As a great development of my workshop I got to collaborate with the SoundLAB workshops at the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam during the Cello Biennale. Here I, together with one of their workshops leaders lead a public workshops on the 2nd of November 2024.
The agreement was that we would merge their concept with mine so therefore I was joined by guitarist, producer, educator and workshop leader Roel Jans. This was also a perfect opportunity for me to further develop the workshop, since SoundLAB has a number of instruments that the audience gets to explore. The audience not only got to make drawings during this workshop, but also their own pieces of music.
The format for this workshop is based on the format for SoundLAB's workshops and implements some of my exercises in the already existing workshop. The goal of the workshop in general is for the participants to explore as much as possible, and for us as workshop leaders to act more as guides.
To the right here you can see the format of the workshop with the exercises shaped by me highlighted in orange.
In short the participants get to explore the instruments, we give them a composition assignment and they do the assignment and perform in groups for each other.
Since this workshop was also a collaboration with the Cello Biennale, it was important to implement the sound of the cello in some way. This is what we decided to do in the part called Discover the SoundLAB instruments.
After warming up together, we divided the group into four smaller groups and let them go into each room to discover the different instruments that were placed on a ‘planet’. First, SoundLAB's workshop leader gave the participants some instructions on how the instruments worked, and after we had let them play a little, I entered the room with my cello.
The exercise was simple: I played a sound on my cello, and the participants were supposed to look for sounds that were similar to their instruments.
The second element we added was the new exercise from workshop number 5 called ‘Explaining and exploring the concept’. In this exercise, I bring a graphic score, and through this I explain and explore with the audience that drawing can become sound. To the left you can see the realisation of the exercise. Underneath you can see the graphic score and hear the collective performance of the score (with no rehearsal!).
Reviewing the exercise
This was the second time I got to try out the exercise where I get the audience to perform a graphic notation together with me. In this rehearsal of the exercise, it's all influenced by the fact that I don't speak Dutch and that Roel has to translate for me. That said, the audience still makes suggestions about what sounds might fit the drawings, and both Roel and I help them along the way. Everyone participates both in the exploration of sound and when we perform the entire graphic notation.
The last of my elements was the final exercise given to the audience. The aim of the SoundLAB workshops is for participants to perform their own music at the end of the workshop in a group. Here we used my concept of letting them create their own graphic score that they could perform. I wanted to give as few guidelines as possible, so we started this exercise by telling you to get paper and pencils to create your scores, figure out how you want to play it, rehearse and then perform it. During the 25 minutes they had to develop a score and music, Roel and I walked between the groups giving suggestions and guiding the process.
An interesting thing that occurred during the creation of the drawing and music was that even though we gave them no guidelines, nearly all of them started the process by finding out how you could draw the sound of the instrument and from then create the drawing. Still all of them resulted in quite different results.
In group one there are three performers, two adults and a child. In their music you can hear a clear musical form and that the instruments have defined roles. The drawing is quite abstract, without any clear lines, but with defined shapes. In the drawing from group two, you can see some clear drawings of the instruments they play, such as the theremin, as well as objects such as a snake and a cupboard. The music they created has a clear tripartite shape with different instruments in the different parts.
In the example from group 3, the drawing consists of many different elements. All the drawings represent one instrument or the sound it produces. At Roel's suggestion, they wrote numbers to specify the order of performance. In their performance, you can hear that the first instrument creates the base and that the piece continues with elements of different instruments and sounds. In the fourth group, the drawing is characterised by minimalism, with few elements and simple figures. The music, on the other hand, is based on rhythmic elements, with only one instrument playing at a time.
It's interesting to see that the results from all the groups are so different, both musically and visually. It's also amazing to see the results considering they had about 20 minutes to make a drawing, familiarise themselves with their new instruments and learn how to play them.