For the second phase of the project, I had firstly planned to use the same methodology of the first phase of the project, giving the participants total freedom to what they would want to explore in the process of creating a collaborative online concert, and how they would want to carry out the creative process.
However, in the first meetings with the first potential teenage participants, this strategy did not seem to flow well.
I had already talked to composer Alwynne Pritchard about commissioning her to write a piece for this project, which should have involved collaboration with the participant girls. Initially, this piece would be part of the work with the participants. But, after the trickiness to make the process go ahead with total freedom, it seemed appropriate to make the collaboration on Alwynne’s piece the core of the activities with the girls.
We were then ready to start the creative adventure: myself and Alwynne were set to begin a series of online workshops with these 6 teenage girls (ages 13 – 17), from 4 different countries, with the goal to realise Alwynne’s piece, which will be premiered in a concert that I will give in Bergen in March 2025.
This new piece involved a series of activities to be done by the participants, either during the week at their own time, or together during the online workshops. And, at the end of everything, they would be able to watch remotely the piece which they collaborated – either by live stream or by recording of the concert where I will premiere it.
The details of the collaborative process will be seen in another post.
For the time being, a word that could summarise the learnings from this beginning of phase 2, could be: flexibility.
If music, here, is proposed and an invitation, the response to it can be yes, or no. And, sometimes, it makes more sense to say yes to someone who you know. Music is personal. Why wouldn’t the invitation be personal as well?
And, I want this to be a meaningful invitation, a personal invitation, an invitation to be, and to share affects, the what and the how ought to be relevant to the invitee’s personalities. It’s good to have a planned methodology in mind.
But, for this invitation, the methodology has to adapt to the people (it’s about the people), not the other way around.
We respond to the invitation of the music. But the music is us.