How we improve our skills with rhythm while having fun, and being creative and collaborative with CVI - Collaborative Vocal Improvisation?
This we’ll explore with Briony Greenhill.
Over the weekend, we’ll move from more basic to more advanced rhythm skills.
If you’re a skilled improviser, I hope the first parts will be useful to you in terms of how to work with folks with less skill, either as a teacher or a collaborator - fun approaches to build really good rhythmic foundations in your vocal improvisation community.
If you’re less skilled with rhythm, the first parts will be teaching for you, and then if the content starts to go over your head, you can either hold on for dear life and fill in the gaps later, or go elsewhere with whoever else feels similarly, and I will give you some fun singing forms to do together.
My aims in this workshop are:
a) To help you all become more skilled with your use of rhythm with vocal improvisation and
b) to share forms that you can bring into your collaborations, teaching, and practice in the medium to long term, so that the vocal improvisation community is able to meet folks where we are with rhythm, and do creatively juicy forms that also build rhythmic skill.
We’ll work with: Downbeats, upbeats, 8th notes, 16th notes, straight and swung. 12/8, 3/4, 6/8; and we’ll visit oddmeter and polyrhythm. It’s a lot but we’ll aim to cover that terrain over the weekend through a mix of more focused study exercises, and more creative vocal improvisational play. This is a big download to take away and use over the coming year and beyond.
Limited to 16 places.
Details
Cost
Tier 1 $350
Tier 2 $250
Tier 3 $150
Please select your tier in integrity, you will not be assessed.
How to Pay
Please pay directly, also please register using the button below.
Venmo @Briony-Greenhill
Paypal brionygmusic@gmail.com
Payment plans are fine. Email info@brionygreenhill.com and propose something that works for you.
About Briony Greenhill
Briony is a highly experienced, internationally recognised teacher of collaborative vocal improvisation, CVI. Since 2018 she taught the class Wild Voice, Solid Roots, which balanced vocal improvisation training with training in vocal musicianship / applied music theory / chops for singers. She’s taken 15-30 students a year through that program from beginner to advanced levels.
Briony now tends The Singing Circle online membership program, and Your Song library of online courses, including Chops for Singers which covers melody, harmony and rhythm for singers from beginner to advanced levels.
Briony studied music with Atulkumar Upadhye in India, David Eskenazy in France, Rhiannon and Bobby McFerrin in the US, and also several piano teachers including Frank Martin, Julie Wolf, Huw Warren and Michiel de Koning. She was recently awarded funding from Arts Council England to study non-diatonic harmony for a year, producing learning she’s applied to composition and string/ horn arrangements for her next album, Symbiocene Mama (currently recording).
Briony has released 4 entirely improvised albums, and her debut studio album, Crossing the Ocean, received good reviews from The Guardian, Mojo, and BBC Radio 3 and 4.
Between polycrisis, omnicide, motherhood, the hopeful rise of the Green Party in the UK and Briony’s degree in political science and background in change work, Briony’s life is being drawn more and more into politics and she’s somewhat in handover mode with her teaching.
She cares deeply about access to this embodied, ear-based approach to learning music, particularly drawing from improvisational and non Western music cultures, as extremely accessible and empowering for anyone who is musical yet alienated by the dots, as Briony was. So this is a path of studying music with the voice, ear and body, to use as a vocal co-creative human.
Briony’s teaching is trauma informed, but to be clear, this will not be such a space of self expression and check ins and so on, as a space of regulated, calm, creative music school. Here we go :)