After I realised that I wanted to create these workshops, I quickly understood that I wanted to have some musicians who could develop this project with me and be the subject of my research. Due to the fact that I don't speak Dutch, and since I would be working with children, it was more natural for me to conduct the workshops in Norway. That's why I ended up finding two Norwegian musicians.
I asked baritone saxophonist Jenny Frøysa and double bassist Nicolas Leirtrø to join my project. They are both improvisers with degrees from Jazzlinja at NTNU in Trondheim, Norway. I knew them both from before and had played in different constellations previously with them both, but never just the three of us together.
Therefore we started this journey with having a session in February 2024 where we did some free improvised and improvisation over a drawing.
"Whether alone or with others, I believe that music is a way of expressing yourself. I believe that any sound can be music as long as it comes from an intention. I also believe that, no matter how many rules there may be for different types of music, music will always be subjective since we all are individual human beings." (Angelsen, 15.10.2024)
"I believe that music is a necessary result of the human urge to be creative and to create. Music, and art in general, adds something to life that we can't get any other way, and helps to make whole, at one with ourselves and the world. This happens regardless of whether the music merely pleases us, challenges us or enlightens us. The sense of community that exists in both listening to and performing music nourishes one of the most basic components of human existence: belonging, and cannot be fully replaced by anything else."
(Frøysa, 21.10.2024, via email)
"For me, music is a way of expressing or communicating feelings, emotions or something else, through sound and noise and the lack of those and the balance and imbalance between them. It can be presented in endless different ways through planned or not planned organization - composition, improvisation or spontaneous expression caused, shaped or influenced by experiences and impulses from the performing musician, through interaction with other musicians, or through interaction and impact with the audience, the room, or other external and internal factors." (Leirtrø, 13.01.2024, by email)