Improvising Together

Friends,

What a blessing to be included in this sharing and receive such great daily doses of love. Thank you for all your inspiring words!

This past year my mom has been intensively studying improvisational singing with her teacher Rhiannan. Its become one of her most important spiritual practices and has helped her grow tremendously as an artist. I grew up taking a lot of music lessons and improvisation was always the hardest area of music for me to grasp. I could study theory all day long, but taking the leap to letting the music freely flow out of me and loosen my analytical grasp was too scary for me.

Inspired by my mom, I've been trying to find more spaces to spontaneously make music and nurture my improvisational side. My favorite part of improvisation are the unspoken connections and cues that guide people to co-create music. Even if you've never studied music theory, we share musical patterns that allow us to easily create song and melody together. In the video below, Bobby McFerrin shows the power of the pentatonic scale that brings a random group of people together in song:

If you go to this webpage for an imprivisational singing workshop, the first video gives me chills listening to people so simply making a beautiful song together:

http://www.eomega.org/workshops/circlesongs-1#-workshop-video-block

I'll leave you with these final words:

“Improvisation involves coming into a situation without rigid expectations or preconceptions. We must keep going forward, fearful or not, and be ready for anything that comes our way. That’s how life is. Remembering that life can be full of surprises is always useful. We’re improvising all the time—it’s good to recognize that.” —Bobby McFerrin

Love, Micah