We Can All Make Music.
Singing together is fun!
What happens at a Vocal Nosh and singing circle
You've
decided to take the plunge... What are
you likely to find?
Welcome: it is expected that there will always be new
people introduced to the group, including people who are complete
strangers. Arrivals are individually
acknowledged, made to feel welcome, put at ease, and introduced to the other
participants (including late-comers).
Every effort is made to encourage participants to feel safe, comfortable
and energised.
Warm-up: leaders have developed diverse approaches to
warming-up, the most common aspects being:
the use of call and response techniques.
creation of soundscapes (humming, heightened speech, vowel
chanting) which often turns into improvisation opportunities.
lots of physical movement (for example clapping, stamping,
and body slapping).
Key
points: The aim of the warm-up is to
encourage participants to let go of “external” worries, become a
group, and to see and hear each other.
Leadership: actually leading
the team, incorporating both specialist functions (eg, catering, promotion,
song-leading) and sharing functions (eg, welcoming, cleaning-up and even
song-leading, as often there will more than a few participants who will choose to
lead a song). The leader's function is
to facilitate engagement and release, to build confidence and to maximise
collaboration among participants.
Song introduction: every song is
contextualised in terms of where it comes from, what it means to its makers and
how the leader learnt the song, for example.
Conduction: songs are conducted via the use of extremely
visual techniques. That is, the leader
(who may be a different person, depending on the song being sung) not only
indicates tempo and volume with their hands, but also melody. Conducting visually in this manner is very
much an “eye-contact thing”, and the leader is always aware, and obviously aware, of each participant's
engagement level.
Learning a song: by ear, call and
response or using line by line accretion.
A leader’s song introduction dialogue may sound like this:
“First
I'll sing you the whole song” (often, it's only three or four lines
long).
“Now
I'll sing the first line. Listen first, then we'll sing it together.”
“Ok,
let's do that again.”
“And again.”
“Now,
here's the second line - I'll sing it first, then we'll sing it
together.”
“Good. Now let's try the two lines together.”
(And so
on).
Once
everyone is comfortable with the whole, variations will be introduced which might
include harmonies, singing the piece as a round, introducing overlays of new
words which can be sung simultaneously, introducing another snatch of song
which matches the original, and improvisation.
Key points: a song which contains
one minute's worth of lyrics can provide half an hour of engaging and enjoyable
singing. Group sound-making hardly ever
stops and the concepts of “learning”, “rehearsing” and
“performing” are seamlessly intertwined. There is no pressure to achieve a
standard. Ultimately, the pleasure is in
the synergy of the group as participants make different contributions to the
overall sound. The “total”
sound is not just an aggregation of everyone singing the same thing, but of the
parts which combine to create a single, larger sound which is greater than its
individual voices.
Repertoire: the expectation that there are newcomers in the
room, and the desire that absolutely no-one feel left out demands a unique
repertoire combined with a teaching process which is not boring for those who
already know the song. This creates a
“level playing field” as everyone is in this together and starting
from the same point. The material is
often short but always contains a capacity for complexity.
Eating and conversation: there's usually a
break from song in the middle for other forms of interaction.
More singing: the journey continues…
Closing: Noshes always have a focused ending - a song
which acknowledges the good times that have been had and the collaboration that
has occurred but that now it's time to return to the world. There's no homework and no pressure on
participants to commit beyond the moment they have just experienced, but our
guess is that you'll have enjoyed it so much that you'll be eager to come back!
CMV - making a
sound world together.
©
Community Music Victoria Inc.