Working without Words
Words have meaning. Words have associations. Words provide context. Sometimes expression can be limited by the words available. And, words can create distance between the event they describe and the experience of the event.
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Think of it this way. How you experience lying in bed listening to rain fall is different from how you experience reading about a character who is lying bed listening to rain fall. For this reason, much of the singing at Songtaneous doesn’t use words. By using fabricated “language,” we can access different places of the music of the moment.
Even though we don’t always sing using words, we do create language. The stories we sing have (hopefully) beginnings, middles and ends. Ideas progress, narratives exist and we journey somewhere over the course of an improvisation.
I admit it. I have a hard time creating music from movement. In fact, it’s only recently that I began to think about the movement of my body as a creator and incubator of sound.