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