Playing by ear

Each term I devise a different collaborative music project for each class at Pelican Primary School, which we develop over a series of weeks. The grade 4/5 class has been working on the song Somebody I used to know by Gotye (a Melbourne artist, they were excited to learn). The song starts with a xylophone melody that follows the contour of Baa Baa Black Sheep and the class were familiar with the song when I first played it to them.

This project of learning to play the Gotye melody has developed into an exploration of pitch, and specifically, using an understanding of pitch to learn to play familiar melodies by ear. My ideas of how best to facilitate this developed over the term – we were working things out together.

Week 1

Initially, after getting the students to listen to the melodic introduction to the song and mark the contour in the air with their hands, I gave each child a tuned percussion instrument (xylophones and glockenspiels), and told them the first two notes of the melody. I asked them to see if they could work out any of the other pitches. We played the song’s introduction over and over and they tried to play along. This was much too difficult for them and many of them got frustrated and disheartened. I realised that they didn’t know how to approach the task, so did a rethink.

Week 2

I introduced the idea of pitches or notes being the different letters on the instrument and we established that these can go up (higher, to the shorter bars) and down (lower, to the longer bars). I taught them about pitches “moving by step” (moving to the next adjacent note rather than to a note further away), and  that we weren’t going to be thinking about them “by skipping” (as they call it) at this stage. Again, everyone had an instrument, and I asked them to locate D. I played a short phrase, always starting on D, and only moving by step (up or down one step). They listened carefully, and we played a series of phrases (unrelated to the Gotye song) in call-and-response – me by myself, and all of them playing it back to me.

The group was highly engaged during this activity. They understood it, and were challenged by it, but it was achievable for most. Two or three didn’t seem to be responding so positively, and appeared to be hitting any notes randomly (albeit in rhythm with the phrase they were to copy) and laughing across to each other. I asked them to repeat my phrase one by one. Immediately they were more engaged, and repeated the pitches and rhythm accurately. I think they found the task frustrating because they couldn’t hear their own efforts when playing at the same time as everyone else. I find that this cohort (who I’ve written about many times in this blog), generally has a low tolerance of situations where they can’t get immediate feedback (which in music is the opportunity to clearly hear their own instrument in the mix) in music class. This creates disillusionment and frustration, they stop trying, and start distracting others. They wouldn’t be able to develop the skills if they were feeling annoyed by the task (or be able to develop the confidence to approach it) so I tackled this issue of being able to hear oneself the following week.

Week 3

We started a musical version of Chinese Whispers. I set up a line of 8 instruments. Player 1 invented a short phrase, starting on D and only moving by step between D, C and B. Players 2-8 had to try and play it back, taking it in turns so that they were all playing alone. Each child got at least one turn on an instrument. While they weren’t playing they were sitting as audience, listening and (hopefully) mentally figuring out the pitches for themselves.

Everyone – those who were sitting at an instrument and those who were in the audience – could hear when an echoing phrase was different to the original, or the same. A lot of excellent self-correcting started to happen.

Week 4

We discussed phrases in music. I explained that the phrase end was where there was a natural pause in the music – maybe not a long one, but a point where the musical line came to some kind of rest. We sang through Dynamite as an example (a favourite song of the class), and they raised their hands every time we came to the end of a phrase. Everyone did this with confidence. “You see?” I said, “You already know this about music. All I’m doing is putting a name to something that you already know and understand.”

Next, I gave out a chart of the Gotye introduction, written only in rhythmic notation. Each of the four phrases was colour-coded – red for phrase 1 and 3 (because these phrases are exactly the same rhythmically and in pitch), black for phrase 2 and blue for phrase 4. (Colour-coded information is a very helpful visual cue for a lot of my students, it helps them orient themselves around new information and not feel overwhelmed by unfamiliar symbols).

For this session, I asked them to focus only on phrases 2 and 4. Phrase 1, I explained, would be tackled later. Phrases 2 and 4 are slower (crotchets rather than quavers) and move only by step.

There was quite a buzz in the air in this class. The preliminary work we’d done on pitches moving by step had given the students tools for tackling the Phrase 2 & 4 challenge, and most of the class was able to play along with the recording by the end of the lesson. Some were already starting to figure out how to play phrase 1 – something that had been frustratingly difficult in the first week.

Next steps…

We will finish figuring out the notes for Phrase 1, and write the pitch names (according to what they have figured out) under the rhythmic notation on the chart. After that, we’ll creating a class arrangement, adding a bass line and other accompanying riffs, and create a drum/untuned percussion accompaniment by ear. I’m hoping they will be able to perform the piece for a school assembly in the next few weeks.

Learning journeys of young musicians

The first week of September always marks the last get-together of that year’s MSO ArtPlay Ensemble, a group that I direct every school holidays that is made up of 28 young musicians (aged 8-13 when they start, usually 9-14 by this time of year). Each time we meet, we compose a new piece of music using collaborative strategies and improvisation, taking inspiration from a core piece of orchestral repertoire.

Then the last project for the year is over (in this case, Elgar’s Cello Concerto Re-imagined), and I can reflect on the musical and developmental journeys that I’ve seen some of the young participants take.

Sullen violin girl

One girl came to us at the start of the year flanked by her sister and a friend. The three of them took part in the Open Workshops audition with a certain amount of eye-rolling and cynicism. I took a punt on the older of the two sisters being ready to branch out on her own and offered her a place in the ensemble. In the first project, she barely moved her bow. She and another girl, similar in age, joined forces and giggled their way through the project, offering little to the creative process. The musician leading that small group was infuriated.

The next project, we put her in a different group, and her musician leader gave her a lot of musical responsibility. She jollied her along, creating a shorter name for her (in a gesture of jovial friendliness) and insisted, in an encouraging, positive way, that she be the one to play a solo in her group. Sullen Violin Girl was sullen no more after that project.

Fast forward to September and the project we have just completed, and this violinist was a different person to how she’d been at the start of the year. When I asked at one point for volunteers to play a solo – an improvised solo – she was the first to raise her hand. “Great sound!” I enthused at one point, and she happily told the whole group that this was her new instrument. (That’s a topic for a whole other post, the wonderful momentum that cam come when a young player starts to play on a decent instrument). She was obviously very proud, but also so much more confident. Her’s was a very positive journey, from insecure, shy, sullen teenager to someone who was really starting to blossom.

Hard-to-stay-focused boy

This boy was one of the younger members of the group. He’d impressed us all at the auditions with his vibrant imagination. He wasn’t a strong player, but he obviously loved inventing his own music. Once in the large group however, he floundered. He found it difficult to stay on task as long as the others in the group, needed a lot of personalised attention, and would frequently raise his hand to ask when we’d be taking a break.

In the second project it all got too much for him and there were tears. “Just because I’m the youngest doesn’t mean I always have to play the easy stuff,” he wailed. I sat with him and listened, and explained how we were happy for him to make the music harder for himself. If his part was too boring he could change it to make it more challenging. But, I told him, he has to try and do this by himself. His musician-leader would help him, but he’d need to take the initiative. He cheered up with that information, and went off to eat his lunch.

In the September project, he was still energetic and twitchy, but I got the sense that he’d settled into our routine now. When we did body percussion in our warm-ups he didn’t – as in previous warm-ups – start to jitter his feet and legs like an out-of-control Irish dancer, but managed to stay more or less in one place. At one point he came and showed me his bag of rice crackers. “I don’t want to get hungry! I’m always hungry here!” he told me. He still raised his hand and asked for breaks at inopportune moments, but I too had learned how to respond to this, and would tell him he should take a break if he needed one, but that I needed to keep the rehearsal going a bit longer. “Oh… alright then. I’ll stay too,” he said, sighing.

He played a solo, in a section where I had asked each of the soloists to play very slowly. “You could change notes just at the start of each bar,” I suggested. His eyes never left me during that section, waiting for his cue. He played his improvisation just as I’d asked, one note, changing at the start of each bar. Slow and solid. I think he knew how good it sounded.

I didn’t get to catch up with his parents at the end of the project. After the tears in the middle of the year his dad had said, “This is so good for him! Being part of a group, having to work with others… he isn’t good at these things, and he is just getting so much out of it.”

The quiet ones

After the project had ended in September and I was back home, I found myself thinking about the quieter members of the group. They were among the less confident players. One was a cellist, one of the oldest in the group, and quite a beginner. Initially we’d had two older beginner cellist girls in the group (I try to ensure the older kids have someone else their own age in the Ensemble – I can well remember the self-consciousness I felt as a teenager taking part in activities where I seemed to be the oldest and the tallest) but the other girl never came back after the first project. This girl didn’t get to blossom the way the Sullen Violin Girl did. She never put her hand up to play a solo and would shake her head in horror if asked to do so directly. I don’t think she liked playing alongside the other two cellists who were both younger than she.

Two other girls who didn’t ever want to play a solo were sisters. They had learned to play their instruments (piano and violin) in a very stern, traditional, schooled fashion, and the creativity of the Ensemble was a very new experience for them. I think the younger sister got a lot out of it – as a violinist she was often a section player and so not necessarily being asked to invent things for her instrument. The older sister was the main pianist/percussionist in the group, and by September I realised she was not offering her musician-leaders anything. Everything she played was suggested to her by someone else.

In a fast-paced 2-day project like the ArtPlay Ensemble projects, there isn’t a lot of time to coax individuals. You can make suggestions and encourage them to try, but if they don’t respond, time demands that you move on. In this way, I think the project wasn’t as good for some as it was for others. Was it the wrong project for them? Were we wrong to offer a place? Or was there a small sense of hope inside them that something in this project would unlock the kernel of potential that they know is there, but that they cannot voice due to the greater fear of sounding ‘wrong’?

Playing by ear

I’ve led two composition projects recently that worked with just a limited range of pitches, and it’s interesting to see how this restriction helps the participants hone in their aural skills and pitch awareness.

The first project was with teenagers at Signal. Linked to the Australian Art Orchestra’s ongoing collaboration with musicians from South India, we developed an original composition that took inspiration from one of the AAO’s movements of the work Into The Fire, borrowing a mode, a tala (like a time signature), some melodic phrases, and some structural ideas and rhythmic patterns.

The mode had 6 pitches ascending and 5 pitches descending. We learned it aurally, slowly, and got the participants to improvise on it and invent short patterns and phrases. Later, when we began to teach melodic material that was taken directly from the original (again, aurally), I was impressed by how quickly the group found the pitches and memorised the phrases. They were already becoming sensitive to the ‘taste’ of the different pitches within the mode, and their relationships with each other. Or if they weren’t, they were getting better at making more accurate educated guesses as to which note in the 5-6-note mode was being played.

That group was a jazz and improvisation group so perhaps their ears were more ready to be put to use. The following week, with a group of classically-trained younger musicians at ArtPlay (aged 9-14 years), we were creating short sections of music using only the notes of the Aeolian mode (A to A on the white notes of the piano, A natural minor). The group was tired, and uncertain how to proceed. I reminded them, “We’re only using these 7 notes! You don’t need to guess, just notice if it is going up or down from where you already are, and if it moves by step or by leap. Then find the note. And listen for its flavour!”

A little while later, I felt a shift in the group. We’d reached a section in the music where I wanted everyone to create a short riff, working in instrument sections. I wanted them to do this quickly, there and then, as we were short on time. What I felt was a shift in energy, where enough of the participants suddenly understood that every one of those 7 notes would sound “good” and “right” and that all they had to do was arrange some of them in a rhythm. Suddenly, we had riffs bursting out all over the group. One player would invent something, and the others in that section would learn it from them, on the spot.

“That’s the idea!” I thought to myself. There is something really liberating about the discovery that you can figure out how to play something by listening to it. Some young players instinctively understand this, but others are filled with trepidation. It takes courage to blow or bow those first tentative notes, trying to match pitches or play by ear – but how thrilling the energy rush is that you get when you realise it worked!

Music in immigration detention, day 4

I’ve now given my fourth and final workshop at the immigration detention centre. John (guitarist and music volunteer) and I returned to Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation on Saturday afternoon equipped with a range of  guitar, drums and other percussion, and together with the young men there we worked our way through our repertoire of music from Iran and Afghanistan, with some spontaneous improvisations along the way.

Once again, the workshop set its own pace in a very organic way. It had a sense of ease and familiarity to it, I felt, perhaps as a result of the warm relationships that we’ve been building over these last few weeks. We were greeted by Hussein, the singer, and Arun, the young man who’d started learning some guitar chords in the previous workshop. For the first time, no-one moved to take the drums, or pull percussion out of the crates. Today, the mood was more reflective, and when the music began in its usual emergent, un-led way, it was with everyone playing guitar. We showed Hussein the two chords (E minor and A sus 2) that we’d worked with the previous week, and the four of us strummed in rhythm together, getting a rich full sound from the guitars.

A new person wandered in – Mustafa, another young man from Afghanistan. He left again almost immediately but returned minutes later with his own guitar. It had a broken string but John found a way to fix that, and then got him started on the chords.

I think it was Hussein breaking into song that might have moved us away from the chords and onto some percussion. I think he might have started with a song that we didn’t already know but that invited some energetic drumming. From that first casual improvisation we began to move through the material we already knew from previous weeks.

Saghe emshab mesle harshab ektiaram dastete

“Soltane Ghalbhe?” I suggested to Hussein. He looked back at me, and countered with “Saghe”.

“Soltane,” I said again, thinking that perhaps my pronunciation was wrong and he hadn’t understood me. “Saghe,” he repeated, with a persuasive smile and perhaps some steely determination. Who was I to argue with such enthusiasm? So we launched into Saghe emshab mesle harshab ektiaram dastete.

We needed to change the key this week – we’d been playing it in the same key as the CD but it was too high for Hussein. Easy for John on guitar to adjust of course! But it moved it into an awkward key signature for me and when we got to the instrumental break I realised that I hadn’t quite assimilated the new key properly. I broke off and Hussein looked at me in bemusement. “What, what?” he asked, gesturing at me and at his friends in mock dismay.

This halt in proceedings meant another song got started, and I worried we wouldn’t get to do Saghe with everyone (I confess, it is a favourite of mine as it took quite a bit of learning). Still, this new song sounded fun. When I sat back down again I asked Hussein, “Can we sing the new song again?”, hoping I could learn it.  He gave me the quizzical look that I now know he always gives me when I suggest doing something again. “What would we want to do that for?” it seems to ask. Every now and then he humours me with these strange requests but that day wasn’t one of those times. Never mind. I tried out the clarinet solo for Saghe in the new key, the new song got discarded, and we were ready to get going.

John started the song with a short rhythmic intro, and then Hussein began singing, with the clarinet also playing the tune. The rest of the guys (including John) joined in on the chorus ‘response’ and we sounded pretty good, pretty tight! It still moves at a fantastic pace and it’s tricky to keep the 6/8 feeling going, but overall we were a much more aware ensemble this week.

Soltane Galbhe

From there, we moved to Soltane Ghalbhe (King of Hearts).

I didn’t really like this song when I first hunted it down on YouTube. On my first couple of listens it sounded like one of the overblown, full-orchestra, grandiose versions of folk songs that were so popular in Bosnia at the time I worked there. However, since we started singing it each week at MITA, I’ve developed a great fondness for it. The melody has a sense of yearning or heartache in its phrases, and it feels like it has a powerful emotional resonance for the guys, who always sing it in full voice. John played the guitar, Arun provided an additional E minor chord drone, and I played the melody on the glockenspiel, accompanying the singers.

There was a point where I think the singers felt the song had ended, but I kept it going on the clarinet, playing the melody once more. As I experienced in my first week at MITA, in very expressive, emotion-filled musical moments such as this, the clarinet has a way of pulling the focus of the group inwards in quite an intense way. The room becomes stiller, and they give their attention to the instrument and the sound.

Soltane Ghalbha has a verse (played 2 times) followed by a chorus, higher in pitch and with a sense of emotion and yearning. The singers joined in again when I reached this point and together we played/sang through to the end of the song. I caught Hussein’s eye at one point, his face was serious as he sang, and it was clear to me that this song, at this moment, had a huge sense of poignancy for them. There was silence after it ended, and then they all breathed out, or slightly nodded or shook their heads, making connection with each other in response to the song, no words exchanged.

Bia ke borem ba Mazar

The remainder of the workshop was focused on Bia ke borem ba Mazar, that I now know is about a well-known pilgrimage city in Afghanistan, home to a very beautiful mosque.You can see it in this video:

With four guitars at our disposal (two of John’s, one of mine, and one belonging to Mustafa) we decided to teach the guys how to play the chords for this song.

We taught the chords one at a time, and labelled each as ‘chord 1’, ‘chord 2’, ‘chord 3, and ‘chord 4’. Arun was a quick learner, as was Hussein. They got used to watching our fingers to check the chord shape, and then checking in on each other’s fingers in order to stay together. They picked up on the way I was numbering the strings of the guitar as a way of explaining each of the chords (eg. A minor, our ‘chord 1’, uses strings 2, 4 and 3) and began to repeat these strings of numbers to themselves as a way of remembering the different fingerings. One of the MITA staff members lent us a marker and we drew up some big chord diagrams and labelled these too.

Meanwhile, Mustafa was keen to learn the glockenspiel part. We worked through the first three phrases (which are a melodic sequence) slowly. Once he’d got these memorised we added the fourth phrase. This took more than an hour of work on his part, I’d say, and it was extraordinary to see how focused he was. He gave himself barely a break, and played it over and over again, phrase by phrase.

Once the guitarists had the four chords ready, we started to put the two lines together. We would pause on the penultimate note of each phrase to give the guitarists time to change to the next chord, and gradually these pauses became shorter until the chord changes were happening more or less in time.

I played the clarinet along with Mustafa, providing a guide. By now too, we’d been joined by a number of other guys (the ones we usually see towards the end of the session – I think of them as the ‘late-risers’), and they were happy to sing along. Our group garnered quite a bit of attention from people wandering through the building, including interpreters and other MITA staff – I think we sounded pretty impressive by that stage.

Numbers began to dwindle in the last half-hour. Hussein and Arun stood up, shook our hands and wandered off – they had computer time booked, I think, and didn’t want to lose it. Some more guys came to join us.

One was the authoritative young man who’d informed us of the price of keyboards in Pakistani marketplaces, back in week 2. He is an interesting person, with such a hunger for intellectual stimulation, I think. He picked up the descant recorder that I’d brought along (hoping to see Javid, the recorder player from the previous week) and began to play. He clearly had experience with wind instruments as he played with a strong tone, and moved his fingers in intricate repetitive patterns, sliding his fingers to create quarter-tones and fluttering them on and off the holes to create a kind of vibrato effect. I improvised along with him for a while, mimicking his phrases, and adding echo-lines.

After a while, he stopped, took the recorder from his mouth and said sadly, “But, this instrument is no good. It’s not a good sound.” I agreed with him – this was a plastic recorder, and definitely had its limitations! Still, he did more with it than many. I could imagine him playing a wooden instrument.

Later he went to the kitchen to make tea – “Pakistani-style tea!” he told me proudly. I watched as he filled two cups 2/3 full of milk, and put it in the microwave to boil, then put three tea-bags in a third cup, filled it with boiling water in the urn and added this to the microwave too. When everything was boiled and brewing, he poured the tea into the cups of milk, which was now frothy and thoroughly boiled, added sugar, gave one to me and carried the second one out to give to John.

Our session ended on time today, because everyone left! As I said, it had its own organic shape to it, from start to finish. We never suggested doing the concert in the Visitor Centre. There was no activity officer working with us today to facilitate it, but in any case, it didn’t feel necessary. I loved the focused, studious learning energy that we tapped into in this session. The frantic, almost competitive noise and energy of earlier sessions was transformed into something calmer, more focused and collaborative.

This was the last of my booked workshops at MITA. Hopefully they will decide to continue them – it feels to me like it is too early to stop. The guys are only just getting used to the fact that we come along every Saturday afternoon, and what they can expect from, and ask of, the workshops. Maybe in time, the range of what we do will broaden, to include more improvisation, perhaps some songwriting, as well as the performances of music from their countries. I think it has been a good experience for everyone so far. It certainly has been for me and John.

Music in immigration detention, part 2

I made my second visit out to MITA [Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation] recently, leading music workshops with the young men there. Once again it was a session with lots of music and energy, that demonstrated  the way that music offers these young men a way to explore their skills and their sense of identity through music. It also generated some interesting questions about ways of working with structure and form (in terms of music, and in terms of workshop content) in this challenging environment.

My first visit was 3 weeks ago, with the following two sessions postponed due to illness (mine) and a lock-down (at MITA, due to a public protest). I was joined for this second visit by a volunteer, John. John is a guitarist and mandolin player (though an economist by trade). The MITA Activities Officer also took part in the session.

During the week I’d been thinking about establishing a bit more structure in the workshops. Would the group benefit from, and respond well to, a warm-up activity of some kind? I planned a simple task that would teach us all each other’s names and kept this in mind as a starting point. However, the first guys to arrive began playing instruments as soon as they entered the space and once they’d started, it wasn’t easy to stop them. The level of English is generally very low, and without an interpreter, it is more effective to go with the flow of their energy than to try and impose a different activity to what they have started themselves.

Sound Journey – ‘the Camel Caravan’

On Friday morning my colleague Jen and I presented the first two workshops in this series of four. The Sound Journey is a project I’ve been working with one of the directors of Pocketfool Productions, who create beautiful, detailed arts experiences for children aged 2-5 years. Jen invited me to develop a music project with her that would focus on young children making very deliberate decisions about when and what they would play. So often for this age group, Jen lamented, it is just about giving the children instruments and having a bit of a playing free-for-all. The intention with this project was to encourage the children to listen, and to play with care, deliberation, and new ears.

We designed it as a journey, with the open space and natural light of ArtPlay in mind, and suggested to the children that they would be travelling as a group of camels, joined by a long length of bells (the traditional kini-kini, or bana bells that I bought in East Timor). Holding these bells, the children moved through a range of different landscapes, including a market place where they could buy sounds of all sizes and impressions (icy sounds, shiny sounds, big sounds, bony sounds), and a sea journey where they placed their hands on the rim of the ocean drum and moved its tiny silver balls en masse around the drum’s interior, making circles and waves. The journey culminated with a little village of three cardboard houses, large enough for the children to enter, and each with an instrument inside. The children took it in turns to enter a house, and play the instrument inside, while the other children and their parents listened. This point in the journey captivated the children, and encouraged very attentive listening to the range of sounds, and excellent turn-taking.

It was gorgeous! Lots of beautiful music-making, and experiences of how this age group works best that are giving me lots of ideas for the other early-years workshops I have taking place later this year. We have two more of these workshops in a fortnight’s time.

Songwriting in Timor

My current evening task is to edit footage from my Timor residency, in order to present some of the ‘themes’ and projects that emerged while I was there. It’s wonderful to watch all this footage with the bit of distance I have now – I’ve been back 2 months this week. I feel like I am only just starting to digest my experiences, and to put them into succinct story form so that when people ask me, “So, how was Timor?” I have coherent things to say!

This video is from Baucau, and shows the initial songwriting workshop I did with the women’s centre there.

 

And this video from Lospalos shows some of our instrument-making activities. I love the energy and activity that this footage shows.

The last verandah jam

Kids were hanging around all day that last Sunday, waiting for us to start playing. It was a busy day for me – there was a whole house to clean and pack up, people to farewell, and certificates to write out. We told them we’d start playing at 4pm.

Rain started to pour just as we started the jam. As always, the udan boot [heavy rain; literally, ‘rain big’] was heavy and noisy and relentless, the kind of big, wet rain that drenches the ground in minutes and that always seems to inspire Timorese children to fling off their clothes and run around naked. It inspires the same in me, truth be told, but I exercised great restraint and stayed clothed and dry under the roof of the verandah.

On this day, the kids came over and got the instruments out themselves, and just started playing. I loved it when this happened – it showed what a wonderful learning journey these energetic, slightly chaotic boys had been on with us, and how their approach to the instruments and music had changed since they first started joining us on the verandah. They established their playing to the backdrop of the udan boot thundering on the roof and ground.

Tony has a memory of one very satisfying moment in that jam:

They’d got started playing, and they were all sitting in the groove for quite a few minutes – all without any guidance or leadership from us. But then – as if all their concentrations had started wavering at once – the groove started to get shaky. But before anyone called attention to this, and before it fell apart completely, it pulled back together, and locked in again. It was as if they all realised they were about to lose it, and with their intuitive sense of ensemble, rescued it and got themselves back on course.

“Let’s keep this jam for just the kakalos and buckets,” Tony suggested. The chime bars were packed up and in their boxes, awaiting their transport to their new home. The kids hadn’t got them out.

Tony and I decided to play our instruments, Tony on the now famous alto sax (that which had got away, and come back to us), me on the clarinet. This too, was a development for our jams. Any player of wind instruments will tell you how tricky it can be to get to play your own instrument in a jam session that you are also leading… leading nearly always requires use of your hands and your voice, as does playing! But on this occasion, the boys were solid enough to give us space to play with them and not throw them off course.

We improvised all together for a while, and then Tony put down the sax in order to lead some call-and-response rhythms with the boys. I continued to improvise in the gaps, and somehow, what I was playing began to morph into Oh hele le, one of the most well-known Timorese anthems. We hadn’t worked with this song before, but of course everyone knew it, and they began to sing along as they played. The rhythms changed too, so that they became a simple, pulse driven accompaniment for the song. Other people – new faces, including some girls – started arriving when we played Oh hele le.

This morphed again, into the traditional Fataluku song we had sung in the Toka Boot the day before, and again the boys sang along. Mostly we all just sang for ourselves, not necessarily projecting our voices out into the group. This felt like our most organic jam yet, and perhaps the most equal. It didn’t really need a lot of leading.

At the end, we told them about the certificate presentation. We asked them to help us put everything away, and then to go home to get a parent or someone important to them, to come and watch them receive their certificates. We would start again in 30 minutes. The boys gathered up the instruments, now well-schooled in how to do this without dropping them, or rushing and pushing each other. Certain boys automatically assumed roles of authority, collecting all the sticks, instructing others where to put things. Then the group dispersed, and we cleared the verandah and put out the mat, ready for the presentation.

Workshop in Kakavei

On the last Friday in Lospalos, we went to a village named Kakavei for the day. Kakavei is in the mountains outside Lospalos, and has a population of just a few thousand. It is one of the places that we learned about in the English conversation classes where we asked the students about the villages they came from. We struck up a friendship with one of the students in that class – a man named Tomas – and he invited us to come to his village for the day to make some music with the local children.

Tony and I were joined by Lina and Rachel from ANAM. We travelled to Kakavei in a ute, three of us riding in the back, the other two in the cab with the driver. It is about an hour’s drive from Lospalos.

Kakavei is a long, skinny village, laid out along a ridge on the road to Iliomar. We started by visiting Tomas’ family, eating lunch with his wife, neighbour and children, and trying on tais that his wife had woven. Then we drove to the home of the Village Chief, wanting to introduce ourselves and ask formally for permission to do the workshop in one of the village’s public spaces. The Chief wasn’t home, but two of his kids jumped in the back of the truck in order to join in.

As we drove slowly back towards the town centre, we called out to children, “We’re going to play music together! Come along!” Children along the road would stop what they were doing and run to catch up with the truck.

Making a parade

A couple of hundred metres from the venue we hoped to use, we all got out of the ute. Lina began to play the flute, and Tony tapped rhythms on one of the kakalos we’d brought with us. “Lina, can we lock into this groove,” he suggested, demonstrating. “It’s one of the rhythms I learned last week from one of the Kakavei elders, that she played on the gong.” (Tony had made a visit to Kakavei with his daughters the week before, and recorded a performance by one of the elders, which he later transcribed). Meanwhile, Rachel and I were scanning the roadside, finding coconut shells and smooth flat stones to clap together, and offering them to the more willing and curious of the children who were now trailing after us.

When we reached the proposed workshop site, an earlier health education workshop was just packing up, so there were lots of people milling around. School had finished just a short time earlier, so there were also many children, in addition to those that had joined our impromptu parade.

However, the Village Chief had not yet been found, and Tomas was reluctant for us to use the covered workshop space without formal permission from him. We chose a shady spot on the grass in front of the building, rolled out the large workshop mat and brought all the instruments from the car.

Starting the workshop

By now, my one-off workshop plans were beginning to lock into a familiar shape. We started with Mobakomeenofway, with all the children standing in a circle around me, the other musicians mingling with the group. First we learned the words, then the dance step, and then we put it together. There was lots of laughing and self-consciousness at first, and we never quite got full participation with this first song. However, I knew by now that that didn’t matter. The Timorese are often shy at the beginning of unfamiliar activities like these workshops, and like to watch for a while, before they really get involved.

Language

I led the workshop from the centre in Tetun, and every now and then, one of the adults standing around the outside of the circle would translate an instruction into Fataluku. Language is such an interesting challenge in Timor Leste. Tetun may be one of the national languages but it is not the native tongue in many parts of the country. People learn to speak Tetun if they are going to school regularly, and adults may speak it if they have worked in Dili, or have spent lots of time with people from other parts of the country. It means that when leading a workshop, the reason people don’t understand may be because of my clumsy Tetun, or may be because they don’t actually know any Tetun!

Working outdoors

As an outdoor workshop, it was much harder to build a strong sense of shared focus among the group. My voice would not carry far, and there was lots of chatter and talking going on – both among the young participants and the older people who were watching everything with curiousity and amusement.

Building response to rhythm

I followed the song with some call-and-response body percussion rhythms, keen to try and get everyone working from visual cues and creating sound as a massed ensemble. We then divided into three groups, based on where people were standing, and named these ‘Tony-nia grupo’, ‘Lina-nia grupo’ and Rachel-nia grupo’ [Tony’s group, Lina’s group, Rachel’s group]. I taught each group a body percussion rhythm, made up on the spot, with one derived from the gong rhythms Tony had learned the previous week. We set these rhythms to different body percussion sounds – thigh slaps, chest thumps, claps, etc. We tried layering these rhythms up, which was not completely successful – as I have frequently found in Timor, people are quick to imitate rhythms and melodies but they are so attuned to imitating what they hear that when multiple rhythms are played, they tend to copy whichever is the most dominant. Still, the group of participants was highly engaged and filled with energy and excitement about what was taking place. We used this rhythmic task as a precursor to instrument-playing.

Working with instruments

We gave out the instruments one by one. Chime bars were given out one by one, and we kept back the Bs and Fs, so as to have a pentatonic scale/chord. I kept one full set back initially, in order to have something to demonstrate melodies on for the musicians. Also, I felt a bit uncomfortable about our outdoor working space – it was hard to contain the energy, but it was also hard to keep an eye on everyone taking part. I was fearful that one of the chime bars could easily go walkabout, and for that reason didn’t give out bars from the third set. Illogical, I know! And it is worth pointing out that in all the workshops we did with the chime bars, we never lost a single bar or mallet. Everything always came back, so my fears and cautions were unfounded.

We tried transferring the body percussion rhythms onto the instruments. At this stage we realised it would have been good to give out the instruments in sections – instead, we had given them out quite randomly, focusing more on spreading the different sounds around the group so that participants would be exposed to a range of instruments and colours. With a group that size, and with the difficulties we were having in talking over the thick buzz of ambient sound, there was no way of getting individuals to move places and position themselves within a section. So we let this idea go, and instead began to work with unison rhythms.

Given that we were now set up in a pentatonic mode, I decided to work with So-so feeling, a pentatonic song I wrote some years ago with English language students at Collingwood English Language School. The tune is one that came about after listening to lots of Malian blues music with the students, in particular Boubacar Traore’s music. I got Tony to play this melody on the sax, and the ANAM students and I demonstrated to the group where to place two syncopated claps/beats at  the end of each phrase.

Moving indoors

By this stage what had started off as a shady grassy workshop space was now in the full sun, and we – the musicians and the participants and onlookers – were all getting hot and burned. Tomas caught my eye.

“Let’s move into the building,” he suggested. None of us needed any persuasion (although I hoped it was okay for us to use that space, given we hadn’t been able to get formal permission from the Village Chief). We picked up our workshop mat at each of its four corners and the group moved swiftly to the shelter of the building. Ah! The relief of a contained space! Things began to pull together much more quickly now.

Creating a song

“We need some words for our song!” I suggested to the group. “It’s a song about feeling good, feeling happy. Who can suggest some words in Fataluku?”

No suggestions came at first, and Tomas stepped in both translate the request, and clarify with me what it was we were wanting.

“Just one word each from a few different people would be great,” I told him. “They don’t need to flow as a sentence, just as a series of words about feeling good.”

“Maybe… feeling good singing?” he suggested. “Something like that!”

So our words for the song in Fataluku ended up as

Vaci inica rau-rau kanta vaihoho

(‘Today we are feeling good and singing’)

We were now fully in gear, and charging toward the end of the workshop. The ‘B’-section to the pentatonic melody is a short repeating riff in A minor. I asked Tony to play it, and the other two musicians also picked it up quickly. The crowd of participants joined in with the unison rhythm.

Now we were ready to move from one section to the next. “1-2-3-CHANGE!” I would call, and the group would switch sections – either playing their instruments, or singing the words of the song. Tony played some charged improvisations over the instrumental sections, and we had a satisfying whole-ensemble massed singing feel to the sung chorus sections.

Sharing the familiar

It was time to bring things to a close. “Why don’t you sing the song I taught you in the car?” suggested Tomas.

“Will you sing it with me?” I asked him. “It’s in your language – can we do it together?”

There was no way Tomas was prepared to sing in front of his community in this context though! Fair enough – he had way more too lose, and we were still something of an unknown entity. Also, Tomas has a certain social standing in his community, as he is a missionary, and also quite politically engaged. Add to that the fact that he may not be an enthusiastic singer, and it was quite reasonable for him to refuse my suggestion.

Therefore, I took the words for the song that I had scrawled into my notebook during our bumpy, rattling ride to Kakavei, and introduced the song the crowd as one that “I think you will all know. I just learned it this morning. It’s something we can sing together.”

I sang through the words hesitantly. The tune was familiar to me, but the words were hard to read and given that I’d tried to learn them from Tomas over the noise of the car engine, I wasn’t sure I had them all written correctly. I was therefore heartened and gratified (and secretly thrilled) to be given a spontaneous round of applause from the crowd when I sang through the song that first time. The Timorese aren’t great clappers (this is both my experience, and something I’d been warned to expect before coming here) so that burst of applause seemed particularly heartfelt and appreciative.

After singing together, it was time to pack up the instruments. We gathered them together in sections (in marked contrast to the way we’d given them out), calling for each instrument type in turn. When it came to the chime bars, I called for them by colour – “I need three big red chime bars” – and this proved a very effective, orderly way of gathering together all the sets of instruments.

Reflections on chaos and stress

As I write this reflection on Kakavei (some two weeks after the event), I remember in particular the overwhelming sense of chaos the workshop had for me, right up until the time we were able to go into the covered building. I don’t mind chaos so much, but the sense of starting to lose the hold I have on the group can cause me worry at the time, especially when there are lots of instruments spread out among the group and no-one seems particularly contained.

In Timor, though, I’ve learned that showing stress or worry is difficult for the Timorese. I’m not sure if it is because it scares them if your voice seems to change pitch or tone, or if your anxiety makes them feel uncomfortable or guilty that things aren’t going better for you, or if it just makes them dislike you.

There was a point in the Kakavei workshop where things had just become really noisy and no-one could hear me. I could feel my voice fading on me, getting tired due to working outdoors. I was doing my best to keep smiling and looking relaxed, but said to the group (to whoever could hear me), “ Wait, wait… Just listen… If you speak when I’m talking then you won’t be able to hear what I say.” One of the watching men took pity on me and called to the group in Fataluku to quiet down. I thanked him with a grin and we continued on.

At the end of the workshop, Tomas said, “I could see you were getting stressed for a while there. I’m sorry they weren’t listening so well at that time.”

“Oh, yes… I’m sorry about that,” I replied, pretty unconcerned for myself by that stage, but suddenly on alert that I might have upset Tomas, our host. “I just couldn’t make myself heard. But that’s okay – it’s a normal situation, especially when you are doing music outdoors and everyone is getting tired.”

“No, I mean, it’s okay for me,” Tomas clarified quickly. “I was just worried for you, that you weren’t enjoying yourself, or that you didn’t think it was going well.”

I reassured him that getting a bit stressed in the middle of noisy, chaotic moments in workshops is fairly normal for me, and something I hope I am getting better at managing, with age!

But I also remember the delight that we all felt just about being in Kakavei, and sharing our music and our workshop with these people whose lives are really quite isolated. Lospalos is the ‘big smoke’ for them, and that town is over an hour away by truck. The young people here have probably spent all of their young lives living on this ridge, in this long, narrow village. Visitors like us are the kind of thing that people may talk about for ages afterwards.

At the end of the workshop, I asked Lina, Rachel and Tony to play together. They played a solo each, and then improvised together, the crowd of young and old people gathered around them. The most musically magic moment for me was when they improvised – lightly, sweetly – on the kindergarten song I’d learned from young Dona in Lospalos, Ikan hotu nani iha bee. The melody is open-hearted and innocent, and the three instruments (oboe, flute and saxophone) floated, twirled and glided around each other, improvising around the melody and harmony. I don’t know if anyone recognised the melody in Kakavei – there is no kindergarten program there, as far as I know – but the audience was as entranced as I was. It was a peaceful and uplifting way to finish.

Final parting gesture

As we began to move toward the car to go, one of the elderly women who’d been watching the workshop came up to me. In fact, this woman had been a participant in the workshop, playing a chime bar for much of the time. She came towards me and at first I thought she was going to press her cheek against mine, the traditional warm greeting between women and friends. But she brought her head closer and closer to mine, and from the buzz in the crowd around us I knew that others were enjoying seeing this exchange. She leaned forward so that her face was close to mine, and I did too. Then she dipped her face slightly and rubbed her nose firmly against mine. The crowd roared their approval.

“Do it again, do it again,” Tony urged. “I want to photograph it.”

The woman completely understood his desire to document this moment, and happily obliged with a repeat nose-rub especially for the cameras. Once again, I felt the warmth of genuine appreciation in Kakavei and climbed back into the back of the ute feeling myself glowing.

Playing informally

I’ve been thinking a bit lately about those opportunities that arise from time to time to play informally with others and how we respond to them. I went through a classical music training. Improvisation and composing came later to me, after I had finished my undergrad studies. I tend to think of myself as someone who was “classically-trained” and know that I have worked at letting go of a lot of rigidity and baggage that can go along with that training.

Recently there was another gathering of the ArtPlay Senior Artists (you can read the blog and forum that is responding to those sessions here) at which we discussed the pedagogy and thinking that underpins the MSO ArtPlay Ensembles that I direct. After the session one of the other artists began to tell me about her own music performance experiences, and how unable she had always felt to just pick up her instrument and play whatever… she felt she had to have something prepared, or time to rehearse, before every playing in front of anyone. “Then I went to art college, in the 1980s,” she told me. “And of course everyone was joining and forming bands. They ‘d ask me to play too, but I couldn’t, I just didn’t feel I could play in that way, and I wished that I could.”

The funny thing is, I told her, despite all the work I do with improvisation, and in encouraging people to play, I too still can feel crippled by exactly the same feelings. I was at a party recently where there were many musicians (quite a contemporary, avant-garde experimental crowd) and after dinner the music started. Tiny (my boyfriend – not his real name) played (brilliantly, as always), the host and his son performed, some other guests (each of whom were electronic music people) performed using various bits of equipment. I had brought my clarinet with me, but when the time came, I shrank away from playing. I surprised myself, but I knew I didn’t want to play. I felt like I needed to have prepared something. I didn’t feel comfortable to just get up and improvise, for some reason, even though I know I could have done that.

By contrast, there was another party recently, when Nico and Martin were here from Ireland, and when the music started there you just couldn’t stop me. Someone lent me a saxophone (I hadn’t brought an instrument with me) and I played all night. I passed it to Tiny, seeing as he is the resident expert saxophonist, but the mouthpiece/reed set-up was wrong for him and he was happier just jamming on the guitar. We sang, we played, we rolled out as many songs as we all could think of. No shyness or reluctance on my part at all.

It was a very different crowd at the second party – people I know very well, whereas at the first party I was a bit of a newcomer to that group – they are Tiny’s friends who I am only just getting to know. When he and I discussed this barrier to playing informally he didn’t agree that it was a legacy of a “classical music training”. He had felt similarly reluctant at the second party, he said, as I had at the first, where he knew fewer people and where the music environment was one based around familiar songs. I know heaps of songs – I’ve always sung and been around people who sing – but he doesn’t, and hasn’t.  So he felt less comfortable playing, despite being a seasoned, veteran improviser!

Therefore, perhaps the ‘barriers’ are set up more in response to the environment or people present, than they are to our training or abilities. However, I do think the “classical music” training does little to prepare musicians to engage informally and spontaneously with their instruments (I am thinking about a comment an MSO player made to me years ago, when I first started running training projects there, that even to play Happy Birthday at a celebratory gathering felt stressful). And it is crazy, in a way, to think there are any barriers for people playing music who already know how to play. There are enough for those who’ve had little experience or exposure!

All of these questions are going to be put in a completely new context when I go to East Timor, I suspect. More on that later.