On the 6th of October 2021, in the school canteen, I performed Evelyn’s Birthday for the first time. I felt nervous for the first time in ages, like properly, I’m going to pull out at the last minute nervous, in part due to the fact that I was taking a huge risk in performing a whole show deticated to evelyn's birthday, but also becuase of the various lockdowns I hadn't performed in over a year, outside of class presentations, so I didn't feel my performance skills were very strong. I had been practising playing the birthday song, which turned out to be really hard riff to play and sing at the same time over a drum machine.
I decided to present myself as myself, hired to perform at Evelyn’s birthday and extend a welcome to all the guests. I refered to Evelyn between each song, insisting that she’s on her way but was running late, but that she’ll be here at any moment. She also functioned as a useful persona to whom I can dedicate, or explain my songs. I can say “I was talking with Evelyn about how hard it is to make friends…” and then play the song Hard To Make Friends. The set ended with me playing the birthday song, preceded by a simple audience round, where I split them into groups, accompanied by a drum loop on my keyboard. Moving around the audience, I build a sort of chant - ‘Evelyn/it’s your/birthday/today’, which returns at the end, along with a group clap and me moving around the audience repeating the chorus.
The set ended and people enjoyed it. I thought I sang badly but I put it down to nerves. The next day I performed again, this time properly in public, at Spisebar in Nørrebro. I bought party hats and paper plates and distributed them around the room with cookies on them. Again, people responded well. The audience participated, smiled, danced and clapped in all the right moments. The end was fun, the hats ended up everywhere, people clapped to Evelyn’s Birthday song as I moved between the crowd.
The birthday party narrative is a happy accident. If there weren't scammers out there preying on gulible out of work artists stuck in lockdown, none of this would have happened, or at least it would have had a different outcome. It's fun to play, but it has a useful function too.
What if, instead of the audience being an audience, they were in fact guests at a birthday party? A birthday party is a ready made community, so by using this devise I could label the situation and all the people present in the room a community from the beginning.
Turning the space from a singer/songwriter performance into the birthday party narrative is a bewildering act, one that works in my favour to shake people out of their comfort zones, but the bewilderment carries with it something humorous, like, this is not what you thought it was, it’s something else! It’s not a joke, it’s just a bit weird.
There is a rich history of bewildering the audience and transforming the space, and the idea is known as queering.
I am a singer/songwriter, and I love performing my songs to others. I also want to be involved in community music, as my professional background has lead me into these spaces where I have found a unique kind of creativity and joy. I therefore ask myself:
How can I, as a performer create a community with my audience?
Because of my experiences and intentions as a musician, it is important to me that I find a way to link these two practises in a meaningful way.
In what ways can I present unique musical artefacts that seek both to engage with audiences and reward them?
I have been exploring the balance between performing and audience participation.
In March 2021 I was approached on instagram by a stranger to write a birthday song for their daughter, Evelyn, who was turning 10. She had a dog called Maxy and was obsessed with Spiderman. I wrote the song for an agreed fee of $300, and sent samples over to ask if it was OK before I sent the whole track. I requested payment before this, however then it became clear this was all just a set up to try and scam me. ‘I accidentally put an extra 0 on the cheque, can you send me back $2700?’ or words to that effect. Now I wish I had saved the conversations however I immediately blocked the user (after a brief consideration about whether to call their bluff and wait to see if the $3000 actually arrived in my account and then block them)
Apparently this scam is growing in frequency. I posted on Reddit about the situation and one user commented simply “It’s a thing” and pasted links to three separate articles.
I was left with a useless birthday song for a fictional 10 year old girl, that no one would ever hear. I started to tell the story to friends, and play the song at parties. It became a cult hit, something people really resonated with and danced to. Friends started to ask when is it going to be released, and are you ever going to play it live? It wouldn’t be my first thought to play this song in my usual set, however I began to consider the idea that it could have useful applications.
Community music projects are often founded on there being a lack of something, whether the thing is physical, as is the case with The Choir With No Name, whose members are, or have lacked physical shelter and security, or more abstract ideas of lacking support, inclusion and visibility such as the countless LGBT choirs, e.g. San Fransisco Gay Men’s Chorus. If I consider this idea for my purpose, then I must ask myself the question; What is missing? And, what am I providing? That is a difficult question to answer. And perhaps it doesn’t need a specific response, however I do feel that there is a lack of musical activity in the lives of adults. Having witnessed, and contributed to the musical journeys of many people in my experiences with community music, I can see what it can provide in terms of mental health, social regeneration and a potent feeling of togetherness. Not to say that the ideas of this project are providing that, I guess I just thought it was worth a mention. Perhaps I feel there is also a lack of engagement and imagination in live music. There is something about streaming services that are perhaps doing some damage to the way we interact with music, even though I’m a keen user. Although maybe damage is the wrong word; change is probably a better one. It’s just like the way our parents used to tell us that playing video games would ruin our minds, but look at me now, mum! The point is, it’s easy to say that Spotify is damaging the music scene stream by stream, but the fact is it’s just changing. What it enables me to do, is to put music back in the room. Not just played by a performer and witnessed by an audience, but felt, experienced, performed and held. I want my music to be a visceral experience, something that you can’t experience to at home. I believe community music is the most potent form of sharing music with people, so in this way, I am finding a way to fullfil the lack of music experience.
In 2015 I started to volunteer for the ‘Choir With No Name’ in Birmingham. Directed by Pete Churchill, the choir met every Thursday evening for a rehearsal followed by a dinner cooked by volunteers. We sang pop songs in 4 part harmony, and eventually I became the piano player for the rehearsals and concerts, so Pete was free to be leading without having to accompany as well. I stayed as a volunteer for this choir until I moved to Copenhagen in 2018. This was my first real introduction into a truly pure community music environment. I was trained as a composer at the Birmingham Conservatoire, and, although I was able to write and perform songs as part of my portfolio, the traditional teaching structure of the Conservatoire created an environment of practise, hard work, rehearsing poise and perfection. The choir was similar in some ways, but opposite in so many others. The choir was specifically set up for people affected by homelessness, providing a safe space and a creative activity for people trying to get their lives back on track. After volunteering with the choir for a few years, the opportunity arose to lead choirs inside prison, which I did with Pete every week. We had weekly 2 hour rehearsals in 3 different prisons, where we would bring simple 2 or 3 part harmony arrangements of pop songs and teach everything by ear, with a guitar accompaniment.
I spoke to Pete about his experiences with community music. It was important for me to reconnect with him and talk about community music, so that I could better understand and communicate why it has become so important to my artistic practise.
We talked about community music having benefits for the wider community that the group exists in. So, not only for the participants who meet once a week to rehearse but for the people who live around, who will enjoy the performances by the group at community gatherings, and witness that creativity and commitment can produce wonderful, joyful music, and create and strengthen social bonds. It’s almost impossible to define exactly why this has become so important to me. But I have seen the power and the joy that sharing music with others can create, and I guess I draw energy from these moments. I get so fired up after working in a community setting either as a facilitator or a participant, because in these moments there’s so much truth and authenticity, no bullshit. I can’t stop to think if what I’m doing looks good, or sounds good, it just happens, and it feels good. I clutch to these morals as I seek to bring the community into the performance space and hope that by sharing my skills and experiences that others will feel the same.
Pete’s story about the Woman with mental illness, who, after only a few weeks of attending rehearsals with the choir was not an unfamiliar story. I remember the choir singing Something Inside So Strong and there was always the same woman taking the first verse. She was incredibly shy during rehearsals and always had headphones on at dinner. But she would stand up in front of crowds and sing ‘The higher you build your barriers the taller I become. The further you take my rights away, the faster I will run’ in the most honest and pure voice you’ve ever heard. My skin shivers when I think about it even now, even when I was accompanying her on piano I found it hard to fight the tears. Like Pete mentioned, the context of the participants’ situations makes anything they do more poignant, however I think in any context, the shy woman who struggles in social situations taking a solo, or even the brave woman singing the alto part at the back of the choir, or in the village choral society, or the town samba band says I’m here, I’m making noise, and I love it. There's a closeness to the performer that you don't get to feel when you know the performers are trained. Trained music and performance is magic, it's unobtainable, but when the performers voice is that close, there's a fragility to the barrier between the audience and the performer that can be felt with so much intensity, it's difficult to ignore. The participants of the group feel it too, and together, raise each other up. Whether upwards be a personal/social goal or a musical one, there is a direction and a journey created by simply creating opportunities for people to participate and perform.
There is a distinct sonic aesthetic to my performance that I enjoy personally, and one which encourages participation. As I give away random pieces of percussion, some western, some African, some Central American, some basically toys, some household items, the resulting sound has a coarseness about it, and a ramshackle quality that makes precise beat placement impossible. As coherence becomes unobtainable, a space opens up for the audience to feel safe to insert their own noise onto the sonic canvas, and therefore encourages community by letting the audience in.
There is a joyfulness to the sound that is reminiscent of folk music performances, where audiences would bang and scrape the objects around them: beer glasses, knives, forks, plates and chairs. It lets the audience know that anything goes. There are no longer any rules, and whatever sound you are able to make is valid.
The resulting sound is queered, due to the nature of the assembly of noise makers. Where one instrument or non instrument is expected to make one sound, many of the same makes a percussive accompaniment that is rough and unfamiliar, thus transforming the final sound into something curious and exciting.
The community singing moments during the performance has much the same effect. All voices interpret the available melody uniquely, resulting in a rich sonic tapestry that encourages participation by broadening the margin for error. There is a feeling of unity and euphoria created by voices sining together. Artistically, this is something I often strive to achieve. I have experimented with recording this sound, however I have found the only true realisation of this sound is during live performances. It is a feeling meant to be felt through the vibrations in the air.
I write simple songs using conversational language. Drawing from the pop music tradition, I write using simple, triadic harmony and catchy melodies. Lyrically, I try to deliver everyday phenomenons in a familiar pop frame. For example: “Everybody looks at each other/as they wonder by/everybody's looking, everybody’s looking” are the opening lyrics to the song Everybody Needs Somebody To See Them, set over chords D, G, Em, A. The purpose of this simplicity is to convey common universal truths in a childlike way, creating catchy pop influenced songs that give a humorous twist on the genre. I want to make people smile first, and think later.
This tone of songwriting really resonated with me while studying at Birmingham Conservatoire. Discovering Ivor Culter, a self described ‘humorist’ who writes songs, as well as poems, and presents both side by side as kind of epic story albums that almost hold a narrative but then again, simply creates a selection of curious thoughts and stories, perhaps from his life, or perhaps not. The point is not to make you laugh, he doesn’t tell jokes but the humour is intrinsic in the fantasy of the storytelling.
Discovering and performing folk music is another key contextual area of my songwriting. Folk music tells simple stories, of legends and lovers in a narrative way. The interesting thing, I think is that no body knows the people in the songs, so there’s no way to guarantee their truth. But despite this, the stories resonate with people still today and we sing them as if they were our own truths. This idea, like Ivor Cutler, of being blurring truth and fantasy supports my intention.
There was a tone in the Conservatoire of humour and fun as a way to express ideas that challenge the seriousness of modernism. There’s a childlike curiosity and charm coming from the teachers, Joe Cutler, Michael Wolters, Howard Skempton… Howard was a founding member of the Scratch Orchestra along with Cornelius Cardew, making experimental music with both trained and untrained musicians. This, as well as classes that introduced us to the Fluxus movement, and performing the bizarre and nonsensical music and performances from this time. It was fun, and funny, and curious and strange, and this made me want to create music that fit the brief. Or rather, I was happy to discovery that my music already fit the brief.
On the 6th of April 2022, during our class presentation week at RMC I decided to make a change. I had already presented the birthday party situation at least twice, so I thought about how to make the presentation different. It was during the presentations the day before mine, that I chose to transform Evelyn’s birthday, into a rehearsal for Evelyn’s birthday. The experiment was a success, as I realised the rehearsal format opens up so many more possibilities for interaction.
There’s a safeness in a rehearsal that allows participants the opportunity to attempt, and fail, and succeed. There is no goal of performance, or perfection, simply trying to do something.
During a rehearsal, as the leader of it I am both the performer and the facilitator of the event. I both guide people through performing an idea, and perform my material to them. In this format I am able to create a space both for myself to perform behind a mic and a stand, and leave that space to unite myself with the audience and thus place myself inside the community. I see this as an extension of the idea of leaving the ‘stage’ during the birthday song to move around the audience. However this way I am able to play with leaving and returning from the performance space, which creates a dynamic contrast between community participation and artistic performance.
There is a balance created, one which shifts and morphs throughout the concert between community and performacne. I am striving to both reward the audience with performed music, and open the space in order for them to explore ideas of participation within a performance setting.
Community music has an undeniably valuable function in society. It gives the untrained, amateur, music-curious musicians a voice and creates a platform to bring out the beauty and purity of their expression, without the pressure of hours of lonely practise, perfection or performance. “community music… is defined by its methods of work and aims, rather than by any art form itself” (L. Higgins, 2012) It builds communities, by placing its emphasis on process over product, and allowing for a social and democratic environment in which people can discover and nurture relationships outside of more traditional social situations. There is a welcome extended to all members, old and new, who together, under direction of the leader, work together towards a common goal. The style and genre of course varies hugely but the fundamental values can be found across all community music settings.
Community music must be lead by a skilled leader, who is able to simultaneously introduce material and ‘see’ everybody in the room, to ensure a solid creative environment that is shared by each and every individual present, regardless of previous experience, age, gender, race, sexuality etc.There is an equal platform between facilitator and participant, which is something not present in audience participation. I mention this because my performance may appear as audience participation however my intentions go deeper. Typically, community music is structured as series of meetings, sometimes called rehearsals, or sometimes called ‘workshops’, as this allows for a more flexible and improvised approach to music creation. In the workshop we are allowed to try, attempt, fail, and try again. A rehearsal may be a more off-putting term to describe community music, a hesitant participant might easily feel intimidated by the formality and association with professionalism. Either way, it’s important that the atmosphere of the meeting be about attempting to achieve something together, as a group of equals. By comparison, at the other end of the spectrum we might find a professional ensemble, something like an orchestra or a choir, who, unlike the community musicians, are trained to varying extents and are most likely paid to participate. Although arguably the ensemble might embody some of the values of community music: social bonding, participating, commitment etc, there are some key factors which I believe separate these groups from community music:
Money – the act of participation is work, and might create a sense of obligation rather than genuine interest.
Audition – the group is locked out to amateurs, and requires a level of skill to be worthy to participate. There might also be the continuing possibility of loosing a position, and therefore your skill and worthiness must remain visible
Hierarchy – the direction and shape of the music is dictated by a figure head, one or more people who instruct the other musicians how to perform.
I think it’s important to briefly consider the opposite, to gain a clearer picture of community music as I understand it.
There’s so much I haven’t discovered or considered about community music. Or, more broadly about community itself. Every time I hear something mentioned about another culture’s music that involves the audience participating with the musicians, clapping, singing, dancing… I become so overwhelmed, so diminished in my tiny world, my miniscule attempt at creating community in a performance setting, that this whole project loses almost all its meaning and I feel stuck, and futile in my attempts to even begin to try to explain what’s really going on. But I must attempt to explain, I must remember that my experiences are valid, even though my knowledge is not encyclopedic, barely even broad, but I can offer my experiences, in a genre of western music where there is not a strong tradition of the audience interacting with the performers. Or, at least not any more. Perhaps I could dive deeper back into the folk tradition, and track the evolution from folk to popular, and see what happens. But in the end I want my research to be auto-ethnographic, based on personal experience and reflection, as this is really the only way for me to communicate my ideas in a true and interesting way, a way that allows the experiences to be shared honestly without the folly of the attempt to conduct ‘proper’ research; a more traditional academic research, well rounded and thorough. The main point of this project is artistic discovery; a discovery which is ongoing and indefinite, and therefore does not ask much in way of conclusions or definitions.
After finishing the masters in August 2020, I felt the series had served its purpuse, and now I could begin to explore making music in a new way. After starting the artistic research in September 2020 I had an impulse to change creative direections. So often in music education we’re taught to be changing our creative practice. If you’re not changing you’re standing still, which is how creativity dies, or something like that. So I tried to change.
I wanted to make a change, so I put something over my face. My face is where the words come out, it is its own speaker, and can also be used to make expressions. Expressions are how I communicate with others. When performing, I use my face to ask people to do things, like sing, or play, or move sometimes. My body is also involved, but I am not going to talk about my body. I covered my face with itself, I placed a speaker from an old amplifier on top of it, and reversed its function. Now my face is looking at itself, in the dark. It is a mirror reflecting sound, rather than light. Now I can speak, and my words travel backwards, and out through a speaker. In this private space, I can make confessions, and they will be broadcast. It is a private space made public, and my expression is hidden. I cannot show you how I feel, but I can tell you. Now, I want you to stand up. Now, I want you to sit down. - Josh Herring 2020
This was part of performance I prepared for an RMC presentation in December 2020. I had this idea to wear a microphone over my face. I turned an old guitar amplifier into a microphone and attempted to strap it to my face. I wrote a series of songs called ‘Do You Still Love Her?’ where the only lyric was this, repeated and the material was a repeated motif played on Rhodes and drum kit simultaneously. Looking back I’m really confused as to why I made this decision, but I think as I was beginning a new chapter, a new year, new course I felt the pressure to reinvent. I thought about doing the opposite of my practice up to that point, and the point where it has returned to now, which had been about being big, and present and visible. I thought about hiding, being completely hidden, and seeing what that does when trying to interact with an audience. Unfortunately I didn’t get to try it on a ‘real’ audience, but I gave up on it, slowly phasing it out over the corse of the year until I was allowed to perform in public again. If it opened up anything, it opened up a consideration for dynamics in a performance. Which is something I carried through, even though I ditched the mic-mask. Eventually I returned to the sing it with me format, after I realised the value and potential of it, not just as a lockdown project but as a means to create material in a restricted way, and be creative regularly (as well as having the added benefit of remaining active on social media)
The pre Evelyn times were actually pretty bleak. There were so many intermittent lockdowns, it really destroyed any growing sense of community I felt among my peers after finishing the masters. Gigs were organised, and cancelled, and re organised, and it felt like there was a growing queue of musicians waiting to play, at which I was at the back. In terms of my research, I felt I couldn’t acheive anything, as what I was aspiring to do was perform to an audience and experiment with community building. My only opportunitieswere our class presentations, at which I made some experiments. My only ray of light in this whole period, was discovering that I could go backwards into a project I started called Sing It With Me.
The lockdown period forced me to be creative in new ways In the summer of 2020 I began to work on a series of songs I called Sing it with me. The purpose of this was to present short and humorous songs, written and performed in a day from different rooms in my apartment. The parameters were:
1) having a singalong element in the song, with lyrics provided, and melody indicated by me, with no prior teaching. Moving my hand up and down to indicate melody direction
2) short, verse/chorus structures
3) filmed on a phone, in one take
4) written, performed and uploaded to social media the same day
These parameters gave me the focus I craved to be able to generate new material, that was a continuation of a practice of simple songwriting. The idea of the ‘sing it with me’ element was born from some experiments I made during the masters, inviting the audience to participate during some of the songs I performed with my band. There was so little connection during this period of isolation, and I really wanted to continue the practice of inviting my audience inside my music, creating a deeper connection to the material. I never really imagined that the viewer would actually be singing, at home, or out and about, watching on their phone, or that the songs would be heard in their entirety, but there was something about the potential of it, that forged an extra dimension to the experience of listening that I found interesting.
The kitchen percussion feeds off the idea of community music – the idea that everybody has the ability to make music using only the things around us. What it sacrifices in quality of sound, it makes up for in its ability to communicate this. Again, there is a closness, or a familiarity to the imperfection that can make the sound so much more joyful to the experience. Having said that, I happen to actually enjoy the actual aesthetic of the sound: I enjoy odd, unusual or rough sounds especially when it comes to percussion, I think it brings an edginess, and an intensity to the sound. The situation is queered, becuase normally the rhythms would be expected to be played by expensive drum kits or electronicly, not by household items.
