Last month (September), I revisited my 30 Days of Songtaneous Songs project. 

It’s becoming an annual tradition to use this improv practice to find musical flow, generate new ideas, and explore/enjoy my instrument. 

I did my first 30 Days right here on the Songtaneous blog while I was taking a year-long vocal improv course. I was looking for a way to work on my improvising skills so I created the following practice: Each day for a month, I record an improvised 3-minute solo with no edits and share it. When I started that meant recording and writing a daily blog post here; these days it means posting to social media (and then sharing here on the blog 😉).

I get to record as many 3-minute songs in a day as I want and I allow myself two takes of any idea — in case something really is trying to come through, and I can’t quite find it or there’s an interruption of some kind (car alarms, planes, people, etc.). The last step is to choose an improvisation I like and post online.

This is the third year I’ve shared this project via social media, but, as some of you know, I usually do it in November. However, I did 30 Days in September this year because I have been writing and developing a solo show as part of a theater/performance fellowship called Naked Stages alongside three other artists at Pillsbury House + Theater in South Minneapolis. 

Over a 7-month period of mentorship, workshops, and one-on-one work with our chosen directors, I and my fellow artists (see what I did there? 😉) are creating 30- to 40-minute solo works that we’ll perform on stage over two weekends in November.

I’ll share more about the work I’ve been doing to find and create my show, but I can tell you that I used the September 30 Days project to help inspire some new songs for it.🙂🎶

For now, please SAVE THE DATES! Our shows run six nights – November 14-16 and 21-23. You can learn more about all of the shows on the Pillsbury House + Theater web site. It’s also where you can buy tickets and Pillsbury is again offering, pay what you can pricing.

Listen to 30 Days of Songtaneous 2024

As the horror and violence in so many parts of the world continues (#ceasefirenow), we begin a new year. And I am – selfishly? hopefully? foolishly? belatedly? once again – choosing a keyword to stand in for resolutions or goals and to help subtly steer my personal and artistic lives for the year.

My keyword for 2022 was CHOOSE.

I CHOSE not to write a blog post about it.😉 (And then worked hard to let go of any guilt about that decision.) I was still finding my way back to art-making and performing after the pandemic shutdowns in 20202 and Covid resurgences in 2021. I picked CHOOSE because I wanted to be intentional about the projects and singing I was doing moving into a new year.

For 2023, I picked EXPLORE.

If you’ve spent time on my blog, you know I can have trouble getting started on new projects and ideas. I had a composition centered around grieving and some other musical projects in mind that I kept letting sit on my musical back burners. With EXPLORE, I wanted to gently push myself to think about how – and with whose help – I might further develop these undertakings.

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This year’s word was gifted to me during the winter concert of my friends Sara Thomsen and Paula Pedersen. During the concert, Sara was talking about her mom’s labors to decorate the house for their holidays when Sara was a kid. How hard her mom worked to create a sense of wonder. (My mom did similar feats and labor.) Sara added that now that she’s an adult she realized that, “wonder takes work!”

And, I’ve been ruminating on wonder and the work it involves ever since.

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My keyword for 2024 is WONDER.

wonder (n) – a feeling of surprise mingled with admiration, caused by something beautiful, unexpected, unfamiliar or inexplicable.

wonder (v) – desire to know or to be curious about something; feel doubt.

That feeling of the unexpected entwined with the inexplicable is one of the things that keeps me coming back to improvising again and again. Wondering has initiated a lot of my art over the years through asking myself (and sometimes others) questions.

• Way back in 2006, I wondered if I could get people to come sing and practice improvising with me on a regular basis and Songtaneous was born.

• A few years ago, I wondered if I could write an album’s worth of original music. So in 2017, I spent a bunch of Friday afternoons writing and then gathered a cohort of musicians and improvisers to record What the Music Says Do.

• In the summer of 2022 while on an artist retreat, I began wondering if the sounds we make as we express sorrow help us to digest and transmute grief? And could I create a composition that incorporated these sounds? And would such a composition help us hold grief communally? With the help of some funding from Metro Regional Arts Council, I’m getting to spend some time finding out.

• Most recently, I wondered if I could produce an anniversary release of my first improvised composition, Between: A Journey Through the Middle. I’ve got a lot to do but the concert celebrating the release is March 2nd. (Hop on my Sarah Sings email list if you want updates.😉🎶)

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Every time I dive deep into a new project or step into an improvising space, I wonder what to do and how, with whom and when? I wonder if it will work and what I’ll learn when it does. And perhaps, more important, what I’ll learn when it doesn’t.

Finally, I’m wondering (when my heart is aching and the world is breaking 🎶) how to encourage and encounter more wonder. How can I discover more surprise, cultivate more caring, and experience more delight in the beautiful and unexpected world we live in?

As always, I am sending light and songs to all of us in this coming year. ✨🎶

I am at work on a composition centered on grieving and the sounds we make when we express sorrow. Part of this work involves my own search for activities and processes that let me sit with and experience my grief over the events of the past few years (not to mention the past few weeks).

Unsurprisingly, this path has been meandering and full of stops, and starts. In other words, improvised. 

One of the less obvious steps on my path to creating a musical composition* has been collecting posts and items from social media that, to me, are grief-related in some way. So for the past year or so, I have been saving tweets, texts, memes and other images in my phone. I did not know how – or if – I would use them; I simply knew that they were … connected. 

For a similar amount of time, I have been saving items that have broken around me — the mug my sister gave me for my birthday, a beaded necklace from a friend, the window of my car (which someone broke to go through my glove compartment), etc.. With my eye focused on grief and how we express it because of this composition, I having been taking notice of losses — even small ones – perhaps as stand-ins for the broken systems and events we are seeing all around us. Again, I didn’t know how, but I knew these broken things were connected to the piece I’m working to create.

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In mid-October, I was fortunate enough to spend a week in the woods for a self-directed mini-retreat. As I prepared for my week away, it came to me to create a “jar of broken pieces,” through which I would reimagine and realign these broken things I had been gathering into a new form. So I headed to the woods with my broken bits and a loose plan for how to reassemble them. (And if that isn’t a metaphor for processing grief, I don’t know what is.)

I arrived during the sweet pre-sunset light and went down to the lake to greet the water. I spent the evening unpacking and setting up my “office” for the week.

On my second night (after a dinner and a ride in the kayak), I began to seriously consider how to work with the jar. I realized that to do the jar work, I wanted (needed?) to create a grounding space out of all those digital items about grief and sorrow. So I pasted the images, memes, tweets, and texts into a document and printed them out on the black and white printer.

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The next afternoon (Day 3), I took my printouts and my broken things out to the porch and set up my camera so I could film myself assembling my jar. 

Once again intuition (spirit) spoke and directed me to embellish the printouts. I grabbed some crayons –pushed aside doubts about my drawing skills — and spent a couple of hours contemplating and embellishing the texts. After creating this “ground,” I recorded a short improvisation to visually and sonically document my progress. The next step was to fill the jar, but I knew I was done for the day. It was a gift to simply leave everything as it was and step away for the evening. I went for a walk, watched the sun set, had dinner and sent a video snippet of the day’s work to my mom and sister. 

Day 4 began with a long and roaming virtual visit with my mom and sis who provided thoughtful feedback and reflections about the video I had sent them. My sister remarked how I had invented a grief work process and confessed to tiny bit of envy that I had spend the day art-making. (We remarked how rarely Black women get time and space to digest grief and/or to make simply for making’s sake). This aligns with conversations I’ve had with other Black artists in the cities who are doing grief work. Another theme that comes up is the healing that happens as we work on creating the spaces and/or rituals that we intend to use with or gift to others.

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I returned to the porch in the late afternoon to assemble the jar — another improvisation. I had to continuously let go of my expectations of the finished result so I could appreciate the process (I found some sounds I might use in the composition) and let the jar become itself. After adding the broken pieces, I added my breath and voice to the jar and closed it. 

I envision visiting the jar and interacting with it as I work on my composition. I think the jar wants some ribbon or other decoration or perhaps adding water or oil or honey to feed(?) the jar. And, I already have some other broken items I plan to add the next time I visit. In the meantime, I left the jar to sit with a view of the woods and changing seasons.

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*This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.