Group Musical Play
It is healing, at many levels of body and psyche, to play music together with other people.
Here are some ways to play that do not require being musically trained, and are therefore accessible to most.
Some players will find these things easier or harder to do especially if doing for the first time but overall they don’t require any musical foreknowledge or competency per se.
My invitation to you: Try these next time you have a group of willing players who are willing to have some fun through experimental musical play.
Group Musical Play format 1: Music Circle, drop in drop out
In this play frame, you can use anything from homemade instruments (you’ll hear 1 sound which is me blowing across a glass bottle full of water as if it were a flute), to your own body sounds (taps and voice), to instruments. Here’s how it goes:
One player starts off with a short, repeating sound offer
Players then join around the circle, one at a time
Each person offers a short, repetitive sound which they will keep the same, for the entire time without changing it, responding to the existing soundscape to fill out places which may not have yet been taken by others
Once everyone has joined in, after enjoying the full orchestra for a moment, slowly drop out in the same order (person who started drops out first).
Group Musical Play, format 2: Vocal Play
In this format, 4 players use only their voices. This requires a little bit of skill, mainly to repeat oneself over an implicit beat, but if you hold a not-too-critical feeling around it, it is fun to do even if it doesn’t always sound “good”. You can introduce the idea also by saying that the first three people are pretending to be instruments and the last person is the singer.
One player starts of singing some kind of a sound offer, which has some space around it.
The next two players join one at a time, again adding short repetitive vocal phrases, looking to fill out the spaces not taken by the other singers.
The fourth person is the soloist. She gets to now improvise and free-sing anything she wants (including words) over the vocal soundscape provided by the other 3.
Alternate roles so that everyone gets a chance to play all parts (starter, joiner, soloist).
Group Musical Play, format 3: Space Jazz Songplay
In this final example, the participants (all children except for myself) put together lyrical lines, the prompt being “Things I learned last year”, where they also were to ask their family members what they learned.
After writing the learnings out on large paper, then cutting up the paper to separate the lines, re-ordering, removing, & changing some lines, we had some song lyrics together as a group.
We then all improvised on the instruments together, rotating and switching instruments as desired, while I took the vocal improvisation/lyrics singing part (the others being too shy to sing and be recorded doing so).
I’m calling it Space Jazz Songplay because the result is a little like a Sun Ra or free jazz kind of feeling, with a lot of wild energies, but, in my opinion, it also works as a piece especially if you’re not too uptight about what counts as music and what is more rightly a sound piece/performance/experiment.
The steps again, so you can try:
Give some kind of question which can get multiple answers depending who you ask, the answers to which will be come the lyrics. In this case we used “What did you learn last year” but it can also be “What are you grateful for” (see my gratitude song for an example of what this could yield) or “What do you believe in”. Variations are infinite here and the framing is a fun way to make the lyrics personal to all.
When each participant has written down several lines which answer the question, have them write out the lines in large letters on large pieces of paper (to make them more visible to read for all).
Have all participants place all of their individual lines (now as individual strips of paper) in the center of the circle.
In an organic process (no leader), have the group decide how these lines should go, mixing up the order and joining ideas that seem similar and make sense, with the idea that they are putting them into one set of lyrics.
Once the lyrics seem to take some kind of a shape, ask the group if the lyrics seem done, and if they are, declare that these are now the lyrics of the song, which all can sing along to (or use for taking away and composing with, if this is a group songwriting exercise). But in this case, it’s a little more impromptu, they are left for all to see, by gluing them down now on a few big pieces of paper.
Have the participants now improvise/jam the music on instruments, while any participant can come forward and sing a line if they want to.
Record the piece if you like, but also realize that recording means most people will feel less free (as my example above shows, where once it was recorded the children became afraid to sing, because of not being fully sure it was ok to do it “badly”. Sigh. Very common).
Have fun!
