4 Sundays in January 2010
1/10, 1/17, 1/24, 1/31 from 1-3pm

Opening performance Friday January 8th, 2010 at 8pm

Led by Rory Cowal, Sara Roberts and Isaac Schankler

For this series of workshops, musicians of all levels and musical backgrounds are invited to participate. Together, we will explore all of the ways we can interact through music and the extraordinary sonic worlds that arise as a result. As a full ensemble and in different small ensemble combinations, we will find strategies for successfully cooperating as a group while still asserting our individuality and expressing our personal voices. We will use improvisation as a tool to better understand structure and form in a performance. We will also hone our compositional skills; while improvising, we must ask ourselves, “what does this work need and how will my contribution add to the character and evolution of the piece?” The fruits of our efforts will be spontaneous and extraordinary works of art. Tapping into our collective imagination and creativity, we will invent fantastic textures of timbre, melody, harmony, and color.

We will explore these ideas further with John Zorn’s Cobra, a popular and continually evolving improvisational game piece. In Cobra, players respond to a variety of gestures and cards that provide countless possibilities for musical interaction. However, players wishing to strike out on their own can become “guerrillas” and set their own agenda, making for an often unpredictable but always compelling spectacle. The workshops will culminate in a performance that incorporates all aspects of these improvisational strategies.

Free!