Casa da Musica @ Porto Dec 14, 2024

Rhythm. Connection. Listening.

This workshop was led by Sam Mason and Tim Steiner, they were teaching us (professional musicians) how to create a composition and get it ready for performance with a group of novices. Without naming a single note, this workshop, which lasted 3 weekends has culminated in an incredible performance, proving that music is much more than scales on a page. It's in the presence of the rhythm, the connection, the listening - simply enabled by the act of letting go. These photos are from the day prior to the performance, we spent it reherasing the material with the community, setting the form to the presentation, leaving a lot of room for improvisation within this form.

Collaborative Creativity

Participating in this workshop had a two fold interest for me. One, is to meet local musician and like-minded people and two, is to learn from masters such as Sam and Tim about their method of working with the public while developing creative material.

While our lives are becoming increasingly divided by personal devices, promoting a life style of attention diverted from physical reality, we are voluntarily giving up one of the most powerful connecting points - the energy of interaction in real life. I am interested in ways to retain this connection and bring it to the forefront of human expereince. In the last few years I have been thinking about how technology can help facilitate such experience. My U.Porto 2023 thesis explores this idea in detail.

Participating in this Casa da Musica workshop for me was a way to learn and observe how collaborative creativity can take place through music. The dynamics of leader vs group, bits of material vs overall composition, timing of structured exploratory activities vs explanatory - these are the observations I take away from working with Sam and Tim.

You are free to use any of these photos, if:

Riff. Groove. Melody.

Every improvisation needs structure. Tim and Sam began our workshop sessions by finding out the musical "ambitus" of range and color present in the room. Because there were classical, rock and traditional folk instruments it was interesting to see how the sounds we make fit together. Then to give it structure we came up with riffs, on top of those we added grooves and then later melodies to carry the messages which were suggested by the participants from the community.

This way of making music relied on listnening most of all. As a classically trained musician, I didn't know about this method, although looking back in history, one could say that gregorian chant with its dominant and tenor base seems like an analogous approach to improvising. The structure provided by Sam and Tim had all of us creating material in an ogranized yet free manner, it let people with more improvisational skills shine in creating the core, while the others filled in the texture palette with the color of their instrument.

Audience Feedback

Following the day of rehearsal, we presented the work to a live audience. This was a comment sent to a participant by a friend who was in the audience:

Lindo, divertido, espetacular , com uma mensagem muito intensamente introspectiva . Pujante! Se todos diferentes, todos iguais, há sempre uns mais diferentes que outros. Para eles o meu abraço de simpatia. Bem haja, Isabella pela sua contribuição e me proporcionar alguns momentos de alegria, até limpou a minha afonia. Até mais logo . Um abraço

Beautiful, fun, spectacular, with a very intensely introspective message. Powerful! If everyone is different, everyone is the same, there are always some more different than others. To them my hug of sympathy. Thanks, Isabella for your contribution and providing me with some moments of joy, it even cleared up my hoarseness. Until later . A hug