The Singing Village in Action
Anthropos: Songs of Humanity approaches and my philosophy of vocal improvisation
How do we make our music?
We understand voice, the sum of our voices and bodies as our creative substance, expressive vehicle and shared playground. Sometimes this is our starting place: our sounding bodies.
We are singular, each one of us. What makes us unique? We value respecting that uniqueness, and at the same time connecting with each other and yielding into the collective conscious and unconscious intelligence.
Listening: to the silence, to each other, to the places and the people that we sing with, to the music that emerges between us, to the voices living within and before us, to ourselves, our instinct and impulses.
Exploring and sharing our vocal archetypes, our individual and shared research into vocality, the different voices that inhabit each one of us, from our imagination, ancestry, musical libraries... Playing with them in contrast and juxtaposition, celebrating our differences, and also learning from each other through mimicking and honouring another’s voice.
Invented languages help to take us to a realm beyond language and enable us to share feelings and tell stories that are common to all humans. Stories of joy, pain, courage, praise, playfulness, mourning …We use syllables and patterns, sometimes deliberately a very limited palette.
Aiming for spaciousness and simplicity help us to bring an open character in our music that goes beyond genre or style. With wordless storytelling, digging into different characters, evoking landscapes and emotions, we aim to open up feeling spaces in our listeners.
We want our music to spread broadly, to be changeable, open to multiple interpretations, unpinned to any specific tradition. Honouring all the music that came before us and made us what we are.
Re-imagining oral traditions and folkloric ways of musicing in-the-moment, we aim to co-create a collective experience for everyone present. Sometimes we journey from a pattern that emerges into a longer phrase and then link phrases together to make up a spontaneous collective song.
SCS Spontaneous Collective Song
Spontaneous Collective Song is a form of instant composition that reimagines the potential origins of anonymous folkloric song, deep within the fabric of daily human life. It encourages the creation of musical phrases from vocables developing into patterns.
From these phrases, more complex musical structures can be derived. Using simple vocal and musical propositions with invented languages and using the voice as an instrument, others can create diverse contexts for these chants. The musical elements can vary in complexity and be multilayered.
SCS acknowledges the whole spectrum of vocal improvisation as a continuum, ranging from free/open/wild improvised sounds to diverse degrees of form and musical constraints. Anthropos’ spontaneous pieces include sonic tapestries, stable harmonic and rhythmic structures, movement-based collective creations and spontaneous chants, closer to folklore and oral tradition.
We understand folklore as an alive and transcultural process. An experiential, dynamic, collective music that is anonymously created, shared and spread among humans, always open to recreation, honouring of source and tradition. A music that belongs to everyone and to no one.