Purpose:
The overall purpose of these 3 Workshops is to build creative confidence and fluidity in teachers, children, and parents who wish to apply themselves in a musically creative learning environment.
Goals:
For children and parents, the goals are specifically to empower them with the knowledge that they have music and other art forms to use for alternative means of expression, realize the importance of community, and discover the joy in collaborative learning.
For teachers (new and tenured), the goals are to get them to learn how to recognize and develop creativity in students, offer concepts and ways to apply one’s own individuality to teaching when standards must be met, provide a basic understanding of music education skills, and provide direction with encouragement to use music and other arts disciplines to teach academia.
Criteria
The willingness to use one’s voice in place of an instrument one imagines him or herself playing to create something new…, Enjoys being around other people, has own instrument, wants to be creative and willing to share ideas, open to the ideas of others, ready to share thoughts and contribute to the development of education, and ready to have fun!
Sing The Rhythym!
A 2 hour workshop designed to get children, youth and adults to realize the Voice as the 1st instrument, become comfortable with it as an expressive tool, and to use it as a tool to reference music.
The goal for instrumentalists is to realize that if you can Sing it, you can Play it!
The workshop consists of vocal warm-ups, exercises, arranging ideas, and wraps up with an accapella vocal jam session. This stand-alone workshop is prerequisite for the Young Peoples Creative Music Workshop and The Chords That Bind Us workshop.
Longer sessions (monthly-yearly) are combined with standard music education skills and is open to instrumentalists.
Young Peoples Creative Music Workshop
The Creative Music Workshop, with a combined emphasis on creativity and performance, is a 3-5 day, 2 hour intensive exploration of original ideas and rhythm for kids 8 to 11 and youth ages 12 to 21. In this workshop, kids will learn how to create chord sequences, develop melodic ideas, explore rhythm, participate in the overall construction of a composition and experience playing in an ensemble. The workshop will culminate in a performance and demonstration of improvisational techniques for teaching. This workshop can be done with college level music students as well, employing more experimental concepts and improvisation.
The Chords That Bind Us
An Intergenerational Community Song-writing Workshop that incorporates music created by children and participants of the Young Peoples Creative Music Workshop.
This project based workshop is done over a longer period of time - generally 4 to 6 months. It requires the participation of kids who have some familiarity with one another (preferably by means of a school or recreational center), their parents, their teachers and/or other community role models.
This workshop consists of 6 components: a Creative Music Workshop, a melody and lyric writing session, a jam session to hear ideas and work out arrangements, sectional and full group rehearsals, a recording, and a performance.
***See a full example of this project in the documentary film When Fried Eggs Fly.