Let the Sound Be: Playing mindlessly is also a way of learning

The American composer John Cage described music as a form of "meaningless play", that is to say "an affirmation of life and not the attempt to bring order out of chaos... a simple way of waking up to the way we are living".

The fundamental purpose of the workshops Let the Sound Be is that girls and boys know and experience different ways of relating to music and sound. That is, to propose activities that pursue a broad relationship with sound, without prejudice or hierarchies. In general, musical pedagogy is centered on a canon that corresponds to a specific historical, social and cultural context. This canon defines how we should approach music, analyze it, judge it, listen to it, “perform” it and/or compose it. His musical practices occupy a wide and privileged space in concert halls, auditoriums, conservatories or music schools and have a fundamental weight in the way of thinking and relating to experiences that are outside this framework.

Who decides what is and what is not music? How do we describe and tell music? What do we expect to happen at a concert? What do we "hear" and what do we not? Why do we get upset when someone eats candy in the middle of a concert? Does music make us better people? Smarter or smarter? More creative? In these workshops, we ask ourselves about all these questions and put them into practice to arouse varied interests in girls and boys.

           

In one of the workshops we held at the Maria Dolores Pradera Municipal School, we built a sound tour: a macro-score made from platforms of sound actions and tapes that mark itineraries and occupy the entire space of the auditorium. In this activity, the participants are composers, musicians and audiences at the same time, highlighting the differences between each of the profiles. All processes happen at the same time and the musical score is transformed into a set of actions that go beyond notes, scales and staves.

         

In the workshops, we also build graphic, textural or tactile scores, the latter based on the work The Time is a Thread by the composer Sonia Megías, and we make them sound together. This "alternative" writing allows to capture composition processes whose results cannot materialize through conventional notation, or at least not in a simple way. What happens at the sound level cannot be described in singular terms of height, intensity, duration or timbre and that is why we look for varied procedures, descriptions and forms of listening: sound planes, thin or thick lines, blocks, rough, smooth, strident sounds, etc. heavy, volatile, sound flows, etc. In other workshops, we also put sound for stories and animations. We play and improvise with sound from images or words. And we mix sounds of bells, sandpaper, cups, bells, wood and rubber toys with various ways of making the instruments sound. In short, we look for activities that make it possible to listen, compose and interact with music in fun and varied ways.

Text written by our facilitator Cristina Cubells

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To publicize the wonderful work we have been doing in Let the Sound Be, we include photos of the audio diary created by Sonia, a student of this program, and an educational dossier created by the facilitator Cristina Cubells.

 

Let the Sound be_Sound ideas for confinement