This structure helped me a lot to visualize and structure the creation and from this motivation, I developed more melodies on my own between sessions, feeling a real growing of joy and gratitude inside me. Essi and I continued practising and developing our performance until we decided that adding percussion would be a great idea. On our first practise with the percussionists we provided them our visual structure but it turned out to not be so useful for them to understand the musical changes. From it, we developed a more common musical structure (similar to figure 1.12) that would help them to follow the different parts and rhythms changes. Even if all the musical material was provided to the percussionists, they had an active voice on refining the final piece. Only at the last practises we added percussion to Stages of growth and it was very rewarding.
With the singers, Noora and Zane, I worked separately. Because we were practising for the song Darkness and Light it was practical to take a few minutes of those practises to teach them the melody created that would go for the last part of Stages of growth. We worked collaboratively as they proposed a second voice, and together we practised a two-part canon. This melody was a repetitive melody, and we planned to encourage the audience to sing along with us during the performance. The last part where the singers join represent all the branches that are appearing as shown in the visual score (Figure 1.8).
3 Stages of growth
The creation of this song took place with the double bass player Essi. During the first practise I introduced her to the theme of Stages of growth and facilitated an exercise of being aware of our breathing in which I played a singing bowl. After a while, I guided her to reflect on how the word growing resonates in her. The following talk about our experiences included some ideas of learning curves and stages of realization. Following, we translated our ideas into a music improvisation.
For the second session, I was bringing composed material that was totally influenced by our first session and consequent talk. When I performed it to her, Essi realized the connection with our previous talk mentioning the smooth growing of the musical material that could symbolise the curves of learning. After we practised and worked on the arrangement, we sat down and listened together to the recording. As we were getting really excited on how it was sounding we started to draw a form in a big paper that ended up to be the visual score for our piece (see Figure 1.8). Drawing ideas, forms, feelings, and characters for each part was unexpected and unplanned. Observing the connection of the music with the topics of our early conversation, we realized the power of setting a mental intention present within our creative practise.