Photo by Sharon Farmer, 2007

Sweet Honey in the Rock visited the Twin Cities this weekend. And, as those of us on the mailing list were lucky enough to learn, the group offered FREE workshops over the course of the weekend. I attended 2 of these events, one on Saturday March 8, hosted by Ysaye Barnwell and a second workshop on Sunday March 9, hosted by Aisha Kahlil.

And … I met them! Both! (They were kind and very generous with their selves and their time. They even let me snap a couple of photos. *smile*) But, enough of that, let me tell you about the workshops!

Dr. Barnwell and me

Building Community with Barnwell
Ysaye Barnwell is the deep-voiced contributor and a frequent songwriter for Sweet Honey in the Rock. (My own a cappella group sings a lot of her arrangements.) Her workshop focused on “Building a Vocal Community” (how apropos!). The group was fairly large for singing at 10:30 on a Saturday morning and I ran into lots of folks from my singer community … Barbara McAfee, Ann Kay and other singer friends.

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I admit to arriving a wee bit late (I hadn’t planned to attend the workshop since I’d be hosting Songtaneous in the afternoon). As I arrived, Barnwell was running the group through some scalar warm-ups; getting people loose and moving them into that wonderful head space community singing creates — the space that holds the qualities of being light-hearted and playful yet mindful and focused simultaneously.

From the warmup, Barnwell moved us to singing a chant from the Ituri Rainforest. In my opinion, it was worth going to the workshop just to hear what she had to say about this chant and it’s purpose. She put so simply and clearly things that have been percolating in my subconscious about communal singing.

[This chant is] Sung to pull all of the members of the community into the center of the community. It can be sung for hours and, some people say, even days. If that’s what it takes to pull everyone into a like-mindedness.

She went on to say …

On the face, it is very simple; in its thought process, it is more complex and more involved.

What you will experience is that when we do it properly and all the parts fit together correctly, new melodies will be created. They can only be created by how the parts come together.

This tells us is that this can’t be done by one’s self, it has to be done with others.

And speaking to the spiritual nature (if you’ll pardon the pun) of the chant …

“Nothing can happen until it’s right. And one of the reasons nothing can happen until it’s right is because the people believe that the Rainforest that they live in is God. And so until they’re right with God nothing else is going to start.

So it’s a really an important thing, an important way of simply sitting and being with each other and being with the environment … of trying to emulate the sounds in the environment, in order to emulate God.”

Like the woman said, simple yet complex.

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Barnwell then taught us a poly rhythmic African chant to which she added words and a “boys to men” chant (not it’s actual name *wink*) out of South Africa. She was patient and kind as we strove to adjust our Western mono rhythmic sensibilities to these new challenges.

She explained about the following about drummers (and other players) of poly rhythmic chants. She gave a great analogy about trying to find the image hidden in the paintings made up of all the dots. The individual rhythms are the dots, but the melody is the spaceship. She advised us to “listen for the spaceship.”

What they’re listening for is different from what they’re listening to. What they listen to, is their relationship to each of the other drums. What they’re listening for is the melody [like] we heard in the first [Rainforest] chant.

We finished the morning of singing with some African American spirituals. All in all, a good morning’s play.

Up Next: Improvising with Aisha Kahlil