This analysis serves as a second phase of the project. On the preceding pages, you can read about the development that took place between the workshops, and how my fellow musicians and I developed the project through exploration and reflection. This analysis is written with a certain distance to the workshops in order to see the workshops from a different point of view, to reflect on the development and to see if we should approach something differently.
This workshop started with an idea to make experimental music more accessible through the use of drawing and graphic notation. During these six workshops, my fellow musicians and I have, through exploration, developed a workshop consisting of several exercises related to the concept that drawings can become sound and sound can become drawings. Through these workshops, we have naturally landed on a form that consists of five parts/exercises: Introduction, exploration of how drawings can become sound, creating our own scores, performing the final score, summarising. Parts 2-4 can be seen as ideas that have developed into exercises through exploration and reflection during the first 5 workshops.
Exercise 1: Drawing can become sound
During the first five workshops, the section called Drawing can become sound has developed from being an introduction to a concept into an exercise in which both the audience and the musicians interpret and play. By getting an idea, trying it out and reflecting on it, my fellow musician and I have developed this exercise through five workshops. Here you can read about the current goal of the exercise and the different stages of development.
What we did in addition to the exercise was that we linked our graphic drawing to the score that the children had made in the exercise no 2. Therefore in exercise 3 the final score consisted of both the children's drawings and our drawing. During the performance we, the musicians, started improvising over the children's drawings, but at some point Nicolas stopped playing and started conducting the drawing instead, getting the audience to join in on the performance. For the last two workshops, we're going to try out the same thing we did in workshop #5.
The second exercise is about approaching the relationship between sound and drawing from the opposite angle as in exercise one. This exercise hasn't evolved much from the original idea, and has pretty much remained the same since the beginning. That being said when analysing this exercise there are multiple questions that should have been asked.
When you look at the drawings the children made and listen to the music we played while they made the drawings, it's hard to see any connection. But this is not really relevant since the whole point of the exercise is for each child to draw their own associations. A bigger concern for the exercise is whether the children are actually listening or if they are just drawing because they are drawing. In several of the reflection conversations we musicians have after the workshops, we discuss whether they're actually listening, and how we should word things to make it clear that they should listen before they draw. We try different approaches, such as in workshop 3, where two of the musicians start playing while the last musician is still handing out markers and answering the children's questions.
Looking back at the videos from workshops 1 to 3, you can hear that the children talk a lot while drawing, some groups more than others, but it happens in all three workshops. Based on this, it may seem that they are more interested in the drawing part of it, than in the music being played. On the other hand, there are several moments in all three videos where you can see that many of the children turn their heads towards us, especially when the texture changes or a new, contrasting sound appears.
In connection with all this, a peculiar thing happened in workshop 2 that may indicate that the children are more aware of the music than we think. During the rehearsal, the music suddenly became fast, noisy and loud. The children suddenly start laughing, and one child shouts: "It sounds like a farting castle!". When looking through the drawings from that workshop one can see a castle that for many seems like it is farting.
It's hard to say what's going on in children's minds when they draw while we play, and we can't be sure that everyone is paying attention, but events like the fart castle suggest that something is going on.
Exercise 3: Performing the final score
At this point in the workshop, we have presented the concepts Drawings can become sound and Sound can become drawings through two different exercises. In the final exercise, we look back at exercise 1 again, but this time we use the children's drawings from exercise 2. This exercise consists of three steps.
When we did exercise #3 in the first three workshops, we had no plan for how to ask questions. The tendency was that in stage 1 we asked what each child had made and what the drawing represented. We tried to remember this and took it with us into stage 2, where we pointed to different drawings and said that this is a mouse, "What sound does the mouse make?”. Going into the third stage, we told them that we were now going to play all their drawings and get them to listen for the specific things we were talking about.
Going through the videos for this exercise, it seems that the way we ask questions is very crucial to how the exercise turns out, and in many ways this also guides us in how to play the drawing. We haven't discussed in advance how we will interpret the children's drawings. The plan is to do it in the same way as with our own drawing at the beginning, but by talking to the children about specific drawings and their sound before we play, we are in many ways giving ourselves guidelines for what sounds we should play and what the children should listen for. From a musical perspective, this makes things a little more complicated, as we are in theory restricting our musicality and giving up spontaneity. Whether we actually play the sounds described with the children or not is a bit difficult to say, and therefore we can also complicate things for the children when we tell them to listen for their drawings. Interpreting the drawings as both a performer and a listener is an individual task, but the way we formulate ourselves when explaining this exercise, I'm afraid we create expectations that we don't fulfil.
I remember a child from workshop #5 asking ‘But how do I know you're playing my drawing?’ after we had explained that we were going to play all the drawings. For the last two workshops, we should focus more on explaining to the children how we musicians will play their drawings. I think it's more important that we emphasize that when we play these drawings, we will draw inspiration from their drawings, but how we interpret them and how it feels to them will be completely individual, just as each of us will have a different experience of how it feels to hear the drawings being played.
Another interesting element when trying to interpret these drawings is that we get the children to sit on either side of the sheet when they draw, but when we perform them, we musicians stand on just one side of the sheet so that many of the drawings are turned upside down. The idea with the big, long piece of paper was that we would end up with one long collective drawing that everyone would contribute to, but by playing out the drawings in this way, is it possible that some of the children feel that we have left out their drawing?
In the last two workshops, I want to focus more on making this exercise clearer, both for the audience and for us musicians. My fellow musicians and I need to talk more clearly about how we proceed the drawing and how we perform it. Should we change the way we create the score by using small pieces of paper? Should we move around during the final performance? How do we interpret the children's drawings and how do we explain how we approach our interpretation? This exercise has so far been created through spontaneity and exploration, but after going through the videos I think we musicians need to talk about how we approach the drawing and the questions we ask the children before we play, in order to make it clearer to the audience what is going to happen.
One interesting thing that hasn't come through clearly in the reviews of the workshops is the verbal tools we discover. In many ways, the verbal tools we learn and choose to use are as much a part of the workshop as the form and exercises themselve. The initial idea was that we would have a plan for the workshop, but that through the response we get from the children we might end up going in different directions than we had planned. That's why much of the workshop's content lies in how we ask questions, react to the feedback we get from the children and how we choose to interpret it.
"(...)maybe it was just that we were more confident, and when you're more confident you can often speak a little more clearly. You often tend to mess with words and speak more when you're unsure." (Frøysa, 01.03.2024, p. 2)
In workshop #4 we visited a Asylum reception centre. Before the workshop, we were unsure how many people would turn up, what age the children would be and what language we would be communicating in. When the workshop starts, there is only one child there who mostly speaks Spanish, but with two parents who speak both Norwegian and English. During the hour we're there, a few more children arrive, some of them accompanied by parents. The workshop doesn't get off to a clear start and ends up being somewhat chaotic. In the end, we ended up not doing anything according to plan. The whole workshop was improvised and the audience also came up with new exercises that we tried out together.
This particular workshop is in many ways irrelevant to the development of the workshop's layout, but from a more human perspective, this was the workshop that felt most impactful, at least for us musicians. Although we ended up not being able to realise our plan, we managed to create a space where we could explore and have fun together with strangers, both children and adults. Being able to do this has been one of the goals of this project, namely that you as a performer have the tools and skills to adapt and let the audience contribute to the exploration.
As Jenny says in the conversation afterwards, it's a strength that you can be flexible in this kind of work (Frøysa, 02.03.2024, p. 3). Drawing a parallel to the work of Adam Tinkle and Christopher Small, this type of situation challenges the perception of who can make music. Being in a space where, regardless of musical training, you can play with music together challenges the idea that music is for the select few who have "talent" and access to a traditional musical education.
In his book ‘Silence’, John Cage says that the word music can be replaced by the term ‘organisation of sound’, and when analysing the music in these workshops, this seems to be a more appropriate term (Cage, 1968, p.3). How do we organise the sound that comes from the children's drawings? How do we organise the sound in relation to the audience? How does the audience organise sound?
"I think it's important that we say that the focus isn't on being quiet, the focus is more on having respect for each other's listening and getting some quiet and focus to listen. I think they should be allowed to make some sound, we shouldn't train them to be a completely classical audience" (Leirtrø, 01.03.2024, p.1)
After the first six workshops, the current layout of the workshop presents three or four moments where the organisation of sound takes place. The first is when we, the musicians, play the drawing we have brought with us. The second only happened in workshops 5 and 6, when the musicians, together with the audience, performed the large graphic score we had prepared in advance. The third sound moment is when the musicians improvise while the children draw. The final sound moment is when the performers improvise over the children's drawing.
In each of these four moments, the way the sound is organised is different. In the first, the musicians improvise over a drawing they have made themselves, consisting of shapes, which makes it easy for them to interpret since they have made it themselves. In the second part, when the musicians and the audience perform the premade graphic notation, the sound and the way in which the drawing will be performed are worked out together. In the third part sound organisation, the musicians improvise freely without looking at any graphic score. In the last and fourth moment we, the musicians, do the same as in the first moment, but over the children's drawings, not their own.
As Nicolas stated after the third workshop, a goal for this project should be to play really good music in the end and that the project has great artistic value both for us and for the children. In the first and second reflection conversations, both Jenny and I mention how we both felt that we changed our musicality. Personally, I felt that I had to make the music understandable for the children, make them understand the connection between sound and drawing, and all the sounds we talked about during the workshop. In workshop #3, when we say that we are working on translating drawings into sound, we show them a drawing and say that we have just made sound from this drawing. At one point, Nicolas asks if this makes any sense, and one of the children replies: ‘I don't understand any of it’ (Video workshop #3, 08.20"). When we talk about this special moment afterwards, Nicolas says that he thinks it was a nice moment because we and the children could recognise that we didn't understand anything, but that we could figure it out together (Leirtrø, 01.03.2024, p. 2).
My experience from the workshop and Nicolas' reflection provoked the question of whether the goal of the workshop is for the children to understand the music. Perhaps this is where the distinction between an educational and artistic project comes in. From the start of the project, the aim has been to provide an aesthetic experience, not to teach the children about experimental music. With this as a starting point, it is perhaps more important to allow children to participate in the art than to understand it. Thus, from a musical perspective, it is more important that we musicians can deliver music at a high artistic level, at the same time as open up for the children to contribute with their musicality and creativity.
Related to all of this, the topic of abstract vs. concrete comes up in one of our conversations. After workshop #3, Nicolas mentions something about noticing that abstract thinking is almost not a thing (Leirtrø, 01.03.2024, p. 5). As mentioned earlier, the drawings consist of a lot of objects, such as boats, mice, etc., in addition to some shapes, but in the videos of the workshop you can also hear that when we talk about sound, they often connect the sounds to actual objects and things. Like in workshop #3 when we show an A4 sheet with lots of little blue dots and ask "What does this sound like?" and they immediately answer that it could be snow, caterpillars or leaves. We follow up with questions that steer clear of the concrete and instead focus on whether there are many or few dots, and whether the dots are small or large. After letting the children answer, one child says "I know, it's leaf fleas!" and we continue by trying to play the sound of leaf fleas.
"You realise that abstract thinking is almost non-existent. They immediately start to be like ‘yes it's caterpillars or it's a thing right". They don't analyse the drawing and think there are lots of small components or one big lump." (Leirtrø, 01.03.2024, p. 5)
With these experiences in mind, we as musicians may need to reflect on how we interpret the children's drawings. One of the goals of the workshop is to let the children be the driving force for the creative input. For this to happen, we as musicians need to have a greater awareness of what abstractness is for a child. The drawings that adults have made in the same workshops have been much easier for us musicians to interpret, perhaps because the shapes are more similar to the graphical notation in art music, and thus more similar to the way we associate drawings and music. That said, it is not the aim of the workshop for the children to draw a ‘traditional’ graphic score. It is perhaps more important that we musicians are able to ask questions and communicate with the children in a way that helps us understand their associations or connections. In other words, we can be verbally responsive and adaptive so that we have a greater understanding of their universe when we try to interpret their drawings.
The workshop has at this stage been developed and tested in different settings, with both private and public workshops, and collaborations with SoundLAB and Kunstfest Rotvoll. All these experiences have shown that the form and exercises of the workshop are flexible and can easily be adapted to different audiences. Nevertheless, all these experiences have raised questions about who this workshop is really for? One thing that has been clear from the start is that the workshop is for children, but what type of children do I want this project to be aimed towards?
The type of children this workshop is intended for is also linked to the organisation of the project. Who should we contact to organise the workshop? Which groups of children should we reach out to? What is the target group? Having the opportunity to collaborate with Muziekgebouw's SoundLAB and Kunstfest Rotvoll was a great opportunity to try out the workshop in a different environment and with a different audience, but this workshop also made me question whether it is a goal to bring this project into already existing art institutions.
These thoughts and questions are related to the question of what the goal of this artistic project is. My first thought about this project was that I wanted to create a workshop that presents experimental music to children and helps them understand this music, which in many ways makes sense from an educational perspective. As clarified earlier in this research, one of the goals of this workshop is that it should be an aesthetic experience, in other words, it is not a goal that the children should understand and learn. It seems that the first workshops are characterised by this uncertainty in the way we explain about our experience about performing. The first six workshops have been all about developing through exploration, but now that this project is entering a second phase, I think it's necessary to concretise the artistic goal of the project in terms of the direction the development will take.
When we talk about the goal of these workshops, the aim, as mentioned, is to provide an aesthetic experience where you have not only observed, but also participated. In this regard, music is an important factor. As mentioned below, the goal should be to be able to play music of high artistic quality, and to allow children to participate with their creativity. Whether this participation is through making music, drawing or listening, the aim should not be to try to make them understand and learn, but rather to let them experience and reflect on their experiences.
"You have to teach each person, each class group, and each moment as a particular case that calls out for particular handling" (Nachmanovitch, 2024, pg. 21)
The aim of the workshop is also closely linked to what we want the children to experience. Through the workshop, we want to promote the concept of co-creation, i.e. being able to create and express oneself creatively in a group. In addition, we want the children to experience a different musical expression. This includes the idea that the children should be able to participate in this artistic expression with their already existing musical skills and creativity, thereby recognising the value of the children's creativity and individuality.
In relation to what we want the audience to experience, we also need to think about who the workshop is intended for. The project has its origins in a cultural and political mindset that art and music should be accessible to everyone, and that creating art and music is not something that only a few people can do. In this lies the organisation of the project and who we choose to contact to carry it out. Throughout the 6 workshops, we have tried out different settings. It was fantastic to be able to collaborate with both SoundLAB and Kunstfest Rotvoll, but from a political point of view, as curator of the project, I see greater value in performing the project in non-art institutions, because this is where you meet people who don't know these institutions beforehand, such as when we give workshops in kindergartens.
The biggest question is what is the value of this artistic project. The goal of giving children a space where there is room for co-creation comes from a social and political perspective that art is not accessible to everyone in today's society. Through these meetings with the children, I as a musician want to say that art is for everyone and that through my artistic work I can help to create situations where everyone is allowed to explore their own creativity. I want the project to focus on reaching out to children who naturally, due to their social and economic status, do not have access to music institutions. Thus, the goal is for the project to have both a social and political value, in addition to an artistic value, of course.