SHARING DAY!

The busiest day of CoLab has arrived! Today is the day when loads of sharings take place and you could spend all day watching performances and doing something "CoLabby". But before our group's performance there's a lot still to do!

09:30 - CoLab crew came and blacked out the Mackerras room, but they only had enough material for two of the four large bay windows argh!

Programme finalised!

10:00 - rest of the group arrive and we break the bad news to them. Whilst thinking of a back up plan, we worked out a performance order and divided up the sections then made 2 copies of the programme just in case. As we'd be in the dark or blindfolded most of the time there was no point in giving everyone a copy! 

11:30 - Blake and I went shopping to acquire some more blacking out materials for the remaining windows as we weren't happy with doing a halfway house or the whole project seemed kind of pointless.

12:30 - We returned to the rest of the group half way through running the logisitical practice of the performance, very pleased that everyone was cooperating well in the last few hours before the big moment. Everybody pitched in to finish the blacking out process and the room was almost completely black (who knew light could be so penetrating?)

Kid's pizza at Bianco,
yum!

13:30 - a well deserved but brief lunch break, a few of us rushed into Greenwich for some sustenance but everywhere was so busy! We ended up in Bianco Ristorante (can highly recommend for quality and speedy service)

14:00 - Final run through and last minute discussions about who would do the talking in between sections (that was me) and who would be available to lead in the blindfolded audience. Many people have never led a blind person before so that ended up being quite interesting to observe, given that instructions such as "Come this way" and "Don't bump into that person" are fairly useless and specific directions and explanations are required, for example "Take one pace left" or "Stop, there's someone in front of you". You have to remember the blind person is relying on your vision for their safety!

3pm Sharing featuring blind-
folded audience

15:00 - Performance time! We had a large audience which proved slightly difficult and time consuming to lead them all in individually to their seats as they were blindfolded and we had scattered chairs facing every direction in no organised fashion. We had people facing walls, each other and someone sat in between two pianos in the middle of our performance space!

16:00 - Sharing time over, we spoke to some audience members to ask what they thought of the whole experience, this brought some positive feedback! 

"I found it relaxing and much easier to focus on the music. I'd love to go to a proper concert like this." - audience member

"I couldn't work out where I was but it was exciting!" - audience member sat in between pianos

"The scary piece was really effective but I nearly s*** myself when the flute played right in my ear!" - audience member

As a group we were very pleased with the outcome after a week of discoveries and enhancing our other sensory skills. We loved sharing what we had found out and hope the audience gained an insight into "Dans Le Noir" as well!

"The Sound and Movement Sculpture"

Following a fairly swift clear up I went to see what else was happening around college. I watched "Jukin' Brass" play a variety of pop songs arranged solely by the performers in the group. I was able to listen to "The Cole Porter Story" but couldn't see it as it was so busy and the room was packed! Then I took a marble up to the top floor and put it down this contraption where by the marble creates sounds as it reaches the different stages of the marble run. You can't see here but right at the bottom includes a cymbal and it finally drops into a harpsichord!

By the time I had seen all of this I was exhausted but certainly had a great experience doing so and I've learnt a lot this CoLab, definitely looking forward to seeing how it helps in my future of performing!

S x

On the 4th day of CoLab...

...our project gave to us;

• 4 practice rooms
• 3 sharing sections
• 2 new ideas

and no blindfolds for the audience!

Practice rooms hooray!

I hope you tried to read that to the tune of 12 days of Christmas (I know it doesn't work perfectly but please try it!)

Now it's probably more than 4 practice rooms but that's how many we had booked and members of the group were using these to memorise and use the last full day to finalise preparations on the pieces they had been working on.

Following on from Wednesday's organisational work, we considered splitting our sharing session into 3 sections, in order to allow audience members to leave or enter with relative freedom without disturbing the darkness. This ended up as section 1 - blindfold audience, section 2 - total darkness (no blindfolds), section 3 - blindfold musicians. Now we just had the task of creating a programme order including all the pieces so that they fit into 3 roughly equal slots within 45 minutes. 

My two new ideas consisted of trying some things we hadn't yet experienced. As I'm primarily a trumpet player I hadn't found the physical aspect of playing in the dark difficult at all, so I decided to reconnect with my piano playing ability (or distinct lack of) and give it a go to appreciate how much harder the week had been for some people. I must admit, that definitely gave me a taster of their challenges! In addition, I wanted to find out how it would be to learn a new piece from scratch without being able to see. This idea was inspired by my Grandma as she has been completely blind for over 50 years yet started learning the piano at age 75, with no sight. She mainly learnt hymns as that was the sort of music she already had an ear for and enjoyed. However, after having only sung them for most of her life, applying that knowledge to the piano is learning a new skill! Rachel had a go a teaching me a simple blues style piece involving chords. The main challenges I experienced were finding the starting notes (it's very difficult to distinguish the sets of 2 or 3 black notes without being able to see them) and actually memorising the music. Because I hadn't seen the sheet music or watched anyone's hand positions I really struggled as I'm generally a visual learner. Here's me attempting a bit of the piece I was taught by Rachel;

Unfortunately Karl hadn't found anyone that could deliver blindfolds to us by Friday but luckily Sandrine found some so we were still able to do all 3 sections providing the CoLab crew had enough material to black out the windows in our performance space!

Not long until performance time now and it's nearly the weekend!

S x

Day 3 - half way point!

It's day 3 and things are starting to come together! We spent the morning practicing our group work and realising which pieces are a bit ambitious with only a week to sort them out, especially if the repertoire is brand new. We had our first rehearsal of the "scary project" - you'll find out more after the performance on Friday - and suffice to say it's pretty scary and effective!

Folk tune including markings for verses
 (something else to memorise!)

The afternoon consisted of a group meeting to show what we'd been working on again. Just before the meeting I was rehearsing a folk tune including some improvisation around "Johnny's Gone for a Soldier" - an American folk song based on the traditional Irish "Suil a Ruin". John created a lovely arrangement on which Lisa (mezzo-soprano) and I alternated playing the tune and improvising and much to our surprise when we removed the blindfolds there was a rather large audience in front of us! Interestingly neither of us had noticed anyone enter the room which you'd presume was due to a lack of sight. However I reckon the engagement in the music and with each must have played a role in keeping our senses occupied given that we were relaxed and not on tenterhooks from being able to see the audience. I also played the 2nd movement of Haydn's trumpet concerto blindfolded and actually really enjoyed it - very different to when I normally perform in front of my peers!

Logistics - a list of pieces, groups
and timings

Finally, we thought it would be a good idea to write a list of all the pieces/groups we want to include in the sharing on Friday so we wrote a big list on the white board. We included timings and how we want the audience and performers to be in terms of sight, for example, it can be quite comical to watch someone perform a memorised piece with a blindfold on so the audience should be able to see that, whereas for other projects it will be more effective if the audience can't see and purely focus on listening out for sounds or how the music is different when you remove the visual element.

In order to blindfold our audience our mentor Karl agreed to find a batch of cheap blindfolds to order (hopefully they'll arrive in time for Friday!).

Now that we've actually started some of the more logistical preparations, I'm looking forward to how the sharing turns out but there's definitely a lot more to do yet in order for it to run smoothly!
Why not come along if you've got a spare Friday afternoon?

S x

Day 2 - Tuesday

We've been back to work for a second day and making some interesting discoveries! Playing in the dark is quite fun actually and provides some amusing photos too (when you're able to see to take a picture of course). After 2 hours of morning practice in our small ensembles/pairs, we had a large group sharing session where we discussed what we had been working on and how we found the whole concept of playing in the dark. Here are some of the main points I took note of:

• Some people felt vulnerable or nervous when they couldn't see (using blindfolds) - knowing there's an audience there who can see you. Personally I feel less nervous as I am able to forget about the audience and find I listen more to myself and the other performers without the visual conflict messing up my focus.
• Simple things such as picking up the instrument the right way round and when tuning it, not being able to see requires you to feel how much the slide needs to move (trumpet) or whether all the parts are in line (flute), proving how often we rely on our sight!
• When playing the piece from memory for the first few times, there are bound to be mistakes. Usually, in a sighted situation, at the first mistake I'd look back to the sheet music and correct myself, however I found that because I couldn't see there was no point stopping so I found it easier to just keep going and I believe this encourages the ear to correct mistakes itself.

A discussion about the audience experience also gave us some things to consider. We could position the members of the audience around the room or facing a different direction to the conventional method. Maybe it would be fun to be sat listening to a performance in the dark surrounded by musicians, what do you think you'd enjoy? Equally we came up with some slightly more "creepy" ideas, such as testing their other senses - blowing a fan in their face, giving them something with a strange texture to hold, or producing a specific smell in the room - in order to generate a particular atmosphere.

Other aspects such as knowing that the audience can't see who it is performing caused us to wonder what they might think about instead. Will they conjure up an imaginary person or will they really engage with the music and actually think about an image linked to emotions depicted by the music? In my case, knowing the audience don't know it's me playing put me even more at ease as I could be anyone to them and there is no judgement on race, gender, what you're wearing, how nervous or confident you appear etc.

With the pieces I had been playing, I found it fairly easy to stay in time and come in together with the other musicians as the tempo generally indicated where to enter. I wanted to experiment further however as there must be something that provides more difficulty in the dark. Blake and Rachael cooperated with my curiosity and here's some of the experiment;

The aim was to play chords together, with the new chord signified by one person playing a single note after which they both changed chords. However, the gap between playing one note and the next chord was not always the same due to the lack of tempo so they began to listen to each other's breathing in order to communicate more effectively.

And that's about where we're at after 2 days, wonder what we'll get up to on Wednesday - half way point coming up!

S x

CoLab day 1!

CoLab is back! This time, it's 2016 and we're experimenting dans le noir... Yes, that's playing music in the dark which kind of makes it a bit difficult to communicate, read sheet music and a multitude of other elements you wouldn't even imagine initially, and that is what you'll have the pleasure of reading about for the rest of this week!

Day 1, well that says it all really doesn't it? First time meeting all the group and talking about what "Dans Le Noir" might entail. Has anyone heard of the restaurant with the same name? It is manned by blind waiters and you eat totally in the dark whilst they serve you strange food like crocodile because it's funny when you have no idea what you're eating and realise your taste buds aren't as good as you thought. Might have to make a trip there as part of my homework this week so I can really engage with this project of course! We're essentially going to to recreate this idea in a concert with the whole room blacked out. Taking away one sense increases the awareness of the other senses (apparently), so we're hoping the audience members will have a new experience listening to live music without a visual influence.

Pairs experiment with playing in the dark using blindfolds.

As I'm sure you can imagine, this provides all sorts of difficulties for the performers as they can't see the music or their instrument! Now memorising music is a very good skill to have as a professional musician, so that is a fairly standard barrier we will happily tackle. However, especially for the pianists, not being able to see their instrument is fairly key to how they perform or memorise a piece of music. Also, it severely affects how a group of performers may interact with each other whilst playing. After having completed some research and gathering of repertoire, we experimented with some elements such as accelerando and rubato basically just to see what happens. What happened? Well Aoife and Sandrine played a flute duet and found that accelerando was very difficult due to the tendency to use physical movement to instigate such an expression, however Rachel and Blake
played a movement from a solo violin and piano sonata and the use of rubato was much more easily identified. We supposed this was due to it's more natural sensation and flow with the music that detecting what the other performer would do next was slightly easier. This was also incredibly interesting to observe how much the performers moved around compared to when they can see the audience themselves.

Researching folk music

Personally, I had a go at memorising the folk tune "Johnny's Gone for a Soldier" that John quickly arranged this morning. We played through it a couple of times to familiarise ourselves then plunged into darkness and gave it a go. I really struggled to remember most of the line after the first 4 bars! However we kept soldiering on (excuse the pun) and give or a take a few wrong notes, managed to improvise our way to a rough end. A couple of singers joined us so we tried swapping around who played the tune and the others improvised either around the chords written down or totally freestyle, and again it was fascinating how different it could feel by simply taking away the visual aspect. As I was transposing my part, I think the visual prompt may have inhibited my performance slightly, so I felt more self absorbed and emotionally connected with the music when I was totally free from written notes. Unsurprisingly I was less nervous too as I didn't have to worry about the reaction to any wrong notes as I couldn't see anybody!

Well there you go - a first crazy insight into what it's like to experience music "dans le noir" and although it's all a bit jumbled and experimental right now, I'm sure we'll have something more organised and conclusive by the end of the week (watch this space!) For now, it's time to rest in the beautiful dark of the nighttime, bonne nuit!

S x