Interested in facilitating some music-making in your community or learning more about accessible music-making?
Contact me to set something up!
Cultivating life-long musicianship through accessible participation
Life-long Musicianship
By programming music with a thoughtful approach to community accessibility, everyone can and should make music for their whole lives! Thinking about these domains of musical accessibility can help facilitators develop a creative process that encourages people with varied levels of artistic and technical experience and allows for varied amounts of logistical realities. Once a facilitator defines the accessibility needs of their community, they can proceed to select a repertoire that enables a fulfilling participatory process for anyone and everyone.
what does participatory music look like?
Each of the videos in this section represent “Dig Down” musical processes I have created, facilitated, or participated in. They all involve performers of widely varied backgrounds and musical interests.
Participatory Sound Installations
If you visit the Playsound | Playground project page on this website, you can more deeply exprience the work that goes into creating participatory sound installations. These encourage anyone who stops by to participate through guided exploration and artistic prompts! I am excited to explore the possibilities of these installation projects with more communities and my creative partner, Paulina Michels! Please reach out if you are interested in developing a sound installation project in your community!
Please reach out if you’re interested in developing a sound installation project in your community!
Performances created from prose-based instructions
Kenneth Maue: Water in the lake
Kenneth Maue’s book “Water in the Lake” features dozens of scores that are simple sets of prose-based instructions. Performers, or groups of people, can understand those instructions conversationally and use them to build personal musical performances at their comfort levels. The sheer number of scores ensures that there is something musically meaningful for many participants of widely varied backgrounds!
If you’re interested in working on some of this Game-based or Prose-based music, please feel free to reach out to me to set something up!
John Cage’s Instruction based music
Many of John Cage’s pieces like “Radio Music” are based on simple sets of instructions mapped to time. Performers participate in ‘chance operations’ to determine the temporal landmarks in their own scores then create musical moments based on those personalized instructions. In “Radio Music” anyone can participate by manipulating the volume and tuning dials of analogue radios!
John Cage’s practice of compsing with “Chance Operations” has inspired generations of musicians to create their own ‘chance-based’ pieces. This recording was created by a community college music student for their community of friends to realize based on chance-operations and their shared love of playing Dungeons and Dragons.
performances created by interpreting graphic scores
Elizabeth A. Baker’s graphic score “Shapes” gives performers simple instructions for certain numbers, and allows them to follow their own path through the score, Freedom of interpretation allows for inculsivity of anyone.
Herbert Brun’s piece “Stalks and Trees and Drops and Clouds” places computer generated images on a timeline in seconds. Performers build their interpretations of the images onto that timeline. Though this is perhaps more advanced than some other pieces in this gallery, the piece is still accessibable in that it doesn’t require any particularly ‘developed technique.’ Performers can realize the graphics in any reasonable meaningful way that fits into their own musical and technical experience!
Performances based on musical Games
These are two pieces I created for large ensembles where variations of the “rules” could be learned by professional musicians, young students (3rd graders!) and anyone who showed up to the concert in different amounts of time. Everyone got to participate to their own level and deep musical moments happened.
Danny Clay: Playbook
San Francisco-based composer “Danny Clay” composes pieces of chamber music based on the games that he plays with young music students. In these pieces, once players learn the ‘rules’ to the games they can build their own interpretations and bring the meaning of the word “play” joyfully to musical performances
Elliot Cole: Flowerpot Games
In 2018, New York-based composer Elliot Cole composed a set of instruction-based musical games to be played on flower pots that can be purchased at any hardware store. In 2019, a group of students recorded and built music videos around some of those games. Please feel free to contact me if you’re interested in the facilitation of any of these musical games!
Reach out if you’d like to discuss facilitating some musical games with your friends, family, or community!
Flexible interpretation pieces
Jason Treuting: Flexible Scores
Jason Treuting often provides musical content and ideas in the form of flexible scores that can be manipulated to serve varied communities of performers. This realization of his piece “Life is (—-)” involved professional musicians, student musicians, and community participants all with their own method of realizing the score together. Working in this way emphasizes that flexible processes can involve people of different backgrounds in fulfilling ways simultaneously!
Danny Clay: Memory chain and Lullaby
This is a piece for solo marimba which I commissioned from Danny Clay. In the composition, the performer hums while playing the marimba. For this realization, we worked together to build a method of offering instructions to communities of people with varied musical backgrounds to participate in creating their own interpretations of the “humming” to create a community-connected recording of the piece during the Covid-19 pandemic. Hundreds of recordings of humming from varied geographic regions came together to create this recording. People submitted their recordings based on this set of visual instructions:
Community-Based Participatory music
Whether it’s collaborating with dancers, musicians, and the audience to make performances of jazz standards like Thelonious Monk’s “Bemsha Swing” participatory events, or facilitating experiences with the Ghanaian music taught to me by my mentor Bernard Woma (founder of the Dagara Music Center in Medie, Ghana), music as a participatory tradition exists all around the world. I work hard to bring those experiences to communities and audiences through my own performance and facilitation practices.
Reach out if you are interested in bringing some participatory folk music to your community!
This is a community drumming class where we were exploring the music “Kpanlogo” as it was tought to me by my mentor Bernard Woma. Participants ranged from professional musicians, to community music enthusiasts, to people playing a drum for the first time. Some participants came to class each month, but for many this was their first class. They were all able to find quick success with this style and many choose to explore more deeply over time.
This recording is the first time that a group of students got to play the “Gyil”- a traditional Ghanaian xylophone! They are learning “Ne Wa Seb” as it was taught to me by my mentor, Bernard Woma. They had quick success exploring this instrument, but there is infinite depth to the artistic expression that it can create!
Interested in facilitating some music-making in your community? Contact me to set something up!
Some repertoire ideas
I’ve collected the beginning of a list of repertoire that is flexible enough to be accessible and artistically fulfilling to anyone. This list focuses mainly on percussion chamber music, but I will keep expanding it over time. Here’s a good place to start, though! Feel free to reach out and start a conversation about other composers, pieces, or formats that might make a good fit for this approach to accessible music-making. I am always eager to learn more and add to this list!
are you interested in programming some flexible or accessible music? Reach out and let’s talk about what that could look like for you!
Facilitating music by “digging down”
Traditionally, we learn music by ‘building up’ all of the skills, notes, and other logistics necessary to achieve a well-defined performance based on a history of standard performance practice. In a “Dig Down” approach, we can select music, like many of the pieces listed above, that are immediately playable but that have layers of depth to explore. Working in this way, a fulfilling performance is possible for anyone in any amount of time. There should be little or no stress to develop a “Dig Down” process that emphasizes flexibility and accessibility. This way, we can invite anyone to participate in a musical process rather than focus on developing particular musical performances. Here’s what a “Dig Down” process might look like:
