. To take an extreme example, imagine imitating a long tone on a trombone using a found instrument such as a tree branch full of dried leaves. It’s obviously not going to sound the same. How can a long tone be imitated by a tree branch? It all depends on the musical element you chooses to imitate.

Ask your participants to brainstorm the elements that make up music:

Time (rhythm, duration)
Pitch (melody, harmony, gesture)
Dynamics
Tone/texture
Form

Form is established by the circle game. Fix another element, leaving the rest open to play with. Here is a circle game where pitch is fixed:

One Note Wonder

Pre-establish a pitch to send around the circle. One person plays that pitch for the length of one breath. When you hear the person to your left play, add your sound to theirs, imitating or varying their sound using time, dynamics and tone/texture.

This is one of my favourite games, since there is security in knowing what to do (i.e. the fixed element) and room to play (everything else!). Let your participants play and discover what they like and do not like. A group sound will start to emerge and lead you and your group to the next step.

Ack! Here comes the concert

You’ve been doing all this improv, everyone is having a great time, and now the concert is looming. What to do? I say improvise in concert, as is. Or you can get a wee bit more composition-y about it. Let’s take the previous blog post ‘Long tones made fun’ one step further…

The basic rule of the game stays the same: you can play a long tone, or a silence. Now for pitch choices. Play through several versions of this game using different pitch set options (see previous blog post or invent your own). Does your group like certain pitch sets better than the others? Take the group’s favourite pitch sets and find a way to display them so that everyone can read off the same chart – a white board, Smartboard or other kind of projection works well for this. Then have one person ‘conduct’ by pointing to which set they want the group to play and for how long.

This is what your white board might look like. The conductor points to a pitch set and the players go to town using those pitches!

Choose different conductors – each conductor will lead the group through the pitch sets in different ways with different timing. This alone is fascinating. For the concert, ask the audience to guess the rules of the game and then have your three most enthusiastic conductors lead the group through the same game – audiences love it, because they hear how active music-making is and they get to be a part of it, too!

Long tones made fun

I admit I’m a geek – I like to play long tones even after 30 years of playing my instrument. It’s a form of meditation when I get to forget about everything and enjoy making sound. I can wax poetic about it, but I also recognize that not everybody feels this way! Yet, more than anything else, long tones dramatically improve my students’ playing. So how do I make long tones interesting and inspiring for the less-geeky-than-me? Oh, I have so many ways…

Sound and silence

Instrumentation: Wind, brass, strings, pitched percussion
Age & ability: All ages, intermediate to advanced
Number of participants: 6-35

My long-time long-tone favourite is a game piece in which players have two choices:

1. play a long tone
2. play a silence

The long tones and silences can overlap in any way, creating shifting textures and timbres as different instruments come in and drop out at various times.

Campbell, Sound and Silence, a variation

Pitches can be open or predetermined. Here are some examples of predetermined pitch sets:

Choose from:

1. 1. 1. 1. An E in any octave
      2. Any note of a specific chord, such as C Major or E minor minor 7
      3. Any note of specific scale, such as pentatonic, or D Major
      4. Any note from a tetrachord such as (0, 1, 2, 6) or C, C#, D, F#
      5. Any note of the chromatic scale

Any of these options can go on for a fair while. Encourage your participants to listen and respond to each other. Each group takes it in a different direction – yours will too.

More next time on shaping this game into collaborative composition.

Hello, sound-making object!

Many of us are saying hello to our instruments and students for the first time after a well-deserved holiday. This blog post is dedicated to Day One, when our students say hello to their instruments for the first time ever. It’s the beginning of a beautiful relationship…

Day One, regardless of the instrument, is about discovery. Let’s imagine we have a music room full of instruments including wind, brass, percussion and strings. The question of the day is: how do these objects make sound?

Instrumentation: Wind, brass, percussion and string instruments
Age & ability: Beginners of all ages
Number of participants: 1-30

Set up a science fair type space in which various stations feature a different instruments. ‘Mentors’ such as older students or specialist are helpful for giving tips on basic technique and hygiene. I favour a fairly hands-off approach: the goal is to let the newbies try instruments on their own terms – they will learn simply by playing and teach each other in the process.

Once the students are happily making sound (usually of the squeeeeakk! blaaaattt!!! scrrraaaape… variety), throw a few questions into the mix. How many different sounds can you make with the same instrument? What does it sound like? Sirens, birds, car horns, squeaky doors? Can you imitate that sound with another instrument? How are instruments are similar to each other? How are they different? Encourage students to articulate and understand the instruments according to sound production, leading to the topic of the next blog post: What happens if…

Playing the Music Game… Pep rally style!

Ever been asked to run a creative music workshop for 120+ teenage girls? I have, and had a great time with Trafalgar School for Girls. I was a wee bit nervous – that’s a lot of people, and when teens are enthusiastic about something, they outrun all your expectations, but if they’re not… well, that workshop could have been a real long hour. So, how was I going to get these girls excited and involved from the get-go?

My number one task in working with amateurs is putting people at ease, since people who are laughing and having fun are naturally creative. Games are great for this. I pulled out all the stops and ran the Traf workshop pep rally style by setting up a participatory music game in which the girls composed, sang and conducted their own music game based on the chanting game Fruit Salad.

Fruit Salad

The following scores are based on a chanting game in which three 4-beat rhythmic chants are repeated and layered an indeterminate number of times. I’ve used variations of this process in situations as diverse as summer camp music exploration for 30 kids, adult music composition classes for 6 people, and high school pep rallies, otherwise known as (insert your school name here) Spirit!

Instrumentation: Voice
Age range: 7 to older adults
Number of participants: 6 to 100+

I borrow the principle of layered rhythmic chants and adapt it by creating rhythmic chants of different lengths: typically 3, 4 and 5 beats long. When repeated, the chants phase due to their different lengths. Depending on the context, I compose the chants, as in the following score appropriate for 6-10 year olds.

Fruit Salad. Repeat each chant as many times as desired. Squares indicate words to drop and add (see The Game).

When possible, I ask participants to compose the chants, encouraging far greater creative input and ownership over the resulting score. The chants in the following score were composed by music students of Trafalgar School for Girls under the guidance of music teacher Kirsten Offer on the theme of ArtsFest, a bi-annual school-wide festival celebrating the arts. More chants were composed than are shown in this score; I selected and tweaked the chants that would work in the context of a 120+ person pep rally.

Traf Spirit! ArtsFest chant Trafalgar School for Girls

The Game

Three conductors, one per chant. Loud, louder, and chilling out. Trafalgar School for Girls

Now to turn these scores into a game: first, teach the chants by rote. Select a conductor(s) who indicates dynamics, entrances and exits. What happens if everyone starts together? What happens when the 3 and 4 beat chants start loud and decrescendo? What happens if the 5 beat chant starts alone, whispered?

Next choose a word or phrase from each of the chants to drop and replace with a rest. Then drop another. And another. Add one back in. And another. Add and drop differently from each of the chants. The gray squares around the words in the scores above are one way in which the words and phrases can be grouped to be dropped and added. Pay close attention to how you do this for your score – it has a huge effect on how groovy or square your piece sounds. Different words and rhythms pop out and line up in different and surprising ways, depending on how and when different words and phrases are dropped and added.

Now find a way to add and drop words on the fly: invent conducted hand signals for drop and add. Write the chants on a whiteboard and cover and uncover the words with pieces of paper. Be creative about how you lead this! Better yet, ask your participants to come up with ways to lead this game. Each group will come up with different solutions, resulting in different pieces from the same score. Have fun!

Musings on making music with anyone

Making music with untrained musicians (aka ‘amateurs’) is a long-time passion of mine. It started over twenty years ago when I walked in to a dance studio with a terrible sound system, a piano that was beautifully twangy and out of tune, and twenty hyper 8-year-olds who had just eaten copious amounts of chocolate during their lunch break. Teaching them how to read quarter notes was clearly going to be excruciating, and not my cup of tea at the best of times. Helping them to become a multi-headed monster chatting away in an invented language – now that was fun! And still is fun, regardless of whether I’m working with 8-year-olds or 80-year-olds.

In recent years, I’ve had the pleasure of leading Teacher Training workshops and Pedagogy 101 for Musicians on the topic of Creativity in the Classroom. The same question always crops up in these workshops: Where do you find your scores? The answer: I don’t find them anywhere. I make them up. With my students. Regardless of who they are, how old they are, and how much (or little) music training they’ve had. We draw on everyone’s experience in the room, using participatory music practices from around the world—that part has a lot to do with me and a long history of musicians whose work I draw on. This blog is a further response to that question: I am going to use this space to share my ideas and experiences in making music with untrained musicians of all ages. Each post will feature the equivalent of one ‘score’, whether it be in traditional notated form, narrative description, or (if I get fancy enough) as instructional video. My hope is that you take these ‘scores’ not as finished products but as starting points to come up with your own music in whatever context you are making it. Try the multi-headed monster thing. It’s seriously fun.

Tag: musiciens neophytes

Droning on…

One Note Wonder

Hello, sound-making object!

Playing the Music Game… Pep rally style!

Musings on making music with anyone

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