International Songwriter, Over to you!

International songwriter is a project devised by the Carousel House Band (UK) in collaboration with Resonaari special music school (Finland) Both groups are comprised of artists with learning disabilities / complex support needs and are supported by music facilitators.

This project is proving to be a dynamic way to engage our Learning disabled artists. We received a video file and figurenotes score from Resonaari Group. They had been busy in Helsinki taking the track to the next stage by adding a chorus chord sequence and a melody for the verse chord sequence we had composed. After watching the video we worked on replicating their addition to composition. To do this we first translated the melody into our figurenotes composition (see attached file) then we played through the composition. This then led us to the next stage of composing the song which was to create and send back to Resonaari Group a melody we had written for the chorus chord sequence composed by Resonaari group. The band experimented with different musical phrases and we used tools such as a figurenotes dice to combine chance and choice which is method that has proved useful to nurturing composition ideas. Once we had settled on our melody this was added to the composition and we looked to make the next part of the song which was the bridge. After discussing the purpose of a bridge part in a song and looking at examples in other songs the Carousel House Band set about choosing chords from the key we were working in to create a passage that had a different feel to the rest of the song. We also discussed how the rhythm changing at this point would really help create a different feel. We sent back our updated figurenotes score and a rehearsal video of us playing our new parts to our collaborators in Finland for their consideration and thoughts on how to progress the piece. Look for my next blog to see how the piece was developed further