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Pranayama Breathing and Meditation in Performance Practice
In the last few years, meditation has helped me tremendously with performance. I used to not able to ‘perform’ at 100% capacity because I suffered from performance anxiety. I have learned that controlling your breathing with various techniques will calm your mind and body in a way that allows you to think clearly. By channeling the mindset you achieve during meditation, you can access your full potential. This has especially helped me with improvisation, because meditation can allow for a deeper level of focus, and more careful attention and awareness. In this workshop, we will work on an alternating breathing exercise, pranayama breathing technique, and meditation.
Using Contemporary Dance Scores to Inform Improvisation
Much of my formal musical training is in Jazz, the improvisational structures of which can be extremely rigorous and explicit. Yet their explicitness and even mechanistic defintion can foreclose other ways of knowing "what one is doing" when one improvises, and hierarchizes explicit knowing over implicit, body-based knowing. Contemporary dance uses the word "score" to mean a variety of things, all relating to the clarity and the structure of their improvisational constraints. I feel that musicians have much to learn from dance scores surrounding defining and perceiving decision procedures through the dance-definition of score-making. I'd like to present a bit about how my beginnings in dance have informed my exploration of improvisation.
Building Sound Communities
How can composers directly engage an audience with their artmaking practice? Can improvisatory works be used to create a shared sense of ownership between artists and communities? What kind of scenarios invite discovery and encourage interpersonal understanding? This workshop will explore the power of participatory works and group dynamics via handheld electronic instruments called Synthbees. Freed from conventional instrumentation and practices, the Synthbees will empower attendees of all abilities to make game-based and action-oriented pieces using sound, light, and gesture.
Horizontal and Vertical Interpretations of Music: Following Through Threads in Composition, Improvisation, and Performance
This workshop will explore ideas behind thinking about music linearly versus vertically. Horizontal or linear music can be followed like a through thread in a tapestry but doesn’t always necessarily need to be the featured component of a composition. It may also be surrounded by material that emphasizes or de-emphasizes the line in various ways. These are our vertical structures in music (harmonies, orchestration, density, etc.). In our workshop, we will improvise horizontal musical lines and experiment with what happens to the lines as they are surrounded by other vertical textures that we create. We will also explore this topic through the use of non-traditionally notated scores. My hope is that this workshop allows the participants to explore these two musical axes and be mindful about using line as a concept in their future improvisations and compositions.
Music and Social Movements
Having been born and raised in Iran in the midst of the longest conventional war of the 20th century, I came to know the immense moving power of music at a young age. I believe music had an important role in propagating the Iranian revolution of 1979. Following the revolution, the Iranian government closely monitored people's access to music, and often used music to unite and influence people in times of crises (such as during the Iran-Iraq war). As an Iranian-Canadian musician living in a time of extreme political sensitivity, when my country of birth is on the brink of a conflict with the United States (where I lived for years and received some of my musical training), I see my role as a cultural ambassador to be an extremely important one. In this workshop, I will speak about how music can respond to, inspire, or reinforce social movements, including those relating to advocation of human rights, peace and social justice.
From Poetry to Song-writing, Composition and Dramaturgy
Jacinta Clusellas will present music from her album "El Pájaro Azul (The Blue Bird)" and her bilingual play with music "Azul Otra Vez (Blue, Revisited)" which are both inspired by Latin American poetry and short stories by the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Darío. Jacinta will intersperse her music with a conversation on the creative relationships that arise between theatre and music. Together, we’ll explore connections between poetry, dramaturgy, multi-linguistic artistic communication, interdisciplinary collaborations and more.
(Un)Ambitious: How (not) to Succeed in Music
Why do some people feel unable to make music, not good enough or not “musically inclined”? Nick Hon will facilitate a living room style open discussion/performance on what it means to "make it" as a musician/artist, investigating why that is often prioritized. We will talk about music as both a product and/or a creative act, and begin deconstructing what it means to "make" music, looking into what is it about music that we value and why. During the discussion we can address specialization and occupational identities, in and outside of the arts, asking questions about our own constructions/ideas/framings of our societies and how that has affected what it means to "be" musical / a musician.
Vernacular Microtonality
While microtonality and non-diatonic scale systems have been ubiquitous around the world and throughout history, many non-academic composers shy away from microtonal music for its inaccessibility. I’ve recently been exploring and researching alternative approaches to microtonality for us non-academic composers who do things by ear, as opposed to following strict scale systems like the 13-tone scale, etc. We can touch on historic methods, like Just Intonation and regional tuning systems, and I can share a few approaches I’ve developed for my own music that can add a new layer of richness and direction to harmonies and chord progressions.
Physicality, Theatricality and Beautiful Singing
Can we keep pushing the envelop with classical style singing? Trained in opera, I am attached to the range, stamina and projection without microphone afforded to me through bel canto style. But interest in cross genre work, 'untrained' vocal timbres, electronic manipulations and changing concert venues make classical singing less necessary and appealing, even to myself. What's an opera singer to do? I have some ideas, and am looking for more!
Creating Sonic Movement Compositions
For both dancers looking to branch out into the sonic world as well as musicians looking to explore expression in the spatial world. This workshop includes a one hour warm up, introduction to the interactive technology, improvisational time, and ends with the learning of a short original sonic movement piece by Elizabeth A. Baker.
Birds, Wind and Highway: Localization Exercises
Outside, by the willow by the pond, we will create some miniature pieces for each other after “physicalizing” present and absent elements of our habitual creative practice. This can be a launching point for a series of instant mini performances and conversation. We might then gain a bit more of an understanding of the emergent ecology of our practices as a cohort that we can weave into the programming of our final concert together.
A Material Ethics of Musicking
In this workshop, I want to reconsider sound for its vibrational affect, and undo a privileging of sound not just as heard, but as for human listeners. I believe that by exploring this through musical gestures, we can create new ways of being and acting that take into account the material existence of our resources—the fragility of our instruments, the uniqueness of every performer’s body, the infrastructure supporting musical performance as we know it, and even the idea of what we want to experience in music as a performer or audience. This workshop could and probably would involve several modes—discussion of literature reflecting on sound, new materialisms, and the posthuman; performing pre-existing works which are open to a variety of ‘worldly’ perspectives, such as text scores by Pauline Oliveros and Manfred Werder, (to name but a few) and the workshopping of small scenario-like pieces focused on the musicality of the unconventionally musical: object performance, performative listening, ‘musicalization’ of everyday gestures, and other such potential scenarios. It would hopefully be something that takes full advantage of the residency’s surroundings, using material resources considerately and renewably, and human resources with empathy and respect. From this, hopefully participants could incorporate environmental and contemplative practices into their other pursuits, with an understanding of musical community as involving human and nonhuman actors.