Just a few days before Christmas, we had our online workshop for the second task. We wished each other Merry Christmas, and arranged to meet again in the new year to carry on our creative adventure of doing the third task of EVEVEVE Hecate writes.
On the 11th January we met again on Zoom to revise about each participant would be doing on the third activity:
They were to explore the sounds of some objects of their everyday lives. Those could be electronic devices, bowls, books, musical instruments, etc. The imagination was the limit.
Indeed, during the Zoom session we did an exercise where each girl went off for a few minutes to find an object to play for the group. There was some water, there were some musical instruments, and there were some descriptors of objects that they wanted to explore but that were not there at the moment. That ignited our sonic imagination very much!
After exploring and selecting those sounds, each girl would then film themselves reading their texts (now all transformed), and making sounds with those objects whenever they thought it would fit.
Alwynne gave some examples of how they could be creative with the camera, showing different angles and movements.
They had then around 2 weeks to do this activity, and upload their videos and any other creative material to their designated Google Drive folder.
We then met again on the 25th January, to watch each other videos.
It was so impressive to see the creativity, how much each girl put of themselves on this task, and how they shown their own voices in such unique ways!
Some girls showed short videos as if taking us to each discovery in this creative adventure, other girls showed fully edit videos which were so fascinating and so original each.
Now, Alwynne will do more creative work while putting all these videos together, and will write a piano part for me to play along this final video.
In the meantime I am preparing the concert where I will premiere this piece, on the 28th March at the Grieg Academy, in Bergen, Norway.
This has been truly a wonderful experience for me. As a pianist, the process of preparing for a performance usually centres on practicing the pieces of the programme.
Here, my preparation has been centred actually around engaging with participants, being in the creative journey with them, doing lots of communication and juggling schedules, and actually during these months I have no idea about what I am going to play on the piano.
In this process, have I been making music? Has music to do only with producing sound? Or could the interpersonal relationships, the conversations, even the organisational part of the collaboration, could this all be part of the musicking?
