The Singing Village - Vocal Improvisation in community

The Singing Village is a term that emerged through my experiences with groups of vocal improvisers, to describe the many ways to relate, co-create and access spontaneous collective song. It includes frameworks such as circlesinging, collaborative vocal improvisation and other body and movement-based forms shared by the current vocal improvisation communities. It includes as well the multiplicity of voices embodied by a vocal improviser, the archetypal, the ancestral.

The Singing Village recognises everyone’s innate musicality and capacity to take part in a musical experience. It acknowledges that the origins of what we now call ‘vocal improvisation’ are in the cellular memory of humanity, the diverse ancestral musical practices that were part of the fabric of human life on Earth for thousands of years. This enables us to reimagine the huge potentialities of making music as a process of sharing.  The richness of ‘singing with’ rather than ‘performing for’. 

The Singing Village is an invitation to reclaim the transcultural roots of anonymous folklore through vocal improvisation, making fresh, collaborative, anonymous music here and now. It aims to uncover what lays underneath some of the limitations and definitions that might have begun relatively recently in human history, when music became ‘a thing’. 

At the Singing Village:

-all voices are valuable and honoured

-everyone is present in the flow and responsible for the collective outcome 

-the music emerges and falls away, as part of ordinary life

-anyone can initiate a musical idea, as an act of generosity and a sharing of oneself

- no one takes personal credit for generating music, or is above those who follow an idea 

-being part of the musical core, the structure, the fabric that supports and sustains the music, is as important as adding a strong soloistic expression

-if a musical idea doesn’t echo, it dissipates ans makes space for motion and newness

The Singing Village encompasses my vocal improvisation pedagogy and philosophy of work. It can describe the processes of participants in collective gatherings, and it’s also a metaphor for how I understand the potential of voice and vocal improvisation as a social practice and technology of being, from individual research to working with communities.