On Saturday March 7 we delivered Devising Music, a workshop celebrating this year’s International Women’s Day. Led by renowned composer Laura Bowler, whose work fff featured at hcmf// 2017, participants worked together on a new piece of music, sharing personal ideas of identity and putting them towards a collaboration.
Devising Music took place as part of Contemporary Music for All (CoMA), an annual festival emphasising the communal and universal appeal of contemporary music. The festival aims to extend opportunities to new musicians, bringing down barriers such as skill level. At CoMA events, everyone gets to be a musician. This year’s workshop at hcmf// followed up previous work implemented by our Learning & Participation programme to provide safe, comfortable spaces for women and gender minorities to create music in. After the workshop, participants spoke about how it had been a great opportunity to go out of their comfort zone, providing them with an environment in which they could experiment with performance.
Focusing on the physical nature of performance and the vocal element of composition, participants began the workshop by taking part in group improvisations. With Bowler’s music as a point of reference, the group explored the politicised nature of gender, each group sharing their thoughts through a fully-fledged performance. To keep the workshop accessible and approachable, the prep time was short – after 20 minutes of quickfire brainstorming, participants were already performing their pieces!
As seen with our recent Experimental Singing workshop, these spaces are vital in encouraging and developing new artists who might otherwise not have a chance to find their feet. Participants said they found Devising Music ‘encouraging’ as well as ‘challenging’, and that they would like to see more women and gender minority led workshops in the future.