Making music with untrained musicians (aka ‘amateurs’) is a long-time passion of mine. It started over twenty years ago when I walked in to a dance studio with a terrible sound system, a piano that was beautifully twangy and out of tune, and twenty hyper 8-year-olds who had just eaten copious amounts of chocolate during their lunch break. Teaching them how to read quarter notes was clearly going to be excruciating, and not my cup of tea at the best of times. Helping them to become a multi-headed monster chatting away in an invented language – now that was fun! And still is fun, regardless of whether I’m working with 8-year-olds or 80-year-olds.
The same question always crops up in these workshops: Where do you find your scores? The answer: I don’t find them anywhere. I make them up. With my students. Regardless of who they are, how old they are, and how much (or little) music training they’ve had. We draw on everyone’s experience in the room, using participatory music practices from around the world—that part has a lot to do with me and a long history of musicians whose work I draw on. This blog is a further response to that question: I use this blog to share my ideas and experiences in making music with untrained musicians of all ages. Each post features the equivalent of one ‘score’, whether it be in traditional notated form, narrative description, or (if I get fancy enough) as instructional video. My hope is that you take these ‘scores’ not as finished products but as starting points to come up with your own music in whatever context you are making it. Try the multi-headed monster thing. It’s seriously fun.