Hi everyone!
I hope you're having a great weekend. Just a reminder/clarification of the out-of-class improvisation experimentation for Monday.
Work with one or two partners. (We worked out the partners in class on Friday.)
The first step you can also do on your own. Just breathe in, raising your hands (as we did in class), and exhale as you let your hands descend and move forward. (Like you are conducting a chord.) As you exhale, not at the top of the breath but in the middle, sing any note. Your note. Whichever one comes out.
As Julie and David discuss in the recording you listened to, "ah" and "oh" are very good vowel sounds to make.
These sounds are what in Music for People circles are called "one quality sounds." You're making a beautiful sound, being at one with yourself as you do it. There is no right or wrong!
With your partners, do a number of these, making intervals (which may be consonant or dissonant), if there are two of you, or chords, if there are three or more of you. If you want the sounds to be more consonant, have one person start and then the other(s) join in.
The other thing to experiment with is freely-improvised melodies, which are a series of notes. Sing one note, and while you are singing, listen inside yourself for the next note that wants to be sung. And sing that note. And so on and so forth. At a certain point, you'll sense that there is a rest--which is fine--or that your melody has come to an end.
You can sing this melody for/to your partners.
You can also make this more interactive in a couple of ways.
One is for one person to do a vocal percussion groove while the other improvises a melody over it. Then switch roles. (If there are three or more of you, have two people do vocal percussion while one person does a melody.)
You can also do melodic phrases back and forth, like a conversation.
Do this with voices. You can also do it with an instrument. If you're an instrumentalist, be sure to do it with your voice first!
There are no wrong notes. (Sometimes there are surprises. Embrace them.)
Your voice is perfect the way it is, even if it cracks or the pitch wavers. You'll get more comfortable.
Bad dancing never hurts the ground.
If you have questions, email me. (If the question is some version of, "Is it OK if we also ________?" the answer is yes, as long as you don't hurt anyone or thing.)
Write a comment here about what you did and your experience.
Marian and Michael and I just finished our little improv sess and it was quite fun. I suggested doing a jazzy thing and I thought that it worked quite well. Though we felt uncomfortable at first, we brought it together and started listening to one another. It was interesting to me that we all started gravitating toward the melodic and harmonic inclinations of our respective instruments. For example, I kept finding myself singing walking bass lines. We also tried some other styles and I think continued comfortability will go a long way in making this exercise more musical.
ReplyDeleteBurke, Michael and I began with the "ah" exercises, building chords on a note that one of us began with (after exhaling). We then moved on to improvising vocal rhythms/melodies as a trio. Like Burke said, it was a little awk at first, but once you got into it, it was easy to just follow the path that the music was taking. We were doing our own thing, but were also fitting our individual sounds into the bigger sound. Thinking about it, Burke is right about us following our instruments sounds. I instinctively did a lot of lines that moved quickly, and was often going to a higher register than Michael and Burke. Although that could be because of the gender thing...
ReplyDeleteI thought that this activity was pretty fun once you got over the first few awkward notes. Not having to worry about correct notes or rhythms allowed me to relax and just do whatever my brain wanted it to.
Becca, Laura and I are looking at many different styles of improv. Laura is going to be on melody and vocals primarily as Becca and I are less experienced singers. The "ah" exercises are so relaxing and I think they helped a lot with finding "my sound". One of the best things with improv on voice is that because we use are voices so much the notes we want to sing come so naturally. I am really interested to continue to play with this form of music.
ReplyDeleteIt was very different. I didn't really care for the fact that it our music wasn't written out, but instead spontaneous and coming from that moment of inspiration. I was able to find that some notes came naturally in succesion when you sing/play. I hope it will come in handy later in my musical life.
ReplyDeleteWe made a songs about a train ride, Paul Bunyan, and breakfast food. :) There was even a surprise song! I had a blast with this exercise. In the beginning, we did the "ah" and "oh" exercise and then went right into improvising with percussive sounds and melodies with words. Becca, Sarah, and I had a great time finding out what we could do with our voices.
ReplyDeleteFor me, I felt this was very difficult. I'm not very good with picking out pitches and singing them. I had to get over the fact that any note I sang was not going to be wrong. It was fun to make chords together that were minor and change them to major chords. With more practice with experimenting like that, I feel that I will improve my sight reading abilities.
ReplyDeleteWe sang a lot of stuff in A minor. The first exercise, with us doing intervals, actually had me at an A and Stephanie at lower A simultaneously, which was really cool. All the other exercises we did after that were A-based. For the melodies sung back and forth, Stephanie and I went off of each other's melodies with embellishment, slight changes in rhythm and a few of the notes changed, though the progressions were basically the same. Overall, it felt really natural for me.
ReplyDeleteI found this to be such a fun and creative assignment. Zoey and I initially hit the same note (just in different ranges, her being one octave higher than I) after the first deep breathe which I thought was so interesting. When we got to the improv part, I noticed how we would take what the other person had just sang and try to play off of that by rearranging the melodic pattern of the notes or by maybe changing up the rhythm a tad bit. We also had a great motif going which we would return to after switching off a couple of melodic phrases. It was so interesting to just sing whatever my gut felt like should be sang instead of having to constantly worry about the notes that are written on the sheet of music and if I was going to be able to hit it, etc. In general, it was really free and relaxed.
ReplyDeleteI found this assignment to be a lot harder than I expected. I think you really have to prepare yourself for the exercise and make sure you are in the right frame of mind. Rachel and I tried to do the exercise at a time when I was emotionally all over the place and extremely jittery. The result was that both of us laughed the whole way through and couldn't make it through more than a couple pitch changes. I am really looking forward to trying it again at a time when I can be more sensitive and "in tune" with the exercise.
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed doing improv with the class today. I would like to focus on the class for this post because it was so much fun!! It was very different and cool but I thought it was fun! All the things we tried were original and it was so relaxed that it was really easy not to feel self conscience. It was a lot of fun and I can't wait to do it again.
ReplyDeleteI cannot get enough liberation. Joy and relaxation overwhelms my senses when I am given freedom to express myself. The homework for today (late, I know) felt like an intro into today's class. We dipped our feet in the water of vocal improv, which was magnified greatly in class today. Hopefully I am correct in saying that Rachel and I had a blast on the homework. I have to say, if homework was always like that, I'd be more likely to do it :)
ReplyDeleteI thought the improv was a lot of fun. Everyones was different and each group was different. Improv is not as much as showing off as i really thought it was. you can do something easy and it still sound great.
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